Gandhi & Churchill (43 page)

No other pacifist would have dared to write such words, and in the context of 1918 India, they won him few converts. He did win the keen appreciations of the Raj, which awarded him the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal, India’s highest award for “important and useful” public service. However, his recruiting drive not only offended some of his closest supporters; it also ruined his health. Gandhi came down with dysentery in late July and was out of action for nearly seven weeks. He refused all medical treatment. Delirium set in. His mill owner friend Ambalal Sarabhai summoned doctors, who said Gandhi was suffering from dysentery and starvation and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
⁷²

If Gandhi had become a physical wreck, his nationalist colleagues were in a political quandary. Montagu’s declaration in August had set off a fissiparous scramble within the Congress and across India. Instead of uniting in order to work together, every sect, group, organization, and minority caste across the subcontinent clamored for its rights and claims to be respected under any future constitutional arrangement, whatever that might be.

Muslims and Christians worried that they would be overwhelmed by Hindus; other Hindu castes by Brahmins; rural provinces by the large urban centers. From the start the non-Brahmin paper
Jagrak
sardonically welcomed Montagu’s visit to India because “it would enable him to see for himself how sharply divided the several classes of India are.” It would also show him that the elite that ran the Indian National Congress “is numerically very small and that its interests clash with those of the majority”—not to mention every other minority in India.
⁷³

As separate factions bickered over the anticipated spoils of “responsible government,” the Lucknow Pact collapsed. Moderates fought with so-called Extremists like Tilak and with one another. Muslim radicals turned against their leaders who had signed the pact. A revived Muslim League witnessed a vicious power struggle. Violent riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims in Arrak in Bihar, consuming 160 villages and taking more than a week to quell.
⁷⁴

Chelmsford was horrified. “Our announcement should have rallied” Moderate nationalist opinion, he wrote to the governor of Bombay, “but on the whole this body of moderate opinion…has so far shown itself to be utterly unreliable, inert, and invertebrate.” At least one Indian newspaper noted that native opposition to self-government was actually
increasing,
out of fear that it would merely transfer power from the British—who understood power and at least treated Indians impartially—to men who did not and would not.
⁷⁵

Chelmsford and Montagu adjusted their sights accordingly. In July they announced their plan for government reform. It expanded both the central and provincial legislative councils and actually transferred power in the provinces to a range of Indian ministers and officials. It grew the Indian electorate to about one in ten adult males (although many of those still could not read or write). But it brought no major change at the center, in New Delhi. Under the Chelmsford-Montagu reforms, or “dyarchy,” certain government functions—such as land revenue, justice and police, press censorship and irrigation, and the military—were to be permanently “reserved” to the viceroy and his administration.

The Indian National Congress exploded. They denounced the Chelmsford-Montagu proposals as a farce. Annie Besant bitterly attacked dyarchy as showing that “the bureaucrats…are not prepared to give up materially any fraction of the power which they have enjoyed.” But as Judith Brown and others have shown, even as they denounced it, nationalists and local politicians began to jockey for position under the new dispensation. Dyarchy was going to be the only game in town; alternatives were nonexistent. All-India politics, under the Congress model, had proved to be a chimera.

Only one man had the will and the means to pull it back together. Ill and discouraged, Gandhi’s deepest desire was to steer clear of the Congress and its cesspool of poisonous factions and frustrated hopes. What finally forced him to return to politics, and take leadership of the nationalist camp, was a series of violent events the following year. Winston Churchill would be at their center.

Chapter Thirteen

BLOODSHED

1919–1920

Our reign in India or anywhere else has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1920

W
HAT SET EVERYTHING OFF WAS THE
Rowlatt Acts.

Ironically, they came to pass just as the issue of Indian Home Rule seemed to have turned a corner. India’s magnificent sacrifice in the Great War had not gone unnoticed. Montagu’s pledge in August 1917 and the Chelmsford-Montagu reform package had given birth to the Government of India Act in May 1919, the British Parliament’s stamp of approval on eventual self-government for India. Elections for the reformed legislative councils were already slated for 1920–21. Government departments like agriculture and education were ready to pass into the hands of Indian, not British, ministers. The foundations of “real local self-government” were being laid in many parts of India.
¹

Members of the Indian National Congress and the Home Rule Leagues were still unsatisfied, but the Swaraj train seemed as if it might really leave the station this time. Groups and politicians scrambled to find their seats before it left.

But outside India the atmosphere was stormy. The war ended with both Germany and Russia engulfed in revolution. Following a bloody insurrection in Dublin during Easter 1916, Ireland had turned into a cauldron of violence and sectarian strife. Turkey was in the throes of revolution as well, and radical Muslim warriors from Afghanistan were poised along India’s border. Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “Never has there been a time when people were more disposed to turn to courses of violence or show such scant respect for law and custom, tradition and procedure.”
²
To ally the fears of men like Churchill, Indian government officials decided to act. What could be simpler, they asked themselves, than for New Delhi to take some preliminary steps to prevent radical revolution from spreading to India?

Consulting with a committee of lawyers, Delhi high court judge Henry Rowlatt drew up two bills to be ready when the Defense of India Act expired six months after the end of the war. The two bills contained two controversial provisions. One allowed judges to convict suspected terrorists or subversives without a jury; the other sanctioned interning those same suspects without trial.

Two members of Rowlatt’s committee were Indians. They approved the changes wholeheartedly.
³
But when the bills reached the Imperial Legislative Council in February 1919, an outcry began. Even with every Indian member voting against it, the bill passed in March and became law.
⁴
In their innocence, officials in New Delhi had never imagined the uproar the new laws would cause.

Gandhi was at the forefront of the agitation. In February 1919, when the Rowlatt bills reached the legislature, he was still recovering from his illness, but from his bed he wrote that the bills were more than just breaches of ordinary law and justice. They were “evidence of a determined policy of repression,” he said. As a lawyer, he understood the implications of a law that suspended civil liberties without prior cause. If the government let “such a devilish piece of legislation” stand, Gandhi wrote, “I feel I can no longer render peaceful obedience to the laws.” He would invite everyone who felt the same “to join me in the struggle” against such “unjust, subversive laws.”
⁵

Gandhi was not alone. The proposed laws had offended every quarter of Indian opinion. M. A. Jinnah quit the Legislative Council. Protests filled newspapers like Annie Besant’s
Young India,
which accused the Rowlatt Acts of contradicting every promise about eventual self-government. The outrage in newspaper offices, schools and universities, and on the street was palpable. Gandhi suddenly decided he could mobilize it into a force for change. His earlier campaigns in Bihar and Kaira had made him a national figure with a popular following. Here was an opportunity to test its power. At the end of February he announced a formal satyagraha campaign against the Rowlatt Acts, centering on his home turf in Gujarat and the Bombay Presidency.

The hastily organized campaign was a flop. Outside Ahmedabad and Bombay, the response was tepid or nonexistent.
⁶
Few saw the point of joining Gandhi’s pledge to disobey laws that had yet to be implemented. Besant backed the campaign at first, and her Home Rule League activists joined in. But then she and others asked, not unreasonably, how people could disobey the Rowlatt Acts, directed against subversives, without breaking other laws and becoming subversives themselves—thereby justifying the Rowlatt Acts.
^*59
The silver-haired Besant also worried that Gandhi was using the campaign to steal away her followers.
⁷

The viceroy, sensing that Gandhi had overreached himself, dismissed the campaign as “a bluff” and refused to be intimidated. The last stage of Gandhi’s campaign, the nationwide strike or
hartal
called for April 6, was an abject failure. Besant actively campaigned against it. In Delhi the strike led to violence, and ten people were killed. “Poor Gandhi!” wrote one of his more severe critics, the liberal Srinivasa Sastri. “He [is] on his course unruffled—straight and single-eyed…He has some converts but not many.”
⁸

On April 8, aiming to breathe new life into the hartal, Gandhi left Bombay for Delhi and Amritsar, capital of the Punjab. A huge demonstration was planned in the latter city. Fearful of more violence, the central government ordered Gandhi stopped on the train and sent back to Bombay.
^†60
News of this “arrest” triggered a wave of new riots in Bombay and Ahmedabad, where a rampaging mob burned the jail, the telegraph office, and the collector’s office, and several people were killed. Violence erupted in cities in the United Provinces as well.

The worst was in Amritsar. On April 10 a mixed mob of Hindus and Muslims burned their way through the city in Gandhi’s name, and murdered four Europeans. Troops were ordered in. “Dear me, what a d—d nuisance these saintly fanatics are!” Lord Chelmsford had written even before the riots erupted.
⁹
The Raj balefully noted that this apostle of nonviolence always managed to inspire violence among his followers.

Certainly the killings in Amritsar shattered Gandhi’s credibility as a man of peace. He felt deeply ashamed of his failure. A reporter overheard him describe the Rowlatt satyagraha as a “Himalayan miscalculation.” Gandhi called for a national penitential three-day fast to atone for the deaths. Indeed, Amritsar might have been remembered as Gandhi’s Waterloo, were it not for what happened next.

General Reginald Dyer, C.B., had spent his entire career in the Indian Army. Brave, intelligent, and devoted to his duty, he had been born and bred in India. “Rex” to his friends, Dyer had dedicated his life to service to the Raj. And in a single afternoon he was about to destroy Britain’s reputation in India forever.

On April 10 Dyer had marched his brigade of English, Gurkha, Pathan, and Baluchi troops to Amritsar. He found a city in chaos, with crowds burning buildings and tearing up the railway tracks in order to prevent help from arriving. On the thirteenth Dyer entered the city center with a convoy of armored cars, his troops following. With him was Amritsar’s town crier. At each street intersection the crier read aloud in English and Urdu Dyer’s order banning all large public gatherings, followed by explanations in Punjabi and Hindi. A large bass drum drew the crowds to hear the order. The reaction was derisory. “The Raj is dead,” some shouted as the troops marched by. “The British will never shoot,” others said.
¹⁰

The troops’ march through Amritsar took four and a half hours. When Dyer returned to his temporary headquarters, he learned that a demonstration was under way in the enclosed square adjoining the Sikhs’ holiest site, the Golden Temple. Furious at this deliberate violation of his order, Dyer led a detachment of ninety Baluchis and Gurkhas and two armored cars down the narrow street to the square, the Jallianwala Bagh, where a crowd of several thousand had gathered to hear the pro-Gandhi speakers. With Dyer were a lieutenant colonel, his brigade major, and two British bodyguards. Otherwise there were no white soldiers at all.