Gandhi & Churchill (50 page)

Twelve days later the Prince of Wales began an official visit to India. Gandhi called for a national hartal. Overnight it turned ugly and violent. In Calcutta the police were overwhelmed by the angry crowds and lost control of the situation. In Bombay, where Gandhi was, mobs roamed the streets and shut down the city. They attacked shops and homes of Parsis or Eurasians who failed to heed the hartal call and beat many more. They set cars and trams on fire; they smashed store windows and carted away what they could find. Swadeshi had become an excuse to loot.

Gandhi found a friend to drive him around the city and tried to quell the violence. He watched in horror and outrage as young men wearing khadi caps stormed stores and beat helpless victims, all the while chanting,
“Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”
Never, he said later, “has the sound of these words grated so much on my ears.”
⁵⁵

As the car turned one corner, he came on the bodies of two Indian policemen who had been beaten and stabbed. Gandhi called to bystanders and begged them to help him carry the bleeding men to a hospital. (Both later died.) It was a humiliating disaster. In all, the riots in Bombay left 58 people dead and 381 injured. Gandhi declared a five-day fast to try to restore calm. Yet he still refused to call off the satyagraha, hoping against hope that people would realize that violence would only encourage the British government to strike back.

Certainly his views on the Raj had not changed. “It may be,” he told Charlie Andrews, who was having serious doubts about the direction in which Gandhi was taking India, “that the English temperament is not responsive to a status of perfect equality with the black and brown races. Then the English must be made to retire from India.”
⁵⁶
Already an idea was taking root in his mind: If only the British would leave, then perhaps the violence would dissipate and vanish.

Instead, worse was to come. On February 5, 1922, a group of pro-Gandhi marchers in the United Provinces village of Chauri Chaura led a procession past the local police station. The turbaned and khaki-clad policemen, helpless to stop them, taunted some of the demonstrators. The stragglers at the end of the procession responded with rocks and brickbats. Within minutes the situation exploded into a full-scale riot. The police were only twenty-three against several thousand. They fired their pistols into the crowd until the ammunition ran out, then retreated into the Chauri Chaura police station.

Maddened by the gunfire, the crowd became a raging mob. Within minutes they set the besieged station alight with torches and gathered outside, chanting. Eyewitnesses heard screams from inside. Then one by one the desperate Indian policemen ran out, and the mob hacked them to pieces. Body parts—heads, arms, and legs—were thrown back in the fire as the station slowly burned to the ground.
⁵⁷

Just a week earlier, Gandhi had made a speech in Surat openly hoping for another Amritsar to help galvanize the movement. “Let some General Dyer stand before us with his troops,” he cried. “Let him start firing without warning us.” A year before he had predicted that “we have to go probably, possibly, through a sea of blood” to achieve Swaraj. He never imagined the blood would be shed by Indians themselves.
⁵⁸

Gandhi immediately decided to hold another penitential fast. He had no doubt who was at fault. “There are certain crimes for which we are directly responsible,” he wrote to his cousin Chaganlal. “We have but to atone for these. One such crime is Chauri Chaura.” Ten days after the massacre Gandhi decided to bring the Noncooperation satyagraha to a halt.

Many of his closest associates were upset. By now more than thirty thousand of his followers were in jail. They included C. R. Das, Motilal Nehru, and Jawaharlal Nehru. They had sacrificed their freedom, even their careers, in order to secure India’s freedom. Now they felt betrayed and accused Gandhi of throwing it all away. Gandhi knew better. “I assure you that if the thing had not been suspended,” Gandhi wrote to the imprisoned Jawaharlal, “we would have been leading not a non-violent struggle but a violent struggle.” Gandhi noted that the “foetid smell of violence” was in the land, and “it would be unwise to ignore or underrate it.” Besides, he added hopefully, “The cause will prosper by this retreat. The movement had unconsciously drifted from the right path. We have come back to our moorings.”
⁵⁹

But the next time the satyagraha ship left harbor, it would have to sail without the Muslims. Muhammad and Shaukat Ali were particularly bitter over Gandhi’s retreat. Many of their followers had felt all along that working with Hindus was a mistake. (One Muslim reporter was particularly outraged when he found pictures being sold on the street that showed Gandhi dressed as Krishna and stamping on an Islamic crescent.) And the horrific Muslim-on-Hindu violence in Moplal had polarized feelings in both communities.

The Alis had always worried that Gandhi might strike a separate deal with the government and leave Muslims, as always, holding the bag. They were not inclined to trust him again. Gandhi’s suspension of Noncooperation cost him his Muslim alliance. From this point on, Hindu-Muslim cooperation in Indian politics would a pious hope, not a workable reality.

Meanwhile news of Chauri Chaura hit the British government like a thunderclap. At a Council of Ministers meeting Winston Churchill put the blame squarely on the government’s conciliatory attitude toward Gandhi and the nationalists, for acting as though “the British Raj was doomed.” He admitted he had once supported the Chelmsford-Montagu reforms, but now “he felt they had received a great setback.” Making concessions and introducing democratic reforms only brought demands for more concessions, Churchill declared. Instead of winning Indians’ loyalty, liberal reforms only “turned [Indians] against us at every stage.” Surely now everyone could see that trying precipitately to turn India over to Indians was a mistake.
⁶⁰

Churchill’s harsh words horrified Secretary of State Montagu, who had a personal stake in those reforms. To hear them openly denounced in a formal ministers’ meeting was chilling. Montagu was so horrified that when he returned to his desk, he penned a note to Prime Minister Lloyd George. He asked whether Churchill’s words signified a change in British policy, and if they did not, he wanted the prime minister to reaffirm that His Majesty’s Government was committed to “gradually converting India from a dependency into a self-governing partner in the British Empire.”
⁶¹

Montagu waited two days for an answer. Lloyd George’s reply on February 10 was everything Churchill might have hoped for. “There must be a master in India,” Lloyd George said flatly. “Without a master India would relapse into anarchy and chaos. We are now masters in India, and we should let it be understood that we mean to remain so.”
⁶²
Disappointed and chagrined, Montagu resigned a month later.

Meanwhile, Gandhi also noted the colonial secretary’s remarks about Indians not being ready for self-government. “Mr. Churchill, who understands only the gospel of force,” Gandhi wrote in
Young India,
“is quite right in saying that the Irish problem is different in character from the Indian.” Having fought for their independence by violence, the Irish would have to keep it by violence as well. “India, on the other hand, if she wins Swaraj by non-violent means, must be able to maintain it chiefly by non-violent means.” It was up to Indians to prove Churchill wrong.
⁶³
But privately Gandhi felt that Churchill was probably right. India had not been ready for nonviolence, and if Indians could not control themselves, then (as Gandhi had argued since
Hind Swaraj
) they were not ready to rule themselves, either. A month before he had told his satyagrahi that “human nature in India has advanced so far that the doctrine of non-violence is more natural for the people, than that of violence.” Now, in his heart, he knew he had been wrong.
⁶⁴

Gandhi had little leisure to ponder his defeat. The next day policemen arrived at Sabarmati Ashram with an order for Gandhi’s arrest. Eight days later he was put on trial for trying to foment disaffection in the Indian Army and against “His Majesty’s Government established by law in India.” Gandhi was upbeat, “festively joyful,” as one eyewitness put it. He refused to have any lawyers present and pleaded guilty to all charges.
⁶⁵

And he read aloud a lengthy statement, a kind of summary of his life up to that moment. He told how, step by step, he changed from being “a staunch loyalist” to “an uncompromising disaffectionist and non-cooperator.” How he had learned in South Africa that he had no rights because he was an Indian. How he had tried to change attitudes and the law by volunteering for service in the Boer War, and then the Zulu rebellion, and then the Great War. And how his hopes for “full equality in the Empire for my countrymen” had been dashed first by the Rowlatt Acts, then by the Amritsar massacre and the crawling order.

Gandhi also took full responsibility for “the diabolical crimes of Chauri Chaura” and “the mad outrages of Bombay.” But in the end he put the blame for India’s disorders and poverty squarely on British shoulders, arguing that the Raj had turned India into an economic dependency, ruining its once-flourishing cotton-weaving industry and spreading famine across the land.

Above all, he said, Britain had broken India’s pride. “India is less manly under British rule than she ever was before.” To owe loyalty to such a system of government, he said, was impossible. “In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good.” Now, he concluded, it was the judge’s duty to throw the book at him and to impose the harshest penalty the law would allow.
⁶⁶

On March 22 Gandhi was sentenced to serve six years in the Yeravda jail. Gandhi called the sentence light and “a great honor” and submitted to prison without demur. The government was delighted. It had feared riots and terrible outbreaks across India with Gandhi’s incarceration; instead, nothing happened. The Noncooperation program vanished overnight. “Now we are simply routed,” one of Gandhi’s Punjabi followers, Lajpat Rai, wrote from prison. “The only thing for us to do is to be happy in our prison cells in the consciousness that at least we have not contributed to the collapse of the movement”—unlike their former leader, whose “overconfidence in his judgement” and impetuousness, Lajpat Rai felt, had landed them in this sorry position.
⁶⁷

The years in the Yeravda jail would be a time of intellectual reflection and personal reassessment for Gandhi. He had no hard labor to perform; he was allowed a steady flow of visitors. At the end of 1923 he developed dysentery, then appendicitis. The government seriously worried he would die in prison. On February 4, 1924, it ordered his release. Feeble in health and weak in spirit, Gandhi seemed a broken man physically as well as politically. Except for his family and inner circle at Sabarmati, his followers had vanished. The Indian National Congress had reverted to its old ways and the leadership of the Old Guard, dumping Noncooperation on the way. The caliphate had become a nonissue, when the Turks formally abolished the title in 1924.

It was as if the last three years had never happened.

Chapter Fifteen

REVERSAL OF FORTUNES

1922–1929

What a disappointment the twentieth century has been.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1922

O
N
N
OVEMBER
15, 1922,
TWO WEEKS
shy of his forty-eighth birthday, Churchill got the shock of his life.

In the general election that day, Dundee’s voters replaced him with a Labour Party pacifist. A guest at a dinner party caught a glimpse of him shortly afterward. “Winston was so down in the dumps he could hardly speak the whole evening,” the man remembered. “He thought his world had come to an end—at least his political world. I thought his career was over.”
¹

In fact, a new era had begun for British politics, and a decade of turmoil and disappointment for Winston Churchill. He had known the battle for his Dundee seat would be tough. Crowds of socialist-minded young men and women exercising their legal right to vote for the first time heckled him everywhere he went; his reputation as an anti-Bolshevik hard-liner hurt him among Dundee’s working-class voters. But he never imagined that when the ballots were counted, he would get less than 14 percent of the votes.

It was a stunning repudiation. T. E. Lawrence wrote to their mutual friend Eddie Marsh: “I’m more sorry about Winston than I can say.”
²
The humiliation in Dundee was partly spillover from the shipwreck of Churchill’s Middle East policy. In the turmoil that had followed the Turkish Empire’s demise, war between Turkey and Greece had threatened to draw in Britain. Churchill and Lloyd George had clashed over what to do and even over which side Britain should take. Voters recoiled from the prospect of Britain entangled in another armed conflict. Politicians were in no mood for one either, especially in the Middle East. Divided against itself, the Conservative-Liberal coalition that had governed Britain since the Great War crumbled.

India proved a political liability as well. The 1920s saw a sudden rallying to the Raj.
^*70
Backbench Tory MPs had felt all along that the Government of India Act of 1919 had gone too far and had helped to provoke the violence not only at Amritsar but at Chauri Chaura. They were angry with their coalition leaders for joining in the “persecution” of General Dyer. The price they demanded was Secretary Montagu’s resignation, which came in March 1922. A desperate Lloyd George called for expanding the budget for the Indian Civil Service, the “steel framework,” as he termed it, that held India together. One observer called the speech “Kiplingesque” in its imperial overtones, yet it could not save his government.
³
In October the Tories and Andrew Bonar Law walked out, forcing a general election. It brought down the last government that the Liberal Party would ever lead and Churchill with it.