Gandhi & Churchill (53 page)

All the while, the smokestacks of Ahmedabad’s textile factories loomed above them, clearly visible on the Sabarmati’s opposite bank. There the great machines Gandhi so despised churned out textiles to be sold all across India and Asia, the profits of which lined the pockets of Ahmedabad businessmen. These businessmen piously and generously donated the funds without which Sabarmati Ashram could not have survived. Gandhi may not have been blind to the irony, but he took the money. In the immortal words of one observer, the Bengali poetess and Gandhi acolyte Sarojini Naidu, “It cost a great deal of money to keep the Mahatma living in poverty.”
⁴⁴

Naidu first met Gandhi in 1914. Born into a famous Brahmin family and brilliantly educated, she was only one of the accomplished women who found themselves irresistibly drawn to Gandhi and became part of his inner circle, if not part of the ashram itself. Another was Saraladevi Chaudhurani, the niece of Rabindranath Tagore. Headstrong and passionate, fluent in English, French, Farsi, and Sanskrit, she was, like Gandhi, a champion of New Age ideas (her mother had been a Theosophist) and would spend her life fighting for Indian women’s rights, including the right to vote.

Saraladevi and her husband never lived at the ashram. But their daughter did, and Saraladevi was a frequent visitor and one of Gandhi’s closest confidantes. She accompanied him everywhere on his Noncooperation tour in 1921. She wrote the unofficial anthem of the satyagrahis, “I Bow to India.” Indeed, the attraction was not a one-way street. Gandhi’s letters to her reveal a warmth, even an eroticism, that no one else ever kindled. When Gandhi met Margaret Sanger in 1935, he confided that Saraladevi was the only woman who ever made him think about leaving his wife.
⁴⁵

Then on November 7, 1925, another single woman arrived at the ashram. When Gandhi came to the gates to greet her, she knelt at his feet and addressed him as “Bapu,” or father. Gandhi stretched out his hands and raised her up, murmuring, “And you shall be my daughter.” The next day she shaved her head, like the other Sabarmati women, and donned the obligatory khadi sari. She would be a fixture at Gandhi’s ashram for the next two decades.

The difference was that Madeleine Slade was an Englishwoman, the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral. Admiral Slade commanded the East Indies fleet and even served on the board of Churchill’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
⁴⁶
Far more than Gandhi’s other white friends, like Charlie Andrews or Henry Polak or his secretary from Johannesburg days, Sonja Schlesin, Madeleine Slade was ready to turn her back on all Western values to prove her allegiance to Gandhi’s cause. She even surrendered her identity, changing her name to Mira or Mirabehn, after Gandhi’s favorite medieval Indian poet.

Madeleine Slade was the early hint of what would become a cultural tidal wave. Under Gandhi’s inspiration, thousands of educated Westerners would soon jettison their own culture to find a new spiritual inspiration in India. What began with Mirabehn (although there were earlier examples of Westerners turning to Indian culture) would finish with the Hare Krishnas and the Beatles. And the book that more than any other set it off (Slade had booked passage to India almost as soon as she finished reading it) had appeared in European bookstores about the time Gandhi left the Yeravda jail. An international best seller, the book made Gandhi famous outside India for the first time and turned him into a New Age icon.

The book was
Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being
. Its author was French writer Romain Rolland, a leading contributor to the counterculture magazine
New Age
and later winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Rolland, a pacifist and a keen admirer of Tolstoy, had always been fascinated by Eastern philosophy.
^*75
He had learned about Gandhi while corresponding with the poet Tagore and originally wrote his admiring portrait of Gandhi for the magazine
Europe
without actually visiting India or even meeting Gandhi. Rolland was convinced that Gandhi held not only India’s but the world’s destiny in his hands. To Rolland, Gandhi was the greatest religious leader since Jesus Christ.

“This is the man who has stirred 300 million people to revolt,” Rolland breathlessly wrote, “who has shaken the foundations of the British Empire, and who has introduced into human politics the strongest religious impetus of the last 2,000 years.”
⁴⁷
From the beginning, “Gandhi and India have formed a pact,” Rolland explained. “They understand each other without words…and India is prepared to give whatever Gandhi may demand.” Gandhi was “the orchestra leader” of India’s “oceans of men,” who would soon overwhelm the British in a tidal wave of spiritual liberation.
⁴⁸

That message of peace and harmony was destined to reach far beyond India. Rolland portrayed Gandhi as the messiah of a New Age of universal enlightenment, whose message embodied “the principle of life and non-violence.” The only thing Gandhi’s gospel lacked, he gushed at one point, “is the cross.”
⁴⁹

Rolland put it as plainly as he could: “The Apostle of India is the Apostle of the World…The battle the Mahatma began fighting four years ago is our battle” and “will lead a new humanity on to a new path.”
⁵⁰

Mahatma Gandhi
appeared in 1924, when Gandhi’s fortunes were at their lowest. Soon all Europe was buzzing about the Mahatma. Far from being embarrassed by Rolland’s exaggerations and distortions, Gandhi was delighted. It was marvelous, he wrote to Rolland in late March that year, how he had managed to interpret Gandhi’s message so truly without ever meeting or knowing him. This proved, Gandhi suggested, the essential unity of human nature. From that day forward Gandhi liked to refer to Rolland as his publicity agent.
⁵¹

Romain Rolland created the public myth of Mahatma Gandhi that the Western world has admired ever since. At least once a decade it is reproduced in adulatory biographies and hit movies. It is the myth of Gandhi the universal saint, the gentle apostle of nonviolence and humanitarian goodness who gladly turned his cheek to his enemies and won out by sheer moral example. Rolland’s mythmaking deliberately ignored the other sides of Gandhi. It ignored the tough-minded warrior who read Kipling with pleasure and who could write, “You cannot teach non-violence to a man who cannot kill.” It omitted the Victorian patriarch who set impossible standards for his children and refused to allow his son Devadas to marry a girl from a different caste.
⁵²
It left out the shrewd organizer and hard bargainer, and the stern uncompromising moralist. Instead, it projected only a soft New Age glow.

Just as important, this saintly image sharply distorted Gandhi’s role in Indian politics. By implying that Gandhi spoke for all Indians, Rolland ignored the bitter rivalries and divisions of the subcontinent and discounted the challenges that lay ahead. Nonetheless the book’s impact on Western audience was decisive.
Mahatma Gandhi
sharply elevated Gandhi’s stature both with admirers and with antagonists, including a succession of viceroys and imperial ministers. If Gandhi was the modern Jesus, no one wanted to end up as his Pontius Pilate.

One man was impervious to the new Gandhi cult. That was Winston Churchill. His public image had also changed in the 1920s, but not in a saintly direction.

At first the newspapers called him the “smiling Chancellor.” Ebullient, bubbling with charm and charisma, Churchill made his annual speech on the budget into a major media event—just as it is today. His first budget speech in 1925 was a rhetorical tour de force, as he kept the House of Commons enthralled for two hours and forty minutes, switching from broad humor that had the members rocking with laughter, to emotionally gripping descriptions of the need for pensions for widows and mothers that held them in spellbound silence.

Prime Minister Baldwin told the king that “Mr. Churchill rose magnificently to the occasion” and showed he had not only the skills of a consummate parliamentarian but “the versatility of an actor.”
⁵³
Baldwin must have congratulated himself in making the right choice for chancellor.

Yet Baldwin’s secretary P. J. Grigg predicted sourly, “Within a year Winston will have committed some irretrievable blunder which, if he does not imperil the government will bring Winston down.”
⁵⁴
Grigg knew his Winston, and his prediction proved correct. Behind the media publicity and hype, and the parties at Chartwell with the rich, smart, and famous, came a series of decisions that can only be described as reckless. Churchill’s five years at the Exchequer were disastrous for Britain and sowed much of the trouble that lay ahead.

The first misstep appeared in his first budget. Churchill decided to return Britain to the gold standard, which it had abandoned during the war. Before making the momentous move he consulted with many leading economists (including John Maynard Keynes, later one of the decision’s harshest critics). Churchill wanted to send a signal that Britain was returning to the old prewar certainties, including monetary certainties.

Pegging the pound sterling to the price of gold was probably not a bad idea. By itself it might have given Britain’s economy the kind of rock-solid monetary stability it needed. But the economists at the Bank of England who advised him set the price of the pound too high, by returning to the old rate. The result made British exports too expensive and stalled the country’s industrial recovery. It also put fiscal policy on a collision course with the government’s efforts to placate trade unions by raising wages. One of the results would be chronically high unemployment, and the General Strike two years later.
⁵⁵

As chancellor, Winston went on a cost-cutting rampage. He targeted the Royal Navy for a special slashing. It was an amazing, even outrageous move from an ex–First Lord of the Admiralty. But the cuts Churchill wanted over the next five years reflected his belief, reinforced by the Washington Naval Treaty,
^*76
that the days of a large standing fleet were over. “We cannot have a lot of silly little cruisers,” he told Assistant Cabinet Secretary Tom Jones, “which would be of no use anyway.” He bullied the Admiralty into accepting reduced budgets until finally First Sea Lord Admiral Bridgeman threatened to resign rather than let Churchill, as he put it, “ruin the Navy.”
⁵⁶

Churchill’s haughty reply was “You know, I do not write about these naval matters without experience.” He even tried to convince the cabinet to turn the Ten Year Rule into a twenty-year rule for the Royal Navy, insisting that Germany would need decades to become a naval power again and that “war with Japan is not a possibility which any reasonable government need take into account.” As he told Stanley Baldwin in December 1924, “Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our security in any way.”
⁵⁷

Acting on this blithe assumption, Churchill oversaw cuts in Royal Navy strength that were staggering and that grew larger when Labour took power in 1929. The navy had had 443 destroyers in 1918; it had barely 120 left in 1931. Its seventy cruisers shrank to fifty. In the fifteen years after the war ended, only two new battleships were built as well as the ill-fated battle cruiser
Hood
. The naval air arm dropped to 159 aircraft. By contrast, Japan’s grew to more than four hundred. In 1926 Churchill urged postponing the navy’s plans to modernize and fortify its base at Singapore for at least six years. The only power to threaten Singapore would be Japan, and again, “Why should there be a [war] with Japan? The Japanese are our allies. I do not believe there is the slightest chance of [war] in our lifetime.”
⁵⁸

To his mind, Churchill was not abandoning the empire. Instead, his hope was that saving money on defense would leave more for social spending.
⁵⁹
But his strategic miscalculations weakened the Royal Navy’s ability to patrol the globe, including the Pacific, and left Singapore virtually defenseless, with fatal consequences later. If any single person can be blamed for the collapse of Britain’s East Asian empire in 1942, and for allowing Japan to advance to the gates of India, it is Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill.

At the time, however, nothing adversely affected Churchill’s reputation more than his role in the 1926 General Strike.

It began on May Day as a strike by miners in Britain’s coal industry, coal being the essential fuel of the island kingdom’s economic engine. Other unions belonging to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) threatened to join in. The ostensible issue was the usual one of pay. But the real agenda among TUC radicals, including many Communists, was to use a “general strike” as a weapon for toppling the Conservative government, perhaps even the capitalist system. For ten tense days, from May 3 to May 12, Baldwin’s government had to confront the specter of complete economic shutdown as workers in one vital industry after another, from the railways and newspapers to electric plants and dockyards, went on strike in sympathy with British miners.

As chancellor, Churchill was in the forefront of the confrontation. In private, he was actually more conciliatory toward the miners than many of his cabinet colleagues. In public, however, his words were over the top. “We are at war,” he declared to the cabinet on May 7, and he urged its fellow members to show no compromise. “Either the country will break the General Strike,” he had written the previous day, “or the General Strike will break the country.”
⁶⁰

In a strict sense, Churchill was correct. But the strident tone and the call to arms horrified the home secretary, Neville Chamberlain. Churchill “simply revels in this affair,” he wrote, “which he will continually talk and treat of as if it were 1914.” Others saw in Churchill the same “vainglory and excessive excitement” that had led to the Gallipoli disaster. The cabinet had to stop him from printing an article calling for the Territorial Army to march against the strikers.
⁶¹