Gandhi & Churchill (63 page)

“You are making a great mistake,” Gandhi told them. On March 6 he gave a press interview and answered the question about whether Indians were back where they started on New Year’s Eve 1929. “It is not the same position,” he insisted. “Today Dominion Status is a certainty and it is within our power to make it as comprehensive as possible so as to mean complete independence,” through the next Round Table Conference.
²⁴

Many in the Congress felt otherwise, but no one was prepared to challenge their leader. The one person who might have, Motilal Nehru, died on January 30. Jawaharlal could only bury his head on Gandhi’s shoulder and weep angry tears of disappointment.
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For the first time Gandhi’s most passionate supporters felt their Mahatma had let them down.

If the Indian reaction to the Gandhi-Irwin pact was stunned disappointment, the British reaction was splenetic. Churchill was at the fore.

The tired old man of the previous January had been transformed into a human dynamo. On January 8, 1931, he wrote to his son Randolph a letter marked “secret” that is deeply revealing. First, he told Randolph that he had secured the support of Lord Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
for his campaign and that he believed the Labour government would fall in the upcoming election and Baldwin would again be prime minister. But Winston would refuse to join the cabinet. There would be no more politics as usual. He was more than bitterly disappointed that former viceroy Lord Reading and Lloyd George, whom he thought would be his allies, had signed on to the next Round Table Conference and Indian Federation scheme.

Winston was convinced his position was still strong. “It is a great comfort when one finds a question one cares about more than office or party or friendship,” he wrote. “I am going to fight this Indian business
à outrance
.” He and the India Empire Society (who “feed out of my hand”) were planning another mass rally at the end of the month; together they would rally the nation against the surrender of India and defeat “Irwinism” once and for all.
²⁶

Lord Irwin, for his part, had worried that Winston might “make mischief” over Gandhi’s release; and he was right.
²⁷
On January 26, the very day Gandhi left prison, Churchill rose in the House of Commons.

First he lambasted the recent Round Table Conference and “the hysterical landslide of opinion” that had preceded it. “While all the world wondered,” he announced, “the Sovereign Power, which had created modern India and which was its sole support and defense,” entered into unprecedented negotiations to hand over “the title deeds of the British position in India.” Could there have been a “worse way of dealing with so grave a problem”? No wonder a firestorm of violence and lawlessness had erupted in India. And now that “Mr. Gandhi is again at large, no doubt he will contribute a further gloss upon the Government’s proposals” and make Indians of every political stripe believe that the British Raj was about to be replaced by a “Gandhi Raj.”
²⁸

Everyone, Churchill added, expected India to be ready someday for Dominion status, but not in anyone’s lifetime. Churchill had been intimately involved in handing over power in South Africa, then in Ireland, “but nothing of the sort is possible in India.” Now, however, “the orbs of power have been dangled before the gleaming eyes of excitable millions,” in expectation that a handover was only a matter of details.
²⁹

The result was that the subcontinent teetered on the brink of chaos, and the viceroy was “forced to impose restrictions on civil liberty without precedent in India since the Mutiny.” The Indian political elite had became radicalized, and “what had been accepted before was now brushed aside.” A legacy of “two centuries of effort and achievement, of lives on a hundred fields, of more lives given and consumed in faithful and devoted service to the Indian people themselves,” was about to be thrown away.
³⁰

“The great liner is sinking,” Churchill cried, and it was sinking in a calm sea. As the compartments belowdecks flooded one after the other, Britons were jammed in the saloon dancing to jazz bands. But Churchill refused to believe that “our people will consent to be edged, pushed, talked and cozened out of India.” When the British people living there awakened to their peril, with “their individual fellow country men scattered about, with their women and children, throughout this enormous land, in hourly peril amidst the Indian multitudes,” Churchill felt sure that Britain’s “unmeasured strength will once more be used” and the empire made secure.
³¹

The remark about orbs of power being “dangled before gleaming eyes” was certainly racially offensive. So was the reference to European women and children being in peril from Indian multitudes—a deliberate play on race memories of the massacre at Cawnpore and the Mutiny. Churchill also alienated his ex-allies with his cutting references to Lord Reading and Lloyd George selling out by belatedly supporting the Round Table Conference, just as he wildly overestimated the conference’s impact.

Nonetheless, the speech did touch on genuine worries about the loss of India within the House of Commons. George Lane-Fox wrote to Irwin that he had been sitting in the back benches “and when Winston began he had not much support.” But as the speech went on, other Tories “began to feel this represented their own doubts” about Gandhi’s release. “Gradually quite a number first began to purr and then to cheer.” When Baldwin rose to respond, he managed to get cheers from Labour MPs but none at all “on our own benches,” where there was only an “ominous silence.”
³²

Lane-Fox felt frustrated that Baldwin had seemed so “weak and woolly” in the debate. He seemed to defer to Irwin too much and was too cooperative with Labour by half. The passion, the energy, was clearly on the other side. Still Baldwin refused to budge. He even announced that if the Tories did return to power, their “one duty” would be to implement their predecessor’s agreements at the next Round Table Conference.
³³

On the twenty-seventh Winston sent his party leader a brief note. “Now that our divergences of view upon Indian policy have become public,” he wrote, “I feel I ought not any longer attend meetings of your Business Committee,” which in effect set the agenda for the Conservatives’ shadow cabinet.
³⁴
Baldwin accepted the resignation from the committee without demur. The next time Winston Churchill held any official post in his party or the government would be in September 1939.

That was certainly not what he had planned. For as he spoke at another mass rally in Manchester at the Free Trade Hall on January 30, 1931, his mind was already racing ahead. The hall was full to overflowing; Churchill’s speech, according to one of the meeting organizers, was “tremendous.” It reminded his audience, many of them mill workers, how much their own fortunes depended on India as an outlet for exports. “The declared determination of Gandhi to exclude for ever by boycott or a prohibitive tariff” all foreign piece-goods would mean the ruin of Manchester and the economy of Lancashire as a whole. The loss of India would be “final and fatal” for Britain, Churchill added, but also fatal to India.
³⁵

This was the other note Churchill was now adding to his campaign against the government: that India’s future, as well as Britain’s, had to be safeguarded against the likes of Gandhi. Gandhi was “a fanatic and an ascetic of the fakir type well known in the East,” Churchill said, whose incarceration had made him “a martyr under very comfortable conditions, and a national hero without running any risk.” With his release, “he now emerges on the scene a triumphant victor.” A British withdrawal would leave India in his clutches. In a very short time Gandhi and his radical friends would reduce their country to the kind of anarchy in which China now found itself. Churchill avowed, “If, guided by counsels of madness and cowardice disguised as false benevolence, you troop home from India, you will leave behind you what John Morley called ‘a bloody chaos,’ and you will find famine to greet you on the horizon when you return.”
³⁶

As Churchill returned to London with Manchester’s cheers still reverberating in his ears, he sensed that in this hour of peril Britain needed a leader. Others agreed. Even Baldwin’s supporters had been complaining for months that his leadership, especially on India, was “uninspiring.” Lord Rothermere was now convinced that India would be the issue that would carry Winston to the premiership. Randolph Churchill wrote to his father: “I am so thrilled at your stand on India…Perhaps the Tories will have come to their senses and you will be leader of the party”—which must eventually mean Number 10 itself.
³⁷

These thoughts had crossed Churchill’s mind as well, but he knew he had to proceed step by step. The ultimate question of leadership, he told Rothermere, remained in “the remote distance.” First he would have to secure a vote of confidence from his constituents, now that he had turned against his party hierarchy. Then he would have to get the party’s India Committee to debate Baldwin’s support for the second Round Table Conference. If Baldwin lost there, it would shake Conservative confidence in their leader. Finally, he would step up his speeches and the pressure in the media. He begged Rothermere to promise him the
Daily Mail
’s support: “Otherwise Baldwin with the [London]
Times
at his back is master of the fate of India.”
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Winston felt sure the plan would work. “As long as I am fighting a cause,” he said, “I am not afraid of anything.” He was sure many Tory MPs backed him up but were afraid to speak for fear of being labeled disloyal. But loyalty to Baldwin and the party were “mere irrelevancies” compared to the vital issue of India. “Win there,” Winston said, “win everywhere.”
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By the time the next general party conference rolled around, Baldwin would be finished as leader—and Winston would be perfectly poised to take his place.

Indeed, for almost a month Baldwin’s position grew steadily weaker, as the Tory party teetered on the brink of a major shakeup. As Winston had foreseen, the debate in the India Committee on February 9 went badly for Baldwin. Winston did not attend, but Lord Lloyd gave “a forcible Die-hard speech,” Leo Amery recorded in his diary, while others backed up his view that any compromise on India sprang from “cowardice and time serving.” No decision was made, but members agreed to hold a special Conservative Members Committee meeting on the subject.

In the hallway Churchill could be heard telling the press that he was not going to let India be betrayed without telling England all about it. “I am afraid we are in real difficulties over the India business,” Amery wrote to Baldwin. “Winston has chosen his moment and his excuse for separating with the Party very adroitly.”
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More fiery speeches followed in Edinburgh and at the West Essex Conservative Association, as Churchill’s momentum grew. The India Committee for the Tory party grew from 80 to 100 members, and all of them Diehards, one of Baldwin’s intimates told him. Brendan Bracken assured Randolph that his father had “rallied all the fighters in the Tory Party” and “reestablished himself as a potential leader.”
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The
Daily Mail
and the
Evening News
were, if anything, “overdoing their support,” Churchill himself said. Even Sir John Simon agreed to come to the next India Empire Society rally at Albert Hall.

On February 25 Winston wrote to his wife, “It is astonishing looking back over the past six weeks what a change has been brought in my position…Anything may happen now if opinion has time to develop.” In private, many MPs were already talking about whether Baldwin should quit, under the terms. “All I need is time,” Winston said.
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Then quite suddenly time ran out.

On March 5 Irwin’s pact with Gandhi was announced. At one blow it wrecked any chance that Churchill would ascend to the leadership, and it ensured that the next Conservative prime minister would be Stanley Baldwin.

At first glance, the pact should have had the opposite effect. Indeed, when news of their first private meetings leaked out, Churchill had heaped scorn on the idea of Irwin striking a private deal with “this malignant subversive fanatic.”

“In dealing with Oriental races,” he had told the West Essex Conservative Association on February 23, “it is a mistake to try to gloss over grave differences” or “ignore or conceal or put in the background rugged but unpleasant facts.” But this was just what Viceroy Irwin was trying to do, Churchill said. Then he shifted his anger to Gandhi, with words that were to become famous, even notorious:

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India and the danger to which white people there are exposed.
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Churchill had certainly said worse things about Gandhi. For his part Gandhi, when he learned what Churchill had said, was more amused than otherwise. Years later Gandhi even mentioned the phrase in the only personal letter he ever sent the British leader.
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However, the vehemence sprang from Churchill’s mistaken belief that Gandhi was more powerful than he was. It never occurred to Churchill that Gandhi was also under pressure to make a deal. Being largely ignorant of the current Indian scene, he did not realize that Indian politicians suffered from their own version of “Irwinism.” They were quite willing to settle for half a loaf in exchange for some peace of mind, while the Conservative rank and file in Parliament were ready to do the same.