Gandhi & Churchill (64 page)

Contrary to Churchill’s expectations, the Gandhi-Irwin pact did reconcile Baldwin with his party, and it saved the Tory leader from Churchill’s clutches. Indeed, evidence suggests Irwin worked the deal with that in mind.
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Both Geoffrey Dawson and Colonel Herbert Spender-Clay had warned him that Baldwin’s resignation could not be postponed any longer. But once the pact was announced, Baldwin’s position was much stronger. “Don’t think that I imagine that Winston could ever be leader of the Party,” Spender-Clay said, yet that was what members had been saying just days before.

Another Irwin supporter was ecstatic. “All the crooks,” meaning Churchill and Rothermere, had thought Irwin couldn’t reach an agreement with Gandhi. “Now we who had faith in you [i.e., Irwin] have been justified and our leaders—you and Baldwin—are enthroned.”
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Winston refused to believe it was over but kept swinging with his characteristic verve, even after the bell had rung. He and George Lloyd spoke at the Members Committee meeting on March 9 and tried to compel Baldwin to repudiate the Round Table Conference. Baldwin, however, adroitly parried the blow. Then on March 12 came the final showdown in the House of Commons. The subject for debate was His Majesty’s Government’s policy on India; the contest was between Baldwin and Churchill for leadership of the Tory party.

As Baldwin entered the chamber, he was still not sure that Churchill might not pull off a triumph. He knew Churchill’s pyrotechnic skills as a speaker. He also knew, as he confessed to Thomas Jones, that “no Party is as divided as mine.” Old-fashioned Tories who had once loathed Winston were now rallying around him. Baldwin’s own allies were weak. “Sam Hoare is a timid rabbit,” Baldwin complained. “Oliver Stanley has cold feet…It is a party of fools.”
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But his fellow politicians, including Churchill, had spent their lives underestimating Stanley Baldwin. He would prove them wrong again.

The atmosphere on the twelfth was tense. The two men sat only a few yards from each other. Churchill, sitting “with flushed features and twitching hands, looked as though he might spring.” Baldwin, by contrast, conveyed “the impression of a passion frozen into obedience which is his trump card.”
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Winston gave a long, stormy speech, raging against the impending Round Table Conference and the invitation extended to Gandhi to attend. “Once it is judged an aim of high policy to persuade the extremists to come to a Conference,” he declared, then one could only expect the worst. Gandhi had not called off the civil disobedience campaign and boycotts, only suspended them. “They can be loosed at any moment by the mere lifting of Mr. Gandhi’s little finger.”
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Thanks to Lord Irwin, Churchill said, “Gandhi has become the symbol and the almost godlike champion of all those forces which are now working for our exclusion from India” and a breakdown of law and order across the subcontinent. “When Mr. Gandhi went to the seashore a year ago to make salt he was not looking for salt,” Churchill thundered, “he was looking for trouble.” Instead of arresting Gandhi when he clearly broke the law, the viceroy had decided to confine him “under some old Statute as a prisoner of State.” Then Irwin had tried to negotiate with Gandhi while he was still in the Yeravda jail. Then finally he released him unconditionally and opened negotiations with Gandhi “as if he were the victor in some war-like encounter” instead of a criminal and a miscreant.
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It was a good lesson, Churchill said, in how to build up the reputation of a politician or leader of a revolution. Irwin’s policy had turned what should have been Gandhi’s ignominious defeat into “a trophy of victory” that would be hailed from the Himalayas to Ceylon. The Gandhi-Irwin pact, he said, represented “a victory of lawbreakers,” meaning Gandhi, the Congress, and the “circle of wealthy men” who were Gandhi’s financial backers, and “who see at their fingertips the acquisition of the resources of an Empire.”
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He finished with a story from Gibbon, of how in the waning days of the Roman Empire a senator had once bought the imperial throne for a mere £200. “That was fairly cheap,” Churchill warned, “but upon my word the terms upon which the Empire is being offered to this group surrounding Mr. Gandhi, are cheaper still.”
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Churchill’s speech was good, but Baldwin’s, by everyone’s estimate, was better. Indeed, Thomas Jones called it “the speech of his life.”
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Baldwin spoke of how “the unchanging East has changed” and how the world needed to recognize the power of Indian nationalist sentiment. “We have impregnated India ourselves with Western ideas,” like national liberty, he pointed out; “for good or for ill, we are reaping the fruits of our own work.” The All-India Federation plan, he said, was the best hope for realizing self-government for India “as an integral part of the British Empire” Lord Irwin had valiantly taken on “the superhuman task” of negotiating an agreement “upon the success or failure of which may well depend the whole future—the prosperity, the very duration—of the British Empire.”
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But he also spoke of Churchill, and cleverly he quoted the words Churchill had used during his speech a decade earlier condemning the massacre at Amritsar. “Our reign in India or anywhere else has never stood on the basis of physical force alone,” Churchill had said then, but on “cooperation and goodwill” between the two races. That cooperation and goodwill, Baldwin now said, was the basis of the Gandhi-Irwin pact. Members smiled and tittered in recognition of the Churchill quotation. Take that away, Baldwin told them, and all that would be left was force—and the terrifying prospect of holding India together by martial law.

Finally, Baldwin spoke of himself. “If there are a majority in my own party who approach the subject in a niggling spirit, who would have reluctant concessions forced from them one after another” instead of embracing self-government for India, “if, I say, they are in a majority, then in God’s name let them choose a man to lead them!” Baldwin turned and glared at Churchill. He went on: “If they are in a minority, then let them refrain at least from throwing difficulties in the way.”
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Churchill spoke after Baldwin, but it was too late. His Tory colleagues had been offered a stark choice: support your leader on India, or get a new leader. Few, even among the Diehards, were ready to choose Churchill over Baldwin. (Indeed, many would be reluctant to do it almost a decade later in a far worse crisis.) Churchill’s hopes for replacing Baldwin were dead, as were his hopes for uprooting Irwin’s policy on India.

On March 18 at the Albert Hall, in the third great public rally for the India Empire Society, Churchill fired off one last furious bolt. After denouncing Gandhi as an anti-British agitator, and the government for its “hideous act of self-mutilation, astounding to every nation in the world” in inviting him to London, Churchill warned his audience that more sinister forces stood beyond Gandhi. Revolutionaries like Jawaharlal Nehru (whose first name Churchill could barely pronounce), and industrial robber barons like Ambalal Sarabhai, would use Gandhi’s victory for their own dark purposes.

Churchill issued a grim warning of terrible events to come, if Indians won Dominion status. A “triumphant Brahmin oligarchy” would drive out the Muslim minority and grind the untouchables into the dust; Gandhi’s wealthy backers would extract their fortunes from the sweat of the poor; graft and corruption would become the rule of the day; and the lives of Britons in India would be in gravest peril.

“It is our duty to guard those millions from that fate,” Churchill exclaimed. “Our fight is hard. It will also be long…But win or lose, we must do our duty.”
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But as Baldwin had foretold, Churchill’s was now a minority view, even within his own party. After March 12, 1931, he and his Diehard allies could only fight a rearguard action, in hopes of postponing the final bitter day when Parliament would pass its sovereign power into Indian hands. The rest of Westminster looked forward to that day with expectant relief. Labourites, Liberals, and Tories alike scoffed at Winston’s wild Cassandra-like prophecies. It never occurred to them that, like Cassandra, he might be right. Or that the process would start in the very city that epitomized the violence and horrors of the imperial past, namely Cawnpore.

On March 24 Hindu businessmen there organized a hartal to mourn the death of a Punjabi revolutionary who had been executed for killing a British policeman. Some Muslim traders declined to join in. A Hindu mob descended on their shops, and an orgy of arson, looting, and murder followed. For the first time in nearly three-quarters of a century, mangled and mutilated bodies lay strewn in Cawnpore’s streets. By the end of the month, more than a thousand people were dead.
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Churchill balefully warned that “the struggle for power is now beginning between the Moslems and Hindus.”
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Churchill was one of two people who understood the terrible dangers India now faced. The other was Gandhi.

Chapter Nineteen

CONTRA MUNDUM

1931–1932

The loss of India will be the death blow of the British Empire.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, APRIL
1931

O
N A CHILLY WET DAY IN
mid-September 1931 a small, bald bespectacled man in a dhoti and homespun cloak descended the gangplank at Folkestone Harbour. A crowd of press reporters and admirers greeted him, including members of Parliament and the Dean of Canterbury. They were expecting to meet a New Age Hindu saint, an exotic sentinel from the spiritual East. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Mahatma, did not disappoint them. For the next two and a half months his bald head, naked legs, and what the press called “his loincloth and shawl” would become a familiar sight in the streets of London.
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This was Gandhi’s fifth and final visit to London, the city he had once admired as the center of civilization. On the first visit he had been the ambitious law student. On the second, in 1906, he had been the earnest petitioner from South Africa, meeting Undersecretary Winston Churchill in frock coat and stiff collar. He had been a petitioner again in 1909, albeit a disillusioned one. On his last visit, in 1914, hardly anyone even noticed his presence.

But now Gandhi was a world figure. International press coverage of the Salt March and civil disobedience campaign had made him famous. The book by Romain Rolland (he and Gandhi would finally meet on this trip) and admiring biographies like
Gandhi: The Dawn of Indian Freedom
and
“The Naked Fakir,”
along with
Mahatma Gandhi at Work
by Charles Andrews and
Mr. Gandhi: The Man
by Henry Polak’s daughter Millie, prepared the way. Hundreds gathered in a driving rain at the reception for him at Friends House in Euston Road.

“I represent, without any fear of contradiction, the dumb, semi-starved millions of my country, India,” Gandhi told them. “The Congress wants freedom, demands freedom for India and its starving millions.” Another mob of journalists and photographers met him at Kingsley Hall, the pacifist settlement house founded by a former Sabarmati pilgrim, Muriel Lester. It would be home for Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, and his secretary Desai for the next ten weeks.
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To his Western admirers, Gandhi seemed a serenely confident, even triumphant presence. But he was racked by doubts; he sensed from the beginning that this trip would be a failure. Increasingly he was realizing that what he wanted, and what the rest of the world wanted, were two different things. The same was true of the man who had emerged as his fiercest foe, Winston Churchill.

“What if” is a game that historians like to play, but with a serious purpose. Imagining what might have happened but didn’t can sometimes reveal how small events or large personalities can suddenly shift the balance of historical forces in a new direction.

If, for example, the Tories had won the 1929 election instead of Labour, Winston Churchill would very probably have become secretary of state for India.
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The whole tenor of Indian policy for the next two years would have taken an abrupt shift as a result. The moment Gandhi threatened civil disobedience, Churchill would have insisted on his immediate arrest, overruling Viceroy Irwin’s objections. In short, there would have been no Salt March, no iconic image of Gandhi at Dandi to galvanize India or broadcast to the world.

Likewise, if Churchill had managed to force Baldwin’s resignation in the second week of March 1931, he probably would have emerged not only as the leader of but the dominant personality in his party. No one else was in a position to compete. Austen Chamberlain had retired, and his brother Neville was a rising but still minor star. The spring of 1931 was the closest Winston Churchill ever came to leaving his personal stamp on his Conservative Party—closer even than during the Second World War.

The results would have been momentous. With Churchill at the helm, the Tories of the 1930s would have been the party of empire; the party of rearmament and a tough stance toward rising totalitarian powers in Europe; the party of battling Bolshevism abroad and creeping socialism at home. They might not have won another election, but they would have avoided the tainted legacy of appeasement.

And if politicians and negotiators had used the Gandhi-Irwin pact to rush an India Dominion Bill through Parliament in the summer of 1931, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India would be one country today. News of the pact had temporarily paralyzed Churchill and his Diehard allies. Everyone else, including Conservatives, would have signed on with relief. In 1931 Muslims were still too divided to thwart an Indian federation with a Hindu majority. Gandhi was still the only nationalist spokesman who mattered.