Gandhi & Churchill (65 page)

A day after the pact Gandhi even seemed to endorse the idea of India staying in the empire. In the 1920s he had told a student, “I should be quite satisfied with Dominion Status within the British Empire, if it is a reality and not a sham.”
⁴
Now in 1931 he told journalists that “today Dominion Status is a certainty.” Being part of the British Commonwealth did not contradict absolute independence (Purana Swaraj) as long as it meant “absolute equality” between the two powers. Gandhi even predicted that one day Delhi would replace “Downing Street” as the center of the empire.
⁵

But this did not happen. The queen of England’s face does not grace Indian coins and stamps today, as it does Australian and Canadian ones. No Union Jack appears in the upper left corner of the Indian flag. Two men, in the fall of 1931, prevented that from happening. One was Churchill; the other was Gandhi.

Gandhi arrived for the London talks with a deceptively strong hand. Before leaving he had secured a resolution from a unified Indian National Congress at Karachi, stating that only the Congress could speak for India and that Gandhi spoke for the Congress. But Gandhi knew that unity was an illusion. Only his own force of will and saintly reputation could pull together the sharp divisions within the Congress and across India. The very day he arrived in Karachi, he was met at the train station by a mob of young Marxist protesters who were furious over his Irwin pact “sellout.” They angrily chanted “Down with Gandhi!” “Down with the traitor Gandhi!” and waved black flags in his face. One protester nearly brained him with his flagpole.

Then came the worst outbreak of communal violence since the 1857 Mutiny, in of all places Cawnpore. Even as the Karachi Congress met, more than 150 Muslims and 110 Hindus had been killed. When American reporter William Shirer arrived in Cawnpore from Karachi, the bodies of men, women, and children were still putrefying in the streets. “The tales of atrocities on both sides [were] so sickening,” that he hesitated to include them in his dispatches.
⁶
And the very day Gandhi arrived in London, on September 12, fresh riots were breaking out in the Punjab.

Gandhi never felt more divided within himself. Shirer saw him on the eleventh in Marseilles, when he arrived from India on the SS
Rajputana
. The Mahatma briskly set forth his goals for the forthcoming conference. They no longer included Dominion status. He would now accept only complete independence and coequal status with Britain. Only then, he stated, would he and the Congress consider any “reservations and safeguards,” a phrase that was London’s euphemism for a continuing British presence in India.

Shirer was shocked. No Dominion of India? Gandhi was ruling it out, ironically, on racial grounds, much as Churchill did. Indians belonged to a different race and culture, Gandhi averred. They were different from the white Anglo-Saxons who made up the other Dominion countries and therefore had a different destiny. “The world is sick of bloodletting,” he would say later in a CBS radio broadcast from London. “I flatter myself that it will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show the way out” of the labyrinth of violence as a way of life to a higher truth.
⁷

Outwardly Gandhi projected confidence and conciliation. He told the Associated Press that he believed Britain was “faced with such staggering domestic problems” that it would have to give in to his demands. He even told the
Daily Mail
he hoped to meet Winston Churchill “and all those who speak and write against me.” But Shirer sensed that Gandhi was actually determined to wreck the conference.
⁸

In fact, as historian Judith Brown has pointed out, the second Round Table Conference became a necessary casualty in Gandhi’s struggle to stay in charge of the Indian National Congress. His reference to the Congress in his earlier speech at Friends House was calculated. His leadership depended on making the Congress the sole voice of “authentic” Indian nationalism in any and all forums. Gandhi realized that the image of give-and-take discussion of these Round Table Conferences was an illusion. Indians could propose all day, and did, but it was the British and the British alone who would dispose the future of India.

Indians labored under the illusion that they could talk, or at least intrigue, their way to independence. But Gandhi also knew that the British labored under their own illusion, that somehow they could keep India by agreeing to set it free. “The British people,” Gandhi said, “have a faculty for self-delusion as no other people have.”
⁹
It was one of his most profound observations, and he and Churchill were the only ones who understood its implications. What Indians needed to be free, the British could not afford to give up. And what the British were willing to give up, Indians did not want.

Churchill, meanwhile, continued to thunder away at Gandhi in the House of Commons. On July 9 he deplored allowing Gandhi to come to London for meetings “from which nothing but further surrenders of British authority can emerge,” instead of keeping him in jail.
¹⁰
Once again he branded the Gandhi-Irwin pact a farce. This time he quoted in support of his view “the highest authority of all, Mr. Gandhi.” Churchill read from a news report in which the reporter asked the Mahatma if the pact with the viceroy marked a truce or a peace. Gandhi had replied: “It can never be a peace.” Churchill looked up from the paper in his hand. “That is Mr. Gandhi,” he pointed out. The odd thing was that Churchill had to agree with him.
¹¹

Then Churchill turned to the atrocities in Cawnpore. He did not scruple to play on racially charged memories of the earlier Cawnpore massacre and described how Muslims and untouchables, but especially Britons in India
and their wives,
were left “quaking with fear or anxiety” at the threats of the Hindu mob. “I do not wonder at it,” he said, for the riots in Cawnpore were an “outbreak of primordial fury” and “animal and bestial instincts.” They were a bitter foretaste, he implied, of what would happen if Gandhi got his way.
¹²

Yet Gandhi still hoped he could arrange to meet Churchill through “common friends.”
¹³
Such a meeting, almost twenty-five years to the day since their last, would have been a splashy news event. Whether it would have changed anyone’s mind is doubtful. Churchill, however, declined to descend from his fastness at Chartwell to meet the Mahatma.
¹⁴
Others, however, did (including his son Randolph). The flow of visitors into Kingsley Hall and the temporary office that was opened for Gandhi at Knightsbridge, to house his secretaries and staff, became a torrent. “In every corner of the room,” a witness remembered, “there were famous sculptors and artists trying to get a model or a picture of this elusive man.” In the center of the visitors, with the secretaries murmuring to one another and the floor strewn with letters and telegrams, sat the imperturbable Mahatma, quietly spinning on his portable charkha. When he learned it was time to go to the conference, “he would dart out to his car, followed by panting detectives, and some of his staff clutching the famous spinning wheel and the green rush basket containing his food.”
¹⁵

Malcolm Muggeridge covered the conference opening for the
Manchester Guardian
. Muggeridge had been a schoolteacher in Alwaye when Gandhi came to address the college in the 1920s. He remembered Gandhi speaking in a “subtle and discriminating” English, while the students exultantly cried:
“Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!”
—their careful lessons on Ruskin and Dryden instantly forgotten. Now Gandhi seemed changed, “somehow crafty and calculating,” as he sat with ministers and maharajas, including an enormously fat Aga Khan representing India’s Muslims. There were “knights brown and white, turbans and shining pates,” 112 delegates in all. They listened politely to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s droning introductory speech, which included a bizarre appeal for “the lion to lie down with the lamb,” although MacDonald frankly admitted he didn’t know which was which. From that point on, Muggeridge noted, delegates laboriously took up the metaphor, “with everyone trying to decide to which category he belonged.”
¹⁶

All, that is, except Gandhi, who attended all the conference’s sessions
¹⁷
but seemed barely to be listening. Photographs show him wrapped in his shawl, looking bored and out of place. When he spoke, the reaction from British observers, including the most sympathetic, was one of severe disappointment. They expected to hear a man “of commanding gifts” who would mesmerize his audience with spiritual insight and superior wisdom. That expectation, the
Times
declared, “was not fulfilled. He had no mastery of details…His interventions in discussion…often had little real connexion with the matter at hand…constitutional problems did not interest him.”
¹⁸
But it was constitutional questions with which they were supposed to deal. Gandhi renewed his call for a partnership of equals between Britain and India, but it was pro forma. His task was to establish beyond appeal that Congress, and Congress alone, knew what was best for India, in order to hold his fragile Congress coalition together. Beyond that, he took little interest in the broader discussion. The other delegates, like Aga Khan and T. B. Sapru, had different agenda. But the ground had shifted under their feet even before the conference met.

On August 24 a general election turned out the Labour government and brought in a multiparty National Government instead. MacDonald remained prime minister, but he now had a swarm of Tories in his cabinet, including a new secretary of state for India, Sir Samuel Hoare. Hoare had visited India and had Indian friends. He was much closer to Irwin than Churchill on Indian independence; he keenly supported Baldwin’s support of the government. And descended from Quakers, Hoare had emotional roots in Nonconformist social activism, which should have been another opening to the Mahatma. Instead, Hoare’s first meeting with Gandhi was unsatisfactory and hinted at difficulties to come.

It was a wet, cold, and blustery day when they met at India House. Gandhi arrived in his usual costume of cloak and dhoti, totally unsuited for either the occasion or the weather. Hoare, however, was determined to be ingratiating. He invited Gandhi to sit near the fire to dry his cloak and bare legs. “He…looked even smaller and more bent than his pictures showed him,” Hoare remembered many years later. “His bony knees and toothless mouth would have made him ridiculous if they had not been completely overshadowed by the dominating impression of a great personality.”

As they sat by the hissing coal fire, Hoare tried to get Gandhi to open up on the most pressing issue. “I believe that if I had been able to say to him, ‘Take Dominion Status at once without any safeguards,’ we should have found him one of our best friends,” Hoare wrote, but Gandhi refused to be drawn out. The meeting remained friendly. As he left, Gandhi warmly shook Hoare’s hand and thanked him. But Hoare was not fooled. He told the new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, “we cannot possibly make an agreement with him.” Subsequent meetings, and Gandhi’s conduct in the conference, only confirmed that view.
^*88
19

Photo Insert II

Mohandas and Kasturbai Gandhi after arriving in India in January 1915. When Kasturbai died in 1944, “a part of Bapu departed,” a disciple wrote. (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)

Winston and Clementine Churchill on his return to England from America, 1929. A week earlier, he had witnessed the great Wall Street crash in New York. When this picture was taken, he had just learned that the government was planning to give India independence and dominion status. (Hulton/Getty Archives)