Gandhi & Churchill (67 page)

Gandhi listened stonily, then said, “We have come to the parting of the ways.” MacDonald hastily remonstrated, “My dear Mahatma, let us go on in this way; it is the best way, you may find it will be the only way.” That night Gandhi returned to Knightsbridge and sat by the fire, spinning with his charkha, hour after hour, saying nothing.
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Winston Churchill, by contrast, had a great deal to say. Two days after the conference ended, he made a triumphant speech on the floor of the House of Commons. The gist of it was that Parliament should endorse no part of the Round Table proceedings: not the idea of federation; not the granting of Dominion status (especially since Parliament had just extended the autonomy of existing Dominions in the Statute of Westminster to include foreign and defense matters); not even the promise of further negotiations. For nearly an hour Churchill reviewed the history of Britain’s attempt to give India self-rule since Montagu’s first momentous statement in 1917. Each time Britain made a concession, Churchill thundered, the Indians had demanded more; and each time India became more unstable and ungovernable.

Then he came to Gandhi. “We saw the spectacle of Mr. Gandhi and some of his leading lieutenants negotiating almost on equal terms with the Viceroy” to arrive at the Gandhi-Irwin pact. This was a “most profoundly injurious blow at British authority, not only in India, but throughout the globe.” Churchill even blamed the recent plunge in the pound on it: “all the world could see…an apparent complete absence of backbone in our Imperial affairs.”
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The government had said that unless the Indians were promised the same rights as New Zealanders and white South Africans, India would dissolve into bloody chaos. Now the government had done so. The result was—bloody chaos.

Churchill returned once again to the massacres at Cawnpore with an almost hideous relish. He described the corpses of men, women, and children rotting in the streets, the atrocities, the aftermath of bestial fury. “Not for a hundred years,” he said, “have the relations between Hindus and Moslems been so poisoned as they have been since England was deemed to be losing its grip and was believed to be ready to quit the scene if told to go.” Now the government was asking the House of Commons to endorse its shoddy dealings with Gandhi and his coconspirators. Only by scaling back on the plans for Indian Dominion, Churchill warned, would Parliament be able to “uphold the rights of Britons and tell the truth to India,” namely, that self-government was still a long way off.
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It was Churchill’s most powerful attack on Gandhi yet, lasting nearly an hour and a half. But the reaction in the House was less than overwhelming. Samuel Hoare slipped into the corridor to pen a note to the viceroy. He had been “very nervous” going into the debate, he confessed, but now even before it was over he was convinced that “three quarters of the House at least will accept our position.”
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He was right. Tory members may have fidgeted in their seats as Churchill railed away at their leaders’ submission to Labour’s lead on India. They may have agreed with him that the plan to create “450 road-less constituencies as large as Scotland, each containing half-a-million illiterate voters,” in a subcontinent “with more national, racial and religious divisions than Europe,” and to forge a United States of India with no plan on how to merge the princely states, with no plan to protect untouchables and other minorities or to preserve law and order, was an invitation to disaster.
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They shuddered over the memories of Cawnpore. They may even have felt that by letting India go, they would be surrendering something powerful and significant and would be undermining what Churchill called “the great historical position of Britain” in the East.

But in the end it was not worth defying their party leadership to side with Churchill. Once again Baldwin prevailed. Churchill’s effort to amend the resolution drew exactly forty-six votes. George Lloyd’s effort to stop it in the House of Lords lost by almost two to one. Just four days earlier Churchill had completed an article for
The Strand
magazine entitled “Great Fighters for Lost Causes.”
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Now he had an inkling he might be joining them. He nursed his disappointment the next day by leaving for America on the liner
Europa
.

Gandhi was leaving, too. On December 5, after a final meeting with Hoare and Prime Minister MacDonald, he took the train to Folkestone. The weather was bright and warm, “summer in December.” He told an interviewer, “My last words to England must be: Farewell and beware! I came a seeker after peace. I return fearful of war.”
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In personal terms, his final visit to London had been a public relations success. He had traveled to Lancashire to meet with the textile workers whom Churchill had said would be out of work if Gandhi got his way. They had greeted him with warmth, even affection. He had met with Quakers and New Age admirers; he had met Charlie Chaplin. He had even had tea with the king at Buckingham Palace.
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He had talked with left-leaning intellectuals at Oxford like Gilbert Murray and Edward Thompson, dismissing their worries that India might not be ready for self-government. “Give us the liberty to make mistakes,” he told them. “Trust us to ourselves.”
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On the way home he had a chance to finally meet Romain Rolland and visited Rome for an uneasy meeting with Benito Mussolini. Gandhi’s praise of Mussolini was only slightly less effusive than Churchill’s six years earlier. He noted that the dictator was “a great personality” and patriot and that Mussolini “never interferes with voluntary activities for the betterment of the country”—unlike the British with the Indian National Congress.
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However, Gandhi’s troubles began when he docked in Bombay. Irwin was gone, having departed the previous October. The new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, was a very different figure. Unlike Irwin, he had long official experience in India as governor-general of both Bombay and Madras. Although he had been a Liberal MP and opposed the Churchill hard line on self-rule, he was in no mood to put up with “any nonsense” from native politicians, least of all Gandhi.

They had met at Simla the previous April, before Gandhi went to London. Willingdon had refused to change municipal rules that banned all cars in Simla except for those of the viceroy and the commander in chief. Since Gandhi refused to ride a rickshaw—“I shall never allow my brother men to become beasts of burden for me,” he said—he had had to walk the six miles to the viceregal lodge every day and back, often in a cold drenching rain.
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Indians were furious, but Willingdon had made his point. He had respect for Gandhi. “He may be a saint,” he told Sir Samuel Hoare, “he may be a holy man.” But “I am perfectly certain that he is one of the most astute politically minded and bargaining little gentleman I [have] ever come across.” Willingdon was determined not to give him the upper hand.
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The days of the Mahatma’s soulful give and take with Irwin, a fellow “man of God,” were over.

The other problem was that violence was spreading. Terrorist attacks were becoming common in Bengal. On the Northwest Frontier groups of nationalist Red Shirts clashed with police. In the United Provinces Jawaharlal Nehru was leading a protest against farm taxes, which set off pitched battles with authorities. Willingdon cracked down on the violence and even prepared for war if need be. On December 17 he had drawn up an order-in-council in case Gandhi and his supporters resisted. The order included a general police roundup and invoked the Emergency Powers Ordinance. There was also a decree that any meeting of the Congress’s leadership would be deemed an unlawful assembly, and that Gandhi himself was to be immediately jailed. In fact, when Gandhi disembarked in Bombay, his cell at Yeravda was already waiting for him.
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Gandhi, of course, knew nothing of this. He was unhappy with the disturbances and with Nehru’s role in fomenting them. But he felt bound to stand by his wayward lieutenant, especially when Nehru was seized on his way to see Gandhi. The strains of holding together the Congress were showing; after the disaster of the second Round Table Conference Gandhi could not afford another setback. On December 29 he wrote to Viceroy Lord Willingdon, hoping to open a dialogue. But Willingdon’s council had made him swear he would not meet with the Mahatma while riots were still going on in the United Provinces; Willingdon in turn told Gandhi there could be no meeting unless Gandhi immediately denounced the violence. Nor would he discuss the emergency measures already in place.
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Gandhi felt he had no choice. On New Year’s Day he and the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution authorizing a renewal of civil disobedience until the government revoked its Emergency Power ordinances. “My conscience is clear,” Gandhi told Sapru.
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The government, however, moved first. Just before dawn on January 4, 1932, police swooped down on his quarters in the Mani Buvan building in Bombay. Arrest of the other Working Committee members soon followed.

Others started up the noncooperation campaign without them, with the usual flag-waving processions, boycotts, and pickets. Nearly 15,000 went to jail the first month, and another 17,000 in February. But in March the number fell to 7,000.
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Without Gandhi’s leadership, the campaign fizzled. By mid-1932 the entire movement was at a standstill.

The Round Table Conference, too, was a shambles. The Gandhi-Irwin pact was officially “dead” (Willingdon’s word). Civil disobedience had been crushed, and virtual martial law was the order of the day; the Mahatma was back in prison for the second time in less than a year. If anyone was the loser in this struggle, it was Gandhi. And if anyone was the winner, it should have been Winston Churchill.

But once again appearances deceived. In the 1920s, their respective fortunes had undergone a strange and sudden reversal; now it happened again. Gandhi would leave the Yeravda prison more politically potent than ever, while Churchill was descending into a parliamentary oblivion from which many thought he would never emerge.

Certainly the months of January and February 1932 were triumphant ones for Churchill. Ironically he almost did not live to see them.

On December 13 he was in New York City, planning to visit his friend the millionaire Bernard Baruch after dinner. Churchill called a taxi to the Waldorf Astoria and ordered the driver to take him to Baruch’s house, farther up Fifth Avenue. But Churchill could not remember the house number or its cross street. Like most visitors to New York, he found that one cross street looked very much like another, especially in the dark. So for nearly an hour, he and the cab driver drove fruitlessly up and down Fifth Avenue.

“Drop me here,” Churchill finally barked. He got out on the Central Park side, under the dark overhanging trees. He had decided he would simply walk up Fifth Avenue until he recognized Baruch’s house. He only hoped the millionaire and his guests would still be waiting for him.

As Winston crossed Fifth Avenue, he knew enough to glance left for oncoming traffic. (The instinct of most Britons would have been to glance right.) But in doing so he failed to notice a driver headed the opposite way, who in turn failed to see the portly figure emerging from the gloom until it was too late. The car struck Churchill at thirty-five miles an hour and sent him skittering across the pavement.

A crowd instantly gathered. Churchill was badly hurt but still conscious. He mumbled to the first policeman who came to his side that the accident was entirely his own fault.
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Finally a taxi driver took him to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he spent nearly a week recuperating from two cracked ribs, general bruising, and a badly cut scalp and another two weeks laid up at the Waldorf Astoria.

Churchill, unperturbed, dismissed the accident as “a bad bump” and even wrote an account for the
Daily Mail
that was syndicated around the world and earned him £600.
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Lying in his bed, he could read in the English newspapers about events in India that seemed to justify his earlier warnings. “It is obvious the Government must either shoot up or shut up Gandhi” had been Lord Beaverbrook’s prediction on January 2. Two days later it came true.

Greatly relieved, Churchill penned a note to his son: “What troubles [the government] have brought upon themselves, the Indians and all of us!” Now “a strong united Conservative Parliament will soon expose the hollowness” of the claim that suppressing Gandhi and the Congress would take entire divisions of troops from England. “As I have always said, an effort at will-power was the main need.” Churchill’s mood became warm and conciliatory. Now that MacDonald, Baldwin, Hoare, and the rest had done the right thing, “there seems to be nothing to quarrel with them now.”
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A month later he wrote another note from the Waldorf Astoria: “It seems to me that the Government have been forced by the march of events to take exactly the line in India we always advocated. Now that they are maintaining law and order,” he assured Sir James Hankey, “the Constitutional issue is, for the time being, in the background.”
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Not until he returned to England on March 17 did he realize how wrong he was.

In India, the arrests continued and emergency powers remained in effect. But by the end of the month Ramsay MacDonald was plaintively asking how much longer they would have to continue locking up Congress members, and how long Gandhi would have to stay in prison, before “Mr. Gandhi will be allowed to enter into political conversations for the purpose of reaching an agreement.”
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Secretary Hoare thought he had the answer: by pushing ahead his plan for a constitution, in consultation with a committee of non-Congress Moderates like Sapru and Jayakar, the British could do an end run around the Indian National Congress and its jailed leader. Hoare craftily suggested baiting the hook by offering to hand over certain responsibilities from New Delhi to Indians in the provinces. Then the British could reel in the Indian princes, minorities, and leading business interests with a full-fledged Government of India act. Meanwhile the government would also announce its plan to present a settlement of the communal question. This would be further bait to Muslims and other non-Hindus to join hands with the British as they planned “the transfer of power”—the new phrase for giving India back to the Indians.