Gandhi & Churchill (69 page)

On the twentieth Gandhi rose as usual before dawn. The fast was to begin at noon. The night before he ate his usual meal as he described it to Mirabehn—“brown bread, milk, a vegetable, some dates (not bad), and
musambis
.”
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He prayed and sang with his companions his favorite Hindu hymn,
“Vaishnava Jana,”
and from six to eight-thirty they recited the
Bhagavad Gita
together. Gandhi also received a telegram from Rabindranath Tagore, who supported his fast for the sake of “India’s unity and her social integrity.” Half an hour before noon Patel prepared his last glass of honey and lemon juice. Then Gandhi lay down on his cot and awaited his destiny.

All across India there were expressions of fear and dread. Tagore told his students at Santiniketan that a shadow had fallen across the sun.
¹²
British doctors checked on Gandhi’s condition every day. Gandhi had predicted that he might last two weeks. Given his frail body and blood pressure, most gave him only a few days, a week at most.

The next day a group of worried men gathered in the prison office. They included Sapru, Gandhi’s friend G. D. Birla, Rajagopalachari, Patel, and Mahadev Desai. Gandhi sat quietly on the table and listened as they proposed offering terms to the one man who might break the impasse: the untouchable leader Dr. Ambedkar. If he and Gandhi could reach some agreement by sorting through the complexities of reserved seats and weighted electorates, perhaps the government might relent, and the fast could be over.

Gandhi listened but said nothing to encourage them. On the other hand, he did not rule out a compromise, so the group hurried to catch the train for Bombay. Gandhi moved out into the courtyard (the warden had graciously allowed him to set up his cot under a mango tree) and sat down, occasionally sipping a glass of water and not speaking, since it exhausted him too much. Desai, Patel, and Sarojini Naidu sat with him, as the fierce sun passed overhead.

The next day came and went, and then the next. Gandhi grew progressively weaker and could no longer sit up. Fearing the worst, the authorities had Kasturbai brought from Sabarmati to Poona to be near her husband. The following day the gates of the prison opened, and Dr. Ambedkar stepped through.

Portly, broad-shouldered, and bespectacled, Dr. Ambedkar was there against his will. If he hated any man living, it was Mahatma Gandhi. Indeed, along with Jinnah and S. C. Bose, he formed part of the trio of Indian leaders who would hinder and harass Gandhi in his last decade like angry furies. He was also the first openly to challenge Gandhi’s New Age vision of India.

Bhimrao Ambedkar was as resolutely modern as Gandhi was deliberately reactionary. He had little choice. As an untouchable, the India that Gandhi revered had rendered him a nonperson. Instead, he had found Christian patrons who had paid his way to the nondenominational Elphinstone College in Bombay and then to Columbia University, where he had earned a Ph.D. as an expert on Indian finance.

Ambedkar was convinced that the problem of caste in India was neither religious nor philosophical but sociological.
¹³
For centuries, Ambedkar argued, traditional India had maintained itself by a system of exploitation disguised as spiritual hierarchy, “a progressive order of reverence and a graded order of contempt.” That system relegated those who did the hard menial work that kept society alive, the dalits and sudras, to the bottom, and those who reaped the benefits, the Brahmins, to the top.

With his transatlantic perspective, Ambedkar saw a strong analogy between untouchability in India and slavery in the American South. The political figure he revered more than any other was Abraham Lincoln. He fervently believed that India’s untouchables needed the equivalent of an Emancipation Proclamation to free them from servitude to traditional Hinduism. The formation of a separate electorate would be a crucial first step.

Gandhi’s position seemed to Ambedkar delusional at best, and self-serving hypocrisy at worst. The notion that somehow untouchables would lose out by being cut off from other Hindu castes made him choke. He could remember how, when he was a child, people had recoiled from him in horror and stepped five paces back when they learned his caste, and how at school he had been forced to sit on the floor so that he did not pollute the chairs. His teachers and fellow students refused to give him a drink of water unless they could pour it into his mouth without his lips touching the glass.
¹⁴
Ambedkar was determined to force on Hindus a robust series of protections for those they had abused for centuries. He was furious that Gandhi now chose to stand in his way.

He had heard the request to save Gandhi’s life when he was attending a convention of other untouchable spokesmen in Bombay. His first inclination was to do nothing. Who did the Mahatma think he was? “If he wants to eat,” he said contemptuously, “let him dine with me.” It was another dalit leader, M. C. Rajah of Madras, who had brought him around.

“For thousands of years,” Rajah told him, “we have been downtrodden, insulted, despised. The Mahatma is staking his life for our sake, and if he dies, for the next thousands of years we shall be where we have been, if not worse.” The Hindus would blame the untouchables for Gandhi’s death; it could be a catastrophe for the untouchable cause. Ambedkar listened and finally said, “I am willing to compromise.”
¹⁵

So Ambedkar went to Poona, and on the fifth day of the fast he met with Gandhi. The Columbia graduate was in a grim mood. “I want my compensation,” he said to the prone figure on the cot. Gandhi looked up at him, and his eyes glinted.

“You say you are interested in my life?” he murmured, with the faintest hint of sarcasm. He knew Ambedkar was not, but Gandhi had dealt him no choice. Sitting together in his prison cell they worked out a formula that became known as the Poona Pact. It raised the reserved seats for untouchables in the future Legislative Council to 148, instead of the 71 in MacDonald’s Communal Award; and reserved them seats in the Federal Council. But it abolished the principle of a separate electorate once and for all. Only Muslims, and Sikhs in the Punjab, would have that distinction.

Gandhi had won. “In accepting the Poona Pact,” he told Ambedkar, “you accept the position that you are Hindus.” Ambedkar (who became a Buddhist afterward) only said, “Mahatmas have come and Mahatmas have gone, but Untouchables have remained Untouchables,” and headed back to Bombay.
¹⁶

On September 26 Gandhi received word that the British Cabinet had accepted the pact. An hour later Gandhi and two hundred people gathered in the courtyard to watch him break his fast. Rabindranath Tagore arrived to lead the prayers and then the singing of
“Vaishnava Jana.”
Gandhi drank a single glass of orange juice. The six-day fast was over. He told his Quaker friend Horace Alexander, “God was never nearer to me than during the fast.”
¹⁷

Yet Gandhi had hurt himself as much as he had helped his cause. To this day his admirers like to celebrate the “fast unto death” as a heroic event. His adoring secretary Pyarelal devoted an entire book to it, entitled
The Great Fast,
in which he, like other Gandhians, cast Ambedkar in a deeply sinister light. Even a sober historian like R. J. Moore has called Gandhi’s fast “a successful experiment in satyagraha for the sake of Indian unity.”
¹⁸
But that unity was an illusion, and even Gandhi’s admirers had to admit that the fast had been nothing less than blackmail. Fasting in order to stop people from killing one another, as in 1922, was one thing. Fasting to keep them beholden to a system that denied their very personhood was another.

Gandhi’s intentions were noble—they always were. Once he recovered his health, he devoted himself to an elaborate one-year campaign to eradicate untouchability. He even came up with a new term for its victims,
Harijans
or Children of God, and founded a journal with that name to carry on the campaign. But the effort proved hollow. During his fast and for some weeks afterward Hindus opened their temples and wells to dalits, publicly embraced untouchable men, women, and children, and even hosted intercaste dinners. But then the habits of three thousand years reasserted themselves. The moment untouchables left, the temples were repurified; soon they would be closed again. Gandhi’s All-India Anti-Untouchability League, headed by his friend G. D. Birla, raised huge sums of money but changed no one’s mind. The euphoria of reconciliation and forgiveness soon passed.

The damage went further. Gandhi’s arm-twisting made a bitter lifelong enemy of Ambedkar: the title of Ambedkar’s 1945 book,
What Gandhi and the National Congress Have Done to Untouchables,
reveals the intensity of that bitterness. At the same time orthodox upper-caste Hindus like V. Savarkar and others seethed over what they felt had been an abject compromise. They, too, plotted their revenge.

Jawaharlal Nehru was furious over the whole episode for different reasons. “As I watched the emotional upheaval during the fast,” he confessed to his diary, “I wondered more and more if this was the right method of politics…All India, or most of it, stares reverently at the Mahatma and expects him to perform miracle after miracle and put an end to untouchability and get Swaraj and so on—and does nothing itself!” He added, that Gandhi’s “continual references to God irritate me exceedingly.” The problem was that neither he nor any of Gandhi’s closest allies could ever guess where Gandhi was going, or where he intended to lead them. His leadership was a mystery. And, Nehru asked himself, has Gandhi “thought out what the objective, the ideal should be?” The disturbing answer was: “Very probably not.”
¹⁹

None of the doubts, the scratching of heads, or even Ambedkar’s impotent rage disturbed the Mahatma. The fact remained that his Harijan campaign of 1933–34 was a welcome distraction from his fading influence on political events. A third and final Round Table Conference met in November. Then in March 1933 came a government White Paper that provided a complete plan for an Indian constitution. And the Indian National Congress, thanks to Gandhi’s intransigence, played no part in either.

This omission puzzled and distressed Congress members. Why was Gandhi holding them back, they asked, even as other groups and politicians in India were lining up their futures in the post-Raj Dominion? To prove he was still in charge, Gandhi announced another fast in April. Then without warning the government released him, and he found himself back on the street—physically weak and politically impotent.

At long last New Delhi had found a way to neutralize the redoubtable Mahatma. If he tried to organize another civil disobedience campaign, as he would in August 1933, the government would pounce and put him in jail, depriving his troops of his inspiration and leadership. If he then tried to kick-start things from jail by fasting or performing some other dramatic gesture, as he would two weeks after his August arrest, they set him free. Whichever way he turned, it seemed, Viceroy Willingdon and Secretary Hoare were there ahead of him.

It was a time of unceasing frustration for Gandhi, like his time in South Africa during the Black Act agitation. In January 1934 an earthquake struck northern Bihar, affecting thirty thousand square miles and leaving thousands of people dead or homeless. Villages he had visited during his Champaran campaign were obliterated. Gandhi announced that it was God’s punishment for the Hindu sin of untouchability. The remark set off a furious reaction. Crowds began to shout him down when he traveled around India and angrily waved black flags as his car passed. In Jassidi in South Bihar orthodox Hindus threw rocks through the car’s back window. When he stopped in Poona, the site of his Communal Award fast, someone even threw a bomb.
²⁰

Congress members, meanwhile, were growing more impatient. They desperately wanted to assume a significant role in the new dispensation. At the Bombay Congress in October 1934 Gandhi finally had to yield: he allowed Congress members to stand for the coming assembly elections, the last under the old Indian constitution. The ostensible reason was to allow Congress to express its official opposition to the government’s awards of special status to minorities. The real reason was that men who had waited a long time to hold political office could wait no longer. Men like Patel, Bengal’s B. C. Roy, and the Congress’s leading Muslim M. A. Azad found themselves in the position of Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkett: they saw their opportunity, and the time had come to take it.

It was an impulse that Gandhi could neither understand nor withstand. In the end he decided to quit the Congress altogether. “I feel sure that it will do good to the Congress and to me,” he wrote. It was his way of swallowing his disappointment.
²¹
The Mahatma began his Wilderness Years almost a year before Winston Churchill did and for the same reason: public opinion and events were passing him by.

Meanwhile Churchill spent the end of August and early September 1932 on the Continent, touring the battlefields of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. He had begun a two-volume biography of his illustrious predecessor in 1929 for the British publisher Hoddard. The project involved everything he loved: military history, family pride, and the story of redoubtable Englishmen defeating Britain’s enemies. In a large comfortable touring car Winston visited the key battlefields where the Duke of Marlborough had not only built his reputation as the greatest general of the age but laid the foundations of the British Empire: Ramillies, Malplaquet, Blenheim.

It was a personal as well as historical revelation. Winston walked across the spreading green fields where his ancestor had commanded armies and where cannon shot the size of cricket balls could still be dug up.
²²
He gained a renewed sense of Britain’s destiny and of how that destiny relied on generations of Churchills, first on the battlefield and now in the House of Commons. He returned to England just as the fight over India was entering its last, critical phase.