Gandhi & Churchill (70 page)

In July it had become crystal clear that the government was going to push through Parliament a final settlement of self-government for India. Churchill appeared for the first debate with “sheets of typewritten invective against everybody and everything,” according to Stanley Baldwin. But not even Winston could fault the government on one crucial point: Parliament, and no one else, would have the final say over India’s future. In fact, Hoare and the government would submit their plan to a joint select committee of members of both the Commons and the Peers
before
presenting a bill to the full Parliament—a procedure that Churchill told his ally Lord Salisbury “is most advantageous from our point of view.”
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To Churchill’s relief, Gandhi no longer had any voice in the matter; his antics over the Communal Award had cost him any further role. Churchill’s hope now was to rally the Tories behind him and tear up the government’s plan before it left Hoare’s desk.

The crucial moment came at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool in October 1932. Churchill had desperately hoped to be there, but a sudden flare-up of paratyphoid fever left him laid up at Chartwell. So it was George Lloyd who led the opening salvo against the government’s India policy, with a resounding speech that drew “an ovation so prolonged and enthusiastic as clearly to indicate that he and his convictions had the support of the great majority,” as a reporter for the
Morning Post
put it.
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“There was no doubt about it that the sentiment of the meeting was on one side,” Secretary Hoare confessed in a letter to Viceroy Willingdon. “When he sat down most people would have said he would carry Winston’s resolution with a big majority.”

But then Hoare and a young MP for Saffron Walden named Richard A. Butler produced a counterblast of their own. Despite their support for Lloyd, the Conservatives who gathered in the hotel’s great ballroom could not ignore the fact that their leadership was now completely wedded to a National Government plan for “giving away” India. Hoare in fact was its principal architect. To abandon the plan would be to abandon their leadership. That would leave the party to Churchill, a step that few older Tories were willing to take. Besides, Hoare intimated to his fellow Conservatives, without actually saying so, that if they turned down a Government of India bill now, a Labour government would come up with a far bigger giveaway plan down the road.

Politics is not always the art of the possible. It is sometimes the art of choosing between the distasteful and the disastrous. So it was in Blackpool: the Conservative Party Conference reluctantly backed Baldwin and the government, and for the first time Churchill saw the handwriting on the wall.

As New Year 1933 came and went, an alarmed Churchill worried that “creeping Irwinism” had “rotted the soul of the Tory Party.” He knew Baldwin and Hoare had mobilized the whole machinery of the Conservative Party and the National Government to squelch opposition to any India bill—they even got the BBC to shut off its microphones to him.
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With the Tory leaders pulling, and their whips prodding from behind, he feared Conservative MPs “will vote for any measure however disastrous.”

“Still it is our duty to fight with every scrap of strength we can command,” he told his loyal retinue.
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Secretary of State Hoare was just as firm. “My course is set,” he told Baldwin on January 9. “Neither Winston or George Lloyd will deflect it.” Some of his confidence sprang from the fact that he and Lord Willingdon had at last gotten Gandhi muzzled; if they could only get Winston muzzled, they would be home free.
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Churchill’s Diehard lieutenant Alfred Knox had promised they would fight Indian Dominion to “the last ditch.” But one by one the ditches began to fall.

The House first debated a motion to limit Indian government reform to the provinces only. Churchill could muster only forty-two votes in support. Then in late February came a meeting of the National Union of Conservative Associations, where “the Winston crowd have been very active with meetings, lunches, and propaganda of every kind,” Hoare told Willingdon. “Winston is out to make the maximum of trouble. He is determined to smash the National Government and believes India is a good battering ram.” Winston gave what Hoare conceded was one of his best speeches yet, but when the votes were counted, the Diehards had lost again, albeit by only a twenty-five-vote margin.
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In March the government issued its White Paper, recommending that a joint select committee draw up an Indian constitution. Churchill launched a tirade, attacking not just the idea of eventual Indian self-government but also the timing. Gandhi was in jail; India was at peace—what was the rush to hand over the subcontinent? “It is a tragedy that the greatest gift which Britain has given to India was not the fight that India needed most,” he concluded. “You cannot desert them, you cannot abandon them,” he said of India’s toiling faceless masses. “They are as much our children as any children can be…It is impossible that you should hand them over to the oppressor and to the spoiler, and disinterest yourself in their future.” But that was what the House of Commons did. At the end of a three-day debate, the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the recommendation, 475 to 42.
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Winston was undeterred. “I shall fight this business to the end,” he wrote on March 31. “You may be quite sure that any check or disappointment only makes me fight harder.” But the disappointments were coming faster; and a new menace had appeared on the horizon. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the youngest in its history. Within two weeks Hitler established special emergency measures that made him absolute Führer. Dictatorship had taken root in Germany and Italy as well as in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Austria. Indeed, Churchill noted, “three-quarters of the peoples of Europe are under dictatorships.”
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Civic unrest was breaking out in France and Spain. And now the end of the Raj was in sight. To Churchill, the light of enlightened civilization seemed to be guttering like a candle.

Then came an even more wounding blow. On February 17 the Oxford Union, the training ground for the next generation of Britain’s leaders, passed a resolution that its members would “not fight for King and Country.” This “abject, squalid, shameless avowal,” as Churchill called it, came even as powers like Germany and Italy were “eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war.”
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What would the world think now if Britain compounded this unmanliness by “divesting itself gratuitously, wantonly, without any need or compulsion,” of its empire in India and “the title-deeds of its power and fame?”
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Everything seemed to be unraveling. Churchill realized that he could not halt the disintegration of the national character by himself, but he at least could make a clear stand against a Government of India bill that handed over India to the Indians—and to Gandhi.

On June 28, 1933, he carried his fight to the Conservative Central Council, which had been called upon to pass a resolution approving the coming India bill. He told the delegates that surrender on India meant surrender everywhere. “The way in which this question is handled by the British nation will be proof of their resolve to defend their rights and uphold their interests in every quarter of the globe.” The final vote was 838 yes to 316 no. It was the biggest repudiation yet of Baldwin by his own party. Hoare declared the no votes “the high water mark of Winston’s influence.”
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But it was a defeat nonetheless. Churchill’s options were slipping away.

Even his supporters admitted that many of his wounds were self-inflicted. His gift for alienating supporters while failing to convert old enemies remained remarkably unimpaired.
³⁴
His speech in the March debate had included a gratuitous attack on the Indian Civil Service: “the path of promotion has tended to be more easy for those who readily throw themselves into what are regarded as the irresistible moods of the British nation.” He meant it as criticism of those at the top, including Lord Irwin. But the remark made many an ex–civil service man’s mustache bristle, and even the chairman of the Conservative India Committee was outraged.
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Then both he and Lloyd had refused to serve on the Joint Select Committee to draw up the bill, fearing that their minority view would simply be set aside in any final report. It was a severe tactical blunder. Instead of helping to shape a future bill, Churchill was reduced to attacking it from outside. It convinced many, including the committee’s chair Lord Linlithgow, that Churchill’s critics were right all along: Churchill was interested only in bashing the government with the idea of taking over himself. “I believe that at the back of his mind he thinks that he will not only smash the Government but that England is going Fascist,” Hoare venomously wrote, “and that he, or someone like him, will eventually be able to rule India as Mussolini governs north Africa.”
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The charge was unfair but understandable. Churchill’s old reputation as an unprincipled thruster, someone who did not care where he went as long as he was in the driver’s seat, had come back to haunt him.

So did his past record as a Liberal reformer who had brought self-government to South Africa and Ireland a decade before. So why not India? opponents asked. Churchill’s answer was that India was “unsuited to democracy” because of its cultural backwardness and widespread illiteracy. But many suspected the real reason for his resistance was racial. The man who declaimed that “it is never possible to make concessions to Orientals” and shamelessly evoked memories of the 1857 Cawnpore massacre and the Mutiny seemed to use race-baiting in ways that disgusted many in his own party.
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Privately, they may have agreed, but the days were gone when publicly playing the race card could win an argument over India.

“We are in for a long hard fight,” Churchill admitted to Captain Diggle of the India Defense League in April 1933. Victor Cazalet dined with him and found him shrouded in gloom. “He was passionate on India, though I think his arguments are very weak,” his young disciple confessed. Winston admitted he felt like cutting people and hated them “as he had never hated in his life.” He foretold a “very nationalist world—a world of armaments and self-contained nations.” The empire would be more necessary than ever, yet it was slipping away.
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Winston even told Linlithgow he was ready to quit public life were it not for the fight over India.

One more huge stink broke out over the Joint Select Committee, when it declined to hear a delegation from Manchester manufacturers. Winston smelled a rat: he accused the committee and Samuel Hoare of denying the manufacturers a voice because they were bound to oppose any scheme that would allow India to impose tariffs on British goods. The long, tiresome, and pointless battle dragged on well into 1934 and ended up in front of Parliament’s Committee of Privileges. Churchill lost again, then launched a bitter attack on the committee, accusing it of a cover-up and accusing Hoare and Lord Derby, a highly respected Tory stalwart, of lying.

Even his supporters were aghast. Leo Amery, who was not one of them, spoke after Churchill and said it was Winston’s “unique achievement” to stir up a hornet’s nest where there were no hornets. Churchill’s whole aim, he insinuated, was to force Hoare’s resignation as secretary for India and “shatter the Conservative Party.” It was, Amery said, the application of Winston’s favorite motto,
“Fiat justitia ruat coelum”
(Let justice be done even if the heavens fall).

Churchill jumped up. “Translate it!” he called out, trying to score a rhetorical point.

Absolutely deadpan, Amery turned and said, “‘If I can trip up Sam, the government’s bust.’”

The House of Commons dissolved in raucous, derisive laughter. Winston’s whole campaign to awaken his fellow members to the dangers of surrendering India to Gandhi and the Congress was blown away in a gust of ridicule. All he could do now was prepare for the final hopeless battle, when the Government of India Bill itself was introduced.

Before he started, he received an unexpected female visitor. It was Madeleine Slade, or Mirabehn, the admiral’s daughter, direct from Gandhi’s ashram.

After reaching London on September 10, she had written a letter to Churchill. “You will wonder who this is writing to you,” she started diffidently. She explained that she had spent the last nine years with Gandhi, and “I should like to share that experience with you…You may say, ‘Why—our points of view are poles asunder.’ That may be so, but we have one great thing in common, a deep interest in India.” She hoped she might be able to meet Churchill before she left.
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It was the kind of thing Gandhi himself might have done, and Churchill was moved to see her. When they met at the House of Commons, he “greeted me very affably,” she remembered later, and they talked of India. “The Indian nation does not exist,” he told her emphatically. “There is no such thing.” Mirabehn laughed and assured him that there was a more unifying culture throughout the land than appeared from outside, and that “from North to South and East to West, wherever you go, you find the yearning for freedom.” Churchill grunted skeptically but said nothing.

Then they spoke of Gandhi. Churchill said he admired Gandhi for his “work for the moral and social uplift” and admired him as a religious leader; “but I would not choose him for flying the latest airship”—meaning he doubted Gandhi’s political leadership. Mirabehn told him that, on the contrary, “Bapu was one of the most practical people in the world, and loved to call himself a practical idealist,” although he was in his true element when he was “unfettered by any political ties.” Churchill, she wrote, “caught on to this thought rather keenly.”