Gandhi & Churchill (71 page)

They discussed the constitutional bill, which would soon be before the House. “It is a ridiculous, useless thing,” Churchill declared. “It neither pleases us nor you. It falls between two stools, and what is the use of a constitution…if it is not backed by the people of the country for which it is meant?” Churchill said he would have liked something different, “a kind of fellowship of Hindus, Moslems, and Christians, with a strong rule to hold it together. The Orient needs a different kind of government,” he added dogmatically. “You need a strong rule for the good of the people.”

Mirabehn pressed him for details, but he had none to give, any more than Gandhi did. All he knew was that his vision for India was falling apart. “Who knows what will happen?” he said, referring to the bill. “I have done my best, now we shall see.” He muttered a phrase in Hindustani that she could not catch. Mirabehn had him translate it into English so that she could render it again in Hindi. It was “Whatever will be, will be.” Churchill proudly said, “I have been in India, you know,” and smiled.

As she left, he asked her to convey his kind regards to Gandhi and to say he was sorry they had not met during Gandhi’s visit for the Round Table Conference, “but politically it would not have done.” Mirabehn left the Parliament building. A phrase of Churchill’s kept running through her head, which he had repeated over and over: “I believe in truth, pure truth.” It stuck with her, simply because it was exactly what Gandhi would have said.
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In January 1935 the government introduced its Government of India Bill. It was tremendously long—the longest bill Parliament would ever pass—and profoundly complicated. Over the next six months it would be subject to countless amendments and many hours of tedious debate. But its basic form never altered.

First, it provided India with Dominion status through an All-India Federation that excluded Burma but included the princely states. Those states’ rulers would pick their representatives for the federation legislature, while Hindus and Muslims in British India, as well as Sikhs in the Punjab, voted for theirs.

Second, the bill set up an entirely autonomous provincial administration and governance for British India, with ministers and legislators all chosen by Indian voters—almost a sixth of the population (a huge advance over previous electorates). The British governors-general would still preside, along with the Indian Civil Service. A British viceroy would remain with certain “reserve” powers at the center, such as over the army and the police. He would also be able to raise taxes to finance them.
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But otherwise India would be governed by Indians themselves. The bill signaled the end of the Raj and the beginning of the self-governing Dominion of India.

Or so the government hoped. For three long years Churchill and his allies had fought a delaying action against the bill. All they could do now was amend the bill, such as by offering some protection for Lancashire’s textile industry and for religious minorities under a constitution that gave India’s Hindu majority its first taste of real power. “There is a very stern fight before us,” Winston warned his dwindling troops. He was long past any reconciliation with his party or his leadership. In a radio speech he denounced the measure as “a monstrous Bill erected by pygmies” and foretold that its passage would be “a catastrophe which will shake the world.”
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No one believed him anymore. As the bill faced its second reading on February 6, the House’s impatience to finish, and the anger at Churchill for delaying it, became palpable. Hoare’s opening speech was scathing in its denunciation of Churchill’s tactics. Labour’s Herbert Samuel said that if Churchill had been born an Indian, “he would have been a Congress man of a type compared to which Mr. Gandhi would be as a dove to a tiger.” Winston’s son Randolph had tried to add one more vote to his father’s column by standing in the by-election in Wavertree as a self-declared anti–India Bill candidate. He managed only to split the Conservative vote, and the Labour candidate won instead.

On February 11 Churchill made one last speech to try to halt the end of an epoch. “We are now at the beginning of these long debates on India,” he declared. “How shall we come out?…No one can tell.” In fact, everyone could and did. He received wild cheers as he finished. But the vote was 404 votes in favor of the bill and only 133 against, including 84 Tories. (The rest of the naysayers were radical Labourites who felt the reforms did not go far enough.)

The bill’s passage was certain now. On the twenty-first a Churchill amendment was defeated 308 to 50. Even when the Indian princes took a belated hand and met in Bombay to denounce the federal constitution scheme, they could not halt the Government of India Bill freight train. Hoare and R. A. Butler told the princes it was too late, they would have to accept what was offered and negotiate the details later. Winston’s motion to suspend the bill went down to defeat, and what Churchill called “one of the most melancholy, one of the most perverse, one of the unnecessary chapters in the whole history of the British people” was about to become law.
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The third and final reading did not come until June 4. In the last tally the government enjoyed a majority of 264; even with Labour’s support Churchill could muster only 122 votes.

Churchill saved his last bitter words for Sir Samuel Hoare: “He has won his victory, he has won the victory for which he has fought hard, and long and adroitly; but it is not a victory in our opinion for the interests of the country nor a victory for the welfare of the peoples of India.” He only hoped it did not sound the death “knell of the British Empire in the East.”
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As always with Churchill, the bitterness did not last. “We must now look forward and not back,” he told a supporter on July 2. He sent an open letter to his constituents, thanking them for their support through the long, arduous process: “We have done our best and we have done our duty. We cannot do more.” He recalled the words of his father’s old chief, Lord Salisbury: “‘It is the duty of every Englishman, and of every English party to accept a political defeat cordially, and to lend their best endeavors to secure the success, or to neutralize the evil, of the principles to which they have been forced to succumb.’ We have no wish,” Churchill added, “to be unfaithful to so wholesome a tradition.”
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Whatever his feelings toward Baldwin, Irwin, Butler, and the rest, Winston was willing to forgive and forget.
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His sense of magnanimity extended to his opponents on the other side of the world and to the man who he thought, more than any other, had thwarted his will. So he invited one of Gandhi’s closest Indian associates, G. D. Birla, to lunch at Chartwell.

Ghanshyam Das Birla was typical of the new men who would take over India from the British. His grandfather, Seth Shivnarain Birla, had been born into the Marwari merchant caste and had been an accountant in a Hyderabad banking house. In 1862 Seth Birla had traveled by camel to Bombay to venture out on his own as a wholesale broker in the seed and gold bullion trade—and in opium. The fortune he built grew more substantial under his sons. His grandson was barely out of his teens when he decided to expand the house of Birla from the brokerage business into industry and set up the first Indian-owned jute processing mill.
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The stiff fibers of the jute plant were the indispensable material for the world’s gunny sacks. No industry or business, from South American coffee plantations to European gunpowder plants, could function without them. Indian farmers had grown jute for centuries, but until G. D. Birla, jute processing had been considered a British preserve. The hostility and prejudice Birla faced from his white competitors led him to become interested in politics and the nationalist movement. By his own account, he even had to go underground for a time because of his overly close associations with a Hindu terrorist cell.
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Then in 1916 he met Gandhi, and as with so many other Indians, the meeting changed his life. When they became friends and correspondents, Birla was only thirty years old but already one of the richest men in India. He loved the Mahatma as much as he loved any man. “In all my actions,” he wrote later, “I felt he was close beside me, and I was his shadow.”
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Although he was a faithful Hindu, at Gandhi’s request Birla became president of the All-India Anti-Untouchability League. It was in Birla’s mansion in Delhi that Gandhi would live his last days, and in the garden where he would draw his last breath.

So Birla accepted Churchill’s invitation to lunch with some trepidation. They had never met. As Birla’s car drew past Chartwell’s stone gates and he unpacked his long lanky form from the backseat to stand in the gravel drive, he may have wondered if he was going to have to deal once again with the arrogance and racial prejudice of Britons who considered themselves experts on India.

Instead, Birla had a wonderful time. He found Churchill working in the garden, wearing an enormous hat with a feather in it and a workingman’s apron that he continued to wear during lunch. Churchill gave him a tour of Chartwell, showing him the garden, the heated pool, and the buildings and brick walls he had built with his own hands. He also set out some of the pictures he had painted.

They were at lunch for two hours. Churchill “did 75 percent of the talking.” Almost all of it was about India and Gandhi. Birla was polite but astonished at how little Churchill really knew about modern India. He knew nothing about its extensive rail networks and believed that India’s villages still lived in isolation from the towns. Birla had to explain that his factory employed 25,000 men, all of whom went home to their village at least twice a year. “He thought motor cars had not reached the villages. Again I corrected him.”
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On the whole Birla found Churchill’s views on India “most peculiar.” At the same time, his talk was “never boring” and “as eloquent in private as it is in a public speech.”

Churchill asked about Gandhi. Birla told him at length about the Mahatma’s Harijan campaign. Churchill was impressed. “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables,” he said. He asked about Gandhi’s village work. Was Gandhi inclined to wreck the new constitution? Birla told him no, Gandhi was indifferent to constitutions. What mattered to him was liberty, and Gandhi firmly believed that India’s future had to depend on the Indians themselves.

Churchill completely agreed. “My test is improvement in the lot of the masses,” he declared, “morally as well as materially.” Gandhi would doubtless have said the same thing, and Birla must have been startled when Churchill added, “I do not care whether you are more or less loyal to Great Britain. I do not mind about education, but give the masses more butter. I stand for butter.”

As the lunch ended, Winston seemed to soften, even to grow wistful. “Tell Mr. Gandhi to use the powers that are offered and make the thing a success,” he said. He repeated how sorry he was that he did not meet Gandhi when he was in London. “I should like to meet him now. I would love to go to India before I die.” Would he be well received? Birla assured him he would be.

Churchill’s last words, however, were full of foreboding—not for India but for Britain.

“India, I fear, is a burden to us,” he confessed. “We have to maintain an army and for the sake of India we have to maintain Singapore and Near East strength. If India could look after herself we would be delighted.” He said he genuinely hoped the reforms worked. “Make it a success,” he told Birla, “and if you do I will advocate your getting much more.”
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It was a kind and unexpectedly sympathetic statement. But as he left, the astute Birla must have realized there was little Churchill could do for anyone. For the sake of preserving the Raj, Winston had burned his last boats with his party leadership, with his party’s rank and file, and with British public opinion.

The Wilderness Years had begun. Churchill’s defeat over the India Bill confirmed what shrewd and knowledgeable observers like Lady Astor had known three years earlier. She had led a delegation to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. Stalin had asked about British politicians. Lady Astor told him the rising man was Neville Chamberlain. Stalin then asked: “What about Winston Churchill?”

“Churchill?!” she laughed in wide-eyed astonishment. “Oh, he’s
finished
!”
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Chapter Twenty-one

AGAINST THE CURRENT

1936–1938

We are really in great danger.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1936

G. D. B
IRLA RETURNED TO
I
NDIA IN
September 1935 and went to see Gandhi. He told him about his meeting with Churchill. The Mahatma was pleased and keenly interested. He even brought up his own encounter with Churchill almost thirty years before. “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office,” Gandhi told Birla, “and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.” It was a courteous, if guarded compliment. He must have known it would get back to Churchill. (It did.)
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As 1935 drew to a close, Churchill found himself isolated and alone. He had taken his stand on India and lost. His reward was almost four years of political ostracism. Gandhi too had taken his stand—and won, or so it seemed. His reward was national veneration, almost sainthood. But it left him just as isolated and unhappy.