Gandhi & Churchill (76 page)

The most spectacular resignation, and the most important conversion to Churchill’s cause, came a month before that. Anthony Eden bore a superficial resemblance to Randolph: he was slim and handsome, with a broad forehead and a full head of hair. But he was also graceful, cool, and poised with a keen intelligence. He might have been the son that Winston wished for (and later he would address Eden as if he were his son). Certainly Eden was the glamorous rising star of the Tory party in the 1930s.

He had become foreign secretary at only thirty-eight, standing firm with his party against Churchill on India and supporting its policy toward Germany and Italy. He had even been an early user of the term “appeasement” in a
positive
sense—conceding dictators’ reasonable claims in hopes that they would abandon their unreasonable ones.
⁸¹
But year by year Eden watched the opposite happen. Hesitant to conclude that Churchill had been right, he could no longer escape the fact that Chamberlain, Halifax, and the rest had been wrong.

The critical moment came not over Hitler but over Mussolini. In early 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was eager to reopen negotiations with Italy in hopes that Mussolini might provide some counterweight against Hitler. Given the dictator’s previous betrayal of promises to Britain—over Abyssinia and Italian troops in Spain—the gambit was ignoble if not entirely unpromising. Eden, however, had been at the receiving end of those worthless promises. He told the cabinet in Chamberlain’s presence that he could not support such a policy in the House of Commons. The cabinet voted to support Chamberlain, and on February 21 Anthony Eden resigned as foreign secretary.

It was a serious step, the first major break in the appeasement phalanx. Churchill hurried down to the House of Commons to deliver a speech. “This has been a good week for dictators,” Winston declared. “It is one of the best they have ever had.” Not only was Hitler consolidating his power over Austria, but Mussolini had seen his fiercest foe removed from the Chamberlain cabinet. “What price have we all to pay for this?” Churchill asked.
⁸²

The answer came at the end of April. It was Czechoslovakia.

Chapter Twenty-two

EDGE OF DARKNESS

1938–1939

Non-violence to be worth anything has to work in the face of hostile forces.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI, JANUARY
1937

C
ZECHOSLOVAKIA IN
1938
WAS PROBABLY THE
optimal place to finally put the brakes on Hitler’s ambitions. It had a formal defense treaty with France and Russia. It had an effective army—perhaps even better than Germany’s. Except for its three million Sudeten Germans, it had no nationalist sympathies with Germany as Austria did. And unlike Austria before the Anschluss, it was still a democracy. Czech president Edvard Benes was also prepared to mobilize for war rather than allow Hitler to grab an inch of Czech territory.

But if the Czechs were prepared to fight, the French and British governments were not. Prime Minister Chamberlain was neither a weakling nor a dupe. He possessed a stronger streak of realism than Lord Halifax, who replaced Eden as foreign secretary.
¹
But if Halifax was the architect of appeasement, Chamberlain was its buyer. Like anyone who has paid a high price for a dubious commodity, Chamberlain had set aside all doubts about its value. And by the end of summer in 1938 even Halifax was having his misgivings about a policy of endless accommodation. He had learned that what worked with Gandhi bred only disaster with a man like Hitler.
²

But Chamberlain was still a believer. It was he who had resolutely stood in the way of Churchill entering the cabinet—precisely because Churchill had lambasted the principles that Chamberlain still hoped would bring peace. It was Chamberlain who insisted on going to Germany to see Hitler “as the best means of reaching agreement” over Czechoslovakia, even though many in his cabinet, including Halifax, thought it a bad idea.
³

It was Chamberlain who convinced the French to abandon their alliance with the Czechs (not, it must be admitted, a difficult task). It was Chamberlain, not Hitler, who strong-armed President Benes into allowing his country to be dismantled. And it was Chamberlain who put his signature to a final agreement on September 30 that would bring shame to Great Britain and, instead of creating “peace for our time” as Chamberlain promised on the field at Heston, move the world one major step closer to war.

All this became clear when the Munich agreement was debated in Parliament on October 3. Labour’s leader Clement Attlee called it a “humiliation” and “a victory for brute force.” The Liberals’ Archibald Sinclair called it a “surrender.” Anthony Eden, now sitting on Churchill’s side of the Tory benches, warned, “Successive surrenders bring only successive humiliation.”
⁴

But Churchill’s speech on October 5 surpassed them all. It was a towering masterpiece of deconstruction. Just the day before he had written in the
Daily Telegraph,
“It is a crime to despair…It is the hour, not for despair, but for courage and re-building.” His speech on the floor of the House spared no one.

“We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude,” he proclaimed. “Do not let us blind ourselves to that.” Blame for an unbroken decade of retreat sat squarely on the shoulders of Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the other leaders of the National Government. “They neither prevented Germany from rearming, nor did they rearm ourselves in time,” he said. Now “the system of alliances in Central Europe upon which France has relied for her safety has been swept away…The road down the Danube Valley to the Black Sea, the resources of corn and oil, the road which leads as far as Turkey, has been opened.” He might have added: even the road to India.

He had noted the jubilant celebrations and did not begrudge the British people “the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief.” But they “should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know we have passed an awful milestone in our history.” Churchill warned with solemn emphasis that “the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies:
Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.
”
⁵

Six months before, a speech like this from Churchill would have drawn jeers and catcalls. This one did not. For the first time in nearly a decade his words had the weight of credibility. He did not yet realize it, but Churchill was on his way back, although for now, he could only focus on the magnitude of the setback. The day Chamberlain left for Munich, Churchill and Harold Nicolson had met at the elevator at Morpeth Mansions.

“This is hell,” Nicolson remarked, referring to the news that Chamberlain would beg for one more deal.

Churchill’s response was: “This is the end of the British Empire.”
⁶

The news from Munich hit two men in India like a thunderclap, but they reacted in very different ways.

One was Gandhi. “Peace has been preserved but at the price of honor,” he wrote from Delhi on October 4. He had been on his way to the Northwest Frontier to meet with the Pathan followers of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan when he learned what Chamberlain had done. “Europe has sold her soul for the sake of a seven days’ earthly existence,” he wrote sadly.
⁷

Forty-one-year-old Subhas Chandra Bose, by contrast, heard the news with grim satisfaction. “This abject surrender to Nazi Germany on the part of the Western Powers, France and Great Britain,” he realized, had given Hitler control of Europe “without a shot being fired.” Thanks to Munich and a host of other setbacks around the world, British and French imperialisms “have received a considerable setback.” The time had come, he announced, for Indians to take advantage of it.
⁸

Bose was no ordinary observer: he was now president of the Indian National Congress. He had lived in Europe, including in Vienna, and knew the players and stakes involved. Strikingly, he agreed with Churchill. The Western democracies
had
been found wanting. A great new force
was
stalking the world. But it was Bose’s aim to make India part of it.

S. C. Bose—Netaji to his followers—was born the same year as Anthony Eden, in 1897. Intellectually precocious, he enjoyed academic success both at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta and at Cambridge. In 1920 he scored fourth in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service and was poised for a brilliant career there, perhaps the most brilliant of all. But he renounced it all to take up Indian nationalist politics, which by then meant Gandhi’s politics.

The fiery, articulate Bose had chafed under Gandhi’s leadership from the start. Their first meeting in Bombay was a disaster; then Bose came to resent that Gandhi and his inner circle sidelined his mentor, C. R. Das, the standard-bearer of the nationalist movement in Bengal.
⁹
Like Virginians in the early American republic, Bengalis saw themselves as the natural leaders of their nation. Thanks to the international renown of poet Rabindranath Tagore, they even claimed to be the leaders of Indian civilization. The presence of the Gujarati upstart
^*95
chafed their sense of innate superiority.
¹⁰
It certainly chafed Bose. Paradoxically, he also resented the close relations between the Mahatma and the heir presumptive, J. Nehru, even though he was actually closer ideologically to Nehru than Gandhi ever was. For a time in the early 1930s, Bose and Nehru had even been allies in trying to push the Congress in a more modern radical direction.

Both Nehru and Bose felt that India had no choice but to move forward into the industrial world, rather than back to Gandhi’s idealized India of small villages and delicate handcrafts, so remote from the trends sweeping the rest of the world. Nehru believed that India’s future lay in the Soviet Union. A four-day visit there in 1927 was all he needed to confirm his faith in Marxism as the solution to India’s ills.
¹¹
For Bose, the future lay with the emerging dictatorships of Germany and Italy. What Churchill feared most, the power of the totalitarian state, held a irresistible fascination for the young Bose.

Bose never thought of himself as a fascist. Instead, the term he used to describe himself when his book
The Indian Struggle
was published in 1934, was “left-wing nationalist.”
¹²
Certain aspects of Nazism, such as its racial policies, repelled him. Nazis like Heinrich Himmler were fascinated by the ancient Indo-European link between India’s Aryans and Germanic Europe. Even Gandhi had once appealed to it; it meant nothing to Bose. Nonetheless, his first visit to Germany came in 1933, when Hitler had begun his transformation of Germany from a broken bankrupt shell into the most feared nation in Europe. Bose met numerous German intellectuals; he met officials in the German Foreign Office. He even met Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Göring. Those encounters left an aura that years of disappointment and disillusionment never quite dispelled. They also opened a tantalizing window on a future alliance against the British Empire.

A little later someone asked Bose how he could contemplate forging a connection with thugs like the Nazis, but he only shrugged. “It is dreadful but it must be done,” he replied. If that was the only way to get rid of the British, he was prepared to pay any price. Even “the collapse of Europe,” he said, was fine with him: “It is a rotten Europe and therefore does not concern me.” Two years later he horrified Romain Rolland by saying that for nonwhite peoples seeking their freedom, war between the European powers would be not an unmixed evil.
¹³

Bose made a second trip to Europe from November 1937 to January 1938, meeting Mussolini as well as German and Austrian politicians. He came back to India determined to set the nation alight. His vision was of mobilizing the masses for the “complete political and economic liberation” of India. His encounters with Europe’s new leaders had revealed to him the path to the future, as he described it in
The Indian Struggle
.

According to Bose, a truly free India would be able to use a “strong Central government with dictatorial powers” to reorganize its social and economic structure. It would reject “democracy in the mid-Victorian sense of the term” and instead allow itself to be led by “a strong party bound together by military discipline, as the only means of holding India together and preventing chaos.” Bose condemned Gandhi’s hopes for a self-sufficient Swaraj India as hopelessly parochial and out-of-date. “The next phase of world history will produce a synthesis of Communism and Fascism,” Bose predicted, and he wanted India to be part of it.
¹⁴

The Indian Struggle
was Bose’s
Mein Kampf
. The British banned it the moment it hit the streets in India, but it made Bose an instant hero with young Indian radicals who resented the leadership of Gandhi’s aging inner circle. Bose had boldly stated that “Congress has no role to play” in India’s future because it lacked a coherent ideology or revolutionary program. Like Gandhi himself, it was part of the late Victorian clutter that the coming clash of world forces would sweep aside.

Yet Gandhi had also made the Congress the principal vehicle of political power in India. Bose could do nothing without it—or indeed without Gandhi’s support. And so with the help of his fellow Bengali nationalists, he made himself a candidate for its presidency in 1938.