Gandhi & Churchill (77 page)

The Old Guard had deep doubts about Bose; then and later R. Prasad and others worried about his Nazi connections. But Gandhi overrode them. Officially, he was out of Congress politics, but the tradition was that he nominate the next president of the Congress, who was then elected by unanimous vote.
¹⁵
He had nominated Nehru as president in 1936 and 1937 to be the voice of the next generation. At the Haripuri Congress in February 1938 he did the same for Bose.

Bose’s first presidential speech might have forced Gandhi to wonder if he had made a mistake. The thousands of delegates from across India heard Bose speak of a law of empires that governed the rise, expansion, and decline of great powers. Such a law had brought doom to Rome, he said, and then to Turkey and Russia in 1917. Now that moment of doom, he averred, hovered over the British Empire.

“The British Empire at the present moment is suffering strain at a number of points,” Bose pointed out, and not only in India. It was February 1938: Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, and the Far East were all in turmoil. “How long can the British Empire withstand the cumulative effect of this pressure and strain?” he asked the assembled delegates. The answer was, not long. “The clay feet of a gigantic empire now stand exposed as they never have before.”

“This interplay of world forces” worked to India’s advantage, Bose argued. “Ours is a vast country” with a huge population; it was on the verge of doing great things. But it could fulfill that destiny only by severing its connection to a crumbling Britain, which still tried to impose its atrophying will over 300 million human beings through its scheme for Dominion and Federation. “The ultimate stage in our progress,” Bose stated, “will be the severance of the British connection.” Bose wanted Congress to be more than the party of Swaraj. He saw it as the party of power in the future. A new disciplined Congress would take over the administration and the economy and launch a program of social reconstruction. “Only then will it fulfill its role.”

He urged the Congress to look to Europe, where the only countries that saw “orderly and continuous progress” were those “where the party which seized power” undertook the task of governing. What the Brown Shirts were in Germany, and the Black Shirts in Italy, Bose saw Congress becoming in India.
¹⁶

It was a forlorn hope; Bose would be as disappointed by the sheer normality of his fellow Congressmen as Gandhi was, and for some of the same reasons. Congress politicians were no more interested in Bose’s version of mass party discipline than they had been in Gandhi’s. They desired office and influence. They were getting both under the new constitution. The year of Bose’s presidency saw a strange disconnection between the leaders and the led. In the provinces and cities Congress members settled into their roles as councilors and administrators. They began pushing (with Gandhi’s encouragement) India’s princely states to open the corridors of power to Congress methods and candidates. A quiet revolution was taking place, as Indians assumed more and more control over their country, with the Congress taking the lead.

But at the center, inside the Working Committee, a battle royal of wills and personalities was being fought. Bose wanted the Congress to pull out of any and all constitutional arrangements and force the British to an ultimatum. The Old Guard Gandhians on the committee did not. At the end of the year Gandhi was forced to step in.

Privately, Bose’s ideological program appalled him, although he did not challenge Bose in public. It contained painful echoes of the arrogant ultra-nationalist Reader in
Hind Swaraj
. Gandhi was also upset that the Bengali Bose was trying to force out the elected Muslim government in his home province. The loss of Bengal to the forces of Islam had been a bitter pill for Bengali Hindus.
¹⁷
Gandhi saw Bose creating more trouble for Congress’s already strained relations with India’s Muslims.

In 1938 Gandhi also sharply disapproved of Bose’s push for a showdown with the British. “I do not like your constant threats about Federation and ultimatum,” Gandhi wrote to him. “The idea of ultimatum is in my opinion premature.” But Gandhi added self-effacingly, “It is the voice of a dying man who speaks,” and “responsibility is not mine but yours for shaping the national destiny.”
¹⁸
When the time came for nominating the next president, some thought Bose would be the best choice, but instead Gandhi named Dr. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, a relative newcomer.
¹⁹

The Bose forces exploded. Bose learned that several provinces had already renominated him for the presidency. He saw no reason why he should not run for reelection. “It is no use having a democratic constitution for the Congress,” he said, “if the delegates do not have the freedom to think and vote as they like.”
²⁰
His public defiance of Gandhi was unprecedented. A bruising contest of wills unfolded at the Congress meeting at the end of January 1939, with angry speeches, shouting, and shoves and insulting gestures. Gandhi mobilized all his supporters, including a reluctant Nehru, to line up against Bose’s reelection. Bose struck back, accusing both Gandhi and Nehru of bad faith. It was a crisis of the first magnitude. Never since 1924 had Gandhi’s personal prestige been so much on the line.

The final tally came on January 29. Delegates on both sides were stunned when Bose emerged the winner. Gandhi’s handpicked candidate lost by more than two thousand votes. The Mahatma acknowledged that his enemies had won a “decisive victory” not only over Sitaramayya but over himself. “The defeat,” as he put it, “is more mine than his.”

Nonetheless, he courteously if coldly congratulated Bose on his success; “after all, Subhas Babu is not an enemy of the country.” He added that those who could not fully support Bose and his program should probably leave the Congress. Then he picked up his parcel of belongings and left.
²¹

To many of the delegates, it seemed a gesture of surrender. In fact, it proved Bose’s undoing. Bose had won the election but had lost any support from the Working Committee, most of whose members were Gandhi supporters. Bose did not help matters by accusing them of striking a secret deal with the British to accept the Government of India Bill.
²²
On February 22 twelve out of fifteen members of the Working Committee quit, saying they would work with Bose no longer.

To his fury, Bose found himself outmaneuvered by the old man he underestimated as a relic of the past. Gandhi “has done me more harm than the activities of the 12 stalwarts” on the Working Committee, Bose raged to a relative.
²³
He and his Bengali supporters set off for the Congress session at Tripuri in March for a final stand.

For a week they sparred with opponents, as Jawaharlal Nehru assumed more and more the role of Gandhi’s champion against Bose. In the end the Bengalis realized that their position was hopeless. Nirad Chaudhuri remembered Subhas’s brother Sarat returning to Calcutta afterward, looking ill and haggard: “I could see what he had gone through for the sake of his brother.”
²⁴
Subhas really did become ill. His health broke down, as it frequently did in a crisis, and he left Tripur for a month to nurse his body—and his anger.

At the end of April 1939 Bose resigned as Congress president. Gandhi had won. But like Jinnah, Bose was now resolved to take unilateral action. Within days he announced the formation of his own political party, the Forward Bloc, to carry on his struggle. “Give me blood, and I will give you freedom,” he would later tell his followers. “The latest phase of Gandhism with its sanctimonious hypocrisy,” he would also write, “its outrage on democracy…is sickening. One is forced to wonder which is a greater menace to India’s political future—the British bureaucracy or Gandhian hierarchy.”
²⁵
Bose’s struggle against both Gandhi and the British was just beginning.

Gandhi, however, remained aloof and unconcerned. He had already moved on to his next cause. In late February he went to Rajkot for his “princely satyagraha.” V. Patel had convinced him that integrating India’s remaining princely states with their movement would be a crucial way to expand the Congress’s political base—and to thwart Bose’s chances of doing the same.

Five hundred and thirty-two separate principalities still governed nearly a third of India. From the biggest (like Hyderabad and Kashmir) to the tiniest (some no larger than a few square miles), they had posed no threat to the Raj since the Mutiny. But they did threaten Indian nationalism, since without their rulers’ cooperation no federation, no true Indian unity, was possible.

Thus far the princely states had been untouched by the larger currents of Indian politics. But “if the [princely] States persist in their obstinacy and hug their ignorance of the awakening that has taken place throughout India,” Gandhi warned the previous September, “they are courting disaster.”
²⁶
Now he arrived in his former home state of Rajkot to try to bring them on board.

More than sixty years earlier Gandhi’s father had come to Rajkot to serve its ruler as diwan. Now the son came to dictate terms to the ruler. Unless its prince or
thakur
permitted Congress members to take up posts as local officials, Gandhi said, he would conduct a fast. The decision was an entirely spiritual one, he claimed, but shrewdly warned the viceroy what was about to happen.

In 1939 Lord Linlithgow could no more afford a dead Gandhi than he could an India in full revolt. So with the help of the Chief Justice of India, the viceroy arranged a compromise with the wretched prince. Gandhi called off his fast, although many followers felt betrayed and that once again he had accepted a compromise that ignored their months-long efforts.
²⁷

It was Gandhi’s second victory in three months as well as his last prewar satyagraha. Both victories revealed a new impatience, even ruthlessness, in a man approaching his seventieth birthday. After fending off the Bose threat, he had come back into politics with a vengeance. Later he admitted that the threat of a “fast unto death” had been coercive and had not been conducted with the true satyagraha goal of converting his opponent.

But at seventy, his time was running out, as was his patience. “I have become old, I lose my temper,” he confessed to an old friend exactly a year before. “I am not prepared to listen to anyone on anything.” Jinnah, Bose, and Churchill: henceforth they would take him on at their own risk.
²⁸

On March 7, 1939, Gandhi formally broke his fast. One week later German tanks rolled into Prague.

Winston Churchill was sitting in the smoking room of the House of Commons with Anthony Eden when the evening papers brought them the news from the Czech capital. It was just six months after Hitler had signed his agreement with Chamberlain, pledging that Germany had no more territorial demands. “Even those who, like us, had no illusions,” Churchill wrote afterward in his
Gathering Storm,
“were surprised at the sudden violence of this outrage.”
²⁹

In Prague sullen, silent crowds watched as German troops marched through the streets, while church bells tolled the death of their country. Within days the Republic of Czechoslovakia, the last self-governing republic in Eastern Europe, was replaced by a Nazi protectorate. The rounding up of Jews would begin shortly afterward, just as it had in Austria.

Finally and much too late Chamberlain seemed to awaken from the fog of appeasement. “Who can fail to feel his heart go out in sympathy to the proud, brave people who have suddenly been subjected to this invasion,” he told a crowd in Birmingham on March 17. “Is this in fact a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?” Chamberlain asked. If so, he concluded, then it was “one which the Democracies must resist.”
³⁰

The government took the first tentative steps to show it meant business. It recalled the British ambassador from Berlin. At the end of April it introduced a limited draft for the army. However, if Chamberlain wanted to make his new defiant stand more credible, the person he needed at his side was Winston Churchill.

For the past five months Churchill had been steadily hammering away at the government without effect. After the fall of Prague the public finally began to listen. “British opinion was stirred as it had not been by the absorption of Austria or the capitulation at Munich,” historian Alan Taylor has written. Churchill and his stalwarts had warned that Hitler’s ambitions were insatiable and could not be stopped except by threat of armed force. “Like water dropping on a stone, their words suddenly broke through the crust of credulity.”
³¹

Churchill received telegrams of support, as if he had won a great victory. A Liberal candidate for North Cornwall told him that in every one of his speeches he was saying that the man Britain needed for prime minister was Winston Churchill. It took a few minutes “for the idea to sink in,” T. L. Horabin wrote, and then invariably “there was an outburst of applause.”
³²

Very slowly and steadily over the spring and summer, a wave of public sentiment began to gather. It carried one message: Bring Winston into the cabinet. On April 22 the
Evening News
suggested him for either the Admiralty or secretary of state for air. When the new Military Training Act resulted in a minor cabinet shakeup, “There was much disappointment on both sides of the House,” the
British Weekly
reported, “that the changes in the Cabinet did not include such outstanding figures as Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. Anthony Eden.”
³³

In May the
News Chronicle
reported that 56 percent of poll respondents wanted Churchill in the cabinet. By June it became clear that the next confrontation with Hitler was coming, this time over Poland and Danzig. The clamor to bring Churchill on board became almost deafening, with the
Evening Standard,
the
Daily Mail,
and
The Spectator
all joining in.