Gandhi & Churchill (83 page)

Under these pressures Churchill was more reluctant than ever to let India go. “The crown jewel” of the empire, as he called it, had become the embossed seal of British greatness. Seven years earlier he had told the viceroy that with the rise of dictatorships and the retreat of democracies around the globe, the “crux” of England’s position in the world “will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of [our] commercial rights [there].” As long as Britons were acting in the Indians’ best interests, “we are justified in using our undoubted power for their welfare and for our own.”
³³
What had been true in 1933 was even more so in 1940.

Besides, Churchill fought bitterly against the fatalistic view that the loss of India to Gandhi and the nationalists was inevitable. As he told Linlithgow, “I think we differ principally in this, that you assume the future is a mere extension of the past, whereas I find history full of unexpected turns and retrogressions.” He put it slightly differently to Anthony Eden during one of the war’s darkest periods: “No one can foresee how the balance of power will lie or where the winning armies will stand at the end of the war.”
³⁴
He was determined to make sure that when the war did end and the dust cleared, India would still be British.

In the summer of 1940 Churchill and Gandhi shared one conviction: that they could shape the destiny of their respective nations by sheer willpower. In Churchill’s case, it was the will to resist Hitler’s aggression, as well as the naysayers in his own government.
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In Gandhi’s case, it was the will to use satyagraha to finally force the British out.

On August 8 Gandhi and the Indian National Congress learned of Churchill’s negative response to their overture. “I have carefully read over your pronouncement,” the Mahatma told Linlithgow in a note from Sevagram. “It has made me sad.” The implications of the government’s refusal to budge “frighten me, I cannot help feeling that a profound mistake has been made.”
³⁵

India’s politicians, shattered by Churchill’s rebuff, turned to Gandhi in desperation once more. In mid-September 1940 they summoned him to reassume leadership of the Congress and lead another civil disobedience campaign—even though they doubted that it would be effective. Distrust of Gandhi, especially among younger members and on the Left, was palpable. But in an important sense the Congress had nowhere else to turn. The parallels with Churchill’s elevation to the premiership are striking. Like Churchill, Gandhi had come to symbolize the will to resist the common enemy, in this case the British. And like Churchill, Gandhi agreed to take charge because he was anxious to try his own method of winning this “war”—the one he had been waging in one form or another for twenty years.

Before he started the new satyagraha campaign, Gandhi asked for a final interview with Linlithgow. He told the viceroy he and the Congress no longer disagreed on opposition to the war, and he revealed his strategy. He would encourage every Indian to refuse to support the war effort, Gandhi said, just as conscientious objectors in Britain were allowed to forgo serving in the armed services or working in war industries. This time there would be no mass demonstrations, no dramatic gesture of defiance. Every Indian would simply listen to his or her “inner voice” and freely choose the path of nonviolence. It was “an experiment never before tried in the political field,” he said, and he was eager to start.
³⁶

The campaign began in October 1940. German bombs were raining down on St. Paul’s Cathedral, just as Gandhi had once feared they might. But now “it is wrong to help the British war effort with men or money,” Gandhi was telling his followers. “The only worthy effort is to resist all war effort.”
³⁷
He still insisted his new stance was consistent with support for Britain. “I said I would not embarrass Britain,” he emphatically told an English reporter. “I do not wish disaster to British arms.”
³⁸

If the war was about ending fascism and imperialism, Gandhi believed, then his new campaign would strike a blow against the latter. By avoiding collective action, the Mahatma hoped that “individual” satyagraha would prevent rioting or any Muslim-Hindu confrontation. Above all, he saw this “individual” satyagraha as crucial to the spiritual awakening of India, as each person’s inner conscience put them on the path to ahimsa and righteousness. He oversaw every step of its organization and even personally scrutinized the list of individuals who were to make public acts of civil disobedience, throwing out the names of those he considered insufficiently committed.
³⁹

Seen from that perspective, the October 1940 campaign was the most personal of all his satyagraha efforts. It was also the most disastrous. It became Gandhi’s Narvik: a strategic and tactical blunder. Far from refusing to participate in the war effort, Indians joined the army and navy in record numbers—more than 2.5 million before the war’s end. The government reported that the civil disobedience campaign had almost no support; the Indian public quickly lost interest. At its final stage, in May 1941, only fourteen thousand satyagrahi were in jail—less than .001 percent of India’s population. In August the old liberal T. B. Sapru crowed, “A good many Congress leaders are fed up with the barren program of the Mahatma.”
⁴⁰
With leading members of the Working Committee in jail, including Nehru, the Congress was left rudderless.

Gandhi refused to be discouraged. Where others saw quixotic failure, he saw great opportunity. At Sevagram he settled in for a long campaign—five years if need be, he said.
⁴¹
Meanwhile, great events were taking place in Europe and around the world. British and Indian troops were clashing with Rommel’s panzers in North Africa. Muslim insurgents had risen up in Iraq in support of the Nazis. On June 22 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, while the United States was taking the first steps toward entering the war on Britain’s behalf.

India was far from everyone’s thoughts. But when Rajendra Prasad visited his old mentor at Sevagram in October 1941, he found him in excellent health and “thoroughly satisfied. I have never seen him so optimistic about the future.” Certainly there was no one left to push a strategy to reenter negotiations with the British. Gandhi told others that any suggestion of compromise might provoke more rancor and disharmony. Secretly, he preferred nonactivity to any move that might bring about Congress’s complete collapse.
⁴²

In early December the government began releasing its satyagraha prisoners from jail—a sure sign that it no longer considered the campaign a threat. That month Gandhi traveled by train from Wardha to Bardoli to attend the next Congress session. Train travel always seemed to have a catalytic effect on Gandhi’s mind. His first great spiritual breakthrough had come at the Maritzburg railway platform. His reading of Ruskin on a train from Durban to Johannesburg had inspired him to create Phoenix Farm. Now, as the miles clicked monotonously by, he began to write out a document that in its way was more revealing than
My Experiments with Truth
and as significant as
Hind Swaraj
.

He called it his Constructive Program. It was a complete blueprint of how a nationwide campaign could achieve “complete independence through truth and non-violence.” The book was organized into eighteen sections, among them “Communal Unity,” “Removal of Untouchability,” “Khadi,” “Village Sanitation,” “Basic Education” (intended to transform children into model villagers), and “Students.” (“Students must not participate in party politics. They are students, learners, searchers, not masters” and “they will be scrupulously correct and chivalrous in their behavior toward female students.”)
⁴³

What is striking is how little Gandhi’s basic ideas had changed since
Hind Swaraj
thirty years earlier. Nonviolence was still more powerful than violence; sanitation and clean drains were still essential (“instead of graceful hamlets dotting the land, we have dung-heaps”); and machines were still evil. Parliaments were a waste of time: civil disobedience was the true source of power: “It has been my effort in the last twenty-one years to convince the people of this truth.” Echoes of Tolstoy (“imagine a whole people unwilling to conform to the laws of the legislature…They would bring the entire legislative and executive machinery to a standstill”) intermingled with newer themes, like the liberation of women and the empowerment of the peasantry.
⁴⁴

But his version of nonviolence and civil disobedience, he perceived, might be going out of date. Gandhi admitted that his notion of villages holding their possessions together in trusteeship had been ridiculed; his plan for village cooperatives might be “impossible in a country like ours.” The reader might even “make the mistake of laughing” at all the elements he insisted be included in a civil disobedience campaign. Again and again he hearkened back to the Champaran satyagraha with nostalgia, as his touchstone of success—even though the intervening two decades had seen at least eight other satyagraha campaigns.

The last paragraph is the most revealing:

Such at least is my view. It may be that of a mad man. If it makes no appeal to the Congressman, I must be rejected. For my handling of civil disobedience without the constructive program will be like a paralyzed hand attempting to lift a spoon.
⁴⁵

When the train reached Bardoli, Gandhi put down his pen. He sent a short note to Mirabehn: “I was immersed in writing work which I have just finished.”
⁴⁶
Lost in his thoughts, he must have felt the war was very far away. But in fact events were about to bring it right to India’s doorstep.

Chapter Twenty-five

DEBACLE

1941–1942

Is there any man who does not bungle? What else is Churchill doing? And what am I doing?

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI, APRIL
25, 1941

O
N
D
ECEMBER
10, 1941, C
HURCHILL’S WORKDAY
began as usual in bed, as he was opening his dispatch boxes. The telephone rang. It was Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord. He and Churchill had an uneasy relationship. Many in the Admiralty felt that Pound should have been doing more, over the past two years, to rein in Churchill’s more extravagant strategic notions, which often resulted in setback and even disaster.
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But this morning Pound could barely speak—Churchill had trouble understanding him. The gist of the story was that the two great ships Churchill had sent to Singapore in November, the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse,
had both been sunk by Japanese air attack in the Gulf of Siam. The commanding admiral, Tom Phillips, a Churchill favorite, was dead.

“Are you sure this is true?” Churchill asked.

“There is no doubt at all,” said the subdued voice on the other end.

Churchill let the phone drop back into its cradle. “I was grateful to be alone,” he wrote later. “In all the war I never received a more direct shock.”
¹

Three days earlier he and the rest of the world had learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The War Cabinet had immediately declared war on Japan in support of America, which was now Britain’s formal ally against the Axis.
^†106
Churchill told Parliament they should not underrate “the gravity of the new dangers we have to meet, either here or in the United States.”

But the sinking of the
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
was more earth-shaking than Pearl Harbor, not only for Britain but for the world. For more than a century Great Britain had been the dominant power in Asia. The Royal Navy’s supremacy in the Pacific had secured an empire that stretched from Hong Kong and Singapore to Australia and New Zealand. At one stroke under a clear December sky, Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes had stripped that empire of its principal defense: “All over this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”
²

Nowhere was the empire more naked than in Malaya, where at that moment Japanese army units were landing. In less than a month they would close on the British fortress at Singapore. In less than three months they would be at the gates of India. “The full horror” of the news of
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
in December 1941, as Churchill described it, was not just that a whole new war front had opened, a war against Asia’s most dynamic rising power. The British Empire suddenly found itself staring into the abyss. In 1942 Churchill and Gandhi would battle for the highest stakes of all: the fate of the empire itself.

Ironically the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
came at the end of what had been, after a wobbly beginning, a very good year. After a humiliating retreat from Greece and Crete, the eastern Mediterranean had stabilized. Erwin Rommel’s drive for Egypt and Suez, the gateway to India, had been contained. The Battle of the Atlantic to get convoys past the German U-boat wolf pack continued, but with diminishing losses: only 35 ships were lost in November, compared with 109 in June.
³
Defeat of a pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq in May had closed the door to any German incursion into the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
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