Gandhi & Churchill (95 page)

Your sincere friend,
M. K. Gandhi

This strange, jocular note was classic Gandhi. It was his effort to reach out to Churchill in the aftermath of their epic battle. It was the only direct communication between the two men in nearly forty years. But Churchill never received it. After waiting for nearly two months for an answer or at least an acknowledgment, Gandhi contacted the viceroy’s private secretary. He learned that the missive never reached London; Gandhi politely asked that it be resent—although in mid-September 1944, “the psychological moment had passed.”
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On the eve of the Simla summit Gandhi saw again an opportunity to try to open a dialogue with Churchill, and he decided to make the original letter’s text public. Its contents, he said, were of “a sacred character and not meant for the public eye.” In hopes of establishing a common ground that had eluded them in crisis after crisis, in a last stab at opening a path to friendship and peace, he was finally publishing it for the world to read.
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But it was too late for both men, and for India and Britain. Churchill never answered Gandhi’s letter. Even if he had wanted to, he was helpless to do anything. To the astonishment of the world, on July 26, 1945, the British voters turned Winston Churchill out of office.

Chapter Twenty-nine

WALK ALONE

1945–1947

The great ship is sinking in the calm sea.

WINSTON CHURCHILL,
1946

If India wants her blood bath she shall have it.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI
, 1946

N
O ONE WAS MORE SURPRISED THAN
Churchill. In June Jock Colville had returned to his post as the prime minister’s secretary and found his old boss looking forward to the coming election. After his government officially resigned in May, Churchill had as a courtesy allowed his Labour opponent Clement Attlee to join him at Yalta to meet Stalin and Truman. But Churchill refused to accept the possibility that the pipe-smoking former social worker, whom he privately dubbed “a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” could ever be prime minister, or that the British public would ever choose someone other than himself to lead them to final victory.

It was a severe, if understandable, misreading of the nation’s mood. The British people had clung to Churchill in their worst hours. They revered his indomitable spirit and refusal to give in. But as victory approached, they saw a different vision on the horizon. After two world wars in thirty years, Britons had lost their taste for risks and sacrifice. Labour’s vision of the future had been spelled out in the celebrated Beveridge Report
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of 1942: free national health care, social security pensions, and guaranteed full employment. The cradle-to-grave welfare state, the foundations of which Churchill himself had laid in 1911 with his National Insurance Act, was about to replace the old social and economic order that he had taken for granted.

Even his wife knew Churchill was out of touch with the realities of twentieth-century Britain. He had never ridden a motorbus; he had never had to buy a ticket for a train. He rarely traveled anywhere without a valet and at least sixteen pieces of matched luggage.
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The truth was the old Victorian certainties around which both he and Gandhi had constructed their lives, including their leadership, had vanished. Churchill had hoped against hope that victory over Hitler might bring a resurgence of the old imperial spirit, especially in regard to India. Instead, victory brought a sense of relief mingled with exhaustion, and a desire to “get on with things.” That included shedding India as part of the empire.

Few realized at the time how crucial India had been to the war effort. Its soldiers had preserved Britain’s empire in the Middle East and Africa. Two and a half million of them had served in the armed services. Another eight million Indians pitched in with wartime work. But as an imperial possession, India’s value to Britain had shrunk. Its surging industries meant that by 1938–39 Lancashire textile mills supplied only four percent of India’s demand for cotton goods, while India was nearly 86 percent self-sufficient.
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The days when an imperialist like Churchill could threaten Britons with economic ruin if India went independent were over.

Now it was more the other way around. For two decades a growing Indian economy had drawn huge sums from British investors. While Britain had expended a quarter of its national wealth to fight the war, India had emerged with its industrial sector strong and thriving. The war also made India one of Britain’s biggest creditors. In November 1939 London had agreed to let India pay its normal peacetime military budget plus a supplement for the cost of troops serving overseas, while London paid for virtually everything else, including modernizing India’s defense industries. The result was that by the end of the war Britain owed India nearly £1.5 billion, more than a third of Britain’s entire overseas liabilities.
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That sum was a source of near despair for Churchill.
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He realized that as Britain’s economic fortunes dwindled, India’s would only grow brighter. But it also meant India’s economic and financial ties to Britain would continue, whether India was independent or not. Without realizing it, Churchill and his Tory colleagues in 1939 had laid the financial foundations for India’s economic takeoff at the end of the twentieth century.

In the two months after Germany’s surrender, however, Churchill’s mind had been entirely focused on defeating Labour—perhaps too focused. On June 4 Churchill made an infamous radio broadcast suggesting that if Attlee and Labour won, they would introduce a socialist police state in Britain. Jock Colville remembered being amused by Churchill’s theatrical hand gestures in front of the microphone, as if he had been speaking to a hall full of people.
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The British public, however, was not amused. Winston’s attempt to compare Labour with the Axis powers that had devastated Europe, and with the Soviets who were overrunning what was left, backfired.

Before election day Churchill and Clementine went to France for the first time since 1940. Churchill swam at the beach at Biarritz like “a benevolent hippo,” as French police in bathing suits formed a protective cordon. He and Clemmie then returned to England to watch a Labour landslide smash Churchill’s plans as well as his personal pride.

The ejection of a national hero from office shocked those closest to him. The Duke of Chandos, who was minister of production, went down to the cabinet office that night to watch the increasingly gloomy returns. He saw Churchill surrounded by a circle of glum faces. Bracken, Macmillan, Beaverbrook, Eden: all were now out of power. Despite the shock Churchill was determined to put a good face on Labour’s success. “They won’t last forever,” he declared. “Pray God they don’t do too much damage before we get back at them.”
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That evening Lord Moran ran into Jock Colville, who told him that the Labour landslide was as decisive as the Liberal landslide of 1906. The vote from the armed services was most humiliating: it had gone solidly Labour, including the British Fourteenth Army, which had so brilliantly fought the war in Burma.
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Lord Moran went to the Number 10 Annex and found Churchill sitting in a small room adjoining the secretaries’ office, staring morosely into space.

“Well, you know what has happened?” Churchill finally growled.

His doctor said he did and mentioned something about ingratitude.

“Oh no,” Churchill answered, “I wouldn’t call it that. They,” meaning the British people, “have had a very hard time.”

But then he pointed to the red box full of papers and dispatches. “I have made all my plans,” Churchill confessed sadly. “I feel I could have dealt with things better than anyone else. This is Labour’s opportunity to bring in Socialism, and they will take it.”

He paused and added, “They will go very far.” He might have been thinking about India.
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Another person shocked by the election’s outcome was Clement Attlee. Later he confessed to Colville, who was now his secretary, that he had expected to whittle Churchill’s Tory majority down to forty. He never imagined he would take 393 out of 640 seats.
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As the new prime minister, Attlee faced huge problems. Europe was in ruins. Every major capital except Prague and Paris had been bombed or shattered by war, while Russian armies occupied Berlin and Vienna. Chaos reigned in Asia’s capitals as well. On August 6 and 8 atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan’s surrender, the largest capitulation by a standing army in history (nearly 1.2 million Japanese soldiers). In addition to the question of cleaning up the mess that Japan’s aggression had created in the Far East, the question of what to do about India once again raised its inconvenient head.

Churchill had stood alone against Hitler but also alone against Gandhi—he believed for many of the same reasons. Now he was gone. Attlee and his Labour colleagues were now free to do in India what Churchill had refused to contemplate: hand over power.

Attlee’s own record was clear. He had always been sympathetic to Gandhi and Indian nationalism. He had even opposed the 1935 India constitution because it did not go far enough to accommodate “the living forces of India,” by which he meant the left wing of the Indian National Congress.
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Like his colleague Cripps, whose mission in 1942 had been Attlee’s idea, he saw Nehru as a kindred socialist, someone with whom a Labour government could do business. Attlee hoped that by handing over power to Nehru and his colleagues, he could reestablish Britain’s relations with an independent India on a progressive, nonimperial basis.

Like Nehru, Attlee saw India’s problems as social and economic in nature, and he was inclined to discount the reality of sectarian hatreds. Like Gandhi, Attlee was convinced that the Hindu-Muslim split would fade once the British left and inconvenient agitators like Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whom Muslims now hailed as Quaid-e-Azam or “Great Leader,” were firmly put in their place.

In short, Attlee and his new Secretary of State for India Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, believed it was time to quit India, just as Gandhi had always wanted. If Congress had been waiting for a sympathetic British government with which to finally strike a deal, this was it.

Viceroy Wavell too sensed that the election had brought a major sea change. “I think Labour is likely to take more interest in and be more sympathetic towards India,” he wrote in his journal, but added privately, “they will have some weird ideas about it,” especially about how easy it was going to be to leave. He recognized that war-weariness, as much as a burst of anti-imperialism, underlay the desire to cut India loose.
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He also knew Attlee and his colleagues underestimated the scope of the Muslim problem and the necessity of bringing Jinnah along in any final settlement if India were to escape partition or something even worse.

Wavell spent nearly three weeks in London over July and August 1945. He watched the transfer of power in London with optimism mingled with foreboding. Attlee eagerly agreed that India’s next round of legislative elections should be held and prisoners who had been detained during the Quit India campaign released; he agreed to lifting the ban on all Congress organizations. On August 14 Japan surrendered. The war was over. Perhaps now the original Cripps offer, extended by a sympathetic Labour government rather than by a reluctant Churchill, would meet approval. Still, Wavell warned that good intentions alone would not solve the Indian problem.
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The viceroy had a farewell meeting with Churchill on September 2 at Morpeth Mansions. The two men had been at loggerheads over India for almost two years, and they had exchanged angry words more than once. Wavell realized that overall, Churchill considered him “more a liability than an asset.” But he had sent Winston a gracious note to thank him for the opportunity to serve “with so great a man,” and Churchill invited him to lunch.

Churchill talked of his plans now that he was out of power, mentioning a trip to Italy’s Lake Como to paint. But when the subject of India came up, Winston launched into what Wavell called his “usual jeremiad.”

“The anchor is now gone,” Churchill warned, meaning himself. “You are on a lee shore with rash pilots,” meaning Attlee and the Labour Party. He also confessed to Wavell that he had agreed to the Simla conference the previous June only because he was convinced it would fail.

Nonetheless, the meeting ended on a friendly note. Wavell asked if Churchill meant to write a history of this world war, as he had of the last. Churchill said no, he was too old now. (In fact he did, in five large volumes that would win the Nobel Prize for literature.) But as the former prime minister escorted the viceroy to the lift, he had one final request. Just as the lift door closed, Churchill said with a wry smile: “Keep a bit of India.”
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It was the final benediction of the subaltern of ’96 on the subcontinent he professed to love but never understood. The empire builder knew independence was coming. He knew that his day, and his India, were done.

“I dreamed that life was over,” Churchill had confessed to his doctor a few weeks earlier. “I saw—it was very vivid—my dead body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room. I recognized my bare feet projecting from under the sheet. It was very life-like…Perhaps this is the end.”
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