Gandhi & Churchill (98 page)

The first reports reached him in Delhi, where he was staying in an untouchable neighborhood. Only days before he had been fatalistic about communal violence. “Man is born to die,” he told a prayer meeting. “So whether God sent [people] a natural death or whether they were killed by an assassin’s knife, they must go smiling to their end.”
⁴⁶
His New Age instinct was to blame earlier violence on the evil influence of cities: hadn’t he been saying that the Indian village was a peaceful haven that needed no policemen? Now, however, he realized he had to make a more pertinent response.

“Ever since he had heard the news from Noakhali,” the
Hindustani Times
reported him telling his fellow worshippers, “indeed ever since the bloodbath of Calcutta, he has been wondering where his duty lay.” Nonviolence, not just against the British but against everyone, “was the creed of the Congress. It had brought them this far” and would sustain them now.
⁴⁷

Biographers often imply that Gandhi left for Noakhali almost as soon as he heard the news, in order “to dry the tear in every eye.” This is false. Gandhi fully knew what was happening by October 15. His greatest concern, however, was that people learn to die without killing others: it was the duty of himself and others in the Congress “to teach people this supreme act.” On the seventeenth he spoke again of the massacres but only to say that “women must learn to die” before they are raped or converted to Islam. (Refugees had spread rumors that many were being forcibly converted.) It was better to commit suicide than to submit. He also spoke of the sins of gambling and black-marketing. As for Noakhali, “There is no inner call. When it comes, nothing will hold me back.”
⁴⁸

By now Hindu retaliation had begun in Bihar, while police and soldiers in Noakhali and nearby Tippera were trying to restore order and count the bodies. On the nineteenth Gandhi was back in Sevagram. He still had no plan to leave. He did send a telegram saying he might go to Bengal on October 23 or 24. There was no need to rush. He told a friend who was horrified by the latest news: “I have no information…Go to Bengal if you want to.” As late as the twenty-first he told another Bengali contact, Hemprabha Das Gupta, “You should be calm. Hope [to] come soon.”
⁴⁹
He preferred to wait until Nehru returned to India after his visit to London, and Gandhi could discuss the matter with the Congress Working Committee, before doing anything.

Not until October 25, two weeks after the killings had begun, did Gandhi finally leave—not for Noakhali but for Calcutta, to confer with Nehru about how to “still the fury.” In fact, the police and army had already done that. But when Gandhi arrived in Noakhali on November 6 on a special train provided by the Bengali government, there were still burned bodies scattered in the courtyards of Hindu homes and bloodstains on the walls and floorboards. He visited a camp where six thousand refugees had taken shelter. He told them they should be ashamed for running away. “Men should fear only God,” he said, and should either fight off their attackers or submit bravely to their martyrdom.

Despite his stern facade, the truth of what was happening finally seemed to sink in. “Ahimsa is indeed put to the test now,” Gandhi would write from Noakhali. His Bengali interpreter was a professor from Calcutta University named Nirmal Kumar Bose. Bose was a nationalist and a believer in nonviolence but was hardly an unqualified Gandhi admirer.
⁵⁰
He was shocked and disappointed when Gandhi told widows of men killed, “I have not come to bring you consolation. I have come to bring you courage.” But then he heard Gandhi muttering to himself as he toured the devastation, “What shall I do? What shall I do?” The Mahatma began to wonder if his life’s work had all been in vain. “I don’t want to die a failure, but as a successful man,” he confessed to Nirmal. “But it may be that I am a failure.” He spoke for the first time of his own death, even assassination.
⁵¹

“I am groping for light,” Gandhi told Nirmal, but “I am surrounded by darkness.” Finally he decided there was nothing for him to do but live in Noakhali himself. Together he and Nirmal found a simple hut in the village of Srirampur, and in the second week in December Gandhi’s grandniece Manubehn joined them. She did the daily cooking, preparing Gandhi’s meals while Nirmal tended to Gandhi’s daily massages. As January 1947 began, Gandhi set off on foot to tour Noakhali’s villages. With bamboo staff in hand, he set out at dawn every morning, visiting villagers and preaching reconciliation and singing to himself a poem called “Walk Alone” by Rabindranath Tagore:

If they answer not thy call, walk alone;

If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall;

O thou of evil luck,

Open thy mind and speak out alone.

If they turn away and desert you when crossing the wilderness,

O thou of evil luck,

Trample the thorns under thy tread,

And along the blood-soaked track walk alone.

Meanwhile the violence was still spreading. In the village of Garmuktesar in the United Provinces, Hindus turned on their Muslim neighbors and virtually wiped them out.
⁵²
An AP reporter asked Gandhi if the riots would end. “You may be certain that they will end,” he replied archly. “If the British influence were withdrawn, they would end much quicker.”
⁵³
Meanwhile Nehru had returned from London, where the discussions had concerned how to withdraw that influence.

On the last day of 1946 Viceroy Wavell prepared to unfurl his plan for terminating British control of India. Bearing the unfortunate and misleading nickname “the Breakdown Plan,” it was a plan to prevent chaos, not merely to stem its horrible flow. Wavell envisaged a British withdrawal in three separate stages: first from the southern provinces, which were still fairly secure; then from Bihar and the United Provinces in central India, once the violence had been stopped; and finally from the rest of the subcontinent. Wavell had consulted with the army and Auchinleck, as well as the heads of the Indian Civil Service. The idea was to keep British administration intact in religiously divided provinces and states as long as possible, until everyone had worked out a political settlement that might, but did not necessarily, include creation of an independent Pakistan. Wavell felt it was a plan for all contingencies and even set a date for complete withdrawal: March 31, 1948. But his own head of the civil service predicted that de facto British control would end well before that date.
⁵⁴
The alternative, in any case, would be full-out civil war.

When the cabinet first got word of the Breakdown Plan, they were aghast.
⁵⁵
None of them had any idea that conditions in India were so bad. They had faith in Gandhi and Nehru’s reassurances that taking concrete steps for British withdrawal would diminish the violence, not exacerbate it, and that the Hindu-Muslim issue would resolve itself once Indians took over. They worried the plan would make the British look pro-Muslim and encourage Muslim separatism.

Above all, they felt the plan made the British appear to be less in control of the situation than Attlee and the Labour government liked to think they were.
⁵⁶
To Attlee, the Breakdown Plan seemed “evidence of decline in British power and resolution,” even “the beginning of the liquidation of the British Empire”—ironically echoing Churchill. The Labour government wanted the withdrawal from India to look like a triumph of British statesmanship, not a headlong flight.

So on January 8, 1947, Attlee told Wavell that the cabinet could not endorse the Breakdown Plan.
⁵⁷
In his diary Wavell described the letter as “cold, ungracious and indefinite.” But unknown to him, Wavell was already on his way out. A month earlier Attlee had secretly approached the man he wanted to replace Wavell as viceroy: Louis Prince Mountbatten. Attlee believed that the man who had overseen the fate of 120 million people in Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender was just the man to oversee the fate of 400 million now and to find a way for Britain to leave India with honor. Labour politicians also figured Mountbatten’s aristocratic charm and royal lineage might awe Indian politicians into compliance, especially its independent princes and maharajas, the last remaining barrier to a handover of power.

Besides, Mountbatten, despite (or perhaps because of) his exalted status, was also a man of the Left. When his troops marched back into Malaya and Burma, he had strongly endorsed local nationalist movements and set both those countries on the path to independence. His wife, Lady Edwina, was a keen Congress supporter. “Of course we think that Gandhi and his friends are absolutely right,” she told her friends. “We must try to fit in with what they want us to do.”
⁵⁸
Mountbatten had had no qualms about winding up the British Empire in East Asia; he certainly would have none about doing the same in India.

“Dickie” Mountbatten had one other inestimable advantage: he was a Churchill protégé and a personal favorite. Churchill had appointed him Southeast Asia supreme commander over the heads of older, more experienced men, because he had had the dash and reputation for bold action that Churchill liked. At this crucial juncture Attlee felt the need for some cover on his right flank. Back in October 1946 Churchill had launched a slashing attack on the government over the growing violence in India.

“On the morrow of our victory [in 1945],” he growled in that familiar voice, “and of our services, without which human freedom would not have survived, we are divesting ourselves of the mighty and wonderful empire which had been built up in India by two hundred years of effort and sacrifice.” The Labour government had placed the fate of 400 million human beings “into the hands of men who have good reason to be bitterly hostile to the British connection.” Churchill added, “I fear that calamity impends upon this mighty sub-Continent…No one can measure the misery and bloodshed which will overtake these enormous masses of humble helpless millions.”

“All this is happening every day, every hour,” Churchill warned, even as news of Noakhali spread across British newspapers. “The great ship is sinking in the calm sea,” he cried. “Those who should have devoted their utmost efforts to keep her afloat have instead opened the sea-cocks…Sometimes in the past I have not been wrong. I pray that I may be wrong now.”
⁵⁹
Attlee counted on Mountbatten’s appointment to convince Churchill that the India ship of state was still afloat, although set on a course very different from the one Churchill would have chosen.

The plan worked. Churchill sent his congratulations to the government on its choice of the new viceroy—a gesture he would later regret. Not until February 20, 1947, did he learn the awful truth: Mountbatten’s job was not only to extinguish the Raj forever but to do it before June 1, 1948, regardless of the situation on the ground.

Churchill was beside himself.
^*127
He rose in the House on March 6 to rip into the government for its “premature hurried scuttle” of its imperial responsibilities in India.

The whole principle that Hindus and Muslims had to agree on a communal solution before the British left, he complained, had been thrown overboard. “One thing seems to me absolutely certain,” he said. “The Government, by their 14 months’ time limit, have put an end to all prospect of Indian unity.” India was about to be subjected “not merely to partition, but fragmentation.” Those fourteen months “will not be used for the melting of hearts and the union of Muslim and Hindu all over India. They will be used in preparation for civil war.” The scene unfolding now, “with the corpses of men, women, and children littering the ground in thousands,” will be repeated in every part of India, if Attlee’s plan was allowed to go through.

The only explanation, for this situation, Churchill said, had to be that the government had adopted “one of Mr. Gandhi’s most scatterbrained observations,” made after the Cripps mission of 1942 had failed.
Leave India in God’s hands,
Gandhi had said,
in modern parlance, to anarchy…From [this] a true India will arise in place of the false one we see.

By setting its arbitrary deadline,
^*128
Churchill implied, the government had endorsed that hope. He begged Attlee to reconsider.

“Let us not add to the pangs of sorrow many of us feel” over the loss of India, Churchill concluded, “the taint and smear of shame” for handing over the former empire to Gandhi and the forces of chaos.
⁶⁰
Still, Churchill had one more card to play. He had mentioned it in his letter to Clementine back in January 1945: “Pakistan.” Through his secret support for Jinnah and India’s Muslims, Churchill still hoped he could deny Gandhi his ultimate victory.

Photo Insert III