Gandhi & Churchill (41 page)

Then Gandhi remembered that a lawyer he knew from his London days was living nearby in Muzzafarpur, a Muslim named Maulana Mazharul Haq. Gandhi realized, “I must take the reins in my own hands,” and so the unlikely-looking pair took the train to Muzzafarpur. There his old friend gave him a rapturous welcome and introduced him to some attorney friends. Mazharul Haq, who had Congress connections, was already active on behalf of the Champaran cultivators. He and his fellow lawyers had taken several cases to court (while charging, Gandhi noted, hefty fees to their impoverished clients).

“When the
ryots [raiyats]
are so crushed and fear ridden, law courts are useless” was his response, according to his own account. “The real relief for them is to be free from fear. We cannot sit still until we have driven the
tinkathia
out of Bihar.”
³⁵

Easier said than done. But Gandhi’s approach was simple and time-tested in South Africa. He would meet with the peasants himself, he announced, as many as possible. He would write down their grievances, as part of his own independent inquiry into “the condition of the Champaran agriculturists.” Then he would confront the government with the truth. Others immediately volunteered to help, including Haq and a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named Rajendra Prasad.

Prasad found Gandhi’s appearance and behavior bizarre in the extreme. “In those days he was living practically on groundnuts and dates,” Prasad remembered later. “Milk of the cow or buffalo was tabooed
[sic]
and even goat’s milk,” while Gandhi had also vowed not to eat more than five types of food in a single day and to eat no meal after sunset. Although he dressed in homespun peasant clothes, Gandhi spoke not a word of Bihari. He barely understood Hindi.
³⁶
Yet there was something compelling about the strange little man, with his odd habits, his persuasive but pointed banter, and his rapid scuttling walk that made it hard for men two decades his junior to keep up with him.
³⁷

That compulsion would make Rajendra Prasad go with Gandhi to the poorest and most remote villages in Champaran. He became Gandhi’s first intimate disciple outside his home turf. Three decades later Prasad would become India’s first president.

Meanwhile local British authorities knew about Gandhi’s arrival almost the moment he got off the train. They were deeply alarmed. “His mere presence in Champaran is most undesirable,” the district inspector general’s special assistant wrote to the provincial police superintendent. Even in remotest Bihar, Raj officials knew of Gandhi’s reputation as an agitator, especially on the issue of Indian indentured labor. District Commissioner Morshead had a short interview with Gandhi and concluded that he was keener on stirring up trouble rather than on a serious inquiry.
³⁸
Morshead decided he had to forestall any violence.

On Sunday, April 15, Gandhi and another lawyer named Prasad (not Rajendra but the man he had met at the Lucknow Congress) set off by elephant for the first village in the district, called Chandrahia.
³⁹
Just as they arrived in the dusty, deserted street, a police officer rode up on a bicycle. It was a scene worthy of E. M. Forster, or Paul Scott, with the turbaned khaki-clad officer on his flimsy bicycle standing in the path of the great creaking animal, with its weary and bemused passengers.

They were to stop at once, the policeman said. The district magistrate, W. B. Haycock, had an expulsion order waiting for Gandhi, under the Defense of India Rules. Gandhi returned to Motihari and quietly read the letter. He then informed Haycock that he would disobey the expulsion order and sent a similar letter to the viceroy’s private secretary.

Gandhi waited all day Monday to be arrested, even as the news of what was happening spread with torrential speed through neighboring villages. Finally Haycock ordered him to appear on Tuesday at the district court to explain why he should not be put in jail. Gandhi’s whole plan, of course,
was
to be put in jail, and he had prepared a statement to that effect.

On Tuesday morning more than two thousand peasants pressed to get into the courtroom. The glass panels of the door broke under the strain, and Haycock had to ask Gandhi to control his followers, which Gandhi gladly did. Gandhi then read his statement, concluding, “I have disregarded the order served upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”
⁴⁰

Haycock was in a quandary. As Gandhi said later, “He seemed to be a good man, anxious to do justice.” Like any British judge in India, he saw his job as defending law and order in his district. Willful disobedience of the law (specifically Section 144 of the Crown Penal Code) called for punishment. But the unexpected and unprecedented outpouring of peasant support for the strange little man standing before his bench unnerved him. Haycock convinced himself more violence would result if he arrested Gandhi than if he left him at liberty. Therefore he announced he would suspend any judgment and adjourned the court. He privately asked Gandhi to put off his village visits (surprisingly, Gandhi agreed), and that night Haycock sent a long telegram to the lieutenant-governor asking, in effect, what he should do.

It was a watershed moment in Gandhi’s dealings with British officialdom. In fact, it set the classic pattern of the Raj’s response to Gandhi’s satyagraha tactics, then and later: first the insistence that the law be obeyed; then surprise at the Mahatma’s calm defiance; then confusion at the show of sympathy and support from ordinary Indians; and finally hesitation and inaction and a sheepish letter to superiors asking for further instructions.

So Haycock became the first, but by no means the last, British official in India to be reduced to bumbling helplessness by Gandhi’s unorthodox approach. The response to his letter revealed the pressures from the other side. The lieutenant-governor sharply disapproved of the commissioner’s action and ordered Haycock to withdraw the expulsion order. Gandhi would be allowed to continue his inquiry, making visits to villages in Champaran. “Mr. Gandhi is doubtless eager to adopt the role of martyr which as you know he has already played in South Africa,” the official wrote, and nothing “would suit him better than to undergo a term of imprisonment.” The Indian media were already noticing the events in Champaran and were hailing Gandhi as a hero. Better to back down, the lieutenant-governor suggested, than to give Gandhi the publicity he wanted—and possibly set off an even more widespread reaction.
⁴¹
Relieved at not having to enforce the law, Haycock dropped the case.

Gandhi had won. Even more important, Champaran’s peasantry felt they had won, too. As Gandhi resumed his village visits and continued them for the rest of April and May, men, women, and children poured out of their homes. They followed him everywhere, chanting his name, throwing flowers in his path, and—the most striking part of
darshan,
or sighting of a holy man—gathering the dust from his feet on their fingers. When he finally reached Bettiah and Raj Shukla’s home village, the people unhitched the horses from Gandhi’s carriage and pulled it through the streets. A local British official watched. The English might think Gandhi a fanatic or even a revolutionary, he noted, but to the peasants “he is their liberator, and they credit him with extraordinary powers.”
⁴²

As for Gandhi himself, he found the outpouring of adulation deeply moving as well as somewhat unexpected. For the first time in his life he saw the deep, inexorable poverty and isolation of the vast majority of his fellow countrymen. “The world outside Champaran was unknown to them,” he wrote later. “And yet they received me as though we had been lifelong friends. It is not exaggeration, but the literal truth, to say that in this meeting with the peasants I was face to face with God, Ahimsa, and Truth.”
⁴³

By championing the raiyats of Champaran, historian Judith Brown remarks, “Gandhi began to clothe with flesh and blood the figure which had hitherto been only a shadowy contender” in Indian politics. Brown notes that this first “direct object-lesson in Civil Disobedience,” as Gandhi himself described it, “[gave] him an all-India public reputation.” He was no longer a figure of fun among educated Indians, most of whom had even less contact with India’s rural classes than Gandhi did. Champaran turned him into a man to be respected and admired.
⁴⁴

Gandhi also learned a vital lesson in handling the press. He urged newspapers across the country not to send reporters to cover the events unfolding in Bihar. Instead, he explained, he would “send them whatever might be necessary for publication and keep them informed.” In effect, he turned the Indian media into his own publicity machine.
⁴⁵

In Gandhi’s mind, his investigations in Champaran had nothing to do with any future career in politics. On the contrary, he wrote in his autobiography that he fought to “prevent the struggle from becoming political.” He was there to fight for the peasants and their rights; his goal was “disinterested service of the people.”
⁴⁶
That goal might be damaged if others perceived his actions as political, or as aimed to draw support from one or another faction in Congress politics.

At the same time it was impossible to keep politics out of Champaran. By the time he completed his survey and the Indian government agreed to launch an official committee of inquiry, he had built his first political following outside his native Gujarat. Its members were Bihar’s middle tier: young small-town lawyers like the Prasads, small businessmen from provincial towns, and the occasional prosperous cultivator like Shukla who had a smattering of education and time for social activism.

Devoted to Gandhi, they were a fairly ragtag bunch. Raj officials distrusted them all, but every single British official who had direct contact with Gandhi in the Champaran affair came away with a respect for his sincerity and uprightness. “Mr. Gandhi is a philanthropic enthusiast,” was the lieutenant-governor of Bihar’s take on him, “but I regard him as perfectly honest; and he was quite reasonable in his discussions with me.”
⁴⁷

Hence the Raj learned to prefer dealing with Gandhi to dealing with other Indian politicians. He spoke to British officials with the confiding ease of an Inner Temple lawyer, and unlike some of his fellow Congressmen, he seemed to keep his promises. Civil servants, and most politicians, dislike trouble, and all prefer it in small, manageable doses rather than large ones. Hence Champaran laid the seeds of a strange but crucial relationship that grew closer over time. British officials learned that it was better to agree to at least some of Gandhi’s demands, no matter how outrageous, than to reject them all and face a mass disturbance.

In turn, Gandhi learned to quietly drop certain grievances that his followers had insisted on, in order not to force New Delhi into a corner. “Why should we blame the government?” he would ask his followers, especially when, in his innermost mind, he believed that Indian weakness had opened the door to British abuses in the first place.
⁴⁸

In this way Gandhi and the Raj established a pattern of bilateral negotiation that lasted through to the Salt March and beyond. Other Indian politicians and local officials had to learn to sit on the sidelines when the bargaining began, even as they sometimes fumed with impatience, not to mention envy. Yet this strange alliance would hold the subcontinent together for nearly two decades.

It would take Winston Churchill’s rise to power in 1940 to blow it all away.

In May 1917 everyone, Indian and Briton alike, had to agree that Gandhi had won a stunning victory. Gandhi was unhappy that the Committee of Inquiry’s final recommendations did little to change the lives of Champaran’s cultivators, and the peasant schools he had set up all folded once he left Bihar. Nonetheless, he felt confident enough to try the same thing closer to home, in the province of Kaira, in central Gujarat.

Once again he chose a case that involved farmers’ rights, although in Kaira the peasants were more prosperous and wanted tax relief from the Raj. Once again it involved a place where Muslim-Hindu communal strife was nonexistent, making it easier for the peasant community to show a united face.

And once again Gandhi found an enthusiastic band of local activists to help him organize his satyagraha, in this case a pledge from farmers not to pay their land tax at the current onerous rate.
⁴⁹
One of the activists was Mahadev Desai, who returned with him to Sabarmati as his private secretary. Another was Vallabhbhai Patel, a tough-minded lawyer from a Kaira peasant family who sometimes practiced in Ahmedabad. Patel had been skeptical of Gandhi when he first met him at the Ahmedabad Club. But Gandhi’s personal devotion to the plight of the Kaira farmers won him over. He became what Rajendra Prasad was in Bihar, Gandhi’s invaluable link to his new rural base.

As in Champaran, the concessions Gandhi eventually won were less than met the eye. The district commissioner agreed to suspend payments for some of Kaira’s poorest raiyats, but the central government refused to budge on the overall assessment. Gandhi nonetheless declared victory. He had already moved on to his next cause, the mill workers’ strike in Ahmedabad.

This one posed some complications for Gandhi. Two of the mill owners involved, Ambalal and Anasuya Sarabhai, were devout Hindus and generous benefactors of the Sabarmati Ashram. On February 28, 1918, however, the Sarabhai brothers locked out their workers over a wage dispute. Gandhi took up the workers’ cause: he was determined to show that satyagraha could work just as well in a factory as in the countryside. When the mill owners and workers failed to reach a deal, Gandhi tried a new tactic: he publicly declared he would starve himself to death, if necessary, to express his disappointment and make the opposing parties see reason.
⁵⁰