Gandhi & Churchill (79 page)

But the other issues seemed almost beyond human solution, or at least a British solution. “The more I reflect upon the political situation as a whole,” he confessed to his secretary of state, Lord Zetland, “the more impressed I am by the importance of achieving Federation as early as possible.” He was the first, but not the last, viceroy to sense that the Raj had become a ticking time bomb and that, except for Gandhi, all the principal parties—Jinnah, Nehru, Bose, even leading princes—were only waiting for an excuse to set it off, in hopes of building their own order out of the rubble.
²
He certainly never imagined that on September 3, 1939, he would be the one to give them that opportunity.

He had agreed with Zetland that if war in Europe came, he would issue a statement to the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi that a state of war also existed between India and Germany. There was no question of prior consultation with the various party leaders or a parliamentary vote. By law, if Britain went to war, so did India—automatically. Dominions like Australia (which declared war on the same day, September 3) and South Africa (on September 6) had a mechanism for consultation with elected ministers, but that would not exist in India until full federation, at least two years away.

Besides, Linlithgow knew that if he did ask for a vote, the Indian National Congress, which now governed eight of India’s eleven provinces, would likely turn him down.
³
So the first notion Indians had that they were at war was when they heard the king speak on the BBC Overseas Service, followed by the viceroy’s announcement that a state of war emergency now existed in India.

The accusation is often made that Linlithgow dragged Indians into war without their consent and that this “humiliation” poisoned British-Indian relations in the last years of the Raj. Some even suggest that Linlithgow’s decision was a “fatal mistake.”
⁴
In fact, there was no decision to make. Indeed, if anyone was to blame, it was Winston Churchill. For almost four years he had dragged out the battle over the India Act, delaying its implementation until 1937. Its first phase, that of handing over power in the provinces, had hardly been tested when war broke out. The Assembly had no consultative role because there was still no Indian federation. And with a war on, that situation was unlikely to change. Churchill had laid the grim foundations for what was to come—along with Gandhi.

Unlike other Indian leaders, in September 1939 Gandhi was very much “in the loop” on the issue of going to war. The day before Britain made its formal declaration, Linlithgow had sent a message to the Mahatma at Sevagram, who wrote back from the telegraph office at Wardha. “
SORRY TERRIBLE NEWS,”
Gandhi wired. “
TAKING EARLIEST TRAIN. ARRIVING SIMLA FOURTH MORNING
.” That night he was hurtling along the tracks en route for the Viceregal Lodge.

“Terrible news.” From Sevagram, Gandhi had watched the approach of war in Europe with deep foreboding. The rise of fascism had only confirmed his gloomy assessment of the terrible fate awaiting Western materialism. According to biographer Robert Payne, the betrayal at Munich had led him to the edge of a complete breakdown.
⁵
The one reed of hope that Gandhi clung to was that Europeans might discover the power of nonviolence before it was too late.

In 1938 he had urged the Czechs to use nonviolence against the Germans instead of bullets. He urged German Jews to do the same. “The Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than Indians in South Africa,” he wrote in
Harijan
on November 11, 1938. “They are more gifted than the Indians of South Africa.” A “calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women” would turn their “winter of despair” into “a summer of hope,” Gandhi felt. It would win the world’s admiration and perhaps even that of the German people: “The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles, in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity.”
⁶

Gandhi even urged Jews to disarm their persecutors by praying for Hitler. “If even one Jew acted thus,” he said confidently, “he would save his self-respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry.” Even his old friend Hermann Kallenbach had to demur. “[Hermann] wants to be non-violent” was Gandhi’s explanation for their disagreement, “but the sufferings of his fellow Jews are too much to bear.” Gandhi added, “I do not quarrel with him over his anger,” but then he repeated the aphorism that “revenge is sweet, [but] forgiveness is divine.”
⁷

Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust became known, Gandhi still felt that “the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife…They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs…It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany…As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
⁸

In the shadow of Treblinka and Auschwitz or even Kristallnacht, Gandhi’s remarks seem extraordinary, even obscenely naïve. In the same vein, his ambivalent views on Hitler shocked even his supporters. On July 23, 1939, he had written an open letter to Hitler begging him to renounce violence. “It is clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state,” it read. “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war?”
⁹

Hitler, of course, did not. But that did not stop Gandhi from sending the dictator more letters in May and June 1940, or from telling Linlithgow that same month, “Hitler is not a bad man.” As Hitler’s panzers roared across France, Gandhi wrote that future generations of Germans would “honor Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, as a matchless organizer and much more.”
¹⁰
In his last missive to Hitler, written the day before Christmas 1941, Gandhi praised “your bravery [and] devotion to your fatherland…Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents”—one of the most vocal being Winston Churchill.

What could critics expect? At seventy, Gandhi was not about to change his mind on the moral imperative of ahimsa and the spiritual power of nonviolence. “Man may shed his own blood for establishing what he considers to be his ‘right,’” Gandhi would write, but “he may not shed the blood of his opponent” for the same thing. For Gandhi, this was a cardinal rule.
¹¹
This idea led him to one of his most famous maxims, uttered to a group of American clergymen: “To be truly non-violent, I must love [my adversary] and pray for him even when he hits me.” To Gandhi, this was not a formula for passivity or cowardice but the sublime expression of the highest form of courage. To others, however, it seemed an invitation to surrender.

A group of American Methodist missionaries met with Gandhi at Sevagram in December 1938, in the aftermath of Munich and the anti-Jewish riots of Kristallnacht. In Abyssinia the Italian army was using poison gas against recalcitrant tribesmen. Like other New Age Christians, the Americans deeply admired Gandhi but begged him to understand that nonviolence would be useless against ruthless dictators like Hitler and Mussolini and would actually play into their hands. “They are incapable of any moral response,” one of them said. “They have no conscience and have made themselves impervious to world opinion.”

In response, Gandhi was dismissive, almost contemptuous: “Your argument presupposes that men like Hitler and Mussolini are beyond redemption.”
¹²
Gandhi never could accept such a final judgment against his fellow men, not even the worst of them. But what seemed reasonable and humane to Gandhi seemed daylight madness to others, and vice versa.

And of course in a sense, until now he had been lucky. He had never had to deal with a truly fanatical enemy like a Hitler or a Himmler, one for whom mass murder was a means to an end, and mass terror an end in itself. Had his own adversary been more ideologically driven, more fanatical, Gandhi’s claim that “under non-violence only those would have been killed who had trained themselves to be killed” would have been reduced to vicious nonsense.

The truth was that the British in India, and even whites in South Africa, at least professed a set of consistent moral principles and an objective standard of justice to which Gandhi could effectively appeal. He had done so for more than forty years. What he himself had termed the “British sense of fair play” had saved him more than once. Whatever they thought of the Mahatma, Willingdon, Irwin, Reading, and Gandhi’s other viceregal adversaries had lived according to the Christian-based moral temper of Churchill’s “English-speaking peoples.” Even General Dyer had been dismissed after Amritsar, not promoted as Stalin or Hitler might have done, and Yeravda was no gulag. Without this implicit moral contract between ruler and ruled, Gandhi’s career as a nationalist leader would have been nasty, brutish, and short.
^*98
13

Paradoxically, Gandhi’s spiritual strength was also his intellectual blind spot. A world without God was unimaginable to Gandhi, yet it was all around him. From his vantage point, Gandhi could see no fundamental difference between the values of the Raj and those of Hitler. Both in his mind were founded on violence or
himsa
.

Churchill, on the other hand, could and did. In a godless world Churchill clung to Western civilization as man’s best hope because he took full measure of its alternatives both past and present. If Hitler won and Britain lost, he would say in his “Finest Hour” speech, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
¹⁴
He could perceive the disaster of totalitarian victory and democratic defeat in historical terms, not just moral ones. That perception gave him the spiritual energy to summon an entire nation to oppose evil, much as Gandhi had summoned an entire nation to oppose the Raj.

Gandhi and Churchill had one other startling difference that biographers and historians often miss. Gandhi had the gift to see the goodness in all human beings, even in a Hitler. Churchill had the gift to see the evil, because he recognized that quality in himself. The man who denounced Hitler as dictator and murderer was also the one who ordered the firebombing of German cities. He was the prime minister who would order doctors to let Gandhi die in prison and allow millions of Indians to die of famine in 1943 rather than risk diverting the war effort.

At the same time however, Gandhi had no illusions about what Hitler represented, or the consequences of his triumph. His same Christmas letter in 1941 that praised Hitler’s “bravery or devotion” said also that there “was no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity.” Nazism itself, Gandhi told his followers, was “naked, ruthless force reduced to an exact science and worked with scientific precision”—a startling echo of Churchill’s words about National Socialism as “perverted science.”
¹⁵
And on September 4, 1939, during his meeting with Viceroy Linlithgow, he and Churchill were on the same wavelength at last.

He and the viceroy spoke for two hours. The Mahatma stressed that he could speak only for himself and not for the Indian National Congress, but he pledged unconditional support to the British cause. “It almost seems as if Herr Hitler knows no God but brute force,” Gandhi said, “and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, he will listen to nothing else.”

Then Gandhi confessed that he contemplated war “with an English heart” and could not think of the destruction of London “without being stirred to the very depths” of his being. As the Mahatma conjured up the picture of Westminster Abbey and the Parliament buildings destroyed by German bombs, an astonished Linlithgow watched Gandhi drop his head and weep.
¹⁶

It was an extraordinary moment. But like Gandhi’s stand on nonviolence against the dictators, the emotion was consistent with a forty-year history. Gandhi had stood by the empire in 1899 and again in 1914. Despite a lifetime of disappointments, he was ready to do it a third time in 1939. His were tears that Winston Churchill, who himself wept easily and unashamedly, would have understood. If at that moment Churchill had been prime minister and could have summoned Gandhi to London, they might have struck an alliance as far-reaching and meaningful as anything later arranged with de Gaulle or Roosevelt. A great catastrophe could have been avoided, and perhaps a final friendship made.

But Churchill was not prime minister in 1939, and Linlithgow was no Churchill. He did not know how to respond, and the moment passed. So Gandhi wiped his eyes and again stressed that he had no right to speak for the nation. He left. Afterward he told the press that the final decision on India’s support for the war, “this terrible drama,” was up to the Congress, which meant Jawaharlal Nehru.
¹⁷

Nehru had groomed himself as Gandhi’s heir apparent for more than a decade. Their relationship was undeniably close, even intimate, especially after the death of Nehru’s father in 1931. Nehru was always careful to be seen beside the Mahatma and to have his picture taken with him. In fact, they were very different men, even opposites. Their deepest differences would not appear until it was too late, when Gandhi’s legacy for India had turned to tragedy.

Like Churchill, Nehru had been educated at Harrow. Like Bose, he was a graduate of Cambridge. But while Bose (despite his classical education) had remained an Indian and a Bengali, Nehru was undeniably a man of the British Left. Gandhi himself said that Nehru was “more English than Indian in his thoughts and make-up” and that he was “more at home with Englishmen than with his own countrymen,”
¹⁸
especially Englishmen who read left-leaning journals like the
New Statesman
and the
Guardian
and voted for the Labour Party.
^*99
Nehru made their enthusiasms
his
enthusiasms: for the nationalization of industries, for socialist planning, and for the defeat of capitalism and colonialism.