Gandhi & Churchill (92 page)

Still, Churchill clung to hope that his plan would come together. “I am not prepared at the stage to the abandonment of the operation [i.e., Operation Hercules, involving the capture of the island of Rhodes as a prelude for Turkey’s entry in the war],” he told his chiefs of staff on December 22, 1943. “To abandon Hercules is to abandon the prize for which all our efforts are directed upon Turkey.” But without Russian and American support, his plan was a pipedream.
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The days when Britain could wage a major offensive on its own were gone.

Still, Churchill hoped for such an offensive in the Far East. There Churchill had brought on board as supreme commander a man of youthful dynamism and drive, forty-three-year-old Louis Mountbatten. By the beginning of 1944 Mountbatten had assembled nearly a million men at arms in India and a large fleet of ships. Churchill wanted him to launch a major push to retake Rangoon. Retaking Singapore and Malaya, possibly by moving through Sumatra, was also high on his list.

Mountbatten had to point out, however, that India, still recovering from the famine the previous year, could not support anything like such an effort. Clearly the Americans would not provide help for any campaign to reestablish the British Empire in Asia. Without American help, no campaign could take place. And unless Churchill reached some resolution over India, American help would not be forthcoming.

In Cairo the previous November Mountbatten had made the mistake of bringing up the realities of the Indian situation with Churchill. He endorsed Viceroy Wavell’s view on how to break the impasse through a new political dialogue. “The Prime Minister blew up,” Wavell learned, “and damned not only [Mountbatten] but me and all my works.”
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In April 1944, however, all speculation about mounting a fresh Allied drive into Burma ceased. The Japanese struck first, in a desperate bid to reverse their fortunes in Asia. S. C. Bose had encouraged them to believe that once they sent an army across the Assamese border into India, they would find millions of collaborators. The Indians in the British Army would desert, Bose said, the moment they faced free Indians in arms. He told a huge crowd of supporters in Singapore that before the year’s end, they would be standing together on Indian soil.
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After a year’s preparation, the Japanese attacked India. One thrust ran south toward Imphal, less than fifty kilometers west of the Burmese border. The other stretched north to Kohima, as thousands of Japanese infantry poured through the thick jungle hoping to encircle the massive British base being built at Dimapur. Meanwhile Bose arrived in Rangoon with forty thousand volunteers of his Indian National Army, flying Gandhi’s tricolor flag—but with a raging tiger instead of a charkha. With cries of
“Chalo Delhi!”
(On to Delhi!) and
“Azad Hind!”
Bose’s troops boarded trains to head west. Bose himself carried on his lap a small silver casket. It contained earth from the grave of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, who had died in Rangoon after the Great Mutiny and who would now be returned ceremonially to his native land.
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Bose also had reams of Free India paper currency and his own governor-general, to take charge once Imphal and Kohima fell.

And on April 17 Kohima nearly did fall. Its British and Indian garrison fought with desperate courage. Churchill telegraphed Mountbatten: “Let nothing go from the battle that you need for victory. I will not accept denial of this from any quarter, and will back you to the full.” He even ordered Chief of Staff Hastings Ismay to divert supplies and transports that were being stockpiled for his beloved Mediterranean offensive to go at once to Burma: “We cannot on any account throw away this battle.”
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The fighting in Kohima was hand to hand, with bayonet charges; grenades were tossed through windows or into foxholes. At one point the front line ran on either side of the Kohima Club tennis court.
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But bit by bit Punjabi and Gurkha units from General Slim’s Fifth, Seventeenth, and Twenty-third Indian divisions pushed to their rescue.

Armed with tanks and backed by British air power, this was a new model Indian Army. Its troops were mostly Hindu, not Muslim, as the war emergency forced the government to give up the old Churchillesque clichés about the “martial races.” It was also fiercely disciplined and motivated, with a strong spine of VCOs and KCIOs who were the equal of their British counterparts. In fact, as the fighting dragged on through May and June, General Slim began to use Indian troops to stiffen the morale of weary
British
units—reversing a tradition dating back to the Mutiny.
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It was the Indian Army’s finest hour. Back in London, “we watched their progress with tense feelings,” Churchill wrote later.
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Finally in June, Japanese resistance began to crumble, and in late June after savage fighting Imphal was saved. The Japanese army fled headlong back across the border into Burma. Lost in the jungle, many Japanese soldiers, realizing they had been abandoned by their own high command, chose to fight to the death or commit suicide. “Quarter was never asked,” General Slim grimly wrote, “and none was given.” All through July and August Sikh and Gurkha fighters waded through jungle streams choked with the bodies of Japanese who died of starvation or exposure. Ultimately, less than half the Japanese soldiers who set out for India returned. Perhaps as many as eighty thousand lost their lives—the worst military defeat in Japanese history.
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As for the INA, it had not even been a factor in the fighting. Of 6,000 men who actually went into action during the invasion, only 400 died in battle. Another 1,500 died of disease or hunger. Almost all of them suffered from abuse and neglect by their supposed allies—Japanese officers had treated them like coolies or worse, even refusing to salute their INA counterparts. Not surprisingly, more than 800 INA volunteers handed themselves over to British-Indian troops while another 750 simply took to their heels and disappeared into the jungle.
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Bose, choosing to ignore reality, told Indian supporters in Burma that “neither the INA nor he was in the least disenheartened.”
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But in fact he had shot his bolt. There had been no general Indian uprising in his support. Just the opposite: even the most skeptical anti-British nationalists now realized that the Allies were going to win the war. On July 17, 1944, Bose’s biggest Japanese supporter, General Tojo, resigned as prime minister. In a few months Bose would be planning his escape to the Soviet Union, hoping against hope that Stalin could do for his dream of Hind Azad what the Germans and Japanese could not.

The battle for India was over. The battle for Burma was about to begin. And through it all, through the savage jungle fighting and the pounding of artillery and bombs, hardly anyone noticed that Gandhi was finally free.

Wavell had ordered his release on May 6, 1944. The viceroy had heard from doctors that Gandhi had had a severe attack of malaria and “might die any minute.” In addition, he was anemic, had continuing high blood pressure, and suffered from hookworm and amoebic dysentery. His doctors thought his kidney failures might trigger cerebral or coronary thrombosis.
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Given his health, they concluded, he would “not be a factor in active politics again.”
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With the Bombay government, its Home Department, and other agencies all pushing for Gandhi’s release, Wavell turned to Churchill, who finally gave in. On May 24 Churchill explained in a telegram to Wavell: “I assented to letting Gandhi out on the grounds of his grievous state of health.” He had been convinced Gandhi really would die—an event he was prepared to accept with equanimity. But now that Gandhi was out, Churchill wanted no further contact with him. For the first time, he expressed his feelings about Gandhi with genuine venom:

He is a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fiber, largely in the hands of the native vested interests and frozen to his idea of the hand spinning wheel and inefficient cultivation methods for the overcrowded population of India. I look forward to a day when it may be possible to come to an understanding with the real forces that control India.
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It was Churchill’s tragedy to assume those “real forces” actually existed. Like Gandhi, in fact, he still had not learned that no one controlled India, least of all the British. Churchill had convinced himself that the root of India’s problems was its wealthy Hindu landlords and “oppressive industrialists.” Those same people, he believed, were bankrolling Gandhi. For an old anti-Bolshevik, Churchill had come to a strangely Marxist view of India’s affairs, in which economic interest determined every other consideration, including religion, caste, and culture.

Nor could a decade of experience and advice from every quarter shake Churchill’s view. This intransigence meant there could be no serious solution to the “India issue” as long as Churchill remained in office—something Viceroy Wavell understood. In fact, Churchill still liked to pretend there was still no issue at all, only Gandhi and the agitators on one side, and the Raj on the other.

For the time being Churchill worried that Gandhi might recover not only his health but his “political vitality.”
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He need not have worried. Gandhi emerged from Poona a physical and political wreck. However, the illness was not only physical. Something else had happened that affected Gandhi’s vitality, and even made him lose his sense of understanding God.

Unlike her husband, Kasturbai had disliked life in prison.
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She preferred the ashram routine, with lots of children and grandchildren, the comings and goings of visitors, and the constant clamor of the kitchen; at Poona she felt shut in and deprived of inner life. The sudden death of Mahadev Desai shocked her deeply. Desai had been a Brahmin, and she became convinced that his death was in some respect Gandhi’s fault. “The sin rests on our shoulders,” she told one of Gandhi’s young female aides, Sushila Nayyar. “Bapu launched the struggle, and as a result Mahadev came to jail and died here.” She reverted to the Vaishnava faith of her childhood. For hours at a time she worshipped at a tiny altar dedicated to the infant Krishna, and the
samadhi
where Mahadev had been cremated became a virtual shrine for her.

Her health grew worse. In December 1943 it became alarming. She complained of pains in her chest; at times her lips turned blue as she struggled to breathe. Attempts to give her an oxygen catheter failed, and Gandhi quarrelled fiercely with his jailers about nurses and doctors. In January Kasturbai asked to see her sons. Even Harilal made a final appearance, although he was too drunk and had to be sent away. Devadas begged his father to allow their mother to be given penicillin, but Gandhi declined. “Why don’t you trust God?” he said. “Why do you wish to drug your mother even on her death bed?” He added, “If God wills it, He will pull her through.”
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But even Gandhi trembled at the thought that Kasturbai might be leaving him forever.

On February 22 Devadas brought her holy water from the Ganges and
tulasi
leaves. Kasturbai drank the water and bade everyone goodbye. That evening Gandhi was about to go for his usual walk when she called out: “Bapu!” He rushed to her room and held her in his arms. “I am going now,” she said. “No one should cry after I have gone. I am at peace.” She died while Gandhi and everyone else in the room sang the hymn
Ramadhun
.

The next morning she was laid on her funeral pyre in the palace grounds. Gandhi had prepared a prayer drawn from the
Gita,
the Koran, the New Testament, and the
Zend-Avesta
of the Parsis.
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Afterward Gandhi said, “Ba is ever with me though her body has been consigned to the flames.” She had never been fully part of his world, either spiritually or intellectually. After sixty-two years of marriage, she had remained the simple girl he married in Porbandar. Yet she had been the irreplaceable partner of a lifetime, from South Africa days through his fast at Poona. Viceroy Wavell sent a note of condolence. “We were a couple outside the ordinary,” Gandhi wrote in reply.
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To others he simply said, “I cannot imagine life without her.” As Mirabehn noted afterward: “With Ba it was as if a part of Bapu departed.”
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Six weeks later Gandhi had his attack of malaria, which triggered his release. He went to Juhu, a seaside resort near Bombay, to recover. He gave himself two weeks of silence. Then began a long, slow, and tedious recovery both physically and spiritually. “But how God has tested my faith!” he told Pyarelal’s sister, thinking not only of Kasturbai’s death but of all the events of the past year.
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Not until early August 1944 did he feel strong enough to return to Sevagram, after almost a two-year absence. Even there he found it hard to concentrate. Any kind of daily routine became a strain for his frail body. No wonder his doctors pronounced him unfit to ever engage in politics again.

But Gandhi could not stay out, even if he had wanted to. And he did not want to. He had left the Indian National Congress in a state of acute crisis. He felt an obligation to somehow bring it back to national relevance. Even with the war reaching its climax, he felt compelled to show that nonviolence was still the answer for India. In his heart he refused to concede that the Quit India movement had been a failure; but it had left a stalemate that he was now anxious to break. So in June he asked Viceroy Wavell, whom he still had not met, for a conference. Wavell had other things on his mind. A few days earlier he had visited his only son, a major in the Black Watch, who had lost a hand in the fierce fighting around Mogaung and was recuperating in a hospital in Assam. Nor did Wavell trust Gandhi, considering the old man “verbose, petty-minded, and quite devoid of any constructive statesmanship” and “bent only on his own self-justification.”
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