Freedom at Midnight (10 page)

"The British want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine guns where they have the weapons and we do not," he warned. "Our only assurance of beating them is putting the struggle on a plane where we have the weapons and they have not."

Thousands of Indians followed his call, and thousands more went off to jail. The beleaguered governor of Bombay called it "the most colossal experiment in world history and one which came within an inch of succeeding."

It failed because of an outburst of bloody violence in a little village northeast of Delhi. Against the wishes of almost his entire Congress hierarchy, Gandhi called off the movement because he felt that his followers did not yet fully understand nonviolence.

Sensing that his change of attitude had rendered him less dangerous, the British arrested him. Gandhi pleaded guilty to the charge of sedition, and in a moving appeal to his judge, asked for the maximum penalty. He was sentenced to six years in Yeravda prison near Poona. He had no regrets. "Freedom," he wrote, "is often to be found

inside a prison's walls, even on a gallows; never in councfl chambers, courts and classrooms."

Gandhi was released before the end of his sentence because of ill-health. For three years he traveled and wrote, patiently training his followers, inculcating the principles of nonviolence to avoid a recurrence of the outburst that had shocked him before his arrest.

By the end of 1929, he was ready for another move forward. In Lahore, at the stroke of midnight, as the year ended, he led his Congress in a vow for swaraj, nothing less than complete independence. Twenty-six days later, in gatherings all across India, millions of Congressmen repeated the pledge.

A new confrontation between Gandhi and the British was inevitable. Gandhi pondered for days waiting for his Inner Voice to counsel him on the proper form of that confrontation. The answer proposed by his Inner Voice was the finest fruit of his creative genius, the most bizarre, the most stupefying political challenge of modern times. So simple was the thought, so dramatic its execution, that it made Gandhi world-famous overnight. Paradoxically, it was based on a staple the Mahatma had given up years before in his efforts to repress his sexual desires as part of his vow of chastity, salt.

If Gandhi spurned it, in India's hot climate, it was an essential ingredient in every man's diet. It lay in great white sheets along the shorelines, the gift of the eternal Mother, the sea. Its manufacture and sale, however, was the exclusive monopoly of the state, which built a tax into its selling price. It was a small tax, but for a poor peasant it represented, each year, two weeks* income.

On March 12, 1930, at six-thirty in the morning, his bamboo stave in his hand, his back slightly bent, his familiar loincloth around his hips, Gandhi marched out of his ashram at the head of a cortege of seventy-eight disciples and headed for the sea, 240 miles away. Thousands of supporters from Ahmedabad lined the way and strewed the route with green leaves.

Newsmen rushed from all over the world to follow the progress of his strange caravan. From village to village the crowds knelt by the roadside as Gandhi passed. His pace was a deliberately tantalizing approach to his climax. To the British, it was infuriatingly slow. The weird, almost Chaplinesque image of a little old half-naked man

clutching a bamboo pole, marching down to the sea to challenge the British Empire dominated the newsreels and press of the world day after day.

On April 5, at six o'clock in the evening, Gandhi and his party finally reached the banks of the Indian Ocean near the town of Dandi. At dawn the next morning, after a night of prayer, the group marched into the sea for a ritual bath. Then Gandhi waded ashore and, before thousands of spectators, reached down to scoop up a piece of caked salt. With a grave and stern mien, he held his fist to the crowd, then opened it to expose in his palms the white crystals, the forbidden gift of the sea, the newest symbol in the struggle for Indian independence.

Within a week all India was in turmoil. All over the continent Gandhi's followers began to collect and distribute salt. The country was flooded with pamphlets explaining how to make salt from sea water. From one end of India to another, bonfires of British cloth and exports sparkled in the streets.

The British replied with the most massive roundup in Indian history, sweeping people to jail by the thousands. Gandhi was among them. Before returning to the confines of Yeravda prison, however, he managed to send a last message to his followers.

'The honor of India," he said, "has been symbolized by a fistful of salt in the hand of a man of nonviolence. The fist which held the salt may be broken, but it will not yield up its salt."

London, February 18,1947

For three centuries, the walls of the House of Commons had echoed to the declarations of the handful of men who had assembled and guided the British Empire. Their debates and decisions had fixed the destiny of half a billion human beings scattered around the globe and helped impose the domination of a white, Christian European elite on more than a third of the earth's habitable land surface.

Silent witness to an empire's now fading grandeurs, the oak panelings of the Commons had resounded to the phrases of William Pitt announcing the annexation of Canada, of Senegal, of the Antilles; the colonization of

Australia; the departure of the explorer James Cook, off to circumnavigate the globe with the Union Jack atop his mast. They had resonated to Benjamin Disraeli's announcements of the occupation of the vital artery linking Britain and her Indian Empire, the Suez Canal; the conquest of the Transvaal; the defeat of the Afghans; the submission of the Zulus; and the apotheosis of empire, his decision to have Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India. They had heard Joseph Chamberlain describe the scheme to bind Africa in a belt of British steel with the Cairo-to-Capetown railroad.

Now, tensely expectant, the members of the House of Commons shivered in the melancholy shadows stretching out in dark pools from the corners of their unheated hall to hear their leader pronounce a funeral oration for the British Empire. His bulky figure swathed in a black overcoat, Winston Churchill slumped despondently on the Opposition benches. For four decades, since he had joined the Commons as a young cavalry-officer-become-journal-ist-politician, his voice had given utterance in that hall to Britain's imperial dream, just as, for the past decade, it had been the goad of England's conscience, the catalyst of her courage.

He was a man of rare clairvoyance but was inflexible in many of his convictions. He gloried and exulted in every corner of the realm, but for none of them did he have sentiments comparable to those with which he regarded India. Churchill loved India with a violent and unreal affection. He had gone out to India as a young subaltern with his regiment, the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, and done all the Kiplingesque things. He had played polo on the dusty maidans, gone pigsticking and tiger hunting. He had climbed the Khyber Pass and fought the Pathans on the Northwest Frontier. He was, forty-one years after his departure, still sending two pounds every month of the year to the Indian who had been his bearer for two years when he was a young subaltern. His gesture revealed much of his sentiments about India. He loved it, first of all, as a reflection of his own experience there, and he loved the idea of the doughty, upright Englishman running the subcontinent with a firm, paternalistic hand.

His faith in the imperial dream was unshakable. Despite the perception he had displayed on so many world issues, India was a blind spot for Churchill. Nothing could shake

his passionately held conviction that British rule in India had been just, and exercised in India's best interests; that her masses looked on their rulers with gratitude and affection; that the politicians agitating for independence were a petty-minded, half-educated elite, unrepresentative of the masses' desires or interests. Churchill understood India, his own Secretary of State for India had noted acidly, "about as well as George III understood the American colonies."

Since 1910 he had stubbornly resisted every effort to bring India toward independence. He contemptuously dismissed Gandhi and his Congress followers as

The brief text in Clement Attlee's hand had been largely written by the young admiral he was sending to New Delhi to negotiate Britain's departure from India and whose name he was about to reveal for the first time. Louis Mountbatten had, with characteristic boldness, proposed the text as a substitute for the lengthy document that Attlee himself had drafted. It defined the new viceroy's task in simple terms. Above all, it contained the new and salient point that Mountbatten had maintained was essential if there was to be any hope of breaking the Indian logjam; he had wrestled with Attlee for six weeks to nail it down with the precision he wanted.

The chilly assembly stirred as Attlee began to read the historic announcement. "His Majesty's Government wishes to make it clear," he began, "that it is their definite intention to take the necessary steps to effect the transference of power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June 1948."

A stunned silence followed as his words struck home to the men in Commons. That they were the inevitable result of history and Britain's own avowed course in India did not mitigate the sadness produced by the realization that

barely fourteen months remained to the British raj. An era in British life was ending. What the Manchester Guardian would call the following morning "the greatest disengagement in history" was about to begin.

The bulky figure slumped on his bench rose when his turn came to protest, to hurl out one last eloquent plea for empire. Shaking slightly from cold and emotion, Churchill declared the whole business was "an attempt by the government to make use of brilliant war figures in order to cover up a melancholy and disastrous transaction." By fixing a date for independence, Attlee was adopting one of Gandhi's "most scatterbrained observations—'Leave India to God.'

"It is with deep grief," Churchill lamented, "that I watch the tattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered mankind. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself ... let us not add by shameful flight, by a premature, hurried scuttle—at least let us not add to the pangs of sorrow so many of us feel, the taint and sneer of shame."

They were the words of a master orator, but they were also a futile railing against the setting of a sun. When the division bell rang, the Commons acknowledged the dictate of history. By an overwhelming majority, it voted to end British rule in India no later than June 1948.

Penitent's Progress II

The deeper ms little party penetrated into Noakhali's bayous, the more difficult Gandhi's mission became. The success that he had enjoyed with the Moslems in the first villages through which he had passed had aroused the leadership in those that lay ahead. Sensing in it a challenge to their own authority, they had begun to stir the populace's hostility to the Mahatma and his mission.

This morning, his pilgrim's route took him past a Moslem school where seven- and eight-year-old children sat around their sheikh in an open-air classroom. Beaming like an excited grandfather rushing to embrace his favorite grandchildren, Gandhi rushed over to speak to the youngsters. The sheikh leaped up at his approach. With quick,

angry gestures, he shooed his pupils into his hut, as though the old man approaching was a bogeyman come to cast some evil spell over them. Deeply pained by their flight, Gandhi stood before the doorway of the sheikh's hut making sad little waves of his hand to the children whose faces he could make out in the shadow. Dark eyes wide with curiosity and incomprehension, they stared back at him. Finally Gandhi touched his hand to his heart and sent them the Moslem salaam. Not a single childish hand answered his gesture. Even those innocent children were not to be allowed to reply to the fraternal message that he was trying to bring to his people. With a pathetic sigh, Gandhi turned away and resumed his march.

There had been other incidents. Four days earlier someone had weakened a bamboo support holding up a rickety bridge over which Gandhi was due to cross. Fortunately, it had been discovered before the bridge could collapse and send Gandhi and his party tumbling into the muddy waters ten feet below. On another morning, his route had taken him through a grove of bamboo and coconut trees. Every tree seemed to be festooned with a banner proclaiming slogans like "Leave. You have been warned"; "Accept Pakistan"; or "Go for your own good."

Those signs had no effect on Gandhi. Physical courage, the courage to accept without protest a beating, to face danger with quiet resolution was, Gandhi maintained, the prime characteristic required of a nonviolent man. Since the first beating he had received in South Africa from a white coachman trying to drive him from his rightful place in a stagecoach, physical courage had been an attribute the frail Gandhi had displayed in abundance.

Muffling the inner sorrow that those signs and the children's rejection had provoked, Gandhi trudged serenely toward his next stop. It had been a damp, humid night, and the alluvial soil on the narrow path along which his party walked was slick and slippery under the heavy dew. Suddenly, the little procession came to a halt. At its head, Gandhi laid aside his bamboo stave and bent down. Some unknown Moslem hands had littered the tight track, on which he was to walk barefoot, with shards of glass and clumps of human excrement. Tranquilly, Gandhi broke off the branch of a stubby palm. With it, he stooped over and humbly undertook the most defiling act a Hindu can per-