Freedom at Midnight (11 page)

form. Using his branch as a broom, the seventy-seven-year-old penitent began to sweep that human excrement from his path.

For decades, the most persistent English foe of the elderly man patiently cleaning the feces from his way had been the master orator of the House of Commons. Winston Churchill had uttered in his long career enough memorable phrases to fill a volume of prose, but few of them had imprinted themselves as firmly on the public's imagination as those with which he had described Gandhi just sixteen years earlier, in February 1931: half-naked fakir.

The occasion that prompted Churchill's outburst was a turning point in the history of the British Empire. It occurred February 17, 1931. One hand holding his bamboo stave, the other clutching the edges of his white shawl, Mahatma Gandhi had that morning shuffled up the red sandstone steps to Viceroy's House, New Delhi. He was still wan from his weeks in a British prison, but the man who had organized the Salt March did not come to that house as a supplicant for the Viceroy's favors. He came as India.

With his fistful of salt and his bamboo stave, Gandhi had rent the veils of the temple. So widespread had support for his movement become that the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, had felt obliged to release him from prison and invite him to Delhi to treat with him as the acknowledged leader of the Indian masses. He was the first and the greatest in a line of Arab, African and Asian leaders who in the decades to come would follow his route from a British prison to a British conference chamber.

Winston Churchill had correctly read the portents of the meeting. In the great hall in which he protested England's coming departure from India, he had assailed "the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this onetime Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceroy's palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. The loss of India," he said, with a clairvoyance that foreshadowed his speech sixteen years later, "would be final ajid fatal to us. It could not fail to be part of a process that would reduce us to the scale of a minor power."

His words, however, had no impact on the negotiations in New Delhi. In eight meetings over three weeks they produced what became known as the Gandhi-Irwin pact. It read just like a treaty between two sovereign powers, and that form was the measure of Gandhi's triumph. Under it, Irwin agreed to release from jail the thousands of Gandhi's followers who had followed their leader to prison. Gandhi for his part agreed to call off his movement and attend a round-table conference in London to discuss India's future.

Six months later, to the awe and astonishment of a watching British nation, Mahatma Gandhi walked into Buckingham Palace to take tea with the King-Emperor dressed in a loincloth and sandals, a living portrayal of Kipling's Gunga Din with "nothing much before and rather less than 'arf o' that behind." Later, when questioned on the appropriateness of his apparel, Gandhi replied with a smile, "The King was wearing enough for both of us."

The publicity surrounding their meeting was in a sense the measure of the real impact of Gandhi's London visit. The round-table conference he had come to attend was a failure. London was not yet ready to contemplate Indian independence.

The real work, Gandhi proclaimed, lay "outside the

conference The seed which is being sown now may

result in a softening of the British spirit." No one did more to soften it than Gandhi. The British press and public were fascinated by this strange little man who wanted to overthrow their empire by turning the other cheek.

He had walked off his steamer in his loincloth and carrying his bamboo stave. Behind him there were no aides-de-camp, no servants, only a handful of disciples and a goat, who tottered down the gangplank right after Gandhi, an Indian goat to supply the Mahatma's daily bowl of milk. He ignored the hotels of the mighty to live in a settlement house in London's East End slums.

The man who had first come to London as an inarticulate, tongue-tied student almost never stopped talking. He met Charlie Chaplin, Jan Smuts, George Bernard Shaw, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Harold Laski, Maria Mon-tessori, coal miners, children, Lancashire textile workers thrown out of work by his campaigns in India; virtually

everyone of importance except Winston Churchill, who adamantly refused to see him.

The impression that Gandhi made was profound. The newsreels of the Salt March had already made him famous. To the masses of a Britain beset by industrial unrest, unemployment and grave social injustice, this messenger from the East in his Christ-like cotton sheet, and with his even more Christ-like message of love, was a fascinating and vaguely disturbing figure. Gandhi himself, perhaps, put his finger on the roots of much of that fascination in a radio broadcast to the United States.

World attention had been drawn to India's freedom struggle, he said, "because the means adopted by us for attaining that liberty are unique . . . the world is sick unto death of blood spilling. The world is seeking a way out, and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show the way out to a hungering world."

The Western world that Gandhi was visiting was not yet ready for the way out proposed by this revolutionary who traveled with a goat instead of a machine gun. Already Europe's streets echoed to the stomp of jackboots and the shrieks of impassioned idealogues. Nonetheless, when he left, thousands of French, Swiss and Italians flocked to the railroad stations on his route to the Italian port of Brin-disi, to gawk at the frail, toothless man leaning from the window of his third-class compartment.

In Paris, so many people swarmed the station that Gandhi had to climb on a baggage cart to address them. In Switzerland, where he visited his friend author Romain Rolland, the dairymen of Leman clamored for the privilege of serving the "King of India." In Rome, he warned Mussolini that Fascism would "collapse like a house of cards," watched a football game and wept at the sight of the statue of Christ on the Cross in the Sistine Chapel.

Despite that triumphant progress across Europe, Gandhi agonized on the voyage home. "I have come back empty-handed," he told the thousands who greeted him in Bombay. India would have to return to civil disobedience. Less than a week later the man who had been the King-Emperor's teatime guest in London was once again His Imperial Majesty's guest—this time back in Yeravda prison.

For the next three years, Gandhi was in and out of prison, while in London Churchill thundered, "Gandhi and

all he stands for must be crushed." Despite Churchill's opposition, however, the British produced a basic reform for India, the Government of India Act of 1935, offering her provinces some local autonomy. Finally, released from jail, Gandhi briefly turned from his political combat to devote three years to two projects particularly close to him, the plight of India's millions of Untouchables and the situation in her villages.

With the approach of World War n, Gandhi became more convinced than ever that the nonviolence which had been the guiding principle of India's domestic struggle was the only philosophy capable of saving man from self-destruction.

When Mussolini overran Ethiopia, he urged the Ethiopians to "allow themselves to be slaughtered." The result, he said, would be more effective than resistance, since, "after all, Mussolini didn't want a desert."

Sickened by the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, he declared that "if ever there could be justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified."

"Still," he said, "I do not believe in war." He proposed "a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah.... That," he said, "would convert [the Germans] to an appreciation of human dignity."

While Churchill summoned his countrymen to "blood, sweat, and tears," Gandhi, hoping to find in the English a people brave enough to put his theory to the ultimate test, proposed another course. "Invite Hitler and Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions," he wrote to the English at the height of the Blitz. "Let them take possession of your beautiful island with its many beautiful buildings. You will give all this, but neither your minds nor your souls."

That course would have been a logical application of Gandhi's doctrine. To the British, and above all to their indomitable leader, his words rang out like the gibberish of an irrelevant old fool.

Gandhi could not even convince the leadership of his own Congress movement that pacifism was the right course. Most of his followers were dedicated antifascists and anxious to take India into the fight if they could do so

as free men. For the first time, but not the last, Gandhi and his disciples parted company.

It took Churchill to drive them back together. His position on India remained as rigid as ever. He refused to consider any of the compromises which would have allowed India's nationalists to join the war effort. When he held his first meeting with Franklin Roosevelt to frame the Atlantic Charter, he made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, India was not to fall under its generous provisions. Soon another of his phrases was being repeated in the Allied councils: "I have not become His Majesty's First Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire."

It was not until March 1942, when the Japanese Imperial Army was at India's gates, that Churchill, under pressure from Washington and his own colleagues, sent a serious offer to New Delhi. To deliver it, he selected a particularly sympathetic courier, Sir Stafford Cripps, a vegetarian and an austere Socialist, with long, friendly relations with the Congress leadership. Considering its origin, the proposal that Cripps carried was remarkably generous. It offered the Indians the most that Britain could be expected to concede in the midst of a war, a solemn pledge of what amounted to independence, dominion status, after Japan's defeat. It contained, however, in recognition of the Moslem League's increasingly strident calls for an Islamic state, a provision that could eventually accommodate their demand.

Forty-eight hours after Cripps's arrival, Gandhi told him that the offer was unacceptable, because it contemplated the "perpetual vivisection of India." Besides, the British were offering India future independence to obtain immediate Indian cooperation in the violent defense of Indian soil. That was not an agreement calculated to sway the apostle of nonviolence.

The Mahatma cherished a secret dream. He was not opposed to the spilling of oceans of blood, provided that it was done in a just cause. He saw rank on serried rank of disciplined nonviolent Indians marching out to die on the bayonets of the Japanese until that catalytic instant when the enormity of their sacrifices would simply overwhelm their foes, vindicate nonviolence, and change the course of human history.

Churchill's plan, he decreed, was a "postdated check on

a failing bank." If he had nothing else to offer, Gandhi told Cripps, he might as well "take the next plane home."*

The day after Cripps's departure was a Monday, Gandhi's "day of silence," a ritual he had observed once a week for years, to conserve his vocal cords and promote a sense of harmony in his being. Unhappily for Gandhi and for India, his inner voice, the voice of his conscience, was not observing a similar vigil of silence that April afternoon. It spoke to Gandhi, and the advice it uttered proved disastrous to the Mahatma.

It came down to the words that became the slogan of Gandhi's next struggle: "Quit India." The British should drop the reins of power in India immediately, Gandhi proposed. Let them "leave India to God or even anarchy." If the British left India to its fate, he reasoned, the Japanese would have no reason to attack.

Just after midnight, August 8, 1942, in a stifling-hot Bombay meeting hall, Gandhi, naked to the waist, sent out his call to arms to his followers in the All-India Congress Committee. His voice was quiet and composed, but the words he uttered carried a passion and fervor uncharacteristic of Gandhi. "I want freedom immediately," he said, "this very night—before dawn if it can be had.. .. Here is a mantra [prayer], a short one, I give you," he told his followers. " 'Do or die.' We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery."

What Gandhi got before dawn was not freedom but another invitation to a British jail. In a carefully prepared move the British swept Gandhi and the entire Congress leadership into prison for the duration of the war. A brief outburst of violence followed their arrest, but within three weeks the British had the situation back under control.

Gandhi's tactic played right into the hands of Moslem League foes by sweeping his Congress leaders from the political scene at a crucial moment. While they languished in jail, their Moslem rivals supported Britain's war effort, earning by their attitude a considerable debt of gratitude. Gandhi's plan not only failed to get the English

* Cripps did not leave immediately. He nearly succeeded in getting the Congress leadership to break with the Mahatma. The issue was the degree to which they would be allowed to supervise India's war efforts. Once again, it was Churchill who prevented the conclusion of an agreement.

to quit India, but also went a long way to making sure that they would feel compelled to divide it before they left.

This would be Gandhi's last sojourn in a British prison. By the time it ended the old man would have spent a total of 2,338 days in jail, 249 in South Africa, 2,089 In India. Gandhi's keepers confined him not to the familiar grounds of the Yeravda jail, where he had already spent so much time, but in the nearby palace of the Aga Khan. Five months after his prison term began, Gandhi announced that he was going to undertake a twenty-one-day fast. The reasons behind it were obscure, but the British were in no mood to compromise. Churchill informed New Delhi that if Gandhi wanted to starve himself to death, he was free to go ahead and do so.