Assigned by Scotland Yard to protect Gandhi, Sergeants Evans and Rogers walked behind Gandhi and would ‘come back wiping their brow with sweat, trying to keep up with Mr Gandhi’.70 The two went wherever Gandhi went, and kept the long hours he did. Throwing himself into the life of Bow but also conferring, in hotels or chambers in London’s West End, with delegates and British leaders, Gandhi usually worked past midnight and slept, on an average, for about four hours a night.
The pattern of 1906 and 1909 was thus repeated. Much earlier, right after his student years, he had written in Guide to London that England’s climate was conducive to hard work.
To meet textile workers hurt by the Depression and by the Indian boycott of foreign cloth, he went to Lancashire for two days. Andrews (who brought himself to England for the Gandhi visit) had proposed this trip. Gandhi told the workers that he sympathized with them but asked them to think of Indian hardships as well. Following Gandhi to Lancashire, Shirer thought that ‘the bluff… cotton-mill hands’ gave one who had called for the boycott ‘a tumultuous welcome’.71
Gandhi also visited the Empire’s nurseries (Eton, Cambridge, Oxford) and its engines (Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester). Finding his clothes, food and routine irresistible, journalists wrote many stories about him, which also, inevitably, touched on the Indian struggle. Though most large papers buried Gandhi’s remarks in small spaces on an inside page, the press stories and Gandhi’s face-to-face encounters revealed a bluntness to which the British people, the Empire’s shareholders, were not accustomed:
The object of our nonviolent movement is complete independence for India, not in any mystic sense but in the English sense of the term, without any mental reservation. I feel that every country is entitled to it without any question of its fitness or otherwise. As every country is fit to eat, to drink and to breathe, even so is every nation fit to manage its own affairs, no matter how badly… The doctrine of fitness to govern is mere eyewash. Independence means nothing more or less than getting out of alien control.72
To a group in Oxford he said:
The long and short of it is that you will not trust us. Well, give us the liberty to make mistakes… I do not want you to determine the pace (of Indian self-government). Consciously or unconsciously you adopt the role of divinity. I ask you for a moment to come down from that pedestal (54: 87-8).
‘How far would you cut India off from the Empire?’ he was asked. ‘From the Empire entirely,’ Gandhi answered, ‘from the British nation not at all’. To Eton students he said: ‘It can be no pride to you that your nation is ruling over ours. No one chained a slave without chaining himself’ (54:82). Courteously but clearly he indicated that if the RTC failed the Congress would have to resume disobedience.
Tea with the King. All delegates were invited to tea at Buckingham Palace but George V (Willingdon’s friend) disliked the idea of welcoming Gandhi. Churchill’s line had influenced the King, who moreover had not forgotten the Indian boycott, ten years earlier, of his son’s visit. ‘What!’ he exclaimed to Samuel Hoare, secretary of state for India, ‘Have this rebel fakir in the Palace after he has been behind all these attacks on my loyal officers!’
Political advisers persuaded the King that Gandhi could not be left out, and despite his own reluctance Gandhi went to the royal reception, wearing what he always wore. Asked afterwards whether he felt comfortable about his dress, Gandhi replied, ‘The King had enough on for both of us.’
After Hoare introduced Gandhi to him, the King asked, ‘Why did you boycott my son?’ ‘Not your son, Your Majesty, but the official representative of the British Crown,’ Gandhi answered. Then the King, who according to Hoare, ‘evidently thought it was his duty to caution Gandhi on the consequences of rebellion,’ uttered ‘a grave warning’: ‘Mr Gandhi, I won’t have any attacks on my Empire.’ Replied Gandhi: ‘I must not be drawn into a political argument in Your Majesty’s Palace after receiving Your Majesty’s hospitality.’ Hoare would write that ‘Gandhi’s savoir-faire saved the situation’.73
Despite a request sent in by Gandhi, Churchill refused to meet him. But Gandhi agreed to sit for a sculpture that Churchill’s left-leaning cousin, Clare Sheridan, wanted to do. Gandhi said to her, ‘You must tell him (Churchill)… that now that you’ve met me, I am not as bad as reputed.’74
Friends arranged meetings with Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, Hewlett Johnson (later called the ‘Red’ Dean of Canterbury), Maria Montessori and former Prime Minister Lloyd George. In Shaw, socialistic, Irish, and a vegetarian to boot, Gandhi found similarities of outlook, but Chaplin he had not even heard of before. He also met old colleagues like the Polaks, a newer friend and former foe, Lord Irwin, an older foe-and-friend, General Jan Smuts, and spoke, as he had done over forty years earlier, to the London Vegetarian Society.
Lord Sankey, a member of the MacDonald cabinet and prominent at the RTC, complained that Gandhi surrounded himself in England with ‘churchmen, cranks, and faddists’,75 and no doubt others were put off too, while some like the Labour MP, J.F. Horrabin, who was a journalist and cartoonist as well, were struck by Gandhi’s ‘twinkling’ appearance.
Horrabin noticed the twinkle a number of times: when he took a more famous cartoonist, Low, to meet Gandhi, when Gandhi talked with an unnamed Tory MP ‘with a highly aggressive manner’, and again, ‘when, in my Gower Street flat, he sat surrounded by a small crowd of journalists’. At this last occasion Gandhi apparently ‘twinkled for a couple of hours’.76
RTC & Ambedkar. ‘I want to turn the [Delhi] truce… into a permanent settlement,’ Gandhi said on 1 December. ‘But for heaven’s sake give me, a frail man, sixty-two years gone, a little bit of a chance’ (54: 228). Despite his pleas, British ministers refused to spell out a timetable for Indian independence.
Instead, they questioned the Congress’s right to speak for India and pointed to RTC delegates opposed to the Congress. Perhaps the most articulate of these was forty-year-old Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), a brilliant scholar and lawyer born into a family of Mahars, one of Maharashtra’s ‘untouchable’ groups. After humiliations in school and college, Ambedkar had gone on to earn doctorates in London and New York.
In 1927, as a rising leader of the untouchables, Ambedkar had mobilized over 10,000 of his people in Mahad for a satyagraha for access to water from a public tank. After a rally where Gandhi’s portrait was displayed, Ambedkar and the others marched to the tank and drank forbidden water. Later, the town’s Brahmins arranged a ceremony to restore the tank’s purity.
But Ambedkar’s warmth towards Gandhi did not endure. When, shortly before the RTC, they first met in Bombay, Gandhi took Ambedkar to be a radical Brahmin fighting untouchability. (He did not however say this to Ambedkar, and quickly realized his mistake.)
Recognizing Ambedkar’s ability and commitment, and conceding in London (54: 18) that Ambedkar spoke ‘for that particular part of the country where he comes from’, Gandhi insisted, however, that for India’s ‘untouchables’ as a whole he himself was the truer representative.
For years he had championed their cause. In December 1929 he had said that ‘chamars, weavers, cobblers and Dheds, etc., among us… had attained the highest knowledge’ and added, ‘Should it then be surprising if one of them, by virtue of the strength of his services, becomes the President of the State?’ (48: 128)
Often expressed by Gandhi, such sentiments appeared paternalistic to Ambedkar, who wanted ‘untouchables’ to be led by their own. Criticizing Gandhi for not frontally attacking the caste system, Ambedkar was, in addition, fearful that independence would strengthen caste Hindu domination, a fear that Gandhi shared. Shortly before leaving for London, Gandhi had said:
If we came into power with the stain of untouchability unaffected, I am positive that the ‘untouchables’ would be far worse under that ‘Swaraj’ than they are now, for the simple reason that our weaknesses and our failings would then be buttressed by the accession of power (53: 168).
Nonetheless, th
e RTC saw a bitter clash between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Demanding a separate electorate and reserved seats for the ‘untouchables’, Ambedkar challenged Gandhi’s right to speak for his people, even as Muslim delegates, disowning Gandhi’s leadership, insisted on a separate Muslim electorate. Gandhi or the Congress could not reject a Muslim electorate, which had been accepted in the 1916 Lucknow Pact signed by the Congress and the Muslim League. Though both sides complained about the Pact, they had not agreed on an alternative.
But a separate electorate for ‘untouchables’ was contrary to all that Gandhi had worked for. He (and other reformist caste Hindus) had broken the barrier of untouchability and built a slender bridge on which many caste Hindu and ‘untouchables’ were courageously walking. A separate electorate would restore the barrier, weaken the bridge and reverse the reform process among caste Hindus.
Worst of all, it would ‘divide the Hindu community into armed camps’ (54: 119) and expose ‘untouchables’ to greater hostility. During a discussion at Friends House, the Quaker centre in Euston, Gandhi claimed (31 Oct.) that he was one ‘who feels with them and knows their life’ and added:
The untouchables are in the hands of superior classes. They can suppress them completely and wreak vengeance upon the untouchables who are at their mercy. I may be opening out my shame to you. But… how can I invite utter destruction for them? I would not be guilty of that crime (54: 119).
In a bid to woo Ambedkar in London, Gandhi sent Devadas to him and tried also to involve Sir Mirza Ismail, a Muslim delegate. In a speech to the Indian Majlis, Gandhi spelt out his sympathy:
I have the highest regard for Dr Ambedkar. He has every right to be bitter. That he does not break our heads is an act of self-restraint on his part… The same thing happened to me in my early days in South Africa where I was hounded out by the Europeans wherever I went. It is quite natural for him to vent his wrath (54: 84).
Not only were the attempts unsuccessful; to the delight of British officials, Ambedkar and leaders of some other groups at the RTC formed a united front of anti-Congress minorities to prevent the RTC from endorsing Gandhi’s demands.
Gandhi told Shirer that he had never felt more humiliated,77 but a response began to stir inside of him, and he was ready with his reply when, on 13 November, the so-called Minorities Pact was announced. Signed, among others, by Ambedkar and the Aga Khan, the Pact demanded separate electorates in Indian legislatures for Muslims, ‘untouchables’, Christians, Anglo-Indians and India-based Europeans.
Arguing that a separate electorate for the ‘untouchables’ means ‘the perpetual bar sinister’, Gandhi added:
I would not sell the vital interests of the untouchables even for the sake of winning the freedom of India. I claim in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables… I claim that I would get, if there was a referendum of the untouchables, their vote, and that I would top the poll.
Today there is a body of Hindu reformers who are pledged to remove the blot of untouchability. Sikhs may remain as such in perpetuity, so may Mohammedans, so may Europeans. Will untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity?
Referring to ‘the two divisions’ in every village that separate electorates would entrench, Gandhi suggested that those demanding separation ‘do not know their India, do not know how Indian society is today constructed’. He ended with a declaration:
I want to say with all the emphasis that I can command that if I was the only person to resist this thing, I would resist it with my life (54: 158-9).
In other words, he would fast unto death.
Farewell to London. But he would not leave London with any sense of defeat. On 1 December he uttered words that must be unique in the story of empires. Addressing Britain’s leaders, including the Prime Minister, Gandhi punctured the balloons of unreality in the RTC chambers, defended the Congress’s claims, asserted India’s right to rebel, said that negotiation—the ‘second door to Swaraj’—had failed, and announced, in effect, a second wave of assault:
I live under no illusion. I do not think that anything that I can say this evening can possibly influence the decision of the Cabinet…
All the other parties at this meeting represent sectional interests. Congress alone claims to represent the whole of India, all interests… It may not always have lived up to the creed. I do not know a single human organization that lives up to its creed… But the worst critic will have to recognize… that… its message penetrates the remotest village of India…
Congress… has been accused of running or desiring to run a parallel Government; and in a way I have endorsed the charge… [You should] welcome an organization which could run a parallel Government and show that it is possible for an organization, voluntarily, without any force at its command, to run the machinery of Government even under adverse circumstances…
I heard several speakers… saying what a dire calamity it would be if India was fired with the spirit of lawlessness, rebellion, terrorism and so on… As a schoolboy I had to pass a paper in history also, and I read that the page of history is soiled red with the blood of those who have fought for freedom…
The dagger of the assassin, the poison bowl, the bullet of the rifleman, the spear and all these weapons and methods of destruction have been up to now used by what I consider blind lovers of liberty and freedom, and the historian has not condemned [them].
The Congress then comes upon the scene and devises a new method not known to history, namely, that of civil disobedience… But… I am told that that is a method that no Government in the world will tolerate… No government may tolerate civil disobedience, but governments have to succumb even to these forces…
A nation of 350 million people does not need the dagger of the assassin, it does not need the poison bowl, it does not need the sword, the spear or the bullet. It needs simply a will of its own, an ability to say ‘No’, and that nation is today learning to say ‘No’…
He ended by expressing thanks:
[M]y thanks to all—from Their Majesties down to the poorest men in the East End, where I have taken up my habitation… They have accepted me…
[A]lthough… the Lancashire people had perhaps some reason for becoming irritated against me, I found no irritation, no resentment even in the operatives. The operatives, men and women, hugged me… I shall never forget that.
I am carrying with me thousands upon thousands of English friendships. I do not know them, but I read that affection in their eyes as early in the morning I walk through your streets. All this hospitality, all this kindness will never be effaced from my memory no matter what befalls my unhappy land (54: 219-31).
‘With an eye and mind as pointed as a needle, he penetrated in a moment any sham.’78 This was how Hoare, the secretary of state for India, assessed Gandhi’s performance at the RTC.
But, Depression and all, the Empire too had worked out its response: it would crush any new rebellion. Shortly before he left England, Gandhi was given a hint by Hoare that he and other Congress leaders should be ready to be arrested again.
Indian events. Mahadev conveyed the word to Patel, who quickly drew up a list of leaders to lead the Congress, one after the other, if he was arrested: Rajendra Prasad, Rajagopalachari, Ansari, Saifuddin Kitchlew, and the Sikh leader, Sardul Singh Caveeshar.
The climate was worsening in India. In Bengal, a sequence of violence and repression was followed by an ordinance superseding all laws. The UP too saw an ordinance sidelining laws after some peasant groups talked of withholding land revenue. In the Frontier province there were restrictions on Ghaffar Khan and his brother Dr Khan Sahib. And in Gujarat, Vallabhbhai broke off from the Bardoli inquiry that Willingdon had reluctantly ordered; Patel had found the inquiry one-sided and superficial.
‘I came a seeker after peace, I return fearful of war.’79 This is what Gandhi was quoted as saying when, after a three-month stay in England, he left Victoria Station by train for Folkstone and thence by steamer for France.
Children at Kingsley Hall had given Gandhi, for his birthday, ‘a woolly lamb, a little doll’s cradle, and some other things’. Muriel Lester observed that as Gandhi left England he placed the presents ‘on the window sills of every carriage that we changed into’ and kept them with him during the Channel steamer crossing.80
Europe en route. Gandhi and his party spent five days in Switzerland, mostly with Romain Rolland in Villeneuve, and four days in Italy, where he met Mussolini and visited the Sistine Chapel. He had not visited these countries before. At Gandhi’s request, the British government gave Sergeants Evans and Rogers a paid holiday in Italy while he and his party were there.
For several years Gandhi’s interpreter for Europe, Rolland (who had introduced Mira to Gandhi) was now inclining towards Marxism. Perhaps because Beethoven had first brought Mira into touch with him, Rolland played some Beethoven for the Indian party. Mira, Mahadev, Pyarelal and Devadas were much taken by the piece, but Gandhi seems merely to have said to Rolland: ‘It must be beautiful, because you say so.’81
Rolland spoke to Gandhi of the menace of fascism and counselled against his seeing Mussolini, who had expressed a wish to meet Gandhi. Assuring Rolland that he would be wary, Gandhi in turn advised carefulness about Soviet Russia. ‘I follow the Russian experiment with a fundamental distrust,’ he said (54: 261).
He took in Switzerland’s loveliness, saying to an audience in Lausanne (8 Dec.): ‘As the train was slowly gliding by your beautiful lake and as we passed the villages so beautifully clean, I could not but be entranced by the sublimity of the beauty.’
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 48
