The Patient Assassin

by Anita Anand

  Gandhi obliged, causing a throb of almost constant consternation in the higher echelons of the British Raj. Soon after his arrival, he had successfully agitated on behalf of impoverished indigo farmers in Bihar’s Champaran, shaming landlords forcing them to grow the inedible crop even while their families starved to death. Later, in the flood-and famine-devastated area of Kheda in Gujarat, Gandhi demanded that the British cease all tax collection until the natural disasters released his people. Though they hated him for it, the British were forced to give in.

  Wise to his growing influence in the country, and even though he was still in the midst of his vexing Kheda agitation, the new viceroy of India, Hardinge’s successor Lord Chelmsford, invited Gandhi to a war conference in 1918 in Delhi. During two days of talks between 27 and 29 April, the viceroy put the case forward for greater Indian participation in the war effort. He told delegates he was under enormous pressure to send more men to the Front and India had a moral obligation to respond:

  I do not claim, no one claims, that the British Government is infallible. But if you agree that the Empire has been, on the whole, a power for good, if you believe that India has, on the whole, benefited by the British connection, would you not admit that it is the duty of every Indian citizen to help the Empire in the hour of its need?1

  Not only did Gandhi listen patiently to what Chelmsford had to say, but on the way back to Kheda, he wrote a letter to the viceroy’s secretary, John Maffey, saying: ‘I would love to do something which Lord Chelmsford would consider to be real war-work. I have an idea that, if I became your Recruiting Agent-in-Chief, I might rain men on you. Pardon me for the impertinence.’2

  Confounding his former Indian political allies, Gandhi devoted the rest of his time to weaving his way around India, stitching together the argument for his countrymen to sign up. It had not been an easy sell. Gandhi had always preached ahimsa (non-violence), and had declared on numerous occasions that he would gladly give up his own life before taking another. By 1918, however, his message had morphed into something alien, unrecognisable and ugly to many Indian ears. Some of the words coming out of Gandhi’s mouth could have come from Sir Michael O’Dwyer:

  I have been travelling all over India these days and I tell you, from what I have seen for myself, that India has altogether lost the capacity to fight. It has not a particle of the courage it should have. If even a Tiger should make its appearance in a village, the people would not have the strength to go and kill it and so they petition the collector to have it killed . . . Can a nation, whose citizens are incapable of self-defence, enjoy swaraj [self-government]?3

  Gandhi turned the war effort into a test of honour:

  How can people who are incapable of defending their lives, their women and children, their cattle and their lands, ever enjoy swaraj? . . . When the people become physically fit and strong enough to wield a sword, swaraj will be theirs for the asking . . . My experience during the last three months, I know we are utterly timid.4

  The Mahatma was met by a barrage of fury. He was accused of betraying India and was warned repeatedly not to trust the firangi.* Gandhi remained resolute, arguing that, if India helped, it would surely be granted Dominion status by a grateful nation. Autonomous but still bound to the empire, everyone would win. As he continued to push his message, Gandhi was pilloried. Those who had once looked up to him now called him a British stooge, and a fraud.

  The criticism stung, but it was nothing compared to Gandhi’s internal struggle. Was it really acceptable to abandon ahimsa in order to obtain a greater good for the majority of his countrymen? Gandhi seemed to be coming apart under the strain of the argument, making different and eventually peculiar lines of reasoning as to why it was right for men to join up.

  First, it was that the war was just. Then it was that India would earn her freedom through earning the gratitude of her colonial masters. Sometimes he said the war was a test, to prove his people were worthy of governing themselves; other times he argued it was the will of the gods.

  At one point, perhaps wounded by claims he had betrayed his own non-violent beliefs, Gandhi claimed he wanted Indians to travel to Europe, face the enemy and lay down their guns, just so their piling bodies could justify their superior morality:

  Supposing that the response to my call is overwhelming and we all go to France and turn the scales against the Germans . . . [Supposing] further that I succeed in raising an army of fearless men, they fill the trenches and with their hearts of love laid down their guns and challenge the Germans to shoot them – their fellow men – I say that even the German heart will melt.5

  As India reeled from the rising numbers of casualties, Gandhi’s health began to fail. He confessed to his closest friend, a Scottish clergyman named C. F. Andrews: ‘This hard thinking has told upon my physical system.’6 In autumn 1918, while Udham was trying again in Basra, the Mahatma took to his bed wracked with fever. It did not look as though he would make it to the New Year.

  Punjab bristled as Gandhi faded. Why were they fighting a war that they did not understand for a power that treated them like second-class citizens? Sir Michael recognised the growing dissent, however it seemed as if that was all that he saw. The sacrifices of the men who had rallied to his call, the great numbers who were fighting for Britain, dying for Britain, were pushed to the back of his mind as he made it his mission to crush those who defied him. In punishing them, Sir Michael seemed to forget about the debt of gratitude he owed to those, the majority, who had stayed loyal to the empire in its time of need. For the rest of his time in office he would use a blunt instrument in dealing with his Punjabi insurgents, and did not seem concerned about collateral damage. His view went no further than his own desk, which was covered with worrying intelligence reports.

  Thousands of miles away in America, the Ghadars were fully exploiting the misery war had brought the province. Har Dayal and his small cadre of Punjabis in San Francisco, once regarded as a terrorist cell, now appeared to have an army of their own at their disposal. They had made concerted attempts to raise a mutiny among Indian soldiers fighting for the British on multiple fronts. Their most audacious plot, had it worked in February 1915, might have dislodged the British from India altogether. According to the plan, at an appointed time the 23rd Cavalry in Punjab was meant to turn its weapons on its British officers. Peasants and city dwellers alike would take up arms in support of their soldiers, realising that this was the start of a wider action.

  While chaos reigned in India, soldiers based in Singapore were supposed to mutiny, killing their officers and releasing German prisoners of war held in the stockade. The Ghadars assumed that the grateful Germans would fight shoulder to shoulder with those who set them free.

  The plot never got off the ground. Sir Michael’s Punjab Crime Investigation Department successfully infiltrated the conspiracy in India, rounding up scores of men and detaining them under the Defence of India Act. Though some of the men arrested claimed to have nothing to do with the conspiracy, forty-two would be sentenced to death, 114 would be transported for life, and ninety-three would find themselves serving varying terms of imprisonment.

  In Singapore, only four of the eight companies making up the 5th Light Infantry mutinied. The others, mostly Pathan sepoys, wanted nothing to do with the uprising and ran away. The Germans not only refused to join the mutineers; they refused to leave their cells.

  Having headed off trouble in Punjab, Sir Michael fired off a volley of angry missives to London, accusing Westminster of being out of touch with the dangers he was facing. He told politicians they risked losing the whole empire unless they took stronger action against those who agitated against the Raj, either in word or deed.

  November 1917 proved particularly trying for Sir Michael. Five Germans and eight Indian Ghadars living in America were indicted by a US federal grand jury on a charge of ‘Conspiracy to Form a Military Enterprise against the United Kingdom’. The trial, known as the Hindu– German Conspiracy, lasted for five
months. It was a tense affair, with defendants seizing repeated opportunities to condemn British tyranny before a packed press gallery. Thanks in part to these ‘freedom speeches’ from the dock, American reporters began to draw parallels between the Indian struggle and the American War of Independence.

  The Hindu– German trial had everything. There were accusations of bribery and threats made against witnesses. Court proceedings were regularly disrupted by shouting and the slamming of fists into polished wood. Defendants claimed their statements were being deliberately mistranslated by their own legal teams in a bid to incriminate them, and the name Michael O’Dwyer was never far from the lips of those being tried. Sensationally, one of the accused even shot and killed another defendant while in court, having somehow managed to smuggle a pistol into the dock. As the New York Times reported: ‘Ram Chandra arose and started across the room. Ram Singh also arose. He raised his revolver and began firing. Ram Chandra staggered forward and fell dead before the witness chair, with a bullet in his heart and two others in his body.’7

  Public drama was the very last thing Sir Michael had wanted. He had tried to get the Americans to return his troublemakers quickly and quietly, so he might hang them at home; however, such was the colourful coverage that American public opinion started to swing behind the Indian defendants. Though they were ultimately found guilty of conspiracy, the US Department of Justice refused to send the men back to Punjab. The prisoners had done enough to persuade the Americans that they would never receive due process on Sir Michael’s watch. Most were quietly released after relatively short periods of incarceration.

  With one eye on his vexing Ghadar problem in America, Sir Michael continued to drive young men in his own province towards the war effort. Though publicly he celebrated the Punjab’s loyalty and sacrifice, behind the scenes he was petitioning Westminster for yet more powers to supress their freedoms.

  Some of his peers worried he might be pushing his province too far. The governor of Madras, Lord Willingdon, the governor of Bombay, Sir George Lloyd, and the secretary of state himself, Edwin Montagu, would later admit that they thought Sir Michael’s actions in Punjab might cause his province to revolt.8 If he heard their concerns, Sir Michael ignored them. He was fighting for the empire against enemies at home and abroad. If that left him standing alone, so be it.

  Udham Singh was feeling similarly isolated. A nineteen-year-old war veteran with no home, no family, and only a dull ache of failure where others had tales of battles won and comrades lost, Udham would never know what it was to be a part of the ‘band of brothers’. Even in the army he had been insignificant, a low caste among low castes.

  Desperately needing to belong to something more, in 1919 the Kamboj orphan found what he was looking for. The Ghadars were pumping seditious pamphlets into Punjab and needed an army of errand boys to collect the bundles and take them to every corner of the province. The very possession of such literature could lead to lengthy terms of imprisonment, and those who spread the Ghadar message risked far worse.

  Udham was no coward, though he had never been able to prove that in the army. Hiding wads of sedition under his shirt, he became one of the lowliest members of the Ghadar family, running their pamphlets from the narrow gullies of his city into the wide countryside that surrounded it. To many, this would have made him a local hero.9 Sick of being a creature to be pitied and pushed around, he was fighting for something they could understand. He was fighting for his country’s freedom.

  Udham’s battleground had changed, but Sir Michael’s remained the same. Even before the outbreak of war and his liberal use of the Defence of India Act, he had found judicial processes needlessly irksome:

  In the Punjab the task of maintaining order was becoming increasingly difficult owing to three main causes, the weakness of the police, the failure of the public to assist in the prevention and detection of crime, and the tendency of the courts – the personnel of which 90 per cent was Indian – to take too technical and narrow a view of evidence.10

  Sir Michael’s ‘wider’ view of justice created a swifter and more draconian due process. During the war, in Punjab, forty-six men were executed on Sir Michael’s watch. In contrast, in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland only three men were hanged: one was a serial killer responsible for the notorious ‘Brides in the Bath’ murders; one was an army deserter who would later be pardoned; and the last was an Irish nationalist who had once worked for the British Foreign Office. Sir Roger Casement was convicted of conspiring with Germany to incite insurrection in Ireland and mutiny among Irish soldiers in the British army. Udham and Casement would one day meet in the dirt behind Pentonville Prison.

  After the armistice on 11 November 1918, it looked as if the lieutenant governor might lose his Defence of India Act. However, while he had been sending Punjabis to war, he and his peers in the Bengal government had been busy laying the groundwork for a new set of laws to keep the natives in check.

  The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, more commonly known as the Rowlatt Act, indefinitely extended and, in some cases, augmented the Raj’s wartime powers. Thanks to Rowlatt’s ‘Black Bills’, as the Indian nationalists referred to them, he retained the right to detain men indefinitely without trial. He had the right to close down newspapers and imprison journalists who wrote things he disapproved of. He had the power to ban people from entering or departing his province without giving them any leave to appeal. He could prevent Punjabis from speaking in public if he deemed what they might say could be seditious.

  The parameters of sedition were set so wide that anyone critical of the Raj might fall foul. The police were free to search homes without warrants. Courts could try defendants in camera without the defendant knowing what evidence was held against them, or where it had been obtained.

  Punjabi soldiers came back from the war to find they were less well-off than when they had left. The gulf between what they felt they had been promised and the reality Sir Michael presented on their return caused bewilderment and resentment, even in places where there had once been blind loyalty.

  Gandhi was a lawyer at heart and had always respected the British rule of law. Rowlatt was such an illiberal piece of legislation that it roused him from his sickbed. His fever broke just as a bitter realisation dawned: he had been entirely wrong to trust the British. All the pretty words had meant nothing. All his loyalty meant nothing. Instead of reward, the Raj now tightened its grip on his country.

  Gandhi rose, and in doing so became what Sir Michael O’Dwyer had always accused him of being, namely the Raj’s worst nightmare. Cooperation with the British was no longer an option. They had to leave, and his people – all Indian people – would need to unite to force them out. Though Gandhi had radically shifted his perspective on power-sharing, on some things he was constant. His revolt would be bloodless. Not one shot would be fired in anger or retribution. His soldiers’ only weapon would be their total, unwavering non-cooperation.

  Trains would stop on tracks, letters would stay in sacks, telegraphs would fall silent, shutters on shops would remain down. Indians had always outnumbered their British masters. It was time they felt the strength of those numbers.

  The message of resistance tore around Allahabad, Madras, Bombay, Delhi and Madura, but found nowhere a more receptive audience than in Punjab. Pamphlets littered the province like seditious confetti. The date for the mass civil disobedience was set for 30 March 1919. As tirelessly as Gandhi had criss-crossed the country for the war effort, he now travelled around India gathering support for his ‘satyagraha’. The term, invented by Gandhi himself, literally translates as ‘force of the soul’. What it really meant for the Raj was complete and utter paralysis.

  Between 30,000 and 40,000 people gathered in Amritsar on 30 March in answer to Gandhi’s call. The organisers of Amritsar’s satyagraha were a Hindu doctor and a Muslim lawyer. Both committed Gandhians, they believed passionately in their leader’s doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violent resistance.
Aged thirty-three, Dr Satyapal had a thriving practice in the heart of the old city. During the war he had held a viceroy’s commission as a lieutenant in the Indian Medical Service and served with distinction. He was a reserved, thoughtful man with a dry sense of humour, and not naturally comfortable in the spotlight.

  His friend, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, on the other hand, was a showman. Two years younger, innately charismatic and bombastically erudite, he was far happier to take to a stage. Kitchlew had studied at the University of Cambridge and had qualified as a lawyer after leaving Peterhouse College. The experience had not been a happy one for Kitchlew. Like Har Dayal before him, he too had faced lonely isolation and peer-group condescension.

  When Gandhi visited Cambridge in 1909, it changed Kitchlew’s life. Sitting around a table, the two lawyers talked about Gandhi’s developing belief that only non-violent struggle would work against seemingly unassailable powers.11 Little did the idealistic young men realise that, one day in the not so distant future, they would be putting the theory to the test against the mightiest empire in the world.

  Three hundred miles away from Amritsar, Delhi had also ground to a halt in response to Gandhi’s call to inaction. Amid the paralysis, however, scuffles broke out when some food stalls around the main station refused to join the strike. According to British reports, an angry mob gathered round the ‘offending’ stalls and demanded they shut up immediately to show solidarity. Two of the loudest protestors were arrested at the scene and taken to the local police station.

  Fearing the pair might be deported or hanged, crowds gathered outside the police station where they had been taken. They were greeted by police and infantry with guns raised. This only increased tension, and what had started as a noisy demonstration degenerated quickly. A barrage of stones flew at the police. According to the British, men with lathis (long sticks) appeared among the demonstrators. Then, someone gave the order to open fire. Irregular volleys hit the crowd. Two men died instantly. An unknown number were wounded.