The meeting’s organizers had created a lineup of speakers that included some of the most politically active and prominent members of the Indian community. Gani—a partner in the Camrooden firm, head of the BIA, and a Gandhi client—spoke first. He informed the group that a legal opinion had been sought from a distinguished Pretoria lawyer, who concluded that the Act did not, as its sponsors claimed, expand Indian rights, but actually made the condition of the Asiatic “more intolerable than before.”28 Gani then indicated that a resolution to be offered to the group later in the afternoon would have the group pledge to ignore the law and court imprisonment rather than abide by it. Gani’s rhetoric reached a peak with these words: “There are moments in the life of a community when resistance . . . becomes a vital necessity and a sacred duty, and I think that such a moment is now at hand for us if we would be called men.”29
Other speakers included a well-known Indian physician, William Godfrey, whose eloquent speech called for disobedience to the law, and a decorated Indian war veteran, Nawab Khan, who appeared in uniform and gave a dramatic talk in which he argued that the Act treated his service for the British as if it meant nothing.
The afternoon, however, belonged to Haji Habib and H. O. Ally. Habib was a leader in the BIA and a Pretoria merchant. Ally was the founder of the Hamidia Islamic Society and a Transvaal merchant who had long been active in politics. The two men had played key roles in generating support for the meeting.
Habib spoke first, moving the adoption by the assembly of a jail-going resolution. He roused the crowd by mocking whites, who “were perfect in everything they did, having come down from heaven; while the poor Indians obviously came from the other place, because their skins were black.” Indians knew their rights, however. “Will you pledge your word with me to refuse to register and to go to jail instead?” he asked. The reporter for the Transvaal Leader described the assembly’s reaction to this challenge: “The audience as one man agreed to go to prison rather than apply for a new permit.”30
As high as emotions were at this point, Ally stoked them even higher. Seconding Habib’s motion, Ally contrasted the treatment the Indians were receiving from the Transvaal government with the great traditions that characterized the British Empire. He then took a Union Jack, draped it around his shoulders, and reminded the crowd that the British flag stood for equal rights. He promised the crowd that should the Act become law, he would once again wrap himself in the flag and voluntarily present himself to the police for arrest on the grounds that he would not register. When he challenged his countrymen to do the same, the entire group of three thousand rose and shouted out a resounding “Yes!” Then, in the day’s most dramatic moment, each of the three thousand solemnly raised his hand and pledged to go to jail rather than obey the Act.
This was not what Gandhi had expected. As one of the authors of the jail-going resolution, he certainly wanted to see it approved by those in attendance. He had not anticipated, however, that in the process of considering it, the audience would be challenged by the Indian leadership to take a solemn oath to support it. For Gandhi, an oath raised one’s commitment to a whole new level. Invoking the name of God, he thought, made the person who does not keep his pledge a sinner. Gandhi feared that the crowd did not understand and appreciate the seriousness of what it was doing. His original intention had been to remain in the background on this day, and consequently he was not on the original roster of speakers. Aware of his role in initially calling for disobedience and sensitive to how the community looked to its lawyer for counsel, however, he sought and received permission to speak. Gandhi rose from his chair on the stage, faced the thousands before him and brought home to them, “in earnest, serious and carefully-chosen language,”31 the consequences of what they were about to do:
You must understand what is this responsibility, and as an adviser and servant of the community, it is my duty fully to explain it to you. . . .
We may have to go to jail, where we may be insulted. We may have to go hungry and suffer extreme heat or cold. Hard labour may be imposed upon us. We may be flogged by rude warders. We may be fined heavily and our property may be attached and held up to auction if there are only a few resisters left. Opulent today we may be reduced to abject poverty tomorrow. We may be deported. Suffering from starvation and similar hardships in jail, some of us may fall ill and even die. In short, therefore, it is not at all impossible that we may have to endure every hardship that we can imagine, and wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer all that and worse. If some one asks me when and how the struggle may end, I may say that if the entire community manfully stands the test, the end will be near. If many of us fall back under storm and stress, the struggle will be prolonged. But I can boldly declare, and with certainty, that so long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge, there can only be one end to the struggle, and that is victory.
A word about my personal responsibility: If I am warning you of the risks attendant upon the pledge, I am at the same time inviting you to pledge yourselves, and I am fully conscious of my responsibility in the matter. It is possible that a majority of those present here may take the pledge in a fit of enthusiasm or indignation but may weaken under the ordeal, and only a handful may be left to face the final test. Even then there is only one course open to some one like me, to die but not to submit to the law.32
Perfect silence enveloped the crowd while Gandhi spoke. The lawyer upon whom those in the audience had long relied for advice on the niceties of contracts, promissory notes, and ejectments was now advising them on the consequences attendant on committing civil disobedience. A new relationship between the lawyer and his clients was emerging.
The tension created by Gandhi’s sobering remarks was released minutes later when the assembly, giving the jail-going resolution its unanimous approval, burst out in full-throated cheers for what it had done.
EXPERIMENTING WITH DISOBEDIENCE
In his Empire Theatre remarks and elsewhere, Gandhi preached the acceptance of jail as both a consequence of conscientious adherence to principle and, in some vague and undefined way, a pragmatic route to success. It was clear what Gandhi meant when he referred to jail-going as adherence to principle. In just what way was it a route to success? Did part of the answer depend on how the disobedient positioned himself in court? In particular, should a disobedient Indian bow to the prosecution and quietly accept his punishment in an effort to gain public sympathy? Or, by contrast, should Indian defendants engage in spirited resistance to the government’s charges, using the courtroom as a stage to publicize their arguments against registration? And then, if conviction and punishment were, in fact, to follow, could they serve as useful tools in a propaganda campaign? Gandhi would soon have a laboratory, first in the person of a Hindu priest, for his experimentation with these very questions.
Ramsundar Pundit,33 himself the son of Hindu priests, had emigrated from India in 1898 for the purpose of serving the religious needs of the Hindu community in South Africa. He labored in Natal for seven years, married, and began his family there. Then in 1905, the Germiston Hindu community invited Ramsundar to join it in the Transvaal.34 The government provided him with a temporary but renewable pass, making it possible for him to move to Germiston. Once there, he gained a reputation for effective leadership. When the campaign against the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance began, Ramsundar was quick to speak against the Act and to lead the local effort to picket registration officials.
His opposition to the Act was noted. The government, which had routinely renewed his permit earlier, now refused to do so again. He declined to register under the Act, making his presence in the Transvaal putatively illegal. After he refused to heed the government’s advice that he depart the Transvaal, he was arrested on November 8, 1907, and promptly jailed. The charge was for “contravening Act No. 3 of 1907 in residing in Transvaal colony without a permit.”35 Ramsundar refused offers of bail, preferring instead to remain
incarcerated pending his trial.
On November 11, Ramsundar appeared in Germiston Police Court with his defender, Mohandas K. Gandhi.36 The prosecutor sought a postponement so that he could arrange for the presence of a witness. Gandhi did not oppose this and suggested that Ramsundar be released on his own recognizance in the meantime, arguing that Ramsundar had every reason to appear, because he “considered himself innocent . . . and was prepared to fight the case.” The court granted Gandhi’s application and trial was set for the 14th. Ramsundar left the courthouse to an ovation, cheers, and flowers from the Indian crowd that had gathered to watch the morning’s proceedings.
Three days later a much larger crowd of Indians and European colonists took every available seat in the Germiston courtroom. As several hundred more Indians swarmed around the courthouse, Gandhi stood before the magistrate and refused to concede his client’s guilt, entering a plea of “not guilty” on his behalf.
The weight of the prosecution’s case was carried by the registrar of Asiatics. Montfort Chamney testified that the priest had received a series of temporary permits, the last of which had expired on September 30, 1907. The registrar refused to grant another renewal and had ordered Ramsundar to leave the colony. Gandhi had replied to the registrar, sending along a letter from his client in which Ramsundar stated that he would refuse to leave the colony and pleaded that he was needed by his faithful inasmuch as there was no one to replace him.
The prosecution’s case was simple. Ramsundar’s previous permit expired and was not renewed. He was ordered out of the colony. He did not leave.
Gandhi saw another dimension to the case. His cross-examination of the registrar demonstrated that the registrar refused to renew Ramsundar’s permit only because of Ramsundar’s opposition to the Act. When pressed about the source of the information as to Ramsundar’s failure of allegiance to the government, Chamney claimed to have received complaints that Ramsundar was preaching about nonreligious matters. In Chamney’s mind, this made him an undesirable.
Gandhi asked the registrar if he had warned Ramsundar about the complaints. He had not. Gandhi asked him to state when he had received the complaints. He could not recall. Gandhi asked him if he would produce the complaints. He would not.
Gandhi’s hope was to transform the simple factual issue of whether his client possessed a permit into the more complicated political issue of whether the registrar was justified in not renewing the priest’s permit. The prosecutor understood exactly what Gandhi was up to. With the registrar on the ropes, he objected to Gandhi’s questions as irrelevant. Gandhi’s response was that a man who had been virtually accused of sedition should be entitled to know the grounds for the charge, the order to leave the colony, and the “preposterously unjust treatment” accorded him.37
The magistrate did not warm to Gandhi’s argument, however, stating that the court “could not go outside of the four corners of the law” and that it was his duty to “administer the law as he found it.”38 In other words, he accepted the straightforward paradigm advanced by the prosecution—no permit, no right to be in the colony—and rejected Gandhi’s paradigm, which attempted to require the government to offer some justification for the nonrenewal.
In the face of the court’s ruling and with the same relentlessness he exhibited in Adams, Gandhi asked the court to require the production of the complaints. The court gently refused Gandhi’s request.
Gandhi had failed to sink the prosecution’s case with his cross-examination of Chamney. With a conviction practically assured, the prosecution rested.
Gandhi called three witnesses in defense of his client. Abdul Kadir, the chairman of the Hamidia Islamic Society, testified that the level of the defendant’s opposition to the Act was no greater and no less than that of any other member of the society. He also stated that there was a religious dimension to opposition to the Act. This testimony, in light of the magistrate’s interest in only the “four corners of the law,” counted for nothing.
Next on the stand was the president of the Hindu congregation to which the defendant ministered. Lal Bahadur Singh claimed that “the accused had never done anything but religious work” and that he had preached against the proposed Act “purely on religious grounds.”
Gandhi’s third and final witness was the defendant himself. In a dramatic flourish, Gandhi had him complete his testimony by proclaiming that he “would rather suffer imprisonment on account of his religion than leave the Colony” and that he was “quite prepared to die for his religion.”39
On cross-examination, Ramsundar continued to defend his resistance on religious grounds, arguing that Hindus were prohibited from giving their wives’ names, but without referring to any source of this prohibition. From the start of the controversy over the Act, Gandhi and other Indian leaders had claimed there was a religious basis to their opposition. They never succeeded, however, in articulating a compelling explanation of their religious objection.40 Ramsundar’s testimony did not add much clarity to this claim.
In his closing argument, Gandhi forthrightly admitted that conviction was an inevitability, but, in a last attempt to adjust the paradigm by which the court was judging the case, he sought from the magistrate some opinion as to how the law had been administered in Ramsundar’s case. The flavor of Gandhi’s argument might be learned from a letter he wrote immediately after the conviction to the editor of the Johannesburg Star:
The priest was never given the opportunity of facing his unknown traducers or answering the complaints. . . . [H]e was condemned unheard. I am not aware of any precedent except during war-time, for such high-handed, unjust and tyrannical action. One man [the registrar], who, as he admitted . . ., has not the slightest knowledge of the law, is utterly incapable of weighing evidence, and who can scarcely distinguish between sedition and respectful and manly opposition to a particular law touching on personal liberty, possesses under the Act extreme power over the persons of free and inoffensive British subjects.41
The magistrate praised Gandhi’s closing argument as “very able,” but, nonetheless, declined Gandhi’s invitation, stating that the court
was unable to criticise the law, and had only to administer it as it was placed before the Court. Whether the Registrar . . . had been right or wrong in his reasons for refusing the renewal of the permit did not lie with the Court. The . . . Court was to take the case simply as it was presented in connection with the law . . ., and deal with it in accordance with the evidence.42
With that, the court pronounced Ramsundar guilty. The magistrate’s sentence, however, was a surprising, barely veiled response to Gandhi’s plea for the court to render its opinion of the government’s decision to prosecute. He handed the defendant the gentlest and shortest punishment possible—a month in prison without hard labor.
Ramsundar was immediately led from court to jail, but not without first enjoying the vociferous cheering of a large crowd of his countrymen gathered about the courthouse. Gandhi and many other Indian leaders stayed on to address the crowd, now gathered at Market House. During the course of this mass meeting, it was resolved that all Indian businesses would refuse to operate the next day as a show of disapproval of the government’s action. And, indeed, not one Indian merchant opened.43 This demonstration of resolve was preceded by a prophetic resolution, passed by the meeting and stated in the form of a cable to the king:
Pundit has preferred gaol to sacrifice of principle.
Thousands ready do likewise.44
What were Gandhi’s goals in instructing Ramsundar to plead not guilty and in forcing a trial? On the one hand, the lawyer in him sought from the court, if not an acquittal, then an expression of opinion that the prosecution of his client was unjustified and, following from that, the least punitive sentence possible. The political organizer in him, on the other hand, must have desired a suffering hero, a figure to personify to the Indian public the sacrifices necessary for victory to be achieved. His representation of Ramsundar thus exposed the tensi
on between his private role as an advocate for his client and his public role as a political organizer for the Indian cause. Accordingly, the result must have quietly pleased Gandhi in that it gave him everything he wanted: a conviction that made a model of the Indian priest, as well as a sentence that would be served under the most lenient possible conditions and that would free his client from jail in the shortest possible time.
Because the government continued to refuse to compromise with the Indians over registration in the remaining weeks of 1907, it would not be long before Gandhi would be presented with another opportunity to make of the two halves of his life a whole. Before that would occur, however, there was hay to be made in the press from the Ramsundar case. A report in the Transvaal Leader, quoting remarks made by Gandhi in late November, is illustrative: “A man perfectly guiltless, and striving to live his life as he best knew how, serving the spiritual needs of his countrymen, had been sent to gaol, and was today in default in Johannesburg simply because of this Asiatic Act. . . . [A]n Act which had exacted already this heavy price could never be submitted to.”45
In Indian Opinion, Gandhi wrote: “We are convinced that the case against him has done much good to the community. Everyone feels bolder as a result of Pundit’s going to gaol. At a time like this, nothing but good can be done by any Indian going to gaol in the course of the struggle against the law.”46
Indian Opinion also carried an interview by Gandhi with Ramsundar, in which the jailed priest states: “After my release, I shall be prepared to go to gaol again for the sake of the community. . . . How is it that other Indians have not been arrested, though it is already December? We shall gain our freedom only when that happens.”47
With Gandhi at his side, Ramsundar was released from jail December 13, 1907. The two men were greeted by about six dozen prominent figures in the Indian community, and then, as they marched to the Fordsburg mosque for a rally, they were joined by several hundred other Indians who garlanded Ramsundar and escorted him to a platform decorated with flowers and canopied with British flags.48 The press was there to provide ample coverage of Ramsundar’s pledge to continue his resistance. The Transvaal Leader wrote: “Ram Sundar Pundit . . . exhorted his hearers to continue the struggle to the uttermost. If his conduct in going to prison had been an example he hoped it was one which every one of his countrymen would follow. . . . He was prepared to be arrested and rearrested, but he would not leave the Colony or submit to the demands of the new Registration Law.”49
M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law Page 27