The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Each of the potential lawbreakers appeared peacefully at a Transvaal frontier post, courted arrest, and served a jail sentence. Gandhi did the same in October 1908. So he spent a month in prison. Here he reread Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” written in 1849 as tensions over slavery and America’s invasion of Mexico were stirring up controversy. Thoreau refused to pay taxes and was jailed. Of the 13,000 Indian settlers in Transvaal before the civil disobedience movement, almost half of them left the province. Of the remaining, at one point as many as 2,500 were behind bars.14

  Gandhi continued to make a distinction between the nucleus of the British Empire in London and its colonies around the world, and took a benign view of the former. In the second half of 1909 he went to London to highlight the plight of Indian settlers in South Africa. He won the backing of many British liberal and enlightened imperialists and succeeded in getting the Transvaal’s Asiatic Registration Act repealed.

  Among his white liberal supporters in Transvaal, a rich German architect Hermann Kallenbach stood out, all the more because of his wrestler’s physique, handlebar mustache, and pince-nez. In 1910 he purchased 1,100 acres of land at Lawley, twenty miles southwest of Johannesburg, and donated it to the resistors of the unjust laws of Transvaal. Gandhi named the settlement Tolstoy Farm. The idea was to use it as a base to train satyagrahis and their families to live simply in harmony with one another. In other words, it was to be an ashram for the acolytes of Gandhi and his nonviolent civil disobedience movement.

  It was at Tolstoy Farm that Gandhi received Gokhale in October 1912. Surprisingly, the government of the two-year-old Union of South Africa, led by Louis Botha (prime minister) and Smuts (defense and interior minister), facilitated Gokhale’s tour of the country. They promised him the repeal of the Transvaal Immigration Restriction Act and the £3 annual tax imposed by the Natal government on the freed indentured Indian laborers, who had started arriving from southern India beginning in 1860 to work in mines and on plantations. The tax was introduced to ensure that indentured laborers whose contracts had ended returned home.15

  But nothing changed. Indeed, South Africa’s Immigrant Regulation Act, enforced in August 1913, imposed further restrictions on former Indian indentured laborers wishing to settle in South Africa. Gandhi turned his attention to the tax required of the freed indentured laborers. This mattered particularly to the Indians working in coal mines.

  Wielding the Nonviolent Weapon Against Mining Magnates

  Responding to the call by Gandhi and his aides to strike, the Indian miners in Newcastle downed their tools in October 1913. They were joined by others. The strikers were peaceful. Gandhi led a procession of two thousand miners from Newcastle on foot across the Natal border into Transvaal to defy the immigration restriction law. This was a unique but highly effective way to raise popular consciousness.

  Remarkably, these marchers, almost all of them Hindus from South India, shouted such religious slogans as “Dwarakanath ki jai” (Victory to Lord Krishna) and “Ramchandra ki jai” (Victory to Lord Rama). Many sang Hindu devotional songs.16 Gandhi did or said nothing to cool their religious ardor. The protestors were arrested inside Transvaal, about seventy miles from their destination—Tolstoy Farm—and returned to Natal by train. But on November 11 Gandhi was sentenced to nine months in jail with hard labor.

  Nevertheless, by the end of November, the number of strikers soared to sixteen thousand, affecting sixty-six workplaces. The government dispatched extra policemen from Johannesburg and Pretoria, the national capital, to break the strike. Confrontations ensued between them and the strikers. Six Indians were killed by police bullets.

  In Delhi Viceroy Lord Hardinge demanded that the South African government appoint a commission of inquiry into the Indians’ grievances. London pressured the Pretoria administration. It yielded and released Gandhi in December, and appointed a three-person commission.

  In its March 1914 report the commission recommended the repeal of the £3 tax. Four months later the South African parliament passed the Indian Relief Act. It abrogated the £3 tax, cancelled all arrears, and allowed South Africa–born Indians unfettered access to the Cape Colony and free Indians the right to continue to enter South Africa.

  Gandhi was basking in this glory as he sailed to Bombay via London. After setting up a makeshift ashram in Ahmedabad in 1915, and receiving the British Empire’s Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal for his earlier ambulance services, he undertook study tours of the subcontinent.

  Gandhi and Jinnah on Divergent Paths

  Meanwhile, Jinnah was furthering the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity by nudging the Muslim League and the Congress Party to forge a common platform. The League held its annual conference at the same time—December 1915—and the same city, Bombay, as the Congress Party. Their leaders appointed separate committees to consult one another and produce a program for reforming the colonial government by London.

  The result was a common platform adopted by the two parties at the time of their annual conferences in Lucknow in December 1916. Its main points were: “There shall be self-government in India. Muslims should be given one-third representation in the central government. There should be separate electorates for all the communities until a community comes up with the demand for joint electorates. All the elected members of provincial and central legislatures should be elected on the basis of adult franchise.”17

  Following his election as the League’s president in December 1916, Jinnah declared, “The Muslim League stands abreast of the Indian National Congress and is ready to participate in any patriotic efforts for the advancement of the country as a whole.”18 He described himself as “a staunch Congressman” who had “no love for sectarian cries.”19

  He appealed to reluctant Congress Party officials to overcome genuine anxiety among Muslims at the prospect of adult suffrage. Forming only a quarter of the population, they feared being swamped by the 70 percent Hindu majority. To still their apprehension, he argued, Congress leaders should concede separate electorates and 33 percent share of power in the central government for Muslims. His proposal was adopted.

  At the same time Jinnah led Bombay Presidency’s Home Rule League, which demanded the self-governing status of a dominion for India within the empire, as was the case then with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.

  In the summer of 1916, Jinnah was invited to vacation in the enchanting hill station of Darjeeling in Bengal at the summer retreat of his friend and client Sir Dinshaw Petit, an affluent Parsi textile magnate. There Jinnah fell in love with Rattanbai (aka Ruttie), the sixteen-year-old daughter of Sir Dinshaw. Fair-skinned, doe-eyed, with a full, fleshy mouth in an elliptical face, she was intelligent and mature beyond her years. She found Jinnah irresistible. But when he approached her father for his permission to marry her, he was rebuffed. Back in Bombay, though, defying her father’s stricture to stay away from Jinnah, Rattanbai met him secretly. They decided to wait to marry until she was eighteen.

  In politics, Jinnah faced opposition from several Muslim League leaders who were not reassured by the Congress Party conceding separate electoral rolls and enhanced power for Muslims. They were apprehensive that self-rule would lead to Muslims’ oppression by Hindus and lack of jobs in government and the Hindu-dominated business world. “Fear not,” retorted Jinnah in 1917. “This is a bogy put before you to scare you away from the cooperation and unity [with Hindus] which are essential to self-government.”20

  The December 1916 Congress session in Lucknow proved equally pivotal for Gandhi. He was approached by Pandit Raj Kumar Shukla, the representative of the tenant farmers of Champaran, an outlying district of North Bihar adjacent to Nepal. Shukla seconded the resolution placed before the conference that urged the government to appoint a committee to inquire into the strained relations between the indigo farmers and the European planters in North Bihar. Surprisingly, it was the first time that a Congress session had given a platform to a
rural speaker with firsthand knowledge of the state of peasants, who were 80 percent of the population. (Earlier Gandhi had refused to propose the resolution because of his ignorance of the problem, committing himself only to undertaking a study visit later.)

  In mid-April 1917, he met the secretary of the Planters’ Association, the commissioner of the Tirhut Division (covering Champaran district), and the collector of Muzaffarpur. They told him that since an official inquiry had already started, his visit was unnecessary and he should leave. Disregarding the advice, he proceeded to the nearest town of Motihari21 to tour the affected area.

  The crisis was rooted in the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 between the East India Company and local landlords in Bengal and Bihar. It invested the latter with permanent ownership of land. So when British planters started acquiring plots to grow sugarcane and indigo, the source of natural blue dye used in the textile industry, they became absolute owners. They rented land to local sharecroppers on the condition that they would grow indigo on 15 percent of the plot—called teen-katha, or 3/20, in Hindi—and hand over the crop as rent for the leased land. The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 (covering Bihar) codified this practice.

  In the early twentieth century the introduction of a chemical substitute for blue dye made the market for indigo unprofitable. This had a devastating impact on the lives of a million tenant farmers and their families. The European planters in Champaran district urged them to abandon indigo crops and in return pay 75 percent more rent than before. Those who refused were beaten by the planters’ militia, who harassed them further by confiscating their cattle. Many of them signed new contracts only to find that they could not afford to pay the increased rent. Tensions rose in 1912. Left with no legal recourse, sharecroppers rebelled in 1914 and again in mid-1916. Later in the year they dispatched Shukla, a learned Brahmin, to plead their case before the Congress convention.

  Gandhi was no doubt conversant with the historical background as he mounted an elephant, along with two assistants who would serve as interpreters, at nine am on April 16, 1917, in Motihari and went to interview some tenant farmers in the village of Jasaulipatti. The beast plodded along at the typical pace of a human adult. Around noon he was overtaken by a cyclist. The panting rider turned out to be a police subinspector in plainclothes. He told Gandhi that the collector D. Weston wanted to see him immediately. Gandhi got off the elephant and instructed his assistants to record the testimonies of sharecroppers.

  He then boarded a bullock cart procured by the police officer. On their way back to Motihari, they were stopped by the deputy superintendent of police, who was riding in a car. He served Gandhi the collector’s notice, ordering him to “leave by the next available train.” Gandhi signed the receipt but scribbled on the back that he would not abide by it. He was summoned to court the following day. The news about his brush with officials spread fast.

  A couple of hours before his appearance at the court of the district magistrate, W. B. Heycock, several thousand tenant farmers gathered around the place for the darshan (Hindi: sight) of the politician who was ready to face incarceration in order to improve their miserable lot.

  Gandhi pleaded guilty. “I am fully conscious of the fact that a person, holding in the public life of India a position such as I do, has to be most careful in setting examples,” he said. “I have disregarded the order served upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”22

  The magistrate announced a two-hour recess and agreed to release Gandhi on bail. Gandhi refused to furnish the bail, but he was freed nonetheless. When the court reassembled, Heycock said he would announce the verdict three days later. On April 21, following the order of the lieutenant governor of Bihar and Orissa, Sir Albert Gait, the case against Gandhi was withdrawn.

  This was the first victory for civil disobedience in India. Gandhi’s status was enhanced. The local people started to call him Bapu (Hindi: Father). He kept this struggle strictly economic, divorced from the political demand for self-rule, which could have been construed as treason by the government then empowered with the draconian Defense of India (Criminal Law Amendment) Act of 1915.

  By the middle of June, Gandhi and his team, which included several Congress-affiliated lawyers, recorded the testimony of more than 8,000 tenant farmers inhabiting more than 2,800 villages—stories of intimidation and coercion by the British planters and their militia. By then Lieutenant Governor Sir Albert had accepted the suggestion of appointing the Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee, and Gandhi had agreed to serve on it. In August 1917 the committee adopted Gandhi’s proposal to abolish the 3/20 system. In October, when the committee submitted its report, which favored the tenant farmers’ case, the lieutenant governor accepted most of its recommendations. The landlords agreed to forego the rent rise and return a quarter of the increases already collected.23

  This was a moment of glory for Gandhi.

  Gandhi Ascendant

  Gandhi had resorted to traveling in uncomfortable, overcrowded, third-class train compartments to furbish his image as “a man of the masses.” He was riding high when he chaired the First Gujarat Political Conference in Godhra on November 3, 1917. He shared the dais with Jinnah. When Jinnah rose to speak in English, Gandhi interrupted him and asked Jinnah in Gujarati to speak in that language. Jinnah was miffed. He switched to Gujarati but never forgave Gandhi for the slight inflicted on him in public.24

  For his part, Jinnah too was working tirelessly, albeit behind closed doors, for the welfare of the nation. The newly appointed secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, outlined to the British parliament in August 1917 the official policy of “increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and gradual development of self-government institutions with a view to a progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.”25 What had driven the British cabinet to this position was the declaration in favor of self-determination for nations by US president Woodrow Wilson after the entry of America on the Allied side of the war four months earlier.

  Montagu arrived in India in October to consult its leading figures. Jinnah was a member of the three deputations of leaders who met Montagu and Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, one of these deputations representing the Congress Party and the Muslim League jointly.26 In these meetings the forty-one-year-old Jinnah cut a dashing figure. “Raven-haired with a mustache almost as full as [Field Marshall Herbert] Kitchener’s and lean as a rapier, he sounded like [British actor] Ronald Coleman, dressed like Anthony Eden [a future British prime minister], and was adored by most women at first sight, and admired or envied by most men,” noted his American biographer, Stanley Wolpert.27 A successful barrister who craved luxury, he was formal, fastidious, and often imperious and frosty.

  By contrast, the forty-eight-year old mustached Gandhi, dressed in a dowdy dhoti, long shirt, and turban, was accessible and relaxed, with a ready smile. He was used to a Spartan lifestyle at the ashram along the bank of Sabarmati River on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, which he built up properly after the outbreak of plague in the city in August 1917.

  To discourage their workers from fleeing to their villages to escape the epidemic, the textile mill owners belonging to the Ahmedabad Mill Owners Association (AMOA), led by Ambalal Sarabhai, gave them an 80 percent “plague bonus.” When the deadly disease subsided in January, AMOA announced its intention to rescind the bonus. Workers threatened a general strike. Sarabhai approached Gandhi to help prevent it. Gandhi advised arbitration. It failed. Following sporadic strikes, AMOA declared a lockout on February 22. Workers demanded a 50 percent hike in pay to compensate for high inflation caused by World War I. Gandhi suggested a 35 percent increase. AMOA offered 20 percent and lifted the lockout to employ all those prepared to accept its deal. But most workers opted for Gandhi’s figure and leadership.

  Gandhi called a total strike on
March 12, 1918, but the response was patchy. As employees started to drift back to work, Gandhi undertook a fast on March 15 until all workers stayed out or there was a settlement. This was a novel tactic.

  Each day Gandhi published a leaflet to explain his rationale. Stung by the workers’ remarks that he was eating “sumptuous meals” while they were suffering “death agonies,” he had decided to share their condition, he said. Next, he mentioned “the power of suffering voluntarily for spiritual purpose.” He revealed that he had gleaned from “the ancient culture of India . . . a truth which, even if mastered by a few persons here at the moment, gives these few [people] a mastery over the world.” On March 17, in his lecture at his ashram, he conceded that there was “a taint of coercion” in his fasting because AMOA feared that he would die of starvation. Later that day Sarabhai capitulated.28

  The mill owners agreed to pay a 35 percent bonus on the first day, down to 20 percent on the next day, followed by 27.5 percent thereafter until the new arbitration committee came up with its award. Six months later it would prescribe 35 percent.

  The greatness of Gandhi lay largely in his tactical innovation to achieve his objectives. As a trained lawyer, he was well placed to argue his case in legal terms. By setting alight registration cards en masse in Johannesburg he dramatized violation of an unjust law. By leading a long land march in South Africa he helped engender political consciousness at the popular level in a manner not seen before. His field research to gather evidence of the oppression of tenant peasants in North Bihar broke fresh ground. To this armory of tactics he added moral coercion through fasting. His wide array of tactics, all nonviolent, set him apart from Jinnah, who remained tied to deploying constitutional means in legislative chambers or meetings held behind closed doors.