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The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (The Robert Payne Library)

Page 42

by Robert Payne


  Such was the account reported to Gandhi, who was horrified. All his efforts to discipline his followers had ended in failure. When he spoke of non-violence, he was like a man speaking to the wind. He took the blame on himself and spoke of the massacre at Chauri Chaura as a divine warning; once more he undertook a penitential fast. Haggard and emaciated, worn down by grief and remorse, he called off the civil-disobedience campaign intended to be the last of a long series, for he had hoped to bring about at Bardoli a wave of protest that would engulf all India. He had summoned the whirlwind, and now with a wave of his hand he commanded the whirlwind to vanish. The Congress leaders were dismayed, while Gandhi quietly rejoiced. He knew, as others did not, that the civil-disobedience campaign would have produced a thousand more Chauri Chauras.

  Now that he was no longer in command of a powerful movement, the government decided to arrest him. At any other time his arrest would be accompanied by widespread disorder and bloodshed, but not now, for he welcomed it. “My removal from their midst will be a benefit to the people,” Gandhi said quietly. On the night of March 10, Dan Healey, the Superintendent of Police at Ahmedabad, drove up to the ashram at Sabarmati, alone except for a driver. He sent word that Gandhi was under arrest but could take as much time as he liked before being driven to prison. Gandhi asked the inmates of the ashram to sing the Vaishnava song, collected a spare loincloth, two blankets and seven books, and then walked in the darkness to the superintendent’s car.

  The Great Trial

  THE TRIAL, which took place on March 18, 1922, was so calm, so orderly, so lacking in contentiousness and anger, that it assumed the character of a quiet confrontation between two men who had known and studied each other for a long time. The judge was mild-mannered and apologetic. Gandhi was quietly content, and would sometimes break out in smiles. An observer at the trial described him as “festively joyful,” but this was to exaggerate his joy. He had serious and even terrible matters to discuss, and he was under no illusions about the severity of the punishment he expected to receive, for he was charged with sedition and no government punishes sedition lightly. He could expect a very long term of imprisonment, and although he sometimes claimed that he regarded prison terms as rest cures, necessary at occasional intervals, providing him with a calm atmosphere for reading and prolonged meditation, he always chafed under imprisonment, found the prison food abhorrent, and the prison regulations nearly intolerable.

  The tone of the trial was set by the judge when he took his seat, bowing gravely to his distinguished prisoner. Gandhi returned the bow. The judge said later that he was perfectly aware that he was dealing with a man “of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life,” but it was his duty to administer the law, which was no respecter of saints. He gave the impression of a man who was performing a distasteful task with courtesy and good sense. His task was made all the easier by the fact that Gandhi preferred to have no lawyers to defend him and pleaded guilty to all charges.

  In theory the trial which was listed as “Sessions Case No. 45—Impera-tor v. (1) Mr. M. K. Gandhi, (2) Mr. S. C. Banker” was concerned to punish the author of three inflammatory articles which had appeared in Young India at intervals during the previous year. In the first, called “Tampering with Loyalty,” which appeared in September, Gandhi openly declared that his task was to encourage sedition and to accept the consequences. He wrote:

  We ask for no quarter; we expect none from the Government. We did not solicit the promise of immunity from prison so long as we remained nonviolent. We may not now complain if we are imprisoned for sedition. Therefore, our self-respect and our pledge requires us to remain calm, unperturbed and non-violent. We have our appointed course to follow.

  Gandhi left no doubt what the appointed course was, and in an article called “A Puzzle and its Solution,” which appeared in December, he stated the case for subversion with the utmost simplicity. “We want to overthrow the Government,” he wrote. “We want to compel its submission to the people’s will.” He added that it would be a fight to the finish, and that the Indians had not the slightest intention of submitting to a reign of violence. In the third article, called “Shaking the Manes,” which appeared toward the end of February, Gandhi wrote his most vehement and rhetorical attack on British power:

  No empire intoxicated with the red wine of power and plunder of weaker races has yet lived long in the world, and this British Empire, which is based upon organized exploitation of physically weaker races of the earth and upon a continuous exhibition of brute force, cannot live if there is a just God ruling the universe. . . . It is high time that the British people were made to realize that the fight that was commenced in 1920 is a fight to the finish, whether it lasts one month or one year or many years and whether the representatives of Britain re-enact all the orgies of the Mutiny days with redoubled force or whether they do not.

  These inflammatory statements were, of course, merely contributory causes of his arrest, and Gandhi himself was aware that he was being arrested for reasons that went far beyond the simple question of subversion. What was at issue was Gandhi’s growing power and his assumption of great authority over the members of the Congress Party. In a few years he had raised himself to a position where he could exercise a vast influence over the Indian people, and the flashpoint was only a little way away. When he spoke of “a fight to the finish, whether it lasts one month or one year or many years,” he was implying that it was within his powers to bring about the sudden dramatic overthrow of the British Raj possibly within the space of a month. The time had come to curb his influence, to make him powerless. By putting him in prison the government was running few risks. The members of Congress, left to their own devices, would quarrel among themselves, new and less effective leaders would arise, the legend of Gandhi’s invincibility would be liquidated, and the government would be able to prove to its own satisfaction that it was not afraid of him. At the same time the government would be permitted to enjoy a breathing space to ponder the next move in the game. Gandhi, too, felt in need of a breathing space, for he did not yet feel that he had acquired sufficient authority to lead the people into a massive confrontation with the Raj. He feared all authority, especially his own. If he went to prison, he would be returning the power he had won to the people, and he would have time to meditate and recover from long years of physically exhausting work. There was still another reason why he welcomed a prison term. The murders in Bombay, Madras and Chauri Chaura had shown him the explosive character of non-violence, and he hoped by suffering imprisonment to atone in some way for these murders and his own responsibility for bringing them about.

  Although the trial in the small crowded courtroom in Ahmedabad seemed outwardly calm, many complicated issues were at stake. Very few of them involved Shankarlal Banker, the printer and publisher of Young India, who was regarded merely as an accessory after the fact. The main issue was stated clearly in the opening words of the indictment: Imperator v. Mr. M. K. Gandhi. The imperial authority could no longer tolerate Gandhi’s activities. The innumerable subsidiary issues all flowed from the central fact that there was scarcely any area of agreement between Imperator and Gandhi.

  The judge, Mr. Robert Broomfield, was the son of a lawyer and he had a long experience of the law. He came to India as a junior barrister attached to the Indian Civil Service in 1905, and had spent all his active life within the Bombay Presidency. He genuinely liked the Indians and had a considerable respect amounting almost to affection for Gandhi. When Sir J. T. Strangman, the advocate general, asked permission to proceed fully with the trial, the judge overruled him. Gandhi had pleaded guilty, and therefore no purpose would be served by a prosecutor’s recital of his crimes, which would merely exasperate Indian sentiment. The judge had observed that Gandhi was carrying a long written statement and obviously wanted to read it. Many years later, looking back on the trial, the judge said: “I felt pretty sure that the statement was likely to be political propaganda not having very much bearing on the
only issue, which was the amount of the sentence. However, I saw no objection to his reading it, and I allowed him to do so.” What the judge did not know was that Gandhi’s statement was a deeply personal and carefully reasoned explanation of his actions, perhaps the most concise and brilliantly written document he had ever composed. The prosecutor had mentioned Gandhi’s complicity in the crimes committed in Bombay, Madras and Chauri Chaura, and before reading his written statement Gandhi made some extemporaneous comments, admitting his guilt and justifying his actions. He said:

  I wish to endorse all the blame which the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the Bombay occurrences, Madras occurrences, and the Chauri Chaura occurrences. Thinking over these deeply and sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible for me to disassociate myself from the diabolical crimes of Chauri Chaura or the mad outrages of Bombay. He is quite right when he says that as a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, having had a fair share of experience of this world, I should have known the consequences of every one of my acts. I knew that I was playing with fire. . . .

  I want to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth, when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it, and I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me, for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.

  The only course open to you, the Judge, is, as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post, or inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people. I do not expect that kind of conversion, but by the time I have finished with my statement, you will perhaps have a glimpse of what is raging within my breast, to run the maddest risk which a sane man can run.

  When Gandhi spoke of “the maddest risk which a sane man can run,” he was not speaking for the gallery so much as stating a fact of life. The maddest risk involved the destiny of India: the rise of the Indians to power, the defeat of the British Raj. He was not speaking about small risks, but risks involving the fate of millions of people. One of the reasons why he calmly contemplated a long prison sentence was that he would no longer have to concern himself with this risk, which could drive a sane man to despair.

  The lengthy prepared statement should be quoted extensively, because it is all of a piece. The argument is sustained, quiet, remorseless; and if he indicted the Indian town dwellers almost as gravely as he indicted the Raj, this was because he had less sympathy for the town dwellers than for the multitudes of Indian peasants, who were utterly defenseless, drugged by poverty, and incapable of exerting any influence on their own destiny. His own strength derived from the hordes of anonymous peasants who existed in a kind of limbo, forgotten by the Raj and by the Congress Party alike. He said:

  I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England, to placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up, that I should explain why from a staunch loyalist and co-operator I have become an uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator. To the Court too I should say why I plead guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection towards the Government established by law in India.

  My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian, I had no rights. More correctly I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.

  But I was not baffled. I thought that this treatment of Indians was an excrescence upon a system which was intrinsically and mainly good. I gave the Government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticizing it freely where I felt it was faulty but never wishing its destruction.

  Consequently when the existence of the Empire was threatened in 1899 by the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance corps and served at several actions that took place for the relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906, at the time of the Zulu “revolt,” I raised a stretcher-bearer party and served till the end of the “rebellion.” On both the occasions I received medals and was even mentioned in despatches. For my work in South Africa I was given by Lord Hardinge a Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal. When the war broke out in 1914 between England and Germany, I raised a volunteer ambulance corps in London, consisting of the then resident Indians in London, chiefly students. Its work was acknowledged by the authorities to be valuable. Lastly, in India when a special appeal was made at the War Conference in Delhi in 1918 by Lord Chelmsford for recruits, I struggled at the cost of my health to raise a corps in Kheda, and the response was being made when hostilities ceased and orders were received that no more recruits were wanted. In all these efforts at service, I was actuated by the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status of full equality in the Empire for my countrymen.

  The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlatt Act—a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom. I felt called upon to lead an intensive agitation against it. Then followed the Punjab horrors beginning with the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh and culminating in crawling orders, public flogging and other indescribable humiliations. . . . The Punjab crime was whitewashed and most culprits went not only unpunished but remained in service, and some continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue and in some cases were even rewarded. I saw too that not only did the reforms not make a change of heart, but they were only a method of further draining India of her wealth and of prolonging her servitude.

  I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically. A disarmed India had no power of resistance against any aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him. So much is this the case that some of our best men consider that India must take generations before she can achieve Dominion Status. She has become so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the British advent India spun and wove in her millions of cottages, just the supplement she needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources. This cottage industry, so vital for India’s existence, has been ruined by incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English witnesses. Little do town dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the Government established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures, can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye.

  I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town dwellers of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity, which is perhaps unequalled in history. . . .

  I have no personal ill-will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King’s person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the system. In fact, I believe I have rendered a service to India and England by showing in non-co-operation the way out of an unnatural state in which both are living. In my humble opinion, non-co-operation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good. But i
n the past, non-co-operation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil-doer. I am endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent non-co-operation only multiplies evil, and that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence.

  In this way, balancing his accounts with violence and non-violence, Gandhi concluded that only extreme non-violence, the absolute abstention from violence, would bring about the end of British rule. In prison at least he was guaranteed the possibility of practicing non-violence for a long period of time.

  In his summing up Judge Broomfield noted that Gandhi had made his task easy by pleading guilty to the charges. There was no quarrel between them, and he spoke as though it were a matter of merely propitiating an abstract justice. “The determination of a just sentence,” he declared, “is perhaps as difficult a proposition as a judge in this country could have to face. The law is no respecter of persons. Nevertheless it will be impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that in the eyes of millions of your countrymen, you are a great patriot and a great leader.” He remembered that Gandhi had constantly preached against violence and had done much to prevent violence, but it could not be forgotten that he had preached sedition and must be punished. A British judge had sentenced Lokamanya Tilak to six years’ imprisonment, and in his most gentle manner Judge Broomfield said: “You will not consider it unreasonable, I think, that you should be classed with Mr. Tilak.” Gandhi, with his deep respect for Lokamanya Tilak, could only say that he regarded it as “the proudest privilege and honor” to be associated with his name. “So far as the sentence itself is concerned,” he added, “I certainly consider that it is as light as any judge would inflict on me, and so far as the whole proceedings are concerned, I must say that I could not have expected greater courtesy.”

 

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