Freedom at Midnight (9 page)

It was a passage from the Bible that had first set Gandhi meditating on nonviolence. He had been overwhelmed by Christ's admonition to his followers to turn the other cheek to their aggressors. The little man had already applied the doctrine to himself, stoically submitting to the beatings of numerous white aggressors. The philosophy of an eye for an eye led only to a world of the blind, he reasoned. You don't change a man's convictions by chopping off his head or infuse his heart with a new spirit by putting a bullet through it. Violence only brutalizes the violent and embitters its victims. Gandhi sought a doctrine that would force change by the example of the good, reconcile men with the strength of God instead of dividing them by the strength of man.

The South African government furnished him an opportunity to test his still half-formulated theories in the fall of 1906. The occasion was a law that would have forced all Indians over the age of eight to register with the government, be fingerprinted and carry special identity cards. On September 11, 1906, before a gathering of angry Indians in the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg, Gandhi took the stand to protest against the law.

To obey it, he said, would lead to the destruction of their community. "There is only one course open to me," he declared, "to die but not to submit to the law." For the first time in his life he led a public assembly in a solemn vow before God to resist an unjust law, whatever the consequences. Gandhi did not explain to his audience how they would resist the law. Probably he himself did not know that September night. Only one thing was clear: it would be resisted without violence.

The new principle of political and social struggle born in the Empire Theatre soon had a name, Satyagraha ("truth force"). Gandhi organized a boycott of the registration procedures and peaceful picketing of the registration centers. His actions earned Gandhi the first of his life's numerous jail sentences.

While in jail, Gandhi encountered the second of the secular works which would deeply influence his thought, Henry Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience."* Protesting against a United States government that condoned slavery and was fighting an unjust war in Mexico, Thoreau asserted the individual's right to ignore unjust laws and refuse his allegiance to a government whose tyranny had become unbearable. To be right, he said, was more honorable than to be law-abiding.

Thoreau's essay was a catalyst to thoughts already stirring in Gandhi. Released from jail, he decided to apply them in protest against a decision of Transvaal to close its borders to Indians. On November 6, 1913, 2,037 men, 127 women and 57 children, Gandhi at their head, staged a nonviolent march on Transvaal's frontiers. Their certain destiny was jail, their only sure reward a frightful beating.

Watching that pathetic, bedraggled troop walking confidently along behind him, Gandhi experienced another illuminating revelation. Those wretches had nothing to look forward to but pain. Armed white vigilantes waited at the Transvaal border, perhaps to kill them. Yet fired by faith in him and the cause to which he had called them, they marched in his footsteps ready, in Gandhi's words, to "melt their enemies' hearts by self-suffering."

Gandhi suddenly sensed in their quiet resolution what mass nonviolent action might become. There on the borders of the Transvaal he realized the enormous possibilities inherent in the movement that he had provoked. The hundreds behind him that November day could become hundreds of thousands, a tide rendered irresistible by an unshakable faith in the nonviolent ideal.

Persecutions, floggings, jailings, economic sanctions followed their action, but they could not break the movement. His African crusade ended in an almost total victory in 1914. The little man could go home at last.

The Gandhi who left South Africa in July 1914 was a totally different person from the timid young lawyer who had landed in Durban. He had discovered on its inhospi-

* The third was Leo Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God Is Within You." He admired Tolstoy's insistence in applying his moral principles in his daily life. The two men held remarkably similar views on nonviolence, education, diet and industrialization, and they corresponded briefly before Tolstoy's death.

table soil his three teachers—Ruskin, Tolstoy and Thoreau; an Englishman, a Russian and an American. From his experience he had evolved the two doctrines, nonviolence and civil disobedience, with which, over the next thirty years, he would humble the most powerful empire in the world.

An enormous crowd gave Gandhi a hero's welcome when his diminutive figure passed under the spans of Bombay's Gateway of India, January 9, 1915. The spare suitcase of the leader passing under that imperial archway contained one significant item. It was a thick bundle of paper covered with Gandhi's handwritten prose. Its title, "Hind Swaraj" ("Indian Home Rule"), made one thing clear: Africa, for Gandhi, had been only a training ground for the real battles of his life.

Gandhi settled near the industrial city of Ahmedabad on the banks of the Sabarmati river, where he founded an ashram, a communal farm similar to those he had founded in South Africa. As always, Gandhi's first concerns were for the poor. He organized the indigo farmers of the Bihar against the oppressive exactions of their British landlords, the peasants of the drought-stricken province of Bombay in protest against their taxes, the workers in Ahmedabad's textile mills against the employers whose contributions sustained his ashram. For the first time, an Indian leader was addressing himself to the miseries of India's masses. Soon, Rabindranath Tagore, India's Nobel laureate, conferred on Gandhi the appellation that he would carry for the rest of his life, Mahatma — "Great Soul in Beggar's Garb," he called him.

Like most Indians, Gandhi was loyal to Britain in World War I, convinced that Britain in return would give a sympathetic hearing to India's nationalist aspirations. Gandhi was wrong; Britain chose, instead, to pass the Rowlatt Act in 1919, to repress agitation for Indian freedom. For weeks Gandhi meditated, seeking a tactic with which to respond to Britain's rejection of India's hopes. The idea for a reply came to him in a dream. It was brilliantly, stunningly simple. India would protest, he decreed, with silence, a special eerie silence. He would do something that no one had ever dreamed of doing before; he would immobilize all India in the quiet chill of a day of mourning, a hartal.

Like so many of Gandhi's political ideas, the plan re-

fleeted his instinctive genius for tactics that could be enunciated in few words, understood by the simplest minds, put into practice with the most ordinary gestures. To follow him, his supporters did not have to break the law or brave police clubs. They had only to do nothing. By closing their shops, leaving their classrooms, going to their temples to pray or just staying at home, Indians could demonstrate their solidarity with his protest call. He chose April 7, 1919, as the day of his hartal. It was his first overt act against the government of India. Let India stand still, he urged, and let India's oppressors listen to the unspoken message of her silent masses.

Unfortunately, those masses were not everywhere silent. Riots erupted. The most serious were in Amritsar, in the Punjab. To protest the restrictions clamped on their city as a result, thousands of Indians gathered on April 13, for a peaceful but illegal meeting in a stone- and debris-littered compound called Jallianwalla Bagh.

There was only one entrance to the compound down a narrow alley between two buildings. Through it, just after the meeting had begun, marched Amritsar's Martial Law Commander Brigadier General R. E. Dyer at the head of fifty soldiers. He stationed his men on either side of the entry and, without a word of warning, opened fire with machine guns on the defenseless Indians. For ten full minutes, while the trapped Indians screamed for mercy, the soldiers fired. They fired 1,650 rounds. Their bullets killed or wounded 1,516 people. Convinced that he had "done a jolly good thing," Dyer marched his men back out of the Bagh.

His "jolly good thing" was a turning point in the history of Anglo-Indian relations, more decisive even than the Indian Mutiny sixty-three years before.* For Gandhi it was the final breach of faith by the empire for which he had compromised his pacifist principles in two wars. He turned all his efforts to taking control of the organization that had become synonymous with India's nationalist aspirations.

The idea that the Congress Party might one day become

* Dyer was reprimanded for his actions and asked to resign from the Army. He was, however, allowed to retain full pension benefits and other rights due him. His demonstration was applauded by most of the British in India. In clubs all across the country his admiring countrymen took up a collection on his behalf, amassing the then prodigious sum of 26,000 pounds to ease the rigors of his premature retirement

the focal point of mass agitation against British rule in India would surely have horrified the dignified English civil servant who had founded the party in 1885. Acting with the blessings of the viceroy, Octavian Hume had sought to create an organization that would canalize the protests of India's slowly growing educated classes into a moderate, responsible body prepared to engage in gentlemanly dialogue with India's English rulers.

That was exactly what Congress was when Gandhi arrived on the political scene. Determined to convert it into a mass movement attuned to his nonviolent creed, Gandhi presented the party a plan of action in Calcutta in 1920. It was adopted by an overwhelming majority. From that moment until his death, whether he held rank in the party or not, Gandhi was Congress's conscience and its guide, the unquestioned leader of the independence struggle.

Like his earlier call for a national hartal, Gandhi's new tactic was electrifyingly simple, a one-word program for political revolution: noncooperation. Indians, he decreed, would boycott whatever was British; students would boycott British schools; lawyers, British courts; employees, British jobs; soldiers, British honors. Gandhi himself gave the lead by returning to the viceroy the two medals he had earned with his ambulance brigade in the Boer War.

Above all, his aim was to weaken the edifice of British power in India by attacking the economic pillar upon which it reposed. Britain purchased raw Indian cotton for derisory prices, shipped it to the mills of Lancashire to be woven into textiles, then shipped the finished products back to India to be sold at a substantial profit in a market that virtually excluded non-British textiles. It was the classic cycle of imperialist exploitation, and the arm with which Gandhi proposed to fight it was the very antithesis of the great mills of the Industrial Revolution that had sired that exploitation. It was a primitive wooden spinning wheel.

For the next quarter of a century Gandhi struggled with tenacious energy to force all India to forsake foreign textiles for the rough cotton khadi cloth spun by millions of spinning wheels. Convinced that the misery of India's half million villages was due above all to the decline in village crafts, he saw in a renaissance of cottage industry, heralded by the spinning wheel, the key to the revival of India's impoverished countryside. For the urban masses, spinning

would be a kind of spiritual redemption by manual labor, a constant, daily reminder of their link to the real India, the India of half a million villages.

The wheel became the medium through which he enunciated a whole range of doctrines close to his heart. To it, he tied a crusade to get villagers to use latrines instead of the open fields, to improve hygiene and health by practicing cleanliness, to fight malaria, to set up simple village schools for their offspring, to preach Hindu-Moslem harmony—in short an entire program to regenerate India's rural life.

Gandhi himself gave the example by regularly consecrating half an hour a day to spinning and forcing his followers to do likewise. The spinning ritual became a quasi-religious ceremony, the time devoted to it, an interlude of prayer and contemplation. The Mahatma began to murmur: "Rama, Rama, Rama" ("God") in rhythm to the click-click-click of the spinning wheel.

In September 1921, Gandhi gave a final impetus to his campaign by solemnly renouncing for the rest of his life any form of clothing besides a homespun loincloth and a shawl. Based on the humblest of chores, spinning became a kind of sacrament linking Congress's diverse membership with a common daily rite. The product of the wheel, cotton khadi, became the uniform of the independence movement, wrapping rich and poor, great and small, in a common swath of rough white cloth. Gradually, Gandhi's little wooden wheel became the symbol of his peaceful revolution, of an awakening continent's challenge to white Western imperialism.

Sloshing through ankle-deep mud and water on precarious, rock-strewn paths, sleeping endless nights on the wooden planks of India's third-class railway carriages, Gandhi traveled to the most remote corners of India preaching his message. Speaking five or six times a day, he visited thousands of villages.

It was an extraordinary spectacle. Gandhi led the march, barefoot, wrapped in his loincloth, spectacles sliding from his nose, clomping along with the aid of a bamboo stave. Behind him came his followers in identical white loincloths. Closing the march, hoisted like some trophy over a followers head, rode the Mahatma's portable toilet, a graphic reminder of the importance he attached to sound sanitation,

His crusade was an extraordinary success. The crowds rushed to see the man already known as a "Great Soul." His voluntary poverty, his simplicity, his humility, his saintly air made him a kind of holy man marching out of some distant Indian past to liberate a new India.

In the towns, he told the crowds that if India was to win self-rule, she would have to renounce foreign clothing. He asked for volunteers to take off their clothes and throw them in a heap at his feet. Shoes, socks, trousers, shirts, hats, coats cascaded into the pile until some men stood stark naked before Gandhi. With a delighted smile Gandhi then set the pile ablaze, a bizarre bonfire of "Made in England" clothing.

The British were quick to react. If they hesitated to arrest Gandhi for fear of making him a martyr, they struck hard at his followers. Thirty thousand people were arrested, meetings and parades were broken up by force, Congress offices were ransacked. On February 1, 1922, Gandhi courteously wrote the Viceroy to inform him that he was intensifying his action. Noncooperation was to be escalated to civil disobedience. Hfc counseled peasants to refuse to pay taxes, city dwellers to ignore British laws and soldiers to stop serving the Crown. It was Gandhi's nonviolent declaration of war on India's colonial government.