Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic
Rivalry That Destroyed an
Empire and Forged Our Age
Arthur Herman
Reviewed by Amitrajeet A. Batabyal
On 2 October 1869,
in the sleepy town of Porbandar,
Gujarat,
a baby boy was born to Karamchand Gandhi and his wife Putlibai. This
boy was named
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Mohandas was his mother’s favorite and
Putlibai prayed
daily that Lord Krishna should make her son a “hero among heroes” (p.
14). Five
years later and many miles away, on 30 November 1874, another baby boy was born in Blenheim
Palace, the biggest private
home in
Britain.
This
boy’s baptized name was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. The
Churchill name
was steeped in history and for Winston Churchill, “Blenheim
Palace would always
symbolize a
heritage of glory and a family born to greatness” (p. 15). This lengthy
but fascinating
book tells the story of the remarkable and, in many ways, parallel
lives of
these two distinguished men. In the rest of this review, I shall sample
selectively from the book’s contents and thereby attempt to give the
reader a
flavor not only for the extraordinary lives led by Gandhi and Churchill
but
also for the intellectual contributions of this book.
During the time period from 1888 to 1895, Gandhi was first
in London completing his legal education and then in South Africa;
initially to
assist a businessman in a legal matter but then, in the course of his
fight for
equality, to lay the groundwork for many of the techniques that he
would
subsequently use in India with great aplomb in his fight against the
British
Raj. We learn that in the early 1890s in South
Africa, what bothered Gandhi most was
that
he was treated as if his educational accomplishments counted for
nothing. At
that time, Gandhi believed that loyal “Indians of ‘superior abilities’
like
himself deserved to be treated like any similar white person, not like
ignorant
coolies, let alone like African blacks” (p. 88). In other words, Gandhi
thought
of himself “as a Briton first and an Indian second” (p. 88). With the
unfolding
of time, this line of thinking would change dramatically.
In stark contrast, throughout his life, the Victorian era
Churchill never thought of himself as anything other than a privileged
member
of the glorious British Empire, an Empire that
he was
duty bound to protect and sustain. In Churchill’s view, not only was India
an integral part of this Empire but, in addition, the inferior Indians
could
not possibly be counted on to rule India
effectively. Therefore, he believed that India
must be governed on “the [undemocratic] principles of his father and
men like
General Roberts” (p. 99). On this basic point Churchill never yielded
and to
uphold it, he would “be prepared to wreck friendships and his own
career” (p.
99).
After his at best partially successful battle for equality
in South Africa,
Gandhi returned to India
in 1915. Although he was frequently at loggerheads with the Indian
National
Congress, he was different from almost all Congress leaders in that he
thought
about the welfare of all Indians including the fifty million or so
untouchables. This created an interesting state of affairs. On the one
hand,
Gandhi’s unconventional political agitation techniques made him a hero
to some Indians.
On the other hand, some Congress leaders worried “that his focus on
local
grievances detracted from the larger national questions of independence
and
self-government” (pp. 231-232).
While Winston Churchill was successfully rallying his
countrymen and women to never give in and to courageously withstand the
onslaught of the Nazi war machine, in 1942, Gandhi had a novel idea.
This idea
“was that the British should leave India”
(p. 489). The “Quit India” movement that emanated from this idea
started on a
promising note but soon ran out of steam. Within six weeks, the British
crushed
this movement and Gandhi was in jail. Although Churchill had won this
round, he
would soon feel growing pressure from President Roosevelt to
unambiguously
inform the world that “Britain
was serious about giving India
its independence after the [second world] war” (p.498).
This book sheds useful light on two questions that often
come up in contemporary discussions of Gandhi and his methods. The
first
concerns the utility of nonviolent agitation techniques when
confronting personalities
like Hitler or Mussolini or Saddam Hussein. Here, the book notes that
Gandhi’s
nonviolent techniques generally succeeded only because the British in India
and the whites in South Africa
subscribed to a set of dependable moral principles to which he could
appeal.
The book then goes on to correctly point out that without “this
implicit moral
contract between ruler and ruled, Gandhi’s career as a nationalist
leader would
have been nasty, brutish, and short” (p. 447). In this regard, it is
pertinent
to recall Hitler’s final solution to Britain’s
India
problem
that he communicated so succinctly and chillingly to Lord Halifax in
1938:
Shoot Gandhi.
The second question concerns the reasons for Gandhi’s
success in India.
Churchill never quite grasped these reasons. Instead, he repeatedly and
contemptuously dismissed Gandhi as “a fakir and spiritual quack” (p.
505). The
South African President Jan Smuts attempted to educate Churchill on
this
question in 1942. Even though Smuts was unsuccessful in this attempt,
his
reasoning is worth noting. Smuts pointed out to Churchill that whereas
he and
Churchill were “mundane people,” Gandhi was a “man of God” who had
successfully
appealed to religious motives. As the author perspicaciously points
out, “What
Smuts the philosopher could see, and Churchill could not, was the
Mahatma’s
supreme spirituality, which had made him revered across India and even
in the
West” (p. 506).
Let me conclude this review with the following observations:
The names of some people and places are misspelled, some explanatory
footnotes
are a little misleading, and there are a small number of
inconsistencies in the
prose. However, these are small quibbles about a book that is both
thoroughly researched
and extremely informative. In addition, this book is neither overly
fawning nor
unduly critical of Gandhi and Churchill. Therefore, I unreservedly
recommend
this book to all those who would like to learn about the fascinating
lives led
by two of the twentieth century’s most recognizable icons.