Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The struggle was intensified after the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 because the Transvaal restrictions on Indians, which forbade them to own land, to live outside segregated districts, or to vote, were not repealed, and a Supreme Court decision of 1913 declared all non-Christian marriages to be legally invalid. This last decision deprived most nonwhite wives and children of all legal protection of their family rights. Mass civil disobedience by Indians increased, including a march by 6,000 from Natal to the Transvaal. Finally, after much controversy, Gandhi and Smuts worked out an elaborate compromise agreement in 1914. This revoked some of the discriminations against Indians in South Africa, recognized Indian marriages, annulled a discriminatory £ 3 annual tax on Indians, and stopped all importation of indentured labor from India in 1920. Peace was restored in this civil controversy just in time to permit a united front in the external war with Germany. But in South Africa by 1914 Gandhi had worked out the techniques he would use against the British in India after 1919.

Until 1919 Gandhi was very loyal to the British connection. Both in South Africa and in India he had found that the English from England were much more tolerant and understanding than most of the English-speaking whites of middle-class origin in the overseas areas. In the Boer War he was the active leader of an 1,100-man Indian ambulance corps which worked with inspiring courage even under fire on the field of battle. During World War I, he worked constantly on recruiting campaigns for the British forces. On one of these in 1915 he said, “I discovered that the British Empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of these ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope possible for his energy and honor and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience.” By 1918 this apostle of nonviolence was saying: “We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn to use arms.… Partnership in the Empire is our definite goal. We should suffer to the utmost of our ability and even lay down our lives to defend the Empire. If the Empire perishes, with it perishes our cherished aspiration.”

During this period Gandhi’s asceticism and his opposition to all kinds of discrimination were winning him an outstanding moral position among the Indian people. He was opposed to all violence and bloodshed, to alcohol, meat, and tobacco, even to the eating of milk and eggs, and to sex (even in marriage). More than this, he was opposed to Western industrialism, to Western science and medicine, and to the use of Western rather than Indian languages. He demanded that his followers make fixed quotas of homespun cotton each day, wore a minimum of homespun clothing himself, spun on a small wheel throughout all his daily activities, and took the small hand spinning wheel as the symbol of his movement-all this in order to signify the honorable nature of handwork, the need for Indian economic self-sufficiency, and his opposition to Western industrialism. He worked for equality for the untouchables, calling them “God’s children” (Harijans), associating with them whenever he could, taking them into his own home, even adopting one as his own daughter. He worked to relieve economic oppression, organizing strikes against low wages or miserable working conditions, supporting the strikers with money he had gathered from India’s richest Hindu industrialists. He attacked Western medicine and sanitation, supported all kinds of native medical nostrums and even quackery, yet went to a Western-trained surgeon for an operation when he had appendicitis himself. Similarly he preached against the use of milk, but drank goat’s milk for his health much of his life. These inconsistencies he attributed to his own weak sinfulness. Similarly, he permitted handspun cotton to be sewn on Singer sewing machines, and conceded that Western-type factories were necessary to provide such machines.

During this period he discovered that his personal fasts from food, which he had long practiced, could be used as moral weapons against those who opposed him while they strengthened his moral hold over those who supported him. “I fasted,” he said, “to reform those who loved me. You cannot fast against a tyrant.” Gandhi never seemed to recognize that his fasting and nonviolent civil disobedience were effective against the British in India and in South Africa only to the degree that the British had the qualities of humanity, decency, generosity, and fair play which he most admired, but that by attacking the British through these virtues he was weakening Britain and the class which possessed these virtues and making it more likely that they would be replaced by nations and by leaders who did not have these virtues. Certainly Hitler and the Germans who exterminated six million Jews in cold blood during World War II would not have shared the reluctance of Smuts to imprison a few thousand Indians or Lord Halifax’s reluctance to see Gandhi starve himself to death. This was the fatal weakness of Gandhi’s aims and his methods, but these aims and methods were so dear to Indian hearts and so selflessly pursued by Gandhi that he rapidly became the spiritual leader of the Indian National Congress after Gokhale’s death in 1915. In this position Gandhi by his spiritual power succeeded in something which no earlier Indian leader had achieved and few had hoped for: he spread political awareness and nationalist feeling from the educated class down into the great uneducated mass of the Indian people.

This mass and Gandhi expected and demanded a greater degree of self-government after the end of World War I. The Act of 1919 provided that, and probably provided as much of it as the political experience of Indians entitled them to. Moreover, the Act anticipated expansion of the areas of self-government as Indian political experience increased. But the Act was largely a failure, because Gandhi had aroused political ambitions in great masses of Indians who lacked experience in political activities, and these demands gave rise to intense opposition to Indian self-government in British circles which did not share the ideals of the Round Table group. Finally, the actions of this British opposition drove Gandhi from “nonresistance” through complete “noncooperation,” to “civil disobedience,” thus destroying the whole purpose of the Act of 1919 .

Many British conservatives both at home and in India opposed the Act of 1919. Lord Ampthill, who had long experience in India and had valiantly supported Gandhi in South Africa, attacked the Act and Lionel Curtis for making it. In the House of Lords he said: “The incredible fact is that, but for the chance visit to India of a globe-trotting doctrinaire with a positive mania for constitution-mongering [Curtis], nobody in the world would ever have thought of so peculiar a notion as Dyarchy. And yet the Joint [Selborne] Committee tells us in an airy manner that no better plan can be conceived.” In India men like the governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, were even more emphatically opposed to Indian self-government or Indian nationalist agitation. Many Conservatives who were determined to maintain the empire intact could not see how this could be done without India as the major jewel in it, as in the nineteenth century. India not only provided a large share of the manpower in the peacetime imperial army, but this army was largely stationed in India and paid for out of the revenues of the Government of India. Moreover, this self-paying manpower pool was beyond the scrutiny of the British reformer as well as the British taxpayer. The older Tories, with their strong army connections, and others, like Winston Churchill, with an appreciation of military matters, did not see how England could face the military demands of the twentieth century without Indian military manpower, at least in colonial areas.