Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (Signet Classics) by Louis Fischer

Author:Louis Fischer [Fischer, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

17The Half-Naked Fakir

Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was embarrassed to be the jailer of Gandhi. From all over the world and from his own country came a deluge of telegrams asking for the Mahatma’s release. Mr. MacDonald and some of his Cabinet ministers could be faced with their public statements lauding Gandhi and favoring Indian home rule. Lord Irwin was more than embarrassed; civil disobedience had crippled his administration. Revenue dropped steeply. The police and military groaned under the superhuman assignment of maintaining law and order.

A Round Table Conference, attended by Indians who were the Viceroy’s appointees, met in London late in November, 1930, and came to nothing; Congress, the only popular organization in India, was not represented. At its closing session on January 19, 1931, MacDonald expressed the hope that Congress would send delegates to the second Round Table Conference. But they were all in jail in India. Lord Irwin took the hint—or the command—and freed Gandhi, the Nehrus, father and son, and twenty other top Congressmen on January 25th, the eve of the Congress-proclaimed Independence Day. In appreciation of this conciliatory gesture, Gandhi wrote Irwin asking for an interview.

Irwin obliged. The first meeting took place on February 17th, at 2:30 P.M., and lasted three hours and forty minutes. “So the stage was set,” writes Irwin’s biographer, “for the most dramatic personal encounter between a Viceroy and an Indian leader in the whole seething history of the British raj.”

It was more than dramatic. It was historic and decisive. Winston Churchill saw this better than anyone. He was revolted, he declared, by “the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” (A fakir is an Indian mendicant monk.)

Churchill’s anger and contempt, undisguised and ferocious, did not blur his vision. He grasped the basic fact which was not the state of the Mahatma’s undress or his discarded profession but the equality he had acquired and was asserting in the parleys with Irwin. Gandhi had not come, like most of the Viceroy’s visitors, to petition for favors. He came as the leader of a nation to negotiate “on equal terms” with the representative of another nation. The Salt March had demonstrated that England could not govern India against Gandhi. The British raj was at the mercy of the half-naked fakir, and Churchill felt nauseated. Churchill sensed that England was conceding India’s independence in principle while temporarily withholding it in practice.

After many meetings and much wrangling, Irwin and Gandhi signed what Irwin’s biographer called “The Delhi Pact” on March 5th. Two national statesmen had concluded a pact, a treaty, an agreed text. Civil disobedience would be canceled, prisoners released, and salt manufacture permitted on the seacoast. Congress would attend the next Round Table Conference in London. Neither independence nor Dominion status was promised.

Within a few months, and certainly in the perspective of historic events, the terms of the Pact lost their significance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.