Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

buildings. You will give all this, but neither your minds nor your souls.’

      That course would have been a logical application of Gandhi’s doctrine. To the British, and above all to their indomitable leader, his words rang out like the gibberish of an irrelevant old fool.

      Gandhi could not even convince the leadership of his own Congress movement that pacifism was the right course. Most of his followers were dedicated anti-fascists and anxious to take India into the fight if they could do so as free men. For the first time, but not the last, Gandhi and his disciples parted company.

      It took Churchill to drive them back together. His position on India remained as rigid as ever. He refused to consider any of the compromises which would have allowed India’s Nationalists to join the war effort. When he held his first meeting with Franklin Roosevelt to frame the Atlantic Charter, he made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, India was not to fall under its generous provisions. His American partner was stunned by his sensitivity on the subject. Soon, another of his phrases was being repeated in the Allies’ councils: ‘I have not become His Majesty’s First Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.’

      It was not until March 1942, when the Japanese Imperial Army was at India’s gates, that Churchill, under pressure from Washington and his own colleagues, sent a serious offer to New Delhi. To deliver it, he selected a particularly sympathetic courier, Sir Stafford Cripps, a vegetarian and austere Socialist with long, friendly relations with the Congress leadership. Considering its author, the proposal Cripps carried was remarkably generous. It offered the Indians the most Britain could be expected to concede in the midst of a war, a solemn pledge of what amounted to independence, dominion status, after Japan’s defeat. It contained, however, in recognition of the Moslem League’s increasingly strident calls for an Islamic state, a provision which could eventually accommodate their demand.

      Forty-eight hours after his arrival, Gandhi told Cripps that the offer was unacceptable because it contemplated the ‘perpetual vivisection of India’. Besides, the British were offering India future independence to secure immediate Indian cooperation in the violent defence of Indian soil. That was not an agreement calculated to sway the apostle of non-violence. If the Japanese were to be resisted, it could be only in one way for Gandhi, non-violently.

      The Mahatma cherished a secret dream. He was not opposed to the spilling of oceans of blood, provided it was done in a just cause. He saw rank on serried rank of disciplined, non-violent Indians marching out to die on the bayonets of the Japanese until that catalytic instant when the enormity of their sacrifice would overwhelm their foes, vindicate non-violence, and change the course of human history.

Churchill’s plan, he decreed, was ‘a post-dated cheque on a failing bank’. If he had nothing else to offer, Gandhi told Cripps, he might as well ‘take the next plane home’.^*

      The day after Cripps’ departure was a Monday, Gandhi’s ‘day of silence’, a ritual he had observed once a week for years to conserve his vocal chords and promote a sense of harmony in his being. Unhappily for Gandhi and for India, his ‘Inner Voice’, the voice of his conscience, was not observing a similar vigil. It spoke to Gandhi and the advice it uttered proved disastrous.

      It came down to two words, the two words which became the slogan of Gandhi’s next struggle: ‘Quit India’. The British should drop the reins of power in India immediately, Gandhi proposed. Let them ‘leave India to God or even anarchy’. If the British left India to its fate the Japanese would have no reason to attack.

      Just after midnight, 8 August 1942, in a stifling hot Bombay meeting hall, Gandhi, naked to the waist, sent out a call to arms to his followers of the All India Congress Committee. His voice was quiet and composed, but the words he uttered carried a passion and fervour uncharacteristic of Gandhi.

      ‘I want freedom immediately,’ he said, ‘this very night, before dawn if it can be had.’

      ‘Here is a mantra, a short one I give you,’ he told his followers. ‘“Do or die”. We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.’

      What Gandhi got before dawn was not freedom but another invitation to a British jail. In a carefully prepared move the British swept Gandhi and the entire Congress leadership into prison for the duration of the war. A brief outburst of violence followed their arrest but, within three weeks, the British had the situation under control.

      Gandhi’s tactic played into the hands of the Moslem League by sweeping his Congress leaders from the political scene at a crucial moment. While they languished in jail, their Moslem rivals supported Britain’s war effort, earning by their attitude a considerable debt of gratitude. Not only had Gandhi’s plan failed to get the English to quit India; it had gone a long way to making sure that, before leaving the country, they would feel compelled to divide it.

      This would be Gandhi’s last sojourn in a British prison. By the time it ended the old man would have spent a total of 2338 days in jail, 249 in South Africa, 2089 in India. Gandhi’s keepers confined him not to the familiar grounds of the Yeravda jail where he had already spent so much time but in the nearby palace of the Aga Khan. Five months after his prison term began, Gandhi announced he was going to undertake a 21-day fast. The reasons behind it were obscure, but the British were in no mood to compromise. Churchill informed New Delhi that, if Gandhi wanted to starve himself to death, he was free to go ahead and do so.

      Midway through the fast, Gandhi began to sink. Unyielding, the British started discreet preparations for his death. Two Brahmin priests were brought to the prison and held in readiness to officiate at the cremation. Under the cover of darkness the sandalwood for his funeral pyre was secretly taken into the palace. Everyone was ready for his death except the 74-year-old Gandhi. He had weighed less than 110 pounds when the fast began. Yet 21 days on a diet of water mixed with salt and an occasional drop of lemon and moosambi juice couldn’t kill his towering spirit. He survived his self-imposed ordeal.

      Another one awaited him, however. The sandalwood that had been destined for his cremation would feed the flames of another funeral pyre, his wife’s. On 22 February 1944 the woman he had married as an illiterate, thirteen-year-old child died, her head resting in Gandhi’s lap. Gandhi had not been prepared to disavow a principle to save her life. He believed in nature cures and he also believed that to administer medicine by hypodermic needle performed a violent action upon the human body. Aware that his wife was dying from acute bronchitis, the British flew a supply of rare and precious penicillin to the prison. But at the last minute, when Gandhi learned the drug which could have saved his dying wife would have to be administered intravenously, he had refused her doctors permission to give it to her.

      After her death, Gandhi’s own health failed rapidly. He contracted malaria, hookworm and amoebic dysentery. In his weakened and depressed state, it was clear he would not survive long. A reluctant Churchill was finally prevailed on to release him so he would not die in a British jail.

      He was not going to die in a British India, either. Ensconced in a hut on the beachfront estate of a wealthy supporter near Bombay, Gandhi slowly recovered his health. As he did so, Churchill, who had not bothered to reply to his Viceroy’s urgent cables on India’s growing famine, sent New Delhi a petulant cable. Why, he asked, hadn’t Gandhi died yet?

      A few days later, Gandhi’s host entered his hut to find one of the Mahatma’s followers standing on his head, another in transcendental meditation, a third asleep on the floor and the Mahatma himself on his open toilet staring raptly into space.

      He burst into gales of laughter. Why, Gandhi asked as he emerged from his toilet, was he laughing?

      ‘Ah Bapu,’ laughed his host, ‘look at this room: one man standing on his head, another meditating, a third sleeping, you on your toilet – and these are the people who are going to make India free!’

       Northolt Airport, 20 March 1947

      The aircraft waited in the early morning light on the runway of Northolt airport where, two and