Gandhi Before India (38 page)

In the last week of November, the Governor, Lord Selborne, had a further meeting with whites seeking to mediate between the State and the Indians. A Congregational minister named Charles Phillips told Lord Selborne that ‘the coloured people and the educated natives are watching this struggle closely, and that for the first time they recognise that they have an instrument in their hands – that is, combination and passive resistance – of which they had not previously thought.’ Selborne himself believed that Africans were incapable of ‘combination and organized action’. He worried however that the ‘manufacture of martyrs’ by the jailing of Indian protesters had undermined the credibility of the Government.

Selborne now wrote to Smuts asking whether it was not possible to ‘build a bridge’ to the Indians. Perhaps the General could allow them to register voluntarily. Smuts wrote back saying that while he was prepared to meet Gandhi and company in a ‘friendly spirit’, among his colleagues there was a ‘strong popular feeling’ against any concessions to them.
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Writing to a Cape politician, Smuts admitted that ‘the Indian question is a very difficult one here – under the influence of their leaders they have made a very successful resistance to the finger-print registration.’ If the protests continued, the Government would be ‘forced to resort to drastic steps such as the deportation of the leaders’.
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With the Government unyielding, the protests continued. On Sunday, 1 December, another large meeting was held in Fordsburg Mosque. All those present, wrote a reporter on the spot, ‘regarded themselves, Hindoos and Mohammedans alike, as attending a religious ceremony’. They ‘were all prepared to go to gaol, and even to close their stores’.
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Watching these developments from Phoenix was John Cordes. Reading Gandhi in
Indian Opinion
, and reading about the struggle in the white-owned press, prompted him to write a letter of admiration and support. The letter is lost, but we can guess its contents from the answer it elicited. ‘You talk of my generalship,’ wrote Gandhi to Cordes:

This shows how little you understand me. I do not think that there is any generalship in me at all, but, if my action has been hitherto serviceable to the Indian cause, it simply means to that extent a triumph of truth. My faith in God and truth (two convertible terms) is almost invincible, and if appropriate things come from my pen on appropriate occasions, you may take it that I am not to be credited.
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The resolve of the Indians had, by now, impressed some Europeans less in thrall to Gandhi himself. In late November, an article in praise of the resisters appeared in a newspaper published in the Afrikaner stronghold of Bloemfontein. Compulsory registration, it said, had led to ‘suffering to the Asiatic community of a kind and to an extent which we are certain the governing race never intended. It is a martyrdom that the Asiatics are now undergoing. No other word would be exact, because their suffering is voluntary, and marks their refusal to comply with what they consider a degrading law.’ The paper urged a ‘reasonable compromise’ on both parties, namely, a return to the offer of voluntary registration that the British Indians had originally made. To continue enforcing the Ordinance as it stood would ‘drive the self-respecting class of Indians out of the colony [through deportation] and retain only the moral rabble [i.e. those who register] within it. A law which … expels the best and keeps the worst stands self-condemned.’
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Two weeks later, the
Transvaal Leader
printed a long letter from David Pollock. As of 1 December, noted Pollock, 95 per cent of all Indians in the colony were unregistered, and hence liable to arrest and possible deportation. This was now ‘not merely a question of local economics’, but ‘a matter of grave Imperial concern’. For, said this open-minded white, ‘we cannot send thousands of agitators (and
agitators for conscience sake, remember!) to complicate still further the problem with which the Government of India is struggling’ (namely, the growing movement against colonial rule within India itself). Pollock urged the Government to ‘scorn the petty role of persecution’, repeal the Asiatic Act, and issue certificates of domicile to all lawfully resident Asiatics. It was time, he said, to recognize that a mistake had been made, and to set it right.
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On 9 December, Gandhi appeared in court in the town of Volksrust, close to the Transvaal–Natal border. He was defending thirty-seven Indians who had deliberately entered the province without valid permits. Of the protesters only four were Muslims, the others being Hindu. This revealed an interesting lopsidedness, which may have had several causes – among them the example of the Hindu priest Ram Sundar and the charisma of the Hindu lawyer Gandhi; and, on the other side, the reluctance of many Muslim merchants actually to test their commitment by courting arrest.

On 13 December, Ram Sundar Pandit was discharged from prison. He was ‘enthusiastically received with garlands and bouquets’. As advised by Gandhi, the priest now wrote to General Smuts that although he had been ordered to leave the colony in seven days, he would stay on to serve his flock in Germiston.
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Two weeks later, arrest warrants were issued against twenty-three resisters in the Transvaal. They included Gandhi, Thambi Naidoo (described as ‘chief picket, Johannesburg’), the Chinese leader Leung Quinn and Ram Sundar Pandit. Five Muslim merchants also came forward to court arrest. However, the most surprising name was that of C. M. Pillay. Sometime during the course of the year and the struggle, this Tamil rival of Gandhi had become reconciled to his leadership.

Gandhi heard of the arrest warrant against him on the morning of 27 December. The Police Commissioner told him that he was at liberty for twenty-four hours, but had to appear in court the next day. The same evening, a meeting was hurriedly convened in the Hamidia Hall. Here Gandhi termed the legislation under which he faced imprisonment as ‘the savage Act of a … Government that dares to call itself Christian. If Jesus Christ came to Johannesburg and Pretoria and examined the hearts of General Botha, General Smuts and the others, he thought he
would notice something strange, something quite strange to the Christian spirit.’
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Back in 1894, on visiting a Trappist monastery in highland Natal, Gandhi had said ‘a religion appears divine or devilish, according as its professors choose to make it appear.’ In later years he had sometimes lectured Natal colonists on how their acts or actions departed from the spirit of Christ. His remarks here were in character: Gandhi asked Hindus and Muslims as much as Christians to recall the nobler values and practices of their own moral or religious tradition. Had they read these remarks, however, Generals Botha and Smuts would scarcely have appreciated them. Not even the most broad-minded Afrikaner would abide being preached to by a Hindu lawyer with a brown skin.

The case of M. K. Gandhi versus the Transvaal Government came up for hearing in Johannesburg’s B Court on the morning of 28 December 1907. Many friends of the accused were present, mostly Indians but also Henry Polak. When Gandhi asked to make a statement, the judge, H. H. Jordan, refused permission, saying, ‘I don’t want any political speeches made.’ Gandhi said he ‘simply asked the indulgence of the Court for five minutes’. The judge answered, ‘I don’t think this is a case in which the Court should grant any indulgence. You have defied the law.’ He then gave his order, which was that if Gandhi did not leave the colony within seven days, he would be sentenced to a month in prison for not possessing a valid permit. If he stayed on in the colony for more than a week after
that
sentence expired, he would be sentenced next time to six months in prison. The newspaper report on the case continues:

Mr Gandhi, interrupting the Magistrate, asked him to make the order for 48 hours. If they could get it shorter even than that, they would be more satisfied.

Mr jordan: If that is the case, I should be the last person in the world to disappoint you. Leave the Colony within 48 hours is my order.

Immediately after he was sentenced, Gandhi defended the others accused of violating the law. C. M. Pillay, asked why he did not register, said he believed ‘that any self-respecting man would not comply with the provisions of the Act, as it simply places our liberty in the hands of the Registrar of Asiatics who, in my humble opinion, is not [a] fit and
proper person to hold this post’. This irritated the magistrate, who said ‘he would not listen to nonsense of this kind. He thought it was a piece of gross impertinence for a person to come there and abuse an official of the Government in that way.’ Gandhi agreed that the remarks were improper, and then asked Pillay: ‘Do you object to the officer or the Act?’ to get the answer he wanted, namely, ‘Mainly to the Act.’

Thambi Naidoo, for his part, told the judge that he ‘objected to registration as it placed him lower than a Kaffir, and it was against his religion.’ Then it was the turn of two Chinese resisters to speak. One, a Mr Easton, said ‘he was not permitted by his religion – Taoism – to give any impressions’; the other, Leung Quinn, said ‘he did not take out a permit because it was a law disgraceful to himself and his nation.’

The judge, in sentencing the accused to prison, said they

had deliberately defied the Government and had taken up a very serious position – one which he was sorry to see any resident in this country adopt. It had been a mistake, he had no doubt, which had been copied from the [Nonconformist] passive resisters at Home in connection with the Education Bill, and that was an attitude which had never appealed to him in any shape at all. The laws of a country must be complied with by the people resident there, and if they could not do that, there was but one alternative – such people must go somewhere else.
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One of the accused had in fact already decided to go somewhere else. On the 27th, Ram Sundar Pandit was present in Gandhi’s chambers when the Police Commissioner’s notice came. He promised to attend court the next day, but when he reached Germiston that evening, he ‘called one or two of his disciples and told them that he was thinking of running away, since he could not face a second term of imprisonment. His disciples expostulated with him but he was overcome with fear.’ On the morning of the 28th, the Pandit picked up his belongings and took a train to Natal. Gandhi dryly commented that Ram Sundar’s fall

was as sudden as his rise. I have written at great length about him in this paper. All this has turned out to be mistaken. The poems about him have been meaningless. A bad coin will always remain a bad coin. This is a struggle such as will expose everyone in his true colours. So far as the community is concerned, Ram Sundar is dead henceforth. We are to forget him.
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Meanwhile, as news of Gandhi’s own conviction spread, messages of support began pouring into the offices of the British Indian Association. They came from (among other places) Durban, Pietermaritzburg, the Cape, Bombay and Madras. ‘Mr Gandhi will not leave [the Transvaal]’, ran one news headline in Natal, continuing, ‘Widespread Sympathy’.
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The day that Gandhi was tried and convicted, the year’s last issue of
Indian Opinion
was printed in Durban. Copies reached Johannesburg by the evening. Readers would have noticed a call urging them to send in Indian equivalents for the terms ‘passive resistance’ and ‘civil disobedience’, which had been coined by British Nonconformists and an American writer respectively. Gandhi wanted indigenous replacements, since ‘to respect our own language, speak it well and use in it as few foreign words as possible – this is also a part of patriotism.’ The prize for the best entry was ten copies of a booklet on the Asiatic Act, which the winner could circulate among his friends.

On 28 December Gandhi had been ordered to leave the colony within forty-eight hours. A week passed, but the summons did not come, perhaps because magistrates and policemen alike were occupied with the New Year’s festivities. Telegrams protesting the charges were flying thick and fast between the three continents with which the accused had connections. The British Indian Association in Transvaal wired the South Africa British India Committee in London that the impending arrest of Gandhi and his colleagues placed an ‘undue strain [on] Indian loyalty’. The Government of India in Calcutta wired the Imperial Government in London that a meeting of more than 7,000 Gujaratis in Surat had asked the Viceroy to intervene in having the charges against Gandhi and company dropped, and the Act itself withdrawn.
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On New Year’s Day, 1908, a Baptist minister named Joseph J. Doke walked into Gandhi’s chambers at the corner of Anderson and Rissik Street. From a family of Cornish tin miners, Doke had followed his father into the ministry. As a young man he travelled extensively through India, concluding from his experiences of Banaras, Calcutta and Bombay, and Hindus, Muslims and Parsis, that the land was a ‘perfect mixture of opposites: I don’t understand it.’ In later years, he served as a minister in Devon and in New Zealand, before moving to a church in Grahamstown, in the Cape, in 1903. In November 1907, he took charge of the Central Baptist Church in Johannesburg.

Gandhi’s campaign appealed to Doke because of its obvious resonances with the passive resistance of his fellow Baptists against the Education Act in England, which discriminated against children (and families) who were not of the dominant Anglican faith. That this Hindu lawyer regularly and approvingly quoted Christ was an added point in his favour. Doke, writes his biographer, was distressed by the fact that ‘the leaders of Christian thought and energy on the Rand were either apathetic or antagonistic’ to Indian aspirations. He, on the other hand, could not remain ‘untouched and indifferent to the cry of a people where a question of conscience, even religion, was involved’.
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