How Gandhi became a threat to everything Churchill believed inWinston churchill, arguably Britain’s greatest prime minister, spent many years in India, vegetating in Bangalore in between rushing around the subcontinent and outside in pursuit of battle glory. It is, therefore, amazing how little interest he showed in India itself during his stay. This myopia was probably the genesis of his battle to keep the empire intact against that gentle intruder, M.K. Gandhi, the neophyte lawyer who picked up many fads, aside from law, during his stay in London, and saw enough of the heart of the imperial beast to know that he wanted his country to have nothing to do with it.

Given that the standoff between Churchill and Gandhi is one of the set pieces of the Indian freedom movement, it is with a start that one realises that American historian Arthur Herman is the first to study this relationship (if one can call it that) in depth. A dual biography, Gandhi & Churchill traces the two contemporaries’ rise through life to immortality, focusing on their single meeting in 1906 to their almost direct clash from the 1930s onwards.

Why did Churchill so hate (his own word) Gandhi? Churchill, of course, once famously said that he had not become the head of the British government in order to liquidate the British Empire. Herman confirms this was definitely the cause, but it had deeper roots. Reading Edward Gibbon’s account of the fall of the Roman Empire, Churchill was deeply affected by Gibbon’s contention that Christianity and the emergence of the monks contributed to the collapse. He feared that Gandhi, with his heavy reliance on spiritual imagery would do the same to the British Empire. As Herman notes, “No wonder Churchill’s favorite epithet for Gandhi would be ‘fakir’ and ‘fanatic’. Gandhi was more than just a threat to British rule in India. He became a threat to everything that Churchill believed in, and in the end Churchill would fight him with everything he had.”

The wartime leader fighting against Hitler even gleefully noted in official papers the possibility of Gandhi dying in prison, his funeral arrangements, and then ruefully remarked that Gandhi failed to oblige the British! When Gandhi was killed, Churchill was probably the one statesman who did not to condole it. But contrast this with his amazing remarks to Gandhi’s English disciple Mirabehn, when he said he admired Gandhi for his efforts for moral and social uplift. And to thwart Gandhi, Churchill secretly gave all support to Gandhi’s other implacable enemy, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, as his official biographer has revealed.

And Gandhi? Aside from a letter he wrote to Churchill in 1944, which the prime minister never received, there is only one recorded direct comment on him. In 1935, Gandhi told G.D. Birla: “I have got a good recollection of Mr Churchill when he was in the colonial office, and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.” He had earlier tried to meet Churchill in 1931, but had been refused.

Churchill’s virtues were many and his greatness is undoubted. But in the case of India, all his negative traits were given free play, and magnified to the point that his reputation has been greatly marred, and ability questioned. Gandhi’s personal response to Churchill was no different from his reactions to others — respectful and almost affectionate, totally without rancour. In short, quintessentially Gandhi.