That compulsion would make Rajendra Prasad go with Gandhi to the poorest and most remote villages in Champaran. He became Gandhi’s first intimate disciple outside his home turf. Three decades later Prasad would become India’s first president.
Meanwhile local British authorities knew about Gandhi’s arrival almost the moment he got off the train. They were deeply alarmed. “His mere presence in Champaran is most undesirable,” the district inspector general’s special assistant wrote to the provincial police superintendent. Even in remotest Bihar, Raj officials knew of Gandhi’s reputation as an agitator, especially on the issue of Indian indentured labor. District Commissioner Morshead had a short interview with Gandhi and concluded that he was keener on stirring up trouble rather than on a serious inquiry. Morshead decided he had to forestall any violence.
On Sunday, April 15, Gandhi and another lawyer named Prasad (not Rajendra but the man he had met at the Lucknow Congress) set off by elephant for the first village in the district, called Chandrahia. Just as they arrived in the dusty, deserted street, a police officer rode up on a bicycle. It was a scene worthy of E. M. Forster, or Paul Scott, with the turbaned khaki-clad officer on his flimsy bicycle standing in the path of the great creaking animal, with its weary and bemused passengers.
They were to stop at once, the policeman said. The district magistrate, W. B. Haycock, had an expulsion order waiting for Gandhi, under the Defense of India Rules. Gandhi returned to Motihari and quietly read the letter. He then informed Haycock that he would disobey the expulsion order and sent a similar letter to the viceroy’s private secretary.
Gandhi waited all day Monday to be arrested, even as the news of what was happening spread with torrential speed through neighboring villages. Finally Haycock ordered him to appear on Tuesday at the district court to explain why he should not be put in jail. Gandhi’s whole plan, of course, was to be put in jail, and he had prepared a statement to that effect.
On Tuesday morning more than two thousand peasants pressed to get into the courtroom. The glass panels of the door broke under the strain, and Haycock had to ask Gandhi to control his followers, which Gandhi gladly did. Gandhi then read his statement, concluding, “I have disregarded the order served upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”
Haycock was in a quandary. As Gandhi said later, “He seemed to be a good man, anxious to do justice.” Like any British judge in India, he saw his job as defending law and order in his district. Willful disobedience of the law (specifically Section 144 of the Crown Penal Code) called for punishment. But the unexpected and unprecedented outpouring of peasant support for the strange little man standing before his bench unnerved him. Haycock convinced himself more violence would result if he arrested Gandhi than if he left him at liberty. Therefore he announced he would suspend any judgment and adjourned the court. He privately asked Gandhi to put off his village visits (surprisingly, Gandhi agreed), and that night Haycock sent a long telegram to the lieutenant-governor asking, in effect, what he should do.
It was a watershed moment in Gandhi’s dealings with British officialdom. In fact, it set the classic pattern of the Raj’s response to Gandhi’s satyagraha tactics, then and later: first the insistence that the law be obeyed; then surprise at the Mahatma’s calm defiance; then confusion at the show of sympathy and support from ordinary Indians; and finally hesitation and inaction and a sheepish letter to superiors asking for further instructions.
So Haycock became the first, but by no means the last, British official in India to be reduced to bumbling helplessness by Gandhi’s unorthodox approach. The response to his letter revealed the pressures from the other side. The lieutenant-governor sharply disapproved of the commissioner’s action and ordered Haycock to withdraw the expulsion order. Gandhi would be allowed to continue his inquiry, making visits to villages in Champaran. “Mr. Gandhi is doubtless eager to adopt the role of martyr which as you know he has already played in South Africa,” the official wrote, and nothing “would suit him better than to undergo a term of imprisonment.” The Indian media were already noticing the events in Champaran and were hailing Gandhi as a hero. Better to back down, the lieutenant-governor suggested, than to give Gandhi the publicity he wanted—and possibly set off an even more widespread reaction. Relieved at not having to enforce the law, Haycock dropped the case.
Gandhi had won. Even more important, Champaran’s peasantry felt they had won, too. As Gandhi resumed his village visits and continued them for the rest of April and May, men, women, and children poured out of their homes. They followed him everywhere, chanting his name, throwing flowers in his path, and—the most striking part of darshan, or sighting of a holy man—gathering the dust from his feet on their fingers. When he finally reached Bettiah and Raj Shukla’s home village, the people unhitched the horses from Gandhi’s carriage and pulled it through the streets. A local British official watched. The English might think Gandhi a fanatic or even a revolutionary, he noted, but to the peasants “he is their liberator, and they credit him with extraordinary powers.”
~~Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age -by- Arthur Herman
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