In 30 Seconds
Story
On 5 March 1931, in the Viceroy’s new palace at Delhi, the representative of the King Emperor and a prisoner released five weeks earlier signed a settlement as between two powers, and the signature mattered more than the clauses. The Gandhi Irwin Pact, sealing eight meetings and some twenty four hours of face to face negotiation between the Viceroy and the leader of the civil disobedience his government had spent a year suppressing, gave the movement modest terms and an immodest precedent, the empire treating with the rebellion as an equal, and the scandal this caused in England, condensed in Churchill’s famous snarl, measured precisely what had changed.
The road to the palace ran through the failure of force and the requirements of the conference table. The first Round Table Conference had met in London through the winter without the Congress and had thereby settled nothing, its princes and minority delegations unable to deliver the one signature the new constitution needed, and Irwin, a churchman by temperament persuaded that settlement with Gandhi was both necessary and possible, released the Working Committee unconditionally in January 1931 to make the conversation, urged on by the moderates Sapru and Jayakar who shuttled between the camps. The negotiations themselves fascinated the world’s press, the Mahatma walking each day from Dr Ansari’s house to the palace gates, the two tall ascetics, as observers noted of the pair, arguing empire and conscience over Irwin’s tea and Gandhi’s goat’s milk, and the exchange the newspapers loved, Gandhi taking illegal salt from a fold of his shawl to stir, with a smile, into his cup.
The terms, published as the Delhi Pact, traded suspension for concession. The Congress would suspend civil disobedience and attend the second Round Table Conference to discuss a constitution whose stated ambit, federation, Indian responsibility, reservations and safeguards in India’s interest, the pact recorded. The government would release the movement’s prisoners not convicted of violence, withdraw the repressive ordinances, return fines and unsold confiscated lands, and permit peaceful picketing and, the clause dearest to Gandhi, the free collection and manufacture of salt by the people of the coast for their own use, the tax and monopoly otherwise standing. What Irwin refused told the pact’s limits, no inquiry into police conduct, no commutation for Bhagat Singh, whose gallows three weeks later hung its shadow over the settlement’s ratification, and nothing on the political prisoners of the violent movements, the detenus of Bengal.
Each side’s rearguard condemned it. In England the Conservative right erupted at the spectacle Churchill fixed in the language of the age’s prejudice, professing nausea at the sight of a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor, a sentence India received, then and since, as the pact’s finest testimonial. In India the young condemned the equal terms as unequal clauses, Bhagat Singh’s shadow upon the Karachi Congress, the socialists asking what a year’s suffering had purchased if the salt tax itself survived, and historians have debated ever since whether Gandhi, with the government’s own files recording its strain, settled too cheaply. His answer, at Karachi and after, was the satyagrahi’s constant one, that a settlement honourably offered must be honourably tried, that the movement’s power was not spent by truce but banked, and that what the pact conceded in clauses it captured in status, the Congress certified, by the empire’s own signature, as India’s negotiating voice.
The truce lived less than a year. Gandhi went to London in the autumn as the Congress’s sole plenipotentiary, the conference foundered on the communal rocks the next chapter charts, and he returned in December to a new Viceroy, Willingdon, who had resolved that the equal terms would never recur, the ordinances waiting, the Working Committee in jail within days, the movement resumed under repression harsher than before. The pact’s clauses were thus mostly ash by 1932. Its precedent proved fireproof, for the image of the palace steps, the prisoner received as a power, was the transfer of 1947 in rehearsal, and both signatories, the record suggests, knew as much at the table.
