CHAPTER 18
WITH Singapore and Burma lost, the storm was breaking on the edge of India. There the consequence was not at first military action, but an intensification of the political crisis which had lasted thirty years and which was compendiously called the freedom struggle.
A great excitement swept India. The British in India had the mortification of being made to realize that the military crisis did not signify for most people there a time of mortal danger, but was a time of opportunity and interesting uncertainty. The news of the rout in South-East Asia had the inevitable effect. Britain imposed only a very slight censorship on news, and it was in consequence possible to form a clear idea of Japan’s military prowess. Under the influence of this situation the Indian political situation changed rapidly. The war, and its consequences, was suddenly at its gates: India was no longer to be the distant spectator of events: they were at hand.
By the time of the outbreak of war, it had been obvious, to all who chose to look, that India was nearing a period of deep change. Delhi, its capital, at this time was a place of unusual interest. The last days of the old order were bathed in a rather unreal light. They were touched by a sunset. This revealed possibilities and beauties of the scene which had never been noticed before. The British, who were about to put up the shutters on their period in India, suddenly discovered, as they were on the edge of terminating their role, the enchantment of the country, which most of them had ignored as long as they were in secure occupation. India was in the condition typical of countries which are approaching revolution. Only the first rustling of the storm could be heard. It was not yet disturbing because the politics were still interesting and had not yet become lethal.
New Delhi, built chiefly by Lutyens, was then at the height of its brief but real beauty. It had matured and had been sufficiently lived in to have the atmosphere of a city rather than a camp, as it had been only a short time before; but it had not been sufficiently encroached upon by planless building to be spoilt as it is today. Unlike most capitals which have played a part in this chronicle, it had remained outwardly at peace. It was full of talk, and uniforms, and war; but it remained unravaged. The war had brought a flood of new men to the city for the first time, especially young Englishmen of the citizen army of the war years: these were often intelligently attentive to the qualities of Indian life, and they refused to be bound by the restrictions of the colour bar – that fatal barrier which had done so much harm to race relations in the past, and also cut across the natural enjoyment of the country by British visitors. Though there was more political controversy than ever, there was a distinct thaw in the relations of the British and Indians. The old barriers were falling one by one. Life in the capital, though not in the backwoods, became more normal, relations more relaxed. Even while they were engaged in hot dispute, Indians and British alike began insensibly to sun themselves in the climate of emotional debate, which they enjoyed as the most engaging pastime in the world.
In the political arena war speeded up the struggle of Indian Nationalism against the British. But the war had the effect of inflaming even more intensely the divisions within Indian Nationalism: between Hindu Nationalism, which stood for a united India, and Moslem Nationalism, which envisaged a British withdrawal from the continent leaving the predominantly Moslem part to become the independent state of Pakistan. The Hindu-Moslem crisis was the heart of political India. In the critical war years, politics turned chiefly on this, and it was the key to almost everything which happened.
The issue between Hindus and Moslems was relatively simple. Over a part of North India, the Moslems, chiefly as a result of past invasions, were in a majority. This was limited to certain regions: over the country as a whole, the Hindus were in a substantial majority. They were, moreover, the more advanced community in political activity.
When Hindus raised the cry of Indian independence, they had assumed that the Moslems would support them, as following the most advanced political leadership, and, at the start of the national movement, most Moslems had done so. At this period, those Moslems who were politically interested, had been attracted by the parties, which, though predominantly Hindu, claimed to be national, transcending both Hindu and Moslem. But, as politics set light to ever-widening circles of people, the Moslems began to draw apart, and to question whether they would have any benefit from independence, if it were won by Hindus.
The issues thus opened up were plain. Could Hindus and Moslems, by a compact between them, still agree on a common plan? Or, when independence came, should there not more properly be an independence for a Hindu India, and another independence, involving the creation of a new state, for a Moslem India? It took time for this conception to spread among the Moslems, but when it had taken root, it was plain that from the Moslems would come a fierce demand for secession. The Congress claims for independence, which the Moslems represented as a plan for transferring British sovereignty over India into Hindu sovereignty over Moslems, lost its shine and became a matter for controversy.
The Moslem community was at first widely regarded as more backward than the Hindus. At first the Moslems had not taken the same advantage as the Hindus of the opportunities of adopting modern-style institutions. This was partly because the collapse of the Moghul power at the time when the British first arrived in India was a psychological blow from which it took the Moslem upper classes a long time to recover. Initially they had stood stubbornly aside from innovations and educational opportunities offered by the new Raj which, they felt, had displaced them. There was also the fact that Islam half a century ago was opposed to modern education: Moslems were more shackled by their faith at this time than were Hindus. The simplicity of the Moslem outlook commended itself to some temperaments among the British, who were mystified and repelled by the more subtle and exotic Hindu character: but some people sensed in the Moslem mind a greater confusion in the response to the modern world than was to be found among Hindus. The Moslem who fell back on Moslem traditions for guidance in the maze of the modern world often found himself afraid. The Islamic institutions were inadequate; they could not be brought up to date. Moslems tended to live in a world of the past, and, being called on to live in the present, were left with ways uncharted and with reactions for which there was no precedent. The Moslem response to the new life was often unpredictable, unreasonable, and, too often, violent.
The question turned on whether the Moslems were right in declaring themselves to be a separate nation from the Hindus, or whether both were fundamentally Indian, divided only by religion. Both Hindus and Moslems had shared a common Indian state for many centuries: at times the Hindus were dominant, at times the Moslems. Was religion alone sufficient to turn them into irreconcilables?
The Moslems argued that it was emphatically so. No common life for the two peoples was really possible; to hold them together was too artificial. Each community, though they had been joined under foreign rule, lived in isolation from the other. Each had a separate law, its own customs, wore its own clothes, had its own literature, preserved its own way of eating. Sometimes, after prolonged periods of ordered government, they would somewhat unbend and lower their guard. The natural affinities of neighbourliness would prevail to a limited degree over the divisiveness of religion. The common language would inevitably bear some influence in mingling the two peoples. But of a genuine merger of the two societies, there was no sign. Cases of intermarriage between the two communities were very rare, and free intermarriage is the best sign of the fraternization of communities.
The Hindus replied that this was a gross misrepresentation of the position. They could argue that in previous generations the Hindus and the Moslems had felt no such separateness, and automatically regarded themselves as forming a single people. Most Hindus were willing to concede that in recent years the relationship of Hindus and Moslems had often been bad, but this they attributed to the deliberate attempt of the Government to play off one community against the other. To divide and rule was, they held, the first principle of the administration. They argued too that the difference between the communities was largely one of economics, and that, if the economic processes were given free play, these would be enough to break down the communal differences and mould the peoples into a single great society.
As the political situation became more fluid, with signs from the British that they would contemplate withdrawal, there was deadlock between the two sides. The arguments of both appeared to be conclusive. Attempts at mediation proved always in vain.
The coming of wartime tension gave a great impetus to the deterioration. The Moslems, in the fevered atmosphere of the times, set themselves, under the lead of their principal Nationalist Party, the Moslem League, to mobilize their forces. In all the provinces of North India they agitated formidably, concentrating on drawing back all the Moslems who still supported the Nationalist Congress Party. With an ever-increasing show of force, they intimated that they would resort to civil war if any attempt were made to surrender British power to Hindu hands.
The achievements of the Moslem League at this time are due chiefly to a single man, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He had two distinct careers. Before 1930 he was an all-India leader of the Congress. The interest of Indian Nationalism possessed him and the interest of the Moslem community seemed to be reconcilable with the ascendancy of Congress. In other words, he, though personally a Moslem, was very much like Motilal Nehru, the father of Jawaharlal Nehru, who, though a Hindu, assumed that Hindu interests would always be subordinate to Indian nationalism. In the beginning of the thirties, he had retired to England for some years, where he had a flourishing legal practice. During this time he reflected, brooded, thought about his previous career and meditated on the ways that his willingness to subordinate specific Moslem interests to national interests had not been met by a similar disposition in Hindu leaders. He returned to India, broke entirely with the old all-India ideas, and ceased to be in any sense a co-worker with the Congress leaders. Instead he challenged them, and on the whole out-witted and out-manoeuvred them. He denied their right to speak at all for the Moslems; his first major enterprise was to dislodge the Hindus from the foothold they had obtained in the Moslem community. Next he built up the Moslems as a formidable striking force which demanded a state for its expression and existence.
His achievement was to inform it with something like the questing assertive feeling of the Poles when for more than a century they had been deprived of a state. Eventually, in 1919, the Poles succeeded in breaking through, and forced themselves onto the map of Europe. In the same way the Jews, deprived of a state for many centuries, at last completed its reconstitution. Similarly the Indian Moslems had the will, at the time still partly subconscious, to carve out for themselves an independent state in the Indian sub-continent. Jinnah’s contribution to history was to recognize the will in advance of anyone else, and to place himself in its service.
All his successes Jinnah won by the force of his character, by his iron will, and by his clearly marked intellectual superiority. He came to his ascendancy late in life. He had been obscurely born – he was a dentist’s son in Karachi – and had had the handicap that he was hardly a true Moslem at all, but, according to local gossip, was the grandson of a converted Hindu. Gradually he made his career, and owed very little to any help which he received from any quarter. The unemotional singlemindedness of his character did not go with any of the amiable qualities which make a man the darling of the crowd. Nevertheless, his way forward was made in full view of the world. There were no secrets in his career: it could be discussed, analysed, appraised, and judiciously respected.
It was characteristic of the Moslem community that his worldly success won him solid esteem; as much as did Gandhi’s unworldly conduct prevail with the Hindus.
At the beginning of the second chapter of his life history, his phase as leader of the Moslems, he began by taking over the leadership of a weak party, with a very vague ideology, representing every section of a deeply riven society. He hammered it together into an exceedingly effective political instrument, to which he then, relying for persuasion on intellectual power, dictated policy. He was the new force of Islam incarnate. As such he was indisputably one of the great actors of the time in the war years. He was one of the few individual architects of the great changes which were coming about.
With the Japanese at the gates of India the British Government felt that something must be done to rally the country to its own defence. The Labour Party had at this time increasing influence on the policy of the British Government towards India, and they succeeded in persuading the Cabinet that the wisest course was to renew its attempt at conciliating Congress. The principal author of this policy was Sir Stafford Cripps. In the high tide of ‘Appeasement’, this left-wing firebrand had toured armaments factories in England and implored workers to ‘refuse to make armaments; refuse to make war’. Later, in 1940, he had meddled in Anglo-Chinese relations and created a certain amount of mischief through the compound of his appalling reductionism and erratic energies. He was a peculiarly able lawyer, a masterly advocate, and firmly convinced of the benefits of democracy, which, he believed, was a suitable government for any territory, whatever might be its circumstances. He had devoted himself to the study of Indian problems. He was convinced that, if Congress demands were satisfied, it would be ready to take its share in the conduct of the war, and that, by a kind of political miracle, the Indian scene would be transformed.
Cripps was a busybody, mistrusted by Whitehall mandarins as well as by British diplomats and officials overseas. The more conservative influences in London believed that, in spite of the evidently superior quality of his mind, his judgement of reality was less than shrewd. They were convinced that his appreciation of India was wrong. The situation in India could not be transformed by eloquent appeal to Congress leaders; Congress support, they knew, might be bought at a price, but at a price which would worsen the situation, since it would bring about a revolt by the Moslem population, and would cause such chaos in India that it would be useless for the prosecution of the war and would drain off large forces of troops from elsewhere for internal pacification. At the same time Congress, if it were won round, could make no difference to the military circumstances. If Congress were given a free hand in war administration, it would, argued these critics, mismanage it. By its participation it would alienate a large part of India which, as the result of various appeals, was showing wartime zeal. There was a strong likelihood that Congress, having made a deal, would take the first opportunity of leading India out of the war altogether.
In spite of these doubts, Cripps was personally entrusted with the mission to conciliate Congress. The situation for Britain was at the time so bleak, and the Cabinet was so preoccupied with other matters, that his confidence that he could reason with the Indian leaders was contagious, and his offer to go out to see what he could do was welcomed. On 11 March 1942 he arrived and spent three weeks in the country, as a kind of Ambassador from Britain.
Cripps, as the chief motive of his tour, carried with him a specific offer to Congress from the British Cabinet. It proposed as the long-term part of the scheme, that at the end of the war a constituent assembly should draft a constitution for India, and no limitation should be put upon its work. Though it was hoped that India would stay inside the Commonwealth, it would be free to secede from it.
To most people in London, it had seemed that Congress could scarcely have asked for anything more complete or more explicit. Next, as a short-term measure, as something on account, Congress was offered immediate admission to the Indian Central Government, but on terms. The Government would be a diarchy, partly British controlled, partly Indian Nationalist in composition. It would continue to be under the chairmanship of the Viceroy. On its side Congress was to approve the war effort.
Bargaining on these terms had been what Congress had had in mind, when, in advance of the Cripps mission, it let it be known that the Labour Party pressure for a new initiative was welcome to it. But politics had moved a long way since the world had been at peace in 1939. In India they had become purely communal: the conflict between Hindu and Moslem, Congress and the League, had put all else, even the conflict between Nationalist India and the British, in the shade. The Cripps offer, being drafted in part by civil servants in London, had included matter to conciliate the Moslem League as well as Congress. A sense of realism dictated this. It would have been folly to win over the Hindus at the cost of causing inflexible hostility from the Moslems. In the midst of war, the British Government could do nothing which would provoke a civil war in India. Nor could it overlook the fact that a high percentage of the Indian Army was Moslem, and, in event of a Moslem rebellion, would have dissolved in its hands.
This explains why Cripps was equipped with a fatal document that came to be known as the ‘Cripps Offer’. In the eyes of the Hindus, the proposals had the mortal defect that they were conciliatory to the Moslem League demand for Pakistan. The Cripps Offer included a provision that, if the Moslem parts of India declared their firm intention to be separate – by a plebiscite in the areas concerned – they should be permitted to secede and to form their own constituent assembly. This was a permissive clause, not a definite award; what was to be decided in fact was to remain open until the war was over. But though the plan was hedged round with limitations, and was only to be looked on as one among several possibilities, its proposal was a bitter shock to the Indian Nationalists, who had not yet been taught by frustration, disappointed hopes, and blows of fate, to adjust themselves to reality.
This was the point of major controversy. It was the reason why the Hindus felt they had nothing to gain from the offer. They could not bring themselves to complicate negotiations with Britain over what they considered the national demands of India by introducing a solution, if only tentative, of the Moslem problem; the more so because of their suspicion that the problem had been distorted by the British as a device to counter the national movement.
This was the reason for the breakdown of negotiations for long-term settlement. No less completely did Congress reject the short-term offer by which this was accompanied; this was the invitation to join the Central Government at once. Congress could argue, with some reason, that its Ministers, if it had supplied them, would have been installed in a subordinate position in the Central Government, from which they might have been again ejected; and, for this, they were asked, for the first time in history, for a solemn undertaking that, if the Moslems persisted in their demands, Pakistan would be conceded to them. Congress was quite sure that the Moslems would persist if they were encouraged to do so by the attitude taken up by Britain.
The Congress decision was not as unreasonable as it appeared at the time in London. The negotiations were not entirely straightforward. For tactical reasons, Congress preferred that the break with Cripps should come about over the powers which were to be offered to Congress Ministers if India threw in its lot with the war effort. These were to be limited in the Army itself to various matters of administration and supply, which the Government felt it would be safe to delegate; and it was made woundingly clear that in matters of the higher direction of the war, allied strategy and the organization of Intelligence, the Indian leaders would continue to be excluded. Nehru, after an exploratory session with Cripps, said that the offer boiled down to Indian Ministers being given control of the Army stationery and of canteens. In spite of exaggeration, there was some truth in this.
An American attempt to mediate in the negotiations was unsuccessful. The United States had become deeply disturbed at the situation. It saw a real danger that nationalist India would secede from the war, and, for military reasons, greatly feared the loss of Indian territory as a base. It feared also the effects upon its ally, China. Most Americans regarded India as unfathomable, a mysterious land full of magic, strife, heat, filth and teeming multitudes. Paradoxically, few Americans had ever even seen an Indian – or wished any acquaintance with one. They understood neither the complexity of Indian problems, nor the reasons which prompted the policies of the British Government. However much the British Raj excited their imagination, it did so only at a distance. At any closer examination, India – and the British connection with it – seemed to the Americans distasteful in the extreme. The British were kith and kin. The Indians emphatically were not. For others the situation in India was viewed simply as a repetition of the American War of Independence, and naturally their sympathies were strongly on the Indian side. The United States was embarrassed that, in a war which it increasingly advertised as a war for democracy and freedom, it should be tied in alliance with Britain, whose past role in India ran so counter to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. It therefore regarded itself as vitally interested in the outcome of Cripps’s negotiations. But its endeavours to help them on, and to ease out difficulty, did not achieve their purpose.
Yet it was Gandhi who was ultimately responsible for Congress rejecting the British offer. Gandhi was still in effective command of Congress when Cripps came to India. Nominally he had for a long while stood aside from holding office in Congress. But in fact, as Congress adviser, he had the overriding – though never quite uncontested – influence on Congress decisions.
This was understood by the British. Cripps knew that he must convince Gandhi before anyone else. He had long interviews with him. At the end of one of them, it happened that Sardar K. M. Panikkar, an extremely able politician of the Indian princely states, was seen to be going from the sweepers’ colony, where Gandhi was staying, on his way to report to his masters, some of the Indian princes whom the excitement of the times had brought to Delhi. He was asked what view Gandhi took of the Cripps Offer. Actually, Panikkar did not know: his visit had not been directly to Gandhi. But from a knowledge of Gandhi’s mind, he was certain, and he expressed the opinion in an epigram which has the accent of the Mahatma. It was, he said, a post-dated cheque on a failing bank.
Gandhi later repudiated the latter part of the epigram; he said that he in no wise wished to impute failure to Britain in the war, or success to Britain’s enemies. On the other hand, it was clear that his attitude towards the waging of war differed from that of the belligerents. He proposed that resistance to the Japanese on Indian soil should be non-violent. In a letter written to one of his followers in 1942 (quoted by Shri B. R. Nanda in his book on Mahatma Gandhi) he said:
Remember that our attitude is that of complete non-cooperation with the Japanese Army… If the people have not the courage to resist (non-violently) the Japanese unto death and not the courage or the capacity to evacuate the portion invaded by the Japanese, they will do the best they can. One thing they should never do – to yield willing submission to the Japanese.∗
However, Gandhi realized that the British in India, and a large element in Congress, had it been brought to cooperate with the British by ironing-out their political differences, would not employ non-violent tactics in resisting Japan. He had, therefore, no wish to see a compromise between Britain and the Congress which involved the issue of waging war. He was, furthermore, possessed by the idea that if the British left India, Japan would then leave India alone, and it would be spared the fate of Burma and Malaya. Accordingly, his influence was thrown against the Cripps Offer, and, in the circumstances of the time, was strong enough to kill it.
In April, soon after Cripps had failed, Gandhi, by one of the daring simplications of issues which were a part of his strength, began to use the slogan ‘Quit India’. The precipitating cause of his decision was his foreboding of a coming crisis, should the Government take steps to compel the peasantry to adopt a scorched earth policy in the case of an invasion. Gandhi said that it was one thing for the Russians to adopt this policy voluntarily; it was another for a Government to impose it on a confused people, too poor to endure it.
The British protested that, as politically responsible beings, they could not, in the middle of war, walk out of India, without making arrangements for the orderly transfer of British power. The suggestion that they should go seemed self-evidently absurd, and the fact that it was made seemed to the local administration either to reflect on the political sense of the opposition, or to suggest that the demand was made for the purpose of whipping up national feeling, and was not expected to be considered seriously. The British had been willing to promise, in a series of policy statements, which gradually eroded their position, that British power should eventually be wound up. Most of these were sincere. They felt injured when Congress doubted their word. They argued that they must have time: essentially it was impossible to set about the hazardous political experiment in wartime. The British side, although under pressure of the social radicalism which was mounting at home – increasingly liberal in statements and assurances about long-term intentions – remained adamant against immediate radical changes until they judged that the war had been won. The day-today pressure of wartime events at home was too great to permit the liberal forces in the Westminster Parliament to give their undivided attention to events in India. It was upon the constant distraction of the British Government in London that British bureaucrats in India chiefly relied; it saved them from having their hands tied.
Congress, in facing a renewed rebellion, had the experience of its two major collisions with the British to work upon. It had learned much in these. In 1942 Congress was better organized than it had been ten years earlier.
The traditional Congress means of working against the Government was to use the method of ‘open conspiracy’. That it conspired could not be doubted: but it avoided anything in the nature of a secret plot, since by doing so it strengthened its moral force. Politicians who plotted secretly drew on themselves some of the odium that terrorists are never entirely free from, even when the Government, as in India, was unpopular. Congress seldom made any secret of its plans; it carried them out in daylight.
Thus, when Gandhi turned from patient agitation and persuasion to direct action, he openly proclaimed it. Success in what he intended would depend on the willing cooperation of masses of the people. Therefore, after giving his ultimatum in late May, all through June and July he worked up the feeling of the country by explaining in every possible way what Congress, under Gandhi’s direction, meant to do. He hoped, by summoning the people, to induce so many men at all levels to withdraw their support from the Government – while taking care to be non-violent – that the business of carrying on the Government would become impossible, and the British would evacuate. The Army would have a large number of deserters; so would the police; the workers in the towns, by going on strike, would halt the production of war materials; chaos would set in in the civil administration. And all would be done without violence. Gandhi, even at a great crisis, was enough of a lawyer to frame his own statements, and to persuade most of his colleagues to do the same, in such a way as to ensure that this point was clearly made.
Gandhi was waging a war of nerves. The British were bent on giving no provocation. Their interest was to prevent matters going to extremities. Though by the mid-summer, Japan had passed the peak of its war, though the battle of Midway Island was recognized by experts as having been a decisive test of strength, though Japan’s élan was slightly drooping, the British Government had still only a very slight margin of safety to play with. The danger of invasion was still very real, and a Congress rebellion would be found to add to the emergency of the war; it would threaten the Allied use of India, which, geographically, seemed likely at this stage, before subsequent successes of the United States in the Pacific, to play a major part. To contain the outbreak of national feeling, which Gandhi knew he could command, required great coolness and discrimination on the part of the Government in deciding the precise moment for contending it.
The man who had to contend with Gandhi, and who at this stage flared into prominence, was Victor Alexander John Hope, Lord Linlithgow. He had been Viceroy for five years. On the whole he had not had an impressive term of office. He had arrived with the reputation of being an expert on agriculture, having been chairman of a commission which was expected to do something about this flagging but vital Indian industry; but he had totally disappointed the country by taking no initiative. By the time of the war he had shown that he entirely lacked the common touch, the ability to communicate with the masses, and, if he was sympathetic with anybody, it was with the bureaucrats. He may have been unlucky in this. His reports to London did little to inspire civil servants or Ministers, who regarded him as tiresome and a second-rate intellect. Although there were men who affected to find human feeling in him, few if any of the politicians ever established rapport with him. He had neither an evident enjoyment in the discharge of his great office nor a knack of handling the politicians of varying and often irreconcilable opinions who were his necessary acquaintances. He seemed totally to want imagination, and could not fire others with a vision of the importance of what he had to do. He had great industry without a capacity to turn this to account in ways which caught the imagination, considerable public spirit without it being able to gild any of his actions. Politically his main task had been to preside over the constitutional reforms which were meant to convert India into a Federation and to bring the Government of India Act of 1935 into operation; but in this also he failed to achieve anything. The Federation never got off the ground, and it was widely believed that its failure was partly due to Lord Linlithgow’s willingness to let matters drift. He had allowed himself to be weighed down by the Indian realities and concluded, on seeing them at close quarters, that the proposed constitution was not really prudent.
There is no need to see Lord Linlithgow as an essentially fascist type, as was apt to be supposed by some Congressmen. In calmer times he would have been perfectly happy in presiding over a democratic and constitutional India; he was not a permanent adversary of liberalism. But in the conditions of war, he judged it clearly crazy to hand over political responsibility, even in part, to politicians who were untested, and whose statements had aroused a strong suspicion that they were opposed to the war. Lord Linlithgow’s view was that of British common sense at the time. He had the strength of seeing India in the same nineteenth-century light as Churchill, whose stand against the 1935 Government of India Act had been recklessly anachronistic and ill-advised. The majority of Churchill’s Cabinet during the war were not the kind of men to defy their master’s voice on a matter so close to his heart. Linlithgow therefore was given their confidence in taking the steps which he proposed. One needed to be a man of exceptional political vision to see that Indian national feeling might still be enlisted for the war, and that political boldness might still achieve what it set out to do.
Lord Linlithgow’s lack of imagination had allowed the initiative to pass to Gandhi. The Government only prevaricated and played for time; Gandhi promised action. Now Gandhi was about to use his opportunity, to take the steps which many men feared to tread but which their mood would support, and to commit Congress to the greatest gamble of its career. The expectation of action set in strongly among the people, so that Congress, though the organizers of the mood, found themselves finally swept along by it. Linlithgow had cool nerves. That which made him incapable of giving creative leadership and made him dull to the distressed conditions of all around him, served him well in this crisis.
In the first week of August, Gandhi summoned the Working Committee of Congress to Bombay. He made no secret of the fact that his intention was to speak the words which would set in motion a new civil disobedience movement on a grand scale.
Late at night the police pounced and arrested Gandhi and all the Congress leaders. They were transported to carefully arranged and not uncomfortable prisons. Gandhi himself was interned in a requisitioned palace of the Aga Khan. The operation had been carefully planned, and, unlike most actions of the Indian Government at that time, had been kept carefully secret. The success with which it was executed helped to restore the self-respect of the Government.
∗
For the rest of the war, Congress was inactive. Most of its leaders continued to be in prison. The Government, which had been anxious about the extent of their popular support, discovered that this had been exaggerated; but exercised a perhaps understandable prudence in detaining the leaders until Hitler was defeated.
The continuing incarceration of the Congress leaders left the way clear for Moslem agitation. By the time that Congress orators were once again free, they found that the Moslem leaders had organized the Moslem community fairly solidly, and that Congress opposition counted for little. One of the unforeseen consequences of Gandhi’s ‘open revolt’ had been to let in Pakistan.
The British authorities were relieved at the passing of a crisis. But, though they might have been expected to revise their general attitudes in the light of a proven weakness of Congress, they did not do so. Their policy followed very closely the official and unofficial statements of it. This was that time was nearly up for the British in India, and that at the end of the war Britain would do exactly what it had said it would do: make a sincere attempt to set up a Government, or Governments, in India and leave the sub-continent. Most of the politicians in England, even the less enlightened ones, and most civil servants in India, even the more elderly ones, were in agreement about this. For the present India’s war-effort was still needed, and nothing would be done to rock the boat. But as the war went on, the Government gradually ceased to have the feel of certainty and stability, and took on the style and temper of a provisional Government. From London a strong breath of discouragement was blown at anyone who played with other concepts of the future.
Gandhi, the man of peace, who had been obliged by political circumstances to play such a large part in wartime politics, ceased to be a determining figure of the war. Indeed, never again was he to have the personal dictatorship which he had had of the opinion and actions of Congress. His decisions in 1942 marked his passage from supreme authority. After the war, though he had great influence, and though for a time a great deference was paid to him by all who sought to mould events in India, new forces had appeared, and he had to bend before these.
Gandhi’s eclipse for the rest of the war, and the eclipse of Congress, removed from India the feature of its politics which had made India fascinating for so many. In a world given up to the contest for brute power, and, worse still, for military power, the claim of Congress that it was striving for higher things was refreshing. Congress politics were intensely histrionic; drama was the essence of them. They were also steeped in arguments over political and secular morality. It was breathtaking to find Congress, in the middle of the war, calmly demanding on moral grounds concessions which no Government could have made, least of all a Government which possessed a still unbeaten Army; yet it had the authority to compel the rational discussion of its demands. All this was now given up. The politics of India were deflated; they followed more practical, limited, lesser ends; greater vision had been dispersed by contact with reality. Yet never again were Indian affairs to be felt to touch the heart of humanity as they were when their arch prophet was moving around with his strange entourage which recalled, in manners and circumstances, that of St Francis of Assisi and the other compelling figures of the past.
Gandhi’s adversary, Lord Linlithgow, also stalked out of the picture. Immensely tall, gaunt, awkward, he had been out of place in Hindu India, which liked to discuss with passion those ideas which seemed to mean little to Linlithgow. His final actions were not much to his credit. In the summer of 1943 there took place a frightful famine in Bengal. For the first time for thirty-five years this dreaded event had recurred in India. It was an ugly fact that this spectre, to exorcise which had been one of the claims made for British rule, had again appeared. This particular famine was man-made. Throughout the episode there was no actual shortage of food supplies in India. But these were allowed to remain hoarded because the railways, under pressure of wartime operations, had broken down, and because the civil servants, also under wartime pressure, realized too late what was happening. It did not adapt the famine code, which kept the country from starving in normal times, to the changed circumstances of war. It was too much harried by urgent and unfamiliar problems of administration.
In Bengal a great exodus took place from the countryside to the town, in the opposite direction to the population flow of the previous year when the panic set in that India was to be bombed. More and more frightful tales began to circulate of a population driven by hunger to roam until they fell dead from emaciation. The streets of the great modern city of Calcutta were strewn with corpses, and such sights began to appear there of the juxtaposition of extreme wealth and of stark hunger as had before the war been notorious of eastern metropolises such as Shanghai. Another blow had been dealt to the credit of the British Government in Asia.
As reports of what was happening began to come out of Bengal, people expected that the Viceroy would tour the famine area, to bring what help was possible, to be seen communing with the people, and to inquire into what was evidently a failure of administration. To visit the scene of disaster was a tradition of the Viceroy. But, inexplicably, Linlithgow on this occasion departed from tradition. Week after week went by, and he spent the last days of his term of office in Delhi and Simla.
His successor, the new Viceroy, promptly reversed this behaviour. The solid benefit which by his immediate visit he was able to do the administration struck the country as a rebuke to his predecessor. It was evident that more could have been done by energy, imagination and improvisation. Field Marshal Lord Wavell called in the Army to relieve the miseries of the people, and for a period this enjoyed a very real and unusual popularity.
Yet Lord Linlithgow reluctantly though he may be praised, played a great part in guiding Indian affairs so that events took one shape and not another. He was given much latitude by the Home Government. After the failure of Cripps, his judgement prevailed on most matters. He handled the open rebellion of Congress almost under the eyes of the would-be invader. That so few lives were lost, and that India continued belligerent, was due to his calm and to a sense of proper timing that actually belonged to his staff but has been credited to him.