Two years in the political wilderness after the electoral setbacks of 1937 had already transformed the League. Congress rule in many provinces had unwittingly increased Muslim concern, even alarm, about the implications of democratic majoritarian rule in a country so overwhelmingly Hindu. Many Muslims began to see themselves as a political and economic minority, and the League spoke to their insecurities. Jinnah had begun to come to the conclusion that the only effective answer to the Congress’s political strength would be separation—the partition of the country to create an independent state in the Muslim-majority areas of the northwest and east. This demand would be enshrined in the League’s Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940 calling for the creation of Pakistan. Nehru and his fellow Congress leaders were largely oblivious of the change of thinking amongst many League members, manifest in an increasingly populist political strategy (it was only in 1939, for instance, that Jinnah began to learn Urdu and to don the ‘Muslim’ achkan for official photographs, actions reminiscent of that old saw from the French tumult of 1848: ‘I am their leader I must follow them’).
In October 1939, Jinnah persuaded Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, to enlist the League as an interlocutor equal to the Congress and as the sole representative of India’s Muslims, a position to which its electoral results did not yet entitle it. The viceroy, anxious to prevent Congress–League unity on the war issue, consented. The League’s policy, he observed, was now the most important obstacle to any talk of Indian independence, and therefore needed to be encouraged. That November Jinnah was invited, for the first time, to broadcast a special message to Muslims on the occasion of the Id festival; an explicit recognition of the League president as the spokesman of the Muslim community. Nehru and the Congress simply saw such claims as illegitimate and premised on bigotry; however, they did not do enough to address the real crisis of confidence brewing in the Muslim community at the prospect of majority rule.
Through much of 1940 the Congress played a waiting game, hoping for British concessions. Some Congressmen were prepared to go even farther and extend direct support to the war effort if there was a national government established in India to support it. But Linlithgow was a large, slow-moving and slow-witted man: his thinking was far removed from even the most basic of Indian aspirations. (He wrote to London in April 1940: ‘I am not too keen to start talking about a period after which British rule will have ceased in India. I suspect that that day is very remote and I feel the [less] we say about it in all probability the better.’ Indeed that was the year in which Churchill confidently expressed the belief that the British empire would last a thousand years.*) When the official response of the government came in August 1940, it was a derisory offer to associate a few ‘representative Indians’ with the viceroy’s toothless advisory councils. Nehru rejected this utterly. Civil disobedience seemed the only answer.
The government decided not to wait for what Nehru might do. They arrested him on 30 October 1940 and, after a trial distinguished by a magnificent statement by the accused (‘it is the British empire itself that is on trial before the bar of the world’), sentenced him to four years in prison. The conditions of his detention were unusually harsh, with a number of petty indignities inflicted upon him, in particular relating to his ability to send or receive mail, which deprived him of the solace that letters had provided over the years. In December 1941, however, despite the opposition of Winston Churchill, the War Cabinet in London authorized the release of all the imprisoned Congressmen. Nehru hoped in vain for some policy declaration by the British that would enable him to commit India to the Allied cause, but the reactionary Churchill and his blinkered representatives in New Delhi went the other way, with Churchill (whose subsequent beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous) explicitly declaring that the principles of the Atlantic Charter would not apply to India. This was all the more inexplicable in the face of the rout of British forces in Asia: Singapore fell in February, Burma in March; the Japanese were at India’s gates in the east, and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who had fled British India, had fashioned an ‘Indian National Army’ in mid-1941 out of prisoners of war, to fight alongside the Japanese. Nehru had no desire to see one emperor’s rule supplanted by another’s: he started organizing the Congress to prepare for resistance to the Japanese. American sympathy was matched by that of the Labour Party in the War Cabinet. Clement Attlee persuaded his colleagues to send the socialist Sir Stafford Cripps to India in early 1942 with an offer of Dominion status after the war, with the possibility of partition.
Cripps was already a legend in British politics, a former Solicitor General who had been expelled from the Labour Party in 1939 for advocating a united front with the Conservatives (which, of course, came to pass during the war), and who combined an ascetic vegetarianism with a flamboyant ego (‘there, but for the grace of God, goes God,’ Churchill remarked of him). Cripps had visited India after the outbreak of war in 1939 and knew many Indian leaders; he considered Nehru a friend. Yet the Cripps Mission was welcomed by Jinnah, but foundered on the opposition of the Congress. Mahatma Gandhi objected principally because the British proposal appeared to concede the idea of partition; he memorably called the offer ‘a post-dated cheque’ (an imaginative journalist added, ‘on a crashing bank’) and urged its rejection. Congress President Maulana Azad insisted that the defence of India should be the responsibility of Indian representatives, not the unelected Government of India led by the British viceroy, and it was on this issue that Nehru refused to compromise. Cripps was inclined to give in, and spoke of an Indian national government running the country’s defence with the viceroy functioning as a figurehead (like the British king). But he had exceeded his instructions: Churchill (‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’), abetted by the hidebound viceroy, Linlithgow, and the inept commander-in-chief, Lord Archibald Wavell, scuttled the negotiations.
Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma’s meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931, he had notoriously declared: ‘It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King.’ (Gandhi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) ‘Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,’ declared Churchill, ‘will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.’ In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times: in fact Churchill’s statements appalled most of his contemporaries. Even the positive gloss placed on him today seems inexcusable: ‘He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,’ wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. ‘Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and…glory in the possession of India’.
Mahatma Gandhi, increasingly exasperated by the British, argued that Nehru’s pro-Allied position had won India no concessions. His public message to the government was to ‘leave India to God or anarchy’. Nehru, ever the Harrovian Anglophile, quoted Cromwell (in a conscious echo of the Harrovian Amery, who had used the same words just two years earlier in Parliament in calling for Neville Chamberlain’s resignation as prime minister): ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’ On 7 August 1942 in Bombay, the All-India Congress Committee, at Gandhi’s urging, adopted a resolution moved by Nehru, and seconded by Patel, calling upon Britain to—in a journalistic paraphrase that became more famous than the actual words of the resolution—‘Quit India’. (Gandhi’s own preferred phrase was ‘Do or Die’.) Within thirty-six hours the Congress leaders were arr
ested.
For all of Gandhi’s devotion to non-violence, his jailing, together with the rest of the Congress leadership, left the Quit India movement in the hands of the young and the hot-headed. An underground movement was born, which actively resorted to acts of sabotage. Ordinary people took improbable risks to hoist the national flag on government buildings. Young newspaper-boys added sotto voce subversion to their sales cries: ‘Times of India. Quit India! Times of India. Quit India!’ In the weeks after the arrests, no day passed without reports of clashes between demonstrators and police. The British responded with ruthless repression, firing upon unarmed protestors, killing dozens every week, flogging offenders, and censoring (and closing down) nationalist newspapers. ‘Quit India’ became the drumbeat of a national awakening, but all it did was to prolong the nation’s continued subjugation.
Wartime hardened British attitudes to the prisoners as well. Gandhi ‘should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting’, Churchill told the Cabinet. ‘We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.’ He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be ‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Mahatma] into the dirt.’
What became Nehru’s longest spell in prison, a total of 1,040 days, or over thirty-four months, from 9 August 1942 to 15 June 1945, saw the British moving to strengthen the position of Jinnah and the Muslim League, pressuring Jinnah’s critics within the party to remain in the League and under his leadership. Muslim opponents of the Pakistan idea were dissuaded or sidelined. Others who could have made a difference (like Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan in Punjab and Allah Bux in Sindh) died before they were able to influence the outcome. The League formed governments (often with the votes of British members, and with Congress legislators in jail) in provinces where it had been routed in the elections, and enjoyed patronage appointments where formal office was not possible. In this effort the British were complicit: as Lord Linlithgow, Britain’s viceroy during the fraught years of World War II, admitted of Jinnah, ‘He represents a minority, and a minority that can only effectively hold its own with our assistance.’ As the League grew with British patronage, its membership swelled from 112,000 in 1941 to over 2 million members in 1944.
The futility of the Quit India movement, which accomplished little but the Congress’s own exclusion from national affairs, compounded the original blunder of the Congress in resigning its ministries. It had left the field free for the Muslim League, which emerged from the war immeasurably enhanced in power and prestige. Both the resignations of the Congress ministries in 1939 and the Quit India movement in 1942 turned out to be futile gestures of demonstrative rather than far-sighted politics. They paved the way for the triumph of the Muslim League.
On 15 June 1945, Nehru and his Congress colleagues emerged from prison, blinking in the sunlight. The war was over, and they had been freed. But they would be taking their first steps in, and towards, freedom in a world that had changed beyond recognition.
ENDGAME: ELECTION, REVOLT, DIVISION
The British had not covered themselves with glory during the war. They had run a military dictatorship in a country that they had claimed to be preparing for democracy. They had presided over one of the worst famines in human history, the Bengal Famine of 1943, while diverting food (on Churchill’s personal orders) from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies. (More on this in the next chapter.) Even Lord Wavell, who had been rewarded for military failure (in both the deserts of North Africa and the jungles of Burma) by succeeding Linlithgow as viceroy, considered the British government’s attitude to India ‘negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated’.
The Labour victory in the British general elections meant that the egregious Churchill was soon to be replaced as prime minister by Attlee, but this did not bring about any change in the anti-Congressism of the British authorities in India. Wavell convened a conference in Simla from late June 1945, which the viceroy allowed Jinnah to wreck. In this atmosphere of frustration and despair, the British called elections in India at the end of 1945, for seats in the central and provincial assemblies.
The Congress was woefully unequipped to contest them. Its blunder in surrendering the reins of power in 1939 and then losing its leadership and cadres to prison from 1942 meant that it went into the campaign tired, dispirited and ill-organized. The League, on the other hand, had flourished during the war; its political machinery was well oiled with patronage and pelf, while the Congress’s was rusty from disuse. The electoral fortunes of 1937 were now significantly reversed. The Congress still carried a majority of the provinces. But except for the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress won nineteen Muslim seats to the League’s seventeen, the League swept the reserved seats for Muslims across the board, even in provinces like Bombay and Madras which had seemed immune to the communal contagion. Whatever the explanation—and Nehru could have offered a few—there was no longer any escaping the reality that Jinnah and the Muslim League could now legitimately claim a popular mandate to speak for the majority of India’s Muslims.
Nehru did not believe that this meant that the partition of the country, which he thought totally impractical, was inevitable. In speeches, interviews and articles throughout late 1945 and early 1946, he expressed the belief that, free of foreign rule, the Muslims of India would relinquish any thought of secession. The Muslims of India, he wrote, ‘are only technically a minority. They are vast in numbers and powerful in other ways, and it is patent that they cannot be coerced against their will… This communal question is essentially one of protection of vested interests, and religion has always been a useful stalking horse for this purpose’. He even argued that Congress should grant the right of secession just to allay any Muslim fears, not in the expectation that the Muslim League-ruled provinces would actually exercise it. But whether, as many Indian analysts have suggested, Jinnah had really meant to establish a separate state or was merely advocating Pakistan to obtain leverage over the Congress, his followers had taken him at his word. A state of their own was what they were determined to have, and by the spring of 1946 Nehru’s idealism appeared naïve, even dangerously so.
Tragically, divide et impera had worked too well. A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.
♦
But it was clear that Britain’s time in India was almost up. Even Indian soldiers and policemen openly expressed their support for the nationalist leaders, heedless of the reaction of their British officers. Mutinies broke out in the air force and the British Indian Navy. The latter was serious, affecting seventy-eight ships and twenty shore establishments, involving 20,000 naval personnel. Violence erupted at political events. In one incident in Bombay, 233 demonstrators were killed by British soldiers putting down an anti-British riot. The demand for freedom was all but drowned out by the clamour for partition.
In a gesture so counterproductive that it could almost have been an act of expiation, the Raj clumsily gave the warring factions a last chance of unity. It decided to prosecute the defectors of Bose’s Indian National Army. Bose himself had died in a fiery plane crash at war’s end in Formosa (Taiwan), so the Raj sought to find scapegoats amongst his lieutenants. In a desire to appear even-handed, the British chose to place three INA soldiers on trial in Delhi’s historic Red Fort: a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh. The result was a national outcry that spanned the communal divide. Whatever the errors and misjudgements of the INA men (and Nehru believed freedom could never have come through an alliance with foreigners, let alone foreign fascists), they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule. Both the Congress and the League rose to the trio’s defence; for the first time in their long careers, Nehru and Jinnah accepted the same brief, N
ehru donning a barrister’s gown after twenty-five years.
But the moment passed: the defence of three patriots was no longer enough to guarantee a common definition of patriotism. The ferment across the country made the result of the trials almost irrelevant. The trials were eventually abandoned, because by the time they had begun it was apparent that the ultimate treason to the British Raj was being contemplated in its own capital.
London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of the burdens of its Indian empire. In February 1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India ‘to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution’. The endgame had begun.
In April 1946, Nehru was elected unopposed as president of the Congress, with an interim Indian government being formed in advance of talks with the Cabinet Mission in Simla in May. The Mission, a triumvirate of Sir Stafford Cripps, Lord Pethick-Lawrence and A. V. Alexander, was besieged. The vultures, sensing that the Raj was close to its end, began gathering for the feast. The negotiations and confabulations, intrigue and manoeuvring amongst and within the various interested parties—the British, the Congress, the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the loyalists, the communists, the civil servants—became more intense and more convoluted with each passing day. Wavell’s astonishingly candid diaries reveal his distaste for, and distrust of, practically every Indian politician he had to deal with, each (in his eyes) proving more dishonest than the next. Though he was, like most of the British administration, hostile to the Congress and sympathetic to the League his government had helped nurture, he was scathing in his contempt for the mendacity of the League’s leaders, and of their ‘hymn of hate against Hindus’. (No Congress leader expressed any hatred of Muslims to the viceroy.)