As president, when Bose gazed at the thunderclouds of world war on the horizon, he perceived a silver lining: the conflict was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to wrest freedom for India. With the United Kingdom facing a mortal threat that left it utterly dependent on Indian men and materials, its leaders would be forced to give way to nationalists’ demands. In early 1939, he trounced a candidate favored by Gandhi to win reelection as Congress president. Gandhi described the election as a personal defeat. At his instructions, on February 22, 1939, almost the entire senior leadership of the Congress Party resigned their positions, denying the president any way to implement his ideas.
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Bose was deeply hurt by this public repudiation and fell ill. In the 1920s, while imprisoned in Burma on unspecified charges, he had acquired a mysterious fever that recurred in times of stress. Undeterred, he urged at his inaugural address (which his brother had to deliver, Bose being too sick) that London be handed an ultimatum. If the United Kingdom did not liberate India within a specified time limit—he had in mind six months—the Congress should begin a nonviolent civil disobedience struggle with the objective of winning independence. Gandhi countered that civil disobedience would inevitably degenerate into civil war. “I smell violence in the air I breathe,” he wrote to Bose. Communal tensions had escalated in recent years, and clashes between Muslim peasants and Hindu landowners, fueled by economic disputes, had already claimed many lives in eastern Bengal.
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At a meeting in September 1939, the differences among Gandhi, Bose, and Nehru broke into the open. Gandhi was horrified by the bloodshed unleashed by the Nazis and wanted to cooperate with aspects of the war effort. Bose asserted that both Germany and the United Kingdom were fighting for imperial stakes; he saw the war as amoral
and urged that the Congress use it as an opportunity to wrest freedom. Nehru detested fascism—but he also felt that Indians had no compelling reason to participate in a war that would free others while leaving them colonized. His view prevailed, in that the Indian National Congress asked the United Kingdom to clarify the ends to which the war would be fought. “If the war is to defend the status quo, imperialist possessions, colonies, vested interests, and privilege, India can have nothing to do with it. If, however, the issue is democracy and a world order based on democracy, then India is intensely interested in it,” the Congress announced. “A free democratic India will gladly associate herself with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.”
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In October, after consulting with the War Cabinet in London, Viceroy Linlithgow described British war aims as “laying the foundation of a better international system which will mean that war is not to be the inevitable lot of each succeeding generation.” He did not mention democracy. After the war, he added, the 1935 act could be modified to incorporate progress toward the ultimate goal of dominion status—but only if the concerns of India’s many minorities could be met. A dominion (such as Australia or Canada) was a self-ruling entity linked commercially and militarily with the United Kingdom, and in 1929 Viceroy Irwin had announced that His Majesty’s Government desired such a status for India. Linlithgow’s response now indicated to the nationalists that the British did not intend to fulfill this promise in the near future, if ever. “It became clear to us that they did not want us as friends and colleagues but as a slave people to do their bidding,” asserted Nehru.
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In protest, on October 23, 1939, the Congress Party ordered its politicians to resign all the positions to which they had been elected. The Muslim League, which was headed by the lawyer Mohammad Ali Jinnah, celebrated the end of the Congress ministries with a “day of deliverance and thanksgiving.” Jinnah also promised the Muslim League’s support for the war effort—provided that the British recognized it as the only organization that spoke for India’s Muslims.
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For decades the sixty-two-year-old Jinnah had played a leading role in the Indian National Congress. He had departed in 1920 because he
disliked Gandhi’s religiosity. Jinnah had since come to regard the Congress as a Hindu organization, because of the preponderance of Hindus in its leadership, which in his estimation made it insensitive to the concerns of Muslims. In the elections of 1937, however, the Muslim League had won only 4.8 percent of the Muslim vote, largely because some overwhelmingly Muslim regions, such as the North West Frontier Province, had returned Congress politicians. Subsequently, a triumphant Nehru had thwarted Jinnah’s effort to get politicians from the Muslim League appointed as ministers in two provinces where the League had done relatively well. Indians would pay dearly for the resulting rift. The dual humiliation, at the polls and at Nehru’s hands, had convinced Jinnah that the Muslim League could not coexist with the Congress; in an effort to boost the League’s popularity, he began to appeal to Islamic nationalism.
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In February 1940 the marquess of Zetland, who was then the secretary of state for India, suggested to the War Cabinet that the cooperation of the Congress with the war effort be secured by an offer of dominion status at war’s end. Churchill, then first Lord of the Admiralty and a vigorous presence on the War Cabinet, opposed the idea. He recommended instead a “firm course” that would keep the colony “quiet for the duration of the war.” Nor did he “share the anxiety to encourage and promote unity among Hindu and Moslem communities”: disharmony would be more conducive to retaining the British Raj. According to the minutes of the War Cabinet meetings, Churchill warned that if amity among Indians were somehow to be achieved, its “immediate result would be that the united communities would join in showing us the door. He regarded the Hindu-Moslem feud as the bulwark of British rule in India.” Churchill’s chain of reasoning hinged on the fact that the Indian National Congress, though it was secular in its principles, was nevertheless composed mainly of Hindus. If the Congress failed to agree to share power with the Muslim League, the British could claim that their relinquishing India was tantamount to abandoning a vulnerable Muslim minority to Hindu majority rule.
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Churchill had developed this argument during a prolonged campaign he had conducted in the early 1930s against granting partial
self-government to Indians. In a 1931 speech, he had described a religious riot in India in graphic terms: “women and children were butchered in circumstances of bestial barbarity, their mutilated violated bodies strewing the streets for days.” He had used the conflict to argue that only the British could keep the fanatics of India from one another’s throats. By 1937 he had turned that argument on its head, stating in a letter to Viceroy Linlithgow that unity among Indians of different faiths was “fundamentally injurious to British interests.”
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As Churchill explained it, the United Kingdom’s task in India, an expansive land that comprised several feuding groups, was similar to its role in Europe: “to preserve the balance between these great masses, and thus maintain our own control for our advantage and their salvation.” Therefore, Churchill continued, “I am not at all attracted by the prospect of one united India, which will show us the door.” That the Government of India might incline toward promoting harmony between Hindus and Muslims was “to my mind distressing and repugnant in the last degree.” Instead, Churchill hoped that the Muslims of the northwest would combine into a front to combat the “anti-British tendencies of the Congress.” Strife between Hindus and Muslims would bolster the rationale that British rule over India, which Lord Randolph Churchill had described as a calming sheet of oil over turbulent waters, was as necessary as it had always been.
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Although Winston Churchill was not yet prime minister, his views on India were so vehement that they prevailed: the War Cabinet turned down Zetland’s proposal. When in March 1940 the Muslim League introduced a fresh demand—a separate nation for Muslims, to be named Pakistan, or Land of the Pure—Churchill hailed “the awakening of a new spirit of self-reliance and self-assertiveness on the part of the different communities, of which the Moslem League’s resolution was a sign.” As the war dragged on, and financial and political circumstances indicated that the United Kingdom could not control India for long after it was over, Churchill would conclude that partitioning the colony to create Pakistan provided the best chance of retaining British influence in South Asia.
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LEOPOLD AMERY HAD his own, and if anything more carefully considered, ideas on the future of the British Empire. He believed that it had to be modernized so that it could continue to benefit the United Kingdom. Force could not forever hold the colonies, he maintained: loyalty to the Crown was necessary, and it could be bought only by economic solidarity. He saw the colonies not as possessions to be grasped in a fist but as extensions of England to be linked by handshakes. Amery was a leading advocate of Imperial Preference, a proposal by (the then late) statesman Joseph Chamberlain, who had envisioned a system of mutually helpful tariffs that would foster trade within the British Empire and fend off competition from the United States and Germany. As for India, Amery believed that it would sooner or later have to take its place in the imperial scheme as a dominion. But if Indians were to relinquish their stated goal of full independence and instead opt to remain within the empire as a dominion, their emancipation would have to be achieved without acrimony.
Accordingly, Amery suggested to Linlithgow that he probe Gandhi’s views about the prospect of Indians designing their own constitution, while offering a guarantee of dominion status within a year after a successful resolution of the war. The Congress would also get greater representation on the viceroy’s executive council. In return, the party would resume governing in the provinces and—most important—cooperate with the war effort. Linlithgow reported to Amery that Gandhi was responsive.
The initiative ran headfirst into an immovable roadblock: “Winston’s passionately instinctive objection to anything that means giving self-government to India,” as the secretary of state for India recounted in his diary. Churchill charged that matters so disruptive should not have been brought up “at a time when all our thoughts should be devoted to the defence of the Island and to the victory of our cause.”
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Amery argued that it was essential to gain the support of at least the moderate Indians. “A feeling was abroad that we were relying on the continued absence of agreement between the two main communities to free us from the performance of our pledges,” he had stated in his
presentation to the War Cabinet. (He had yet to realize that this was indeed the prime minister’s strategy.) Unless the British government acted to dispel this view, Amery continued, increasing resentment of colonial authorities and escalating hostility between the Congress and the Muslim League could ultimately lead to civil war. Should worse come to worst, he wrote to Churchill, “we could not hold India, even in wartime, for another year, certainly not for another five years.” In the end—Amery warned with remarkable prescience—“a partition of India, like the partition of Ireland and just as fruitful of future trouble, may be the only immediate solution.”
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The prime minister would not be placated. On July 25, 1940, he attacked Amery so furiously in the War Cabinet that one member, Sir Alexander Cadogan, walked out in embarrassment. The next day Amery went to 10 Downing Street to meet Churchill, who “said he would sooner give up political life at once, or rather go out into the wilderness and fight, than to admit a revolution which meant the end of the Imperial Crown in India,” Amery wrote in his diary. It was “hopeless to try and point out to him that what I was suggesting was well within the four corners of pledges and statements made again and again and could hardly be so revolutionary if Zetland at the India Office had proposed it months ago.” The prime minister demanded that Amery show him all the telegrams he had sent to Linlithgow—in which he had freely expressed himself about Churchill—and perused them carefully, showing signs of agitation. “I am afraid he will read and re-read the telegrams and get more and more angry as he does so and work himself up into a high mood of virtuous indignation,” Amery sighed.
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His Majesty’s Government could not accept just any constitution drafted by a group of Indians, the prime minister ultimately informed the viceroy. “We should have to know beforehand what this body was, and feel assured that it truly represented the broad masses of the leading Indian communities, including, of course, not only Hindoos and Moslems, but the Princes, the Depressed Classes, the Sikhs, the Anglo-Indians and others.” (The so-called Depressed Classes, whom Churchill also referred to as Untouchables, were people of tribal origins or lower
castes. Anglo-Indians were whites resident in India.) Nor could the War Cabinet tie the hands of a postwar British Parliament by promising dominion status: “under our free, democratic system,” Churchill asserted, it was impossible to guarantee the attitude of a future House of Commons toward India.
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The prime minister’s refusal to consider any move toward the colony’s emancipation thwarted the possibility of meeting the wartime needs of the United Kingdom by the willing cooperation of Indian nationalists—and his determination to instead secure their compliance by divide and rule would disastrously deepen communal hostilities. “The whole basis of our policy, as you have laid it down yourself, is that it is Indian divisions and not our refusal to surrender authority that is holding back India’s march towards the ‘declared goal’,” Amery wrote to the prime minister in April 1941. “On that ground I can continue to hold my own.”
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THAT WINSTON CHURCHILL was for even an instant prepared to relinquish the post of prime minister, to which he had aspired his entire life, speaks to the depth of his attachment to India. A decade earlier, it had even induced Churchill to break with the Tory Party on its decision to permit limited self-government in the colony. “I have always said that the key to Winston is to realise that he is Mid Victorian, steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern point of view,” Amery had written in 1929, after the two had had a long discussion on contemporary affairs. “It is only his verbal exuberance and abounding vitality that conceal this elementary fact about him.”
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