India: A History. Revised and Updated (91 page)

With the princes and the Muslims, supposedly the beneficiaries of federation, now backing off, the scheme was probably doomed; the outbreak of the Second World War merely gave it a plausible burial. As well as polarising communal opinion and leaving the princes in the constitutional wilderness, the federation débâcle had also left its mark on Congress. In accepting power in the provinces, Congress-men had soon found themselves having to compromise on some of their principles. Plans for agrarian reform were diluted and links with the trade unions were strained by loyalties to industrialists, like the Tata and Birla families, who had substantially funded Congress. The responsibility for law and order meant a more cautious approach to radical causes. ‘A steady shift to the Right, occasionally veiled by Left rhetoric, increasingly characterised the functioning of the Congress ministries as well as of the party High Command.’ Even Nehru, whom the British regarded as little better than a communist, ‘increasingly sought in internationalist gestures [like a trip to war-torn Spain] a kind of surrogate for effective Left action at home’.
⁸

The resulting discontent in the socialist and communist wings of Congress provided the radical Bengali leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, with his chance. A vehement
bhadralok
opponent of the entire 1935 constitution, in 1938 he secured re-election as Congress president on a platform of uncompromising opposition to the new constitution, to the communal awards and in particular to the federation. Congress was to withdraw its collaboration
in the provinces and a new wave of
satyagraha
was to be launched in support of immediate independence. Gandhi had virtually retired from Congress in 1934, but, deeply distrustful of Bose, he again returned to the fray and, with the support of Nehru and others, engineered Bose’s downfall in 1939. Bose, or ‘Netaji’ (‘Leader’) as he would soon be known, responded by setting up a radical party known as the Forward Bloc and espousing terrorist tactics. In 1940 he was arrested. He escaped on the eve of his trial, fled to Afghanistan and thence to Moscow and Berlin.

It was under Tokyo’s auspices that Bose would surfaced, literally, when he landed from a submarine in Japanese-held Singapore in 1943. Like Sukarno in Indonesia, and despite the same left-wing reservations, Bose admired Japan’s disciplined and defiant emergence as a world power and was encouraged by her championship of Asian emancipation and of regional co-prosperity. Forced to choose between two imperialisms, he plumped for what looked at the time to be the more amenable and dynamic.

By late 1943 he was installed on Indian soil as the head of state in Azad Hind (‘Free India’) and commander-in-chief of the Indian National Army (INA), a twenty-thousand-strong force recruited from Indian prisoners of war in Japanese hands. Azad Hind comprised just the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, they being the only Indian territory under Japanese occupation. Previously the Andamans had served as a British detention centre for those convicted of political crimes. Ironically, after an odyssey of some twenty thousand kilometres, Bose had ended up exactly where he would have been sent had he never fled India.

‘A BLESSING IN DISGUISE’

India entered the Second World War much as it had the First. Without consultation, let alone consent, the viceroy simply informed its people that they were at war. The response, though, was less ‘heart-warming’ than on the previous occasion. As well as telegrams of support and a rush to the recruiting stations, there was a howl of protest and, in late 1939, a mass Congress exodus from provincial government. In those provinces where Congress had formed an administration the boycott cleared the way for direct British rule and for the rapid imposition of wartime restrictions. Elsewhere the princes breathed a sigh of relief while the Muslim League provocatively declared a Day of Deliverance from the oppression of ‘Congress Raj’.

The Muslim League would be one of the few beneficiaries of Nazi aggression. As Jinnah would later put it, ‘the war which nobody welcomed proved to
be a blessing in disguise.’ It would enable the League to make good its claim to represent the majority of Muslims and Jinnah, its leader since 1936, to make good his claim to a principal role in the transference of power. Although lacking the charm of Nehru, let alone the fire of Bose or the popular appeal of Gandhi, Jinnah possessed a formidable mind in which intimidating resolve combined with unequalled skills as a tactician. No leader of the twentieth century has a greater claim to have fathered a nation. Schooled in the adversarial techniques of the bar and, as a Bombay Ismaili, comparatively unencumbered by the taboos and concerns of more orthodox Muslims, he soared above both colleagues and adversaries, a lofty and awesome figure immaculately suited for direction rather than incitement. But when he stooped to strike, he did so with effect. Choosing a date and a venue calculated to point up the failure of Nehru’s 1930 proclamation of
purna swaraj
, in early 1940 also in Lahore he secured the League’s endorsement of a very different resolution which changed the whole substance of the independence debate.

Although known as the ‘Pakistan Resolution’, the Lahore text made no mention of ‘Partition’ or ‘Pakistan’ as such. The term was still an academic fiction. It had first been adopted by a group of Muslims at Cambridge in the early 1930s as a wishful acronym for a greater Muslim homeland consisting of P(unjab), A(fghania,
i.e.
the North-West Frontier), K(ashmir), I(ran), S(ind), T(urkharistan), A(fghanistan) and (Baluchista)N. It also meant, according to its inventor, ‘the land of the
paks –
the spiritually pure and clean’. Since there was no ‘B’ for Bengal in ‘PAKISTAN’ it was presumably in this latter sense that it was subsequently applied to the Lahore Resolution.

The Resolution itself stemmed from a shuffing of various constitutional proposals evolved by Muslims anxious about the federation proposal and unhappy with the experience of provincial Congress government, or ‘Hindu Raj’. Some of these proposals included a Muslim homeland in the south (an ‘Usmanistan’ based on the nizam’s Hyderabad) as well as homelands in the north-west and the east. But the final Resolution was both more realistic and more vague. In recognition of the fact that Muslims represented a separate ‘nation’ it called for a constitution whereby ‘areas in which Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute “Independent States” in which the constituent elements shall be autonomous and sovereign.’

Whether these ‘states’ were to be linked in a federation, either with one another or with the rest of India, was left unclear. Bengalis who eventually found themselves in East Pakistan could thus reasonably claim that under the terms of the Lahore Resolution they should have been independent. Also unclear was the geography of the ‘areas’ and ‘zones’ to be so ‘grouped’.
Existing provinces were not mentioned by name, partly because the League could as yet lay no claim to overwhelming support in any of them, and partly because Jinnah was keeping his options open. Indeed it may be that the whole Resolution represented a tactical ploy or, as the viceroy thought, ‘a bargaining position’. It would soon become something much less negotiable, but the hint of a separate Muslim sovereignty certainly had the effect of uniting Muslims behind the League and significantly empowering Jinnah in his negotiations with the Congress leadership and the British.

British attitudes were now heavily conditioned by the war effort. To secure India’s military support and its political acquiescence, initiatives and incentives came thick and fast. Schemes for party representation in the central government and in the conduct of the war, as well as offers of a constituent assembly and dominion status, climaxed with a mission by Sir Stafford Cripps in March 1942. By then Singapore had fallen, 100,000 imperial troops, mostly Indian, were in Japanese detention, and Japanese forces were rapidly advancing through Burma on India itself. It was a moment for closing ranks, for the bold gesture and the magnanimous response. The Cripps Mission, brainchild of the Labour leader Clement Attlee and headed by a man known to be sympathetic to Indian independence, was seen by the British as just such a move. To previous offers it added a clear pledge, as soon as the war was over, of a dominion status which, as recently redefined, amounted to full independence.

Two years earlier such terms might have been welcomed. But, as so often in the past, London was advancing what India already banked on. By now the issue was not so much independence, or even when, but whose; and in this the Cripps offer was deeply disappointing. Gandhi mischievously likened it to a post-dated cheque on a failing bank. But the real problem lay not with the bank or the date but the name of the payee. For the Cripps offer, like all the others, betrayed a British willingness to appease Muslim nationalism, princely autonomy and provincial aspirations by endorsing the possibility that some provinces and states might eventually secede. This was still anathema to all shades of Congress opinion. It challenged the idea of a single and indivisible Indian nation on which Congress’s demands for independence had always rested; it contradicted the idea of Congress as a secular party representing all of India’s communities and transcending all religious differ-’ ences; and it cast doubt on the primacy of democratic representation on which both the national consensus and Congress’s supremacy relied.

‘It is possible, though by no means certain, that if from the outset the British had made it clear that they would never countenance the partition of India, the demand for Pakistan would have been dropped.’
⁹
Like many other British Indian officials, Penderel Moon, himself a key figure in the
Partition saga, would see the break-up of India not just as a colossal human tragedy but as an enduring political tragedy. Had Linlithgow, the wartime viceroy, been less ‘casual’ about the demand, and had he tried ‘to heal the breach between Congress and the League’, Jinnah might have been forced to compromise. But the priority for Linlithgow, as for all his beleaguered countrymen, was the war. Post-imperial strategies were an indulgence which the desperate battle for survival, in Asia as in Europe, as yet precluded. Confronting Jinnah over Pakistan and so inviting the League’s hostility at a time when Congress was already refusing to co-operate with the war effort was unthinkable. It could in fact be argued that it was Congress which badly miscalculated; by withholding its support for the war, indeed endeavouring to exploit Britain’s wartime predicament, it practically obliged the British to play along with the Pakistan idea.

Personally both Gandhi and Nehru wished the Allies well. But to Gandhi the pacifist all wars were anathema; and to Nehru the socialist, this particular war between rival imperialisms should never have involved India. Prior to the Cripps Mission a limited form of anti-war protest had already landed Nehru and some twenty thousand other
satyagrahis
in gaol. They had since been released but, after the disappointment of the Cripps Mission, and at a time when the first Japanese bombs were falling on Indian installations, Gandhi in particular lost patience. Arguing first that only immediate British withdrawal and a declaration of Indian neutrality could save India from Japanese attack, then that only immediate independence would ensure whole-hearted resistance to the Japanese, he secured support for what he called a final ‘do or die’ challenge to British rule.

It was, of course, to be non-violent, but his pre-emptive arrest, and that of other Congress leaders, in August Itwas,ofcourse,tobenon-violent,buthispre-emptivearrest,and 1942 made this ‘Quit India’ movement a more random, spontaneous and violent outburst than any of its predecessors. As well as strikes and boycotts, telegraph and railway lines were sabotaged, police and railway stations blown up, and in large areas of Bihar and eastern UP the government temporarily ceased to function. Viceroy Linlithgow reckoned it ‘the most serious rebellion since 1857’. Given the wartime paranoia, he ordered massive repression, which involved the deployment of tens of thousands of troops, a like number of arrests and perhaps a thousand deaths.

Although the worst violence was all over within a matter of weeks, and although a few misty-eyed imperialists like Churchill and Linlithgow were thereby confirmed in the belief that Britain still had a vital peace-keeping role in India, most British politicians now concurred with international, especially American, opinion in dismissing the possibility of a postwar British Raj. ‘Quit’ they now must, for repression on such a scale in peacetime
would be unthinkable and probably impractical; Gandhi’s point had been made, if not in the manner he approved. However, for the Congress Party the 1942 Quit India movement was much less successful than the Rowlatt-Khilafat protests of 1919-21 or the salt-and-civil-disobedience campaign of 1930-1. The arrest of its leaders meant that the party was unable to direct the movement or to profit from it, and their detention for most of what remained of the war meant that the party would be singularly ill-prepared for the postwar endgame. The League on the other hand, unchallenged by either the British or Congress, continued to proselytise, organise and mobilise.

THE TRYSTING HOUR

Three years of intensive negotiations led up to the final transfer of power from the British Crown to the two successor states of India and Pakistan in 1947. The peaceful conclusion of these negotiations was hailed as a triumph. It was celebrated as such even by the British, and it appeared all the more remarkable in the light of the armed confrontations then getting underway in Indonesia and Indo-China. But the triumph was compounded of failures and betrayals.

For Nehru, Congress and most citizens of the Republic of India, Pakistan itself was just such a failure – historically indefensible as well as humanly catastrophic. Many British officials agreed, seeing it as a betrayal of the united India which they liked to think of as their own creation. The British in turn stood accused of having failed the princes who, without the umbrella of federation, were left to negotiate entry into the successor states with a nationalist leadership they had long distrusted. The League for its part had obviously failed those of its supporters who lived in Muslim minority areas which would not be included in Pakistan. Similarly Congress stood accused of betraying its supporters in what became Pakistan, most notably the Pathans of the North-West Frontier Province who had consistently opposed the League and Partition. More obviously, in the two partitioned provinces of Bengal and Punjab, all parties to the negotiations had failed those Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus who would experience death and dispossession on an unprecedented scale as their homelands were divided, their economic links severed and their shared cultures dismembered.