The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  The first air raids took place from 24 February and lasted for two days.

  Over the following weeks, throughout January and February, ships slowly made the return journey from the Andamans’ Port Blair to Calcutta, taking with them British and Indian officers, their families and more junior officials. But what to do with the prisoners on the islands? Shackled and kept on the lower decks, many of the prisoners from the Cellular Jail were also evacuated back to mainland India as the government feared that the prisoners would be a gift for the Japanese if, and when, the invasion took place. After much indecision and mixed feelings about where to send the prisoners (‘Is Africa at all a possibility?’ scribbled one senior civil servant in the margins of a document), ultimately the government shipped 171 of the 342 prisoners back to Calcutta secretly and took them on to jails in central India. The prospect of these prisoners being shunted from dockside to police van, or shackled prisoners in transit being spotted by a passer-by, preoccupied the ICS officers who were deciding on their fate. As an officer in Bengal put it, ‘If these prisoners were marched in handcuffs openly from the ship to the place of detention, there would be a sensation and nothing could prevent a crop of rumours.’ A coded telegram was used to instruct the Government of Bengal to try to keep this matter as ‘unostentatious as possible’, and to ensure that ‘contact with or exposure to public [was] avoided’. It was to be kept secret, completely out of the newspapers.11

  Alfred Bird and Charles Waterfall waited behind on the islands. Before they could board one of the last ships, the Japanese captured the Andaman Islands on 23 March 1942. In India, officials lost contact with the Governor and admitted in a public statement that they feared for his welfare and did not know if he was ‘dead or alive’. Waterfall had in fact been taken captive by the Japanese and would be a prisoner himself until the end of the conflict.12

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  Twenty-four-year-old Bhajan Singh was one of these top-secret security prisoners sent back to mainland India from the Cellular Jail in February 1942. He was not only a prisoner but also a former soldier, a sepoy of the Central India Horse, recruited from a typical Sikh agricultural tract in Punjab. Among the prisoners on the Andamans who had been convicted for civil crimes, like murder, lived these military prisoners, described by one official as ‘lost sheep’, convicted by court martial and sentenced to transportation. Convicted for mutiny in Trimulgherry, South India, and sentenced to transportation for ten years (he had already served two years in the penal colony), Bhajan was heavy with regret. He may also have been feeling relieved to be back on the mainland. Above all, he dreamed of reprieve and of being allowed to rejoin military service. Bhajan Singh was remorseful, lamenting his crime as a ‘foolish act’ of a ‘young man’.13 Piqued at not getting promoted, he had failed to carry out transfer orders when stationed in July 1940 in the Deccan with the Central India Horse, 21st Cavalry. He claimed he ‘was partially under the influence of liquor, and had no idea that his act amounted to Mutiny’. He also regretted having ‘joined bad company … thus being led astray’. His crime was refusing orders.14

  Guards bundled Bhajan Singh and his fellow prisoners into vans on arrival in Calcutta’s port and they were taken to the Presidency Jail while train arrangements were made. Within days they boarded the Bombay Mail for central India. They had been in transit for about a month, and while preferable to the isolation and eerie strangeness of the Andamans, the Central Provinces must have still felt a long way from Bhajan Singh’s home village in Amritsar in Punjab. And there was little prospect of any visit from a family member. On hearing of his ‘delinquencies’ his father, Bhuta Singh, in all likelihood a former soldier himself, had disowned him. Bhajan Singh’s mercy petition, written from Nagpur Central Jail, conveys the angst of the young soldier who ‘came from a thoroughly Loyalist family and feels very ashamed of himself’. To further reassure the Crown of their loyalty, his father immediately on hearing ‘the bad news’ had his younger son, and nephew, enlisted for active service. This was a family with long-standing ties to the Indian Army that had ‘rendered loyal military service during the great war’. Singh’s great hope was that, at a time of expanding recruitment and war overseas, he could implore his way to freedom. His conduct in jail had been ‘good’ and ‘quiet’, unlike others who were considered violent or had turned to hunger strikes.

  Your petitioner further assures Your Excellency [his petition continued] that should your pardon be extended to him, that he is prepared to show his loyalty, and atonement for his faults, by immediately proceeding on Active Service anywhere out of India, and further swears to be loyal to the Crown for ever after … your petitioner feels that he could be of better use in this world by fighting for the cause of freedom, and is prepared to die for his King … give him another chance to show that his above request to fight once more is no idle boast. For this act your petitioner will be ever grateful.15

  The letter was signed in Urdu in blue ink and the assistant jailer read aloud a translation to Bhajan Singh.

  Bhajan Singh’s timing was fortunate. Both the fall of the Andamans to the Japanese and the growing need for trained young men in the military worked in his favour. He had won the sympathy of the jail board, which recommended that sepoys like him might have learned ‘wisdom’ and be better returned to service than kept in detention. In addition, and decisively, there was growing pressure on heaving Indian jail populations; the government did not want the cost or the inconvenience of military prisoners in its keeping and preferred it if they were returned to the Indian Army where, many of the men pleaded, they rightfully belonged.

  Military prisoners added strain to the civil jails, which were already struggling under the weight of the arrests for civil disobedience. Jails in Bombay were ‘desperately overcrowded’ owing to the civil disobedience movement and had 15,800 prisoners in a space allotted for 11,700. Even the extensions to jails started to overflow. Prisoners from the Indian Army added pressure: ‘the number was reported in October last to be of the order of 400 but it is believed to have nearly doubled since’, recorded Bombay’s provincial prison governor.16 This reached a crisis point in 1943 when a peculiar and virulent epidemic swept through Belgaum Central Jail, in present-day Karnataka, killing an unspecified but significant number of inmates. ‘An alarming proportion’ of the attacks proved fatal, and the disease was never identified, although it was attributed to overcrowding.17 This was a turning point. The war effort could not spare healthy military men any longer and the provincial and national governments demanded to be spared the cost of maintaining them in their own prisons. In 1943, two new military prisons were established for those ‘whose ultimate return to the army is considered worth attempting’.18

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  With half of the prisoners evacuated, by February it was clear that the Andamans were lost. Everything of use was pulled out as quickly as possible: mules, lorries, ammunition, fuel and electrical equipment. Harbours were mined, mills and airstrips destroyed. Government servants left on the HMS Maharaja, which plied back and forth to Calcutta, but also by BOAC aeroplane and motor boat. A handful of British and Indian officials waited behind, alongside the remaining motley population of local cultivators and former convicts. On 22 March ships were sighted off the coast and on the 23rd the Japanese landed on Ross and Snake islands. The Japanese occupation was swift and initially bloodless; a single cannon shot was fired, the police station was disarmed, Japanese sentries were posted at strategic points, and the remaining British officials taken back to Ross Island, a pitiful shadow of its former self. In a grand if reckless populist gesture, the Japanese invaders opened the doors of the Cellular Jail and the prisoners were allowed to go free. However, the prisoners immediately started raiding villages for food and women, and the Japanese shot at these free prisoners within hours of their release. Ten thousand Japanese soldiers now occupied the islands.

  Ambivalence and silence still fall over the Japanese occupation of the Andamans, partly because of a shortage of
archival sources and partly because of the contested and controversial nature of the Japanese presence, in which some local inhabitants became actively aligned with the occupiers, while others suffered torture and repression. Some entrepreneurial individuals ingratiated themselves with the new regime and became important functionaries, sitting on committees and having access to goods and to Japanese language classes. They worked with the Japanese to maintain rice cultivation and to make the relationships between Japanese and Indian more functional. At the same time rumours of horrible tortures spread, and labourers were compelled to labour on airstrips and in the docks. The public execution of a young man, Zulfiqar Ali, who had fired at Japanese soldiers when they chased local chickens in the village of Aberdeen, chilled the local onlookers, who watched his bones being broken before the firing squad. One witness later recalled how as a child he was ‘fascinated with the way a Japanese soldier could throw about Zulfiqar, almost in the manner of the dhobi, the Indian washerman, pounding clothes’.19 Another notable act of brutality, the public execution of Waterfall’s friend and colleague Major Bird, was also watched with horror by the locals, who had warmed to the British official, who spoke fluent Hindustani, and had nicknamed him Chiriya, after his surname. Brought to the public square with a sign reading ‘traitor’ hung around his neck, after a public demonstration of vicious body blows, his head was severed by one blow from a sword.

  The Japanese had also been optimistic about pan-Asian solidarity but these hopes fizzled out quickly once dealing with the complicated, eccentric local community, which was accustomed to habits and patterns of British imperial rule. The Japanese frustrations grew as Allied air raids increased in success and intensity and cut supply lines from South-East Asia, making it harder to feed the population and the occupying army.

  The Andamans occupy a special place in colonial history as an island penal settlement. Ultimately, it was the only place occupied in India during the Second World War.

  11

  Thirty Months Too Late

  THE GENERAL FEELING by now in India was one of despair and disenfranchisement, of political stagnation and lack of freedom to determine decisions. The complete breakdown of trust was threatening the continued existence of the empire, potentially the whole war effort. A political response was needed, and politicians in London, grasping the gravity of the situation, reacted at last. Sir Stafford Cripps, the independently minded lawyer and Labour politician, had completed a world tour in 1940, including the USSR, China and India. He had a reputation for robust fair-dealing, his personal star was rising and he volunteered to try to settle the constitutional crisis and broker a deal between Indian politicians and the British government. He arrived in Karachi on 23 March 1942. Although the Cripps Mission has generated much attention ever since, significantly at the time of Cripps’s arrival in India he was not greeted with much fanfare or anticipation of success.

  Jaded by the tumultuous changes of early 1942, the Indian public response was wary. This austere member of the British War Cabinet did not capture the public imagination in the way that would be necessary to turn the tide of public feeling in 1942 (and in contrast to the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, which Cripps also led and which would at least draw on the euphoria of war’s end and demobilisation, although it too ultimately failed). The diplomatic effort was a contingency measure born out of the particular crisis that the British Empire faced in early 1942.

  The week of Cripps’s arrival in India, he was competing for space in the newspapers with many other headlines: Soviet advances and fierce fighting on the Russian front; the increased tempo of the air war in the Far East; and recent news of intense battles over Malta and British bombers over Essen. The Statesman of Calcutta was running stories that week entitled, ‘If Britain Is Invaded’ and ‘America Wakes up to Total War’. The very week Cripps arrived in India, Vizagapatam was bombed. Bad news flowed from Burma, including the reports of selective evacuation of white people and the vague promise of a government inquiry into the matter at some point in the future. Stories of Indians refused entry to bomb shelters also circulated in Calcutta. Something had to be done to show British goodwill towards India. But Cripps’s mission was not built on a groundswell of support for reconciliation and co-operation with the British. He met hand-picked senior Indian politicians, but he did not consult widely, unwisely leaving major industrialists and businessmen like G. D. Birla absent from his itinerary. This gave the impression of trying to secure a fait accompli. The Congress remained cagey about intentions and deliberately minimised expectations. ‘As everything is nebulous about Sir Stafford Cripps’s proposals, nothing can be said but the Congress Working Committee will give its thought to them if they are worth considering’, Abdul Kalam Azad told reporters. ‘The whole business will be finished soon if nothing substantial is immediately granted.’1

  In Britain too, the expectations for Cripps’s prospects of success were suspiciously low and built on the idea that the mission was born out of necessity rather than goodwill. Orwell noted in his diary that people in Britain, both the ignorant and the well-informed about India, were ‘gloomy’ and ‘pessimistic’ about the chances of full Independence for India even before Cripps set foot in the subcontinent. Orwell would later describe the whole affair as ‘a bubble blown by popular discontent’.2

  Cripps had a cordial pre-war relationship with Nehru, but in the intervening years, the gulf had continued to widen between British and Indian perspectives on the war. And now Cripps had staked his own ascendant reputation by attempting to make a deal in India. He was careful to distinguish himself from Linlithgow, moving out of the Viceroy’s Palace, and joking amicably with Gandhi in front of reporters. The prospect of reconciling the British and Indian nationalists was picked up on by the Japanese and even featured in propaganda dropped in leaflets on the eastern theatre: ‘Sir Stafford Cripps is no angel!’ one leaflet proclaimed.3 There was little risk of a Cripps–Congress front countering the Japanese, however. The unforgiving editorial verdict in one Indian newspaper was closer to the mark: the mission had come thirty months too late.

  The arguments over the details of what exactly was promised and why it was rejected still rage on. Even basic clarity about the diplomacy and what was on offer could not be achieved, then or now, and the charges of propaganda-friendly gesture politics, rather than a real attempt at solving the problem, persist. Once a proposal to give more power to Indian politicians was announced the vernacular press remained lukewarm, commenting on ‘jarring elements’, ‘significant gaps’ and ‘complete dissatisfaction’ with the plans. ‘The proposed transfer of all power minus defence will be like playing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark’, announced the Bharatadevi of Madras. ‘The sooner the British government shed the distrust complex, the better for all concerned.’4 The impression among the public was that something akin to dominion status could have been achieved mid-war, but only with the defence portfolio withheld. But as the legal, economic and social structure of the Raj was at that moment completely dominated and geared to defence, it is little wonder that this offer rang hollow and could no longer satisfy Congress under the radically transformed conditions of war. In addition, the threat that any province might be able to opt out of a new constitution risked the fragmentation of the centralised Indian state. A strong, centralised state had long been the ultimate Congress vision and prize.

  Under the Defence of India Act, defence and power had become synonymous in India. Truly non-violent Gandhians could hardly take part in leading a warring state. Other Congress leaders could barely see the advantage of falling in line with the Allies, when the Japanese looked likely to win in any case, and they were unwilling to be jointly responsible for the economic and social fiasco unfolding in India. To put it plainly, supporting the Allied war effort had simply become too politically unpopular and risky in India. In a public radio broadcast, as he admitted failure and prepared to leave India, Cripps also conceded that the plan faltered on the ‘wrangle over defence�
��.5 Both the mission’s rationale and its failure can be explained only by the daily drama of war in India in early 1942.

  This was a decisive turning point. Coercive measures to ensure success against the Japanese could now be sanctioned without hesitation. As far as Churchill was concerned, Indians had turned their backs on collaboration. ‘We can now go ahead with the war with a clear conscience’, Amery noted in his diary; political collaboration had been attempted and found impossible, so from now on the government could focus on extracting resources for the war effort without compunction.6 Churchill continued to demonise Indians, championing an unbending diehard imperialism and showing an irrational and offensive hatred of the country. He cheered at the growing signs of division between Hindus and Muslims and declared he would ‘sooner give up political life at once, or rather go out into the wilderness and fight, than admit a revolution that meant the end of the Imperial Crown in India’.7 From now on, the government would sideline any resolution of the political question as an irrelevance while prioritising victory at all costs. The war was being imposed on India without consultation or further negotiation, disconnected from indigenous sentiments and priorities, reversing years of hard-won stakes in the political system. To more and more people the costs of defeating the Japanese seemed higher than the gains.

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  Relationships between Hindus and Muslims continued to deteriorate. This was Jinnah’s moment. ‘The war which nobody welcomed’, he would later say with candour, ‘proved to be a blessing in disguise.’8 Piqued at the start of the decade by the Viceroy’s attentiveness to Gandhi’s views, by 1940 Jinnah was equally frank about how he had been ‘suddenly promoted’ in the eyes of the British.9 War was exacerbating the divisions between different ethnic groups in the country, with the ever-increasing alienation of Muslims from the Congress nationalists. The earlier failure of the Congress to fully articulate an inclusive vision of Indian nationalism, particularly during the enthusiastic heyday of the Congress ministries in 1938, was now rebounding on the movement. The resignation of the Congress ministries in the immediate crisis following the declaration of war in 1939 had been announced as a ‘Day of Deliverance’ for Indian Muslims and Jinnah had taken every opportunity since then to reiterate the perceived threat of Hindu domination and a Hindu Raj should Congress come to power. He was carefully welding together a coalition, appealing across diverse regional leaderships to try to bring the Muslim majority provinces into the Muslim League fold, courting the loyalty of landowners and spiritual leaders or pirs who could steer their followers towards the league.