The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  The famine victims tended to be remembered in dry statistics, rather than as individuals. Compared to other global tragedies in the 1940s, there was no deliberate strategy behind the deaths of so many Bengalis, and nobody could be targeted as a culprit. Remembering the victims became more amorphous as a result. Blame was apportioned to Bengali people who stockpiled and made profits at the time, to the Government of India and the Government of Bengal, the British and Churchill, as well as the more general fortunes of cyclone, poverty and war. There was a litany of mistakes and oversights, which had resulted in famine, but there was little time for contemplation or recriminations before the next wave of relocations and deaths caused by the Partition of 1947.

  For many, the celebrations about the end of the war were overshadowed by another question mark: what would be the future constitutional settlement of India, when would the British leave, and what would the future look like if and when they did? An Indian lady writing to a relative in England pointed out the poignancy of the moment in India:

  You have won the war at last. Please let us know how you celebrated Victory day there. We couldn’t enjoy the victory celebrations fully here. It is all the same to us whether you win the war or not. We are in the same darkness we were in before. One must be fortunate to live in a free country.9

  The fears about how power would be distributed in a free India had intensified greatly over the past months and were beginning to show in increasing incidents of violence between Muslims and Hindus in the towns: outbreaks of petty violence at the time of religious festivals, fights over music played near mosques at the time of prayer, or riots because of news that a cow had been killed for meat. But increasingly, there were more pernicious and prolonged acts of economic boycott and exclusion, and a more hysterical note in some of the right-wing Urdu and Hindi press. The shortages undoubtedly played a role in this. The running of food committees and ration shops at the local level, for instance, was providing the perfect opportunity for some Congress and Muslim League supporters to ostracise and penalise their enemies.

  The Simla conference, the first step taken by the British Cabinet to show that negotiations with the Indian political parties would commence again, and that a constitutional deal was in the offing, was opened on 25 June 1945 while the war was still ongoing. This was the week that the Viceroy met Gandhi for the very first time, although Wavell had been Viceroy since 1943. The message was: war is nearly over, national politics can resume again. But too much had taken place to pick up the pieces as if the war had been a simple interlude.

  The dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August added to the continuing sense of a marred victory, of a war that had done much damage as well as good. For Gandhi, it was final confirmation of the innate violence of the world. Despite Japanese atrocities, the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was shocking, especially for people closer to the East. The Viceroy, Wavell, who had fought so long against the Japanese and whose own son had a hand amputated on the Burma front, was also evidently caught unawares. He noted in his private diary that ‘matches’ weren’t safe in the hands of most humans; what would they do, therefore, with atomic bombs? ‘It is not a weapon that any thinking man would willingly put in the hands of the present-day world’, wrote Wavell.10 Gandhi described it as ‘an empty victory to the Allied arms’, which ‘resulted in destroying the soul of Japan … The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter bombs.’11 Nehru had a stronger streak of realpolitik about India’s place in the new world order and would ultimately favour India’s becoming a nuclear nation. He had already spoken before Independence of India needing to defend herself using all means at her disposal. The civil nuclear energy programme in India was a product of wartime scientific investment, and had begun in 1944.12 But Nehru also warned against the horrors of a bomb that represented a completely new world order, the end of the old world which was dying and being replaced by something as yet unknown.

  Nonetheless, the end of the war had come at last. Soldiers, especially those still in Burma, felt the ecstasy of relief and exultation:

  While all of us were sleeping in our tents, one British officer – a non technical man, he was in the officers’ mess and – the middle of the night – he heard on the radio the Japanese have surrendered. He got quite wild about it and went straight to the tent of the CO and brought him out of bed in his night suit. And when they heard that news they sent the subedar and ordered all officers to come to the mess as they were. And so the whole mess was quite informal … some were dressed in their lungis, some in their pyjamas, and they kept on celebrating and drinking for a long time feeling that we have survived … but as luck would have it, the Japanese were fighting in a place called Pegu Yamas in the hills and they had not heard this news and they kept fighting in spite of our repeated messages to them through loudspeakers that your government has surrendered, they refused to believe it and therefore they kept fighting and we kept on getting the casualties from that area.13

  Many, particularly those who had seen action, shared in the universal feelings of joy and relief that they had survived, and anticipated with relish the promise of homecoming. ‘On 14 August, the day Japan surrendered, I was the only member in the Mess which was not much fun. So I explored Kandy town’, recalled General Gul Hassan Khan, who was in Ceylon at the time, ‘and discovered a most agreeable club. There were hundreds of officers celebrating the end of the war and I joined in. I knew no one but it was an occasion when such formality was unnecessary. The party finally broke up after breakfast the next day!’14 ‘I was euphoric and there were massive celebrations in Burma. We partied into the night’, recalled Brigadier Parampal Gill.15 When asked in old age their best memories of the war, former sepoys seemed unanimous that it was the news of peace: ‘Only that we won the war that’s the happiness’; ‘Victory! When Japan surrendered that’s when we were victorious and we were also happy when we got two months holidays that was the best day for us. Victory.’ ‘When the war finished and the way we celebrated it that is the best memory, all the soldiers came together and we had a big feast, food and all the banter that usually goes on, that’s how we celebrated it all together.’16 Some marked it in other memorable ways: crowds flocked to the Taj Mahal; in New Delhi there were dances and route marches, parties and a Victory Parade.

  But the tone of triumphalism hit an off-key note with some listeners, as Frank Moraes recalled:

  I was in Bombay when Allied Victory came at last in May 1945 and I heard Churchill’s victory speech relayed over the BBC through amplifiers in the streets. His tone was understandably triumphant: ‘Advance Britannia!’ he perorated. ‘Long Live the cause of freedom! God save the king!’ It sounded incongruous to Indian ears … How could the cause of freedom live with the simultaneous advance of Rule Britannia?17

  Nor was it entirely clear that fighting was really over. The victory over Japan fused into other missions: to suppress the communist guerrillas appearing in South-East Asia and to restore order to the region and reoccupy the Japanese-conquered territories. The continued deployment of Indian troops, first to reoccupy South-East Asia and then to put down communist insurgency in Malaya, tasks in which Indian and Gurkha soldiers were immediately redeployed, meant that it was not always clear when war ended and peace began. This phase of political upheaval and wartime change was also deeply intertwined with the struggle over Partition and the creation of the new states of India and Pakistan, as soldiers also became involved with internal policing, the control of riots and ultimately were divided into the new armies of the two free states.

  * * *

  Nehru and the other Congress leaders who had emerged from their prison gates in June 1945 needed to quickly catch up with the pace of change in India and to link themselves to the momentous events that had been taking place while they were behind bars. They immediately invoked the image of the ‘heroine of ’42’, Aruna Asaf Ali. She was stil
l on the run, heading her letters ‘somewhere in India’, living with amenable friends, shielded by sympathetic civil servants and police officials. ‘If my voice can reach her I want to send her my love and esteem’, Nehru declared in his very first speech after release from jail. ‘I want to tell her that whatever she has done shall not be wasted and will bear fruit. It will leave its impress on her countrymen.’18 Abdul Kalam Azad pleaded with the Viceroy to lift her arrest warrant. A chorus of Congress voices rang out for Aruna, who was more than a little irritated by all the paternalistic concern and had already strongly disagreed in print and in letters with Gandhi and other Congressmen, who she felt were trying to disassociate themselves from the underground’s more extreme actions or to tame them.

  INA men were captured, interrogated and kept in jail but gradually thousands were released in the winter of 1945–6, as the government realised both the technical and practical difficulties of understanding who had done what during the war and also the political costs of continuing to prosecute INA men. The released followers of Bose found themselves (sometimes to their own astonishment) garlanded on release from jail, celebrated in pamphlets, books and photographs, embraced by politicians and paraded down the streets. The INA became the real heroes of the war in India. Nehru admitted at the end of the year that the INA trial was arousing passions even in remote villages. As they adjusted to life after incarceration, Nehru and many of the other Congress leaders – who had all along been cautious about celebrating violence and had differed with Bose – became loud champions of the INA. The reason why is simple. Deprived of their liberties during the war, newly freed from prison, Congressmen could not resist capitalising on the mass groundswell of support for the INA. Now that the real threat of Japanese invasion had been averted, it was safe to shout from the rooftops about the bravery and heroism of Bose’s men. This was opportunistic but also part of the ferment of the moment and part of the great sweep of enthusiasm, expectation and millenarianism that was running through the country. The Congress was also flexing its military muscle-power, showing that it had the backing of army men and that it was prepared to use violence in the cause of Indian nationalism.19

  By attaching themselves to the legacy of the INA, the Congress leaders hoped some of the glory and vitality of the movement would be transferred to them. Asaf Ali, who had been so cautious about the rebellions while he was in jail, now acted as a barrister in New Delhi defending the INA rebels. The INA also looked like the only organisation capable of championing the major Indian religious communities simultaneously, as Bose had rigorously insisted that the INA was built on inter-religious co-operation and had Hindu, Sikh and Muslim leaders. This added greatly to the appeal for Asaf Ali and Nehru, who wanted to emphasise secularism in the future life of the country and counteract the Muslim League. ‘Though Shah Nawaz, Sehgal and Dhillon are no longer officers of the Indian Army, they have the whole of their lives before them to serve the country and the cause of India’s freedom for which they risked their lives’, Asaf Ali pronounced. ‘They fought outside for the attainment of Independence and, I may add, for communal harmony. I sincerely trust … they will become ambassadors of the unity of India.’20 The men were freed and the story of the INA was soon calcifying into a national myth, albeit one which celebrated officers rather than more junior ranks. Some of the sepoys who had joined the INA became more disgruntled in later years about their lack of pensions and their neglect by the Indian state where they had not been reaccepted back into the army.21

  Asaf Ali was also visited by prisoners of war. Everyone was clamouring to tell their side of the story and to have a stake in the memory of India’s war. Prisoners of war were freed and returned to life in India. For John Baptist Crasta,

  that was the happiest day of my life. A second birth, a resurrection from death, I thought. Now I would be returning to India, the India whose shores I had left four and a half years ago and to which I never hoped to return. I was free again after nearly three and a half years of captivity. I thanked God that he gave me that day. Everyone’s face was now lit up with a bright smile.

  As Crasta recalled:

  Most of us were in torn and tattered clothes, some with only a langoti, barefoot and bare headed, with long beards, thin and emaciated bodies grown dark on account of three and a half years hard toil, wrinkled foreheads, and drooping eyes. With the majority of us the hair had turned grey or fallen off due to increasing worry and care. This spectacle presented a striking contrast to that in which we first landed in Malaya: full of vigour and fine specimens of manhood.22

  * * *

  Eventually Aruna did come out of hiding but only when the state cancelled her arrest warrant on 26 January 1946, four years after she had first disappeared. It was another concrete admission of British imperial defeat. Many years later she would recall the depressing realisation that her dreams of a more sustained revolution had failed and express her bitterness towards some of the jailed Congress leaders:

  Inexperienced, lacking dynamic leadership, their fine spirit of recklessness ridiculed by those who played for safety, the ‘Augusters’ of 1942 grew dejected and gradually drifted away either to different groups or complete inaction … It is one of the ironies of our situation that those who participated in the ’42 struggle had to submit to the leadership of men and women who had only heard of it from behind prison bars.23

  Her marriage had not survived the strains of the war. Asaf Ali was destined for Washington DC as India’s first ambassador to the USA, an appointment that was made before actual Independence and signalled the dawning of India’s new status in the world. Nehru decided to send his old prison cell-mate, with whom he had shared so much, to be a figurehead for the composite identity of India that he wanted to project and protect at a time when Partition loomed. Asaf Ali recorded in his diary how Delhi, his home town, ‘was almost convulsed with elation at the news of my appointment as Ambassador to Washington’.24 Gandhi sent Aruna a note, trying to patch up the differences between the Alis, recognising both the personal and diplomatic utility of the couple working as a team, and writing that ‘I think it is your duty to accompany Asaf’.25The couple was very much in the public eye. ‘Why am I not going to Washington with my husband?’ Aruna said to a public crowd in Karachi on the day of his departure. ‘This is the question which confronts me wherever I go. In return I ask, is it possible for a mother to leave her ailing child? India is sick and is passing through critical times.’26

  Aruna went with Asaf Ali to the airport. Shortly before sunrise, while the stars were still in the morning sky, his plane took off while she looked on.27 Aruna stayed behind to forge her political career in India, where she later became one of the leading Members of Parliament in independent India. The two had drifted too far apart, both politically and personally, and as she later wrote, ‘The thread of happy domestic life which was snapped by the gravest of national crises, nearly five years ago, could not be picked up again’.28 But they wrote letters and she visited him in Washington. Aruna was always respectful of her husband’s erudition and humanism, but while he worked for the economic relationship with America and promoted India’s foreign policy agenda, she kept determinedly to leftist causes. They had both experienced such different events during the turmoil of war, and their political ideologies had shifted so far out of alignment, that even Gandhi could not reconcile them.

  * * *

  The Americans weighed up their future in South Asia in 1945. They made attempts to secure a permanent foothold and suggested keeping air bases in Karachi and Calcutta, requests which the British hurriedly rebuffed.29 The seeds had been laid for the cold war in the region, though, and bases established all over Asia as a result of the war would not be so easily relinquished and would form the platform for a global conflict with the USSR over the decades ahead.

  Dumps of ammunition and war goods lay awaiting decommissioning at the end of 1945. The scale of seepage onto the black market, the sale of arms and the ways in which the Allie
s disposed of their hardware have tended to be overlooked by historians. At Belur Salvage Yard in Calcutta vast quantities of scrap metal scarred the landscape. Some was sold onwards, some stolen and passed on to the black market. Near Digboi, Compton Mackenzie noticed ‘two big American dumps where such vehicles as had not been stolen were being sold off gradually’.30 The Afghan government bought jeeps but was not allowed to buy the guns it requested. Some opportunities for acquiring decommissioned goods would pay lucrative dividends. Military Police in Calcutta spent many weeks tracking down both US Army personnel and Indian civilians ‘engaged in widespread thefts and black market disposals of large quantities of US army property’.31 Soldiers pocketed whatever they could get their hands on, ‘losing’ pieces of uniform and kit on their journeys back home or during the long waits for demobilisation.

  Decommissioning was also an opportunity for industrialists. They could buy up army stocks and machinery and turn military production to civilian causes. Walchand – now branching out into civil aviation – bought ten Dakotas and two smaller planes from the US Foreign Liquidation Commission. The foundations for Air India and PIA were being laid on the basis of wartime aviation. In the regions that would soon become Pakistan, many of the great industrial families of Karachi and Lahore, who would dominate Pakistani economy and politics for generations, had solidified their wealth through wartime contracts. The Muslim League was backed by many industrial and commercial interests who had developed their own power in the 1940s and now preferred a federal or decentralised future for India where they could escape state regulation. Memons, Khojas, Bohras, and Muslim businessmen like the Ispahanis, Habibs and Adamjees supported the league. Muslim shipping and banking interests, in a shrinking economy, started to look to securing their own capital.