The imperial capital, New Delhi, was not left untouched by the protests. The city’s main Congress leaders were quickly arrested, yet younger radicals at large persuaded students not to attend classes. They also distributed handbills and newsletters critical of the government. A cyclostyled sheet printed on 2 October said: ‘Today is Gandhi Jayanti Day. The people of India are called upon to fast today and offer prayers in mosques, churches and temples for the life of our leader and for the success of our struggle. All shops should observe complete hartal. Prabhat pheris, processions…should be carried out.’24
V
Hundreds of thousands of Indians had come out in support of Gandhi’s call for the British to withdraw. They had expressed this support in many ways, not all of which would have been approved by the leader. This was no armed revolt; no protester carried a gun or used it. On the other hand, the storming of government offices, the cutting of telegraph wires, the defacement of railway stations—these were not acts of non-violence either. Gandhi, if he was a free man, would not have countenanced them.
It is striking that the targets of these attacks were so often identified with the colonial state. District offices and police stations, railway tracks and telegraph wires—these were all crucial to the maintenance of British power in India. By attacking them, the protesters were calling into legitimacy a state ruled by non-Indians.
Gandhi’s Quit India movement brought to the fore the manifest patriotism of large numbers of Indians. On the other side, there were the hundreds of thousands of Indians enlisted to serve in the British Army. Even if they were not mercenaries (as Gandhi charged), these Indian soldiers in Europe, Africa and Asia were certainly apolitical. They did not side with Gandhi or with the Congress.
And there were also some Indians who actively and publicly opposed the Quit India movement and its leaders. Four weeks after Gandhi was arrested, B.R. Ambedkar, now a member of the viceroy’s executive council, gave a long interview to a British newspaper. He began by calling the Congress a Hindu party, which had no right to speak for the Depressed Classes. The ‘freedom’ that Gandhi spoke of and wanted, claimed Ambedkar, was ‘the freedom of traditional India, and that means India dominated by Brahmins who believe we pollute them by our presence’. He added that ‘Gandhi certainly created a solid Hindu-India, but in America after the Civil War a solid South came into being and its real object was to keep down Negroes’.
Ambedkar continued: ‘We [the Depressed Classes] are in the same position as those Negroes, so what comfort can we draw from the prospect of a free and solid Hindu India?’
Ambedkar clarified that he was not ‘in favour of domination by the British. But I do not want to escape subjection by the British only to fall victim to complete domination by Hindus.’25
Recall that, back in 1939, Ambedkar and Jinnah had briefly contemplated an alliance. That had proved infructuous. Now, some years later, he was bitterly opposed to both Gandhi and Jinnah. In a talk in Poona in January 1943, Ambedkar observed:
It would be difficult to find two personalities who rival Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Jinnah in their colossal egotism, to whom personal ascendancy is everything, and the country’s cause a mere counter on the table. They have made Indian politics into matters of personal feud, and the consequences hold no terrors for them. Between them Indian politics would become frozen, and no political action would be possible. Their feeling of supremacy and infallibility is strengthened by the Indian press. Indian journalism today is written by drummer boys to glorify their heroes. Never has the interest of a country been sacrificed so senselessly for the propaganda of hero worship.26
While Ambedkar attacked Gandhi, in India, others were attacking him abroad. On 9 September, a month after Gandhi’s arrest, Winston Churchill told Leo Amery: ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’27 A few days later, Churchill launched a blistering attack on Gandhi and the Congress in the House of Commons. The Congress, claimed Churchill, ‘did not represent the majority of the people of India’; it ‘did not even represent the Hindu masses’. Churchill characterized Gandhi’s party as ‘a political organisation built around a party machine and sustained by certain manufacturing and financial interests (cheers and laughter)’.
Gandhi might claim to advocate non-violence; but, said Churchill, his party had now ‘come out in the open as a revolutionary movement designed to paralyse communications by rail and telegraph and generally to promote disorder…’ Churchill charged the Congress with being ‘committed to hostile and criminal courses’, and worse, of being aided ‘by Japanese fifth columnists’.
Churchill’s speech led to a long debate, spilling over into several sessions of the house. The Labour leader Arthur Greenwood said the prime minister’s harsh language would further embitter Anglo-Indian relations. He reminded his fellow MPs that ‘there are nations who do not look kindly on our attitude towards subject people’. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) MP James Maxton went further; noting that, in the 1937 elections, the Congress Party had got an ‘overwhelming majority and that mandate was as good as Mr. Churchill’s or the Conservative party here’. His ILP colleague Campbell Stephen went further still, urging that, since they commanded an ‘overwhelming majority’ of Indian opinion, the government should ‘let the Congress leaders out of jail at once’, and ‘appoint Mr. Gandhi as Viceroy’.
Seeking to calm the waters, the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, said that Britain did not have a claim to ‘permanent domination’ of India, and would, when conditions permitted, restart the process of constitutional reform, so that India could ‘go forward with our goodwill to build her future with her own leadership’. The Indophile Labour MP Sydney Silverman interjected: ‘Is that the Prime Minister’s view?’ Knowing that it was not, Amery ducked the question, instead saying that British policy towards India was ‘to go forward not to fly apart, to build, not to break up’, adding that any settlement must take account of the ‘great Moslem community’ and of the Depressed Classes.
The debate was closed by Clement Attlee, now deputy prime minister in the War Cabinet. His Labour Party was committed to freedom for India, but this had to be balanced against the demands of the war now being fought. Attlee rode the tightrope delicately and diplomatically. His own interest in India was stoked by his having been a member of the Simon Commission in 1928; fourteen years later, he realized ‘how little I know and how great are the difficulties’. He complained about the Congress Party, but in tones gentler than Churchill’s. He had thought the Congress would accept the Cripps offer, but they ‘departed altogether from methods of democracy and tried the method of coercion’. Attlee nonetheless believed that India might, once the War was won, ‘set a lead in Asia for democracy’. He was still hopeful that the Congress would change its mind, and ‘join in our effort to defeat tyranny and thereby hasten the time when the Indian peoples may themselves decide on their own free Government for the future’.28
Meanwhile, Attlee’s colleague in party and government, Stafford Cripps, chose to present the British case to the American people. Writing in the New York Times, Cripps deplored that ‘at a critical time’ in the course of the war, Gandhi should have persuaded the Congress party to carry out ‘a campaign of civil disobedience which can do nothing except give comfort and encouragement to the enemy’. Cripps charged that Gandhi’s campaign would ‘embitter different sections of Indian opinion and so make agreement upon a new Constitution more difficult’. As proof of Britain’s good faith, Cripps spoke of the Indianization of the civil services, and the elections of 1937, adding that once the war had ended, steps would be taken to ensure that ‘India should have self-government as free as that of Canada or the United States’.
Cripps then explained to the American reader the political configuration in India, with parties other than the Congress representing the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Depressed Classes and the princely states. Cripps claimed that ‘these I
ndians, who are considerably more than half the population, do not want Great Britain to walk out of India while the war is on, do not want the chaos Mr. Gandhi had suggested (quite rightly) that his plan would bring, but they do want to help the United Nations defend India against Japan’.29
Cripps’s piece was almost certainly written on the advice of his Cabinet. A left-wing Labour leader, one moreover who knew Gandhi and Nehru and had quite recently attempted to arrive at a compromise with the Congress, was more likely to sway American public opinion than one of his Tory counterparts. Even so, his arguments were somewhat disingenuous. That ‘India should have self-government as free as that of Canada or the United States’, was as he well knew, surely not consistent with his own prime minister’s views. Churchill and Linlithgow were loath to cede power to the Indians—a factor that had contributed to the decision by Gandhi and the Congress to launch a fresh mass struggle for freedom.
That Ambedkar and Cripps should take on Gandhi at this time was not surprising. More remarkable, perhaps, was the decision of Henry Polak, a friend of forty years standing, to enlist in the ranks of those opposing Gandhi. As we have seen, ever since the war broke out, Polak, as a British Jew, had strongly felt that the need to defeat Hitler was paramount. His disenchantment with the Congress’s refusal to unambiguously support the war effort was at first expressed in private to Indian friends. When his criticisms had no effect, he decided to make them public.
In July 1940, Polak had written to the India Office, saying he would like to go on a government-sponsored lecture tour of the United States, to ‘help to place Indo-British relations and Indian cultural values and national aspirations in a fair perspective and to create a sympathetic understanding of each country’s difficulties and endeavours’. The India Office was taken with the idea; since ‘America has had an abundant share of Congress propagandists over the last two or three years’, they were ‘anxious to get one or two people of independent views to put a more balanced picture before the American public’.30
Polak himself wanted freedom for India, but in slow, steady steps, with the British connection kept intact. He was in this respect closer to Srinivasa Sastri than Gandhi. Had Polak gone on a lecture tour of neutral America in 1940, he would have tried to be even-handed between Britain and India, Linlithgow and Gandhi. As it turned out, Polak was finally sent to America by the India Office only in the second half of 1942. By this time, after the failure of the Cripps Mission and the Quit India movement, Polak had—in a political sense—become extremely hostile to his housemate and intimate friend of his Johannesburg days. That America itself had now entered the war made him even more determined to speak out against Gandhi and the Congress.
Polak’s tour of the United States was arranged and paid for by the British Information Services. He spoke in many cities, and also gave several radio interviews. On 15 October 1942, for example, he took part in a public debate in Philadelphia on the question ‘What Should Be Done About India’. The other participants were J.J. Singh, president of the India League of America; and Frederick L. Schuman, professor of government at Williams College. Polak himself was described in the programme as a lawyer and journalist, an adviser to the British Labour Party, and ‘a former law associate of Gandhi’.
The first speaker in the debate was J.J. Singh, here representing the Congress point of view. Singh said that if a coalition government was formed in Delhi ‘by the popular leaders of India’, then India as a whole would ‘fight shoulder to shoulder with the United Nations against the Axis’, thus ‘to fight and to die for freedom and democracy’. An unambiguous declaration, without any ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, to the effect that India would be granted independence at the end of the War, would enable Indians to wholeheartedly join the Allies. What stood in the way, said Singh, were the ‘reactionary British Tories who are still indulging in the pipe dream of their old glory and cannot bear to see the end of their imperialism’.
Polak, speaking next, accused Singh of painting ‘too beautiful a picture’ for it to be credible. The Cripps Mission promised independence after the war, but the Congress wanted a declaration of ‘immediate independence’, and when that was not granted, launched a movement of disobedience and sabotage. Polak went on to speak scathingly of how
within the Congress Party itself there is a strong pacifist and defeatist element, led by my old friend, Gandhi, who is convinced that the United Nations cannot win the war and who, in any case, would defend India against the enemy only by non-violent means. But Gandhi, would, in fact, if his advice was accepted, urge his countrymen to disband the Indian army (he said so) and make peace with the Japanese, who, he believes, would not invade India if the British and American forces were withdrawn (he said that too).
A sharp argument now began between Gandhi’s relatively new follower and his old but now estranged comrade. Singh refuted the claim that Gandhi was an appeaser wanting to make terms with the Japanese. Singh quoted Gandhi as saying: ‘I’m more interested than the British in keeping the Japanese out. If Japan wins, then we are losers of everything. I would rather die than cooperate with the Japanese.’
Polak answered by referring to Gandhi’s letters offering to negotiate with the Japanese, and even with Hitler. At this stage, the moderator remarked: ‘I’m afraid that we can’t get anywhere if we disagree over the facts.’
It was time now for the third panellist, the American professor, to speak. Britain’s leaders did not trust the Indian nationalists, he said, and the Indian nationalists did not trust Britain’s leaders. There was no trust before the Cripps Mission, no trust during it, and certainly no trust after, now that ‘too much blood has flowed, too many hearts have been broken, too much bitterness has been bred by the tragic conflict which is still going on in India’.
Professor Schuman suggested that a United Nations commission be constituted, headed by an American, to work out a provisional war government of representative Indians. To this end, the British should release the Congress leaders, and the Congress should call off the civil disobedience movement.31
The professor’s proposal was well meant, yet with no chance of being heard. The British, led by Churchill, were in no mood to recognize their own fallibilities or imperfections. Imperial arrogance would never permit an impartial arbiter between Britain and India, even if it be America.
VI
These arguments conducted in his name were (at the time) unknown to Gandhi. He was in jail, cut off from his country, his countrymen and the world. Unlike in previous jail terms, he was not allowed to write even non-political letters to his friends and disciples. Few visitors were allowed. He was, however, permitted to subscribe to newspapers.
What we know of Gandhi’s daily regimen in prison, c. 1942–43, comes from the colonial archives. It appears that he got up at 6.30 a.m. (somewhat later than at Sevagram), and after ablutions and breakfast, read books or newspapers. From 8.15 to 9 a.m. he walked in the garden with Pyarelal, Sushila Nayar, Mira and his grand-niece Manu. This was followed by a massage by the doctor in his party (Sushila), and a bath.
From eleven to noon, Gandhi ate lunch, slowly, while Mira talked to or read to him. A short rest followed, after which he spent about an hour discussing the newspapers with Pyarelal, who, after Mahadev’s death, was now serving as his master’s secretary.
As the afternoon progressed, Gandhi taught his grand-niece Manu (precisely what the sources do not say), before supervising the indexing of newspaper cuttings by Pyarelal and Sushila. As sunset approached, Mira read to Gandhi once more. He then took a long walk in the garden, followed by an hour or more at the spinning wheel.
A prayer meeting, then a light evening meal, an hour of conversation with family and friends took up the rest of the day. Gandhi usually went to bed at 10 p.m.32
Other glimpses of Gandhi’s life in prison come from a memoir written by one of his companions, Sushila Nayar. She reports that on 5 November 1942, the newspa
pers reported the death in combat of the son of the former viceroy, Lord Irwin (now known as Lord Halifax). Gandhi wrote a message of condolence for the government to pass on. He then told his colleagues in the palace prison that ‘you will not find a single nobleman in England whose son has not gone to war. They set an example for the common people and generate a spirit of self-sacrifice and stiff resistance in the whole nation.’33
Due to the restrictions on his correspondence, and the fact that Gandhi could not write his weekly columns for his own newspapers, the Collected Works are unusually sparse for this period. The only letters that are preserved are those that he wrote to officials. We thus know that he was distressed by reading, in the newspapers, summaries of government resolutions and statements vilifying him and the Congress, accusing them of being complicit with the Axis powers and of practising ‘totalitarian’ politics. The government had also claimed that Gandhi himself was responsible for the violence that the protests after his arrest had sometimes led to.
In February 1943, the government published an eighty-six-page booklet consolidating these claims. It bore the accusatory title, Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances, 1942–3. Its author, a senior home department official named R. Tottenham who detested Gandhi, had so arranged a series of carefully chosen quotes as to seek to show that: (a) Gandhi did not ever intend the movement to be non-violent; and (b) Gandhi preferred the Japanese to the British. The ‘entire phraseology of Mr. Gandhi’s writings in connection with the movement’, this report claimed, ‘is of a type associated in the ordinary man’s mind with violence’. Indeed, ‘Mr. Gandhi knew that any mass movement started in India would be a violent movement….In spite of this knowledge, he was prepared [to] take the risk of outbreaks of rioting and disorder.’ Gandhi’s stated willingness to allow Allied troops to remain in India, the report further claimed, was insincere; apparently ‘he had no intention of allowing them to operate effectively in resisting Japan’.34
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