The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Do or Die

  In May 1942 the Japanese completed their occupation of Burma and planned an invasion of northeast India after the monsoon. That month, inspired by Gandhi’s hardening stance, the AICC meeting in Allahabad called on Britain to declare its date of withdrawal from India, failing which the Congress would unleash a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign. At the CWC’s meeting in Wardha on July 18, Gandhi won over the skeptics by stating that an independent India would join the Allies as a free nation and offer its soil to their troops to fight Japan. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a Tamil Brahmin lawyer from Madras (now Chennai), argued that Britain should and would not leave India at this critical moment. He was not swayed by Gandhi, and resigned from the party. (Later he would emerge as an acutely realistic politician, realizing, for instance, that Britain in the midst of World War II would never quit India.) The CWC authorized Gandhi to take charge of the nonviolent mass movement. Its resolution—known as the “Quit India” call to the British—was approved by AICC delegates in Bombay on August 8, 1942.

  In his “Do or Die” speech to launch the civil disobedience campaign, Gandhi made a brief reference to Jinnah. “A day will certainly come when he will realize that I have never wronged him or the Muslims,” he said. “I cannot wait till Jinnah Sahib is converted for the immediate consummation of Indian freedom.”40

  Jinnah was furious that Gandhi had decided to launch his campaign without bothering to consult him and that he assumed he alone could deal with Britain and other powers on behalf of India. The League’s president perceived the Quit India resolution as “the culminating point in the policy and program of Mr. Gandhi and his Hindu Congress of blackmailing and coercing the British to transfer power to a Hindu Raj immediately.”41

  What followed the instant arrest of Gandhi and top Congress officials was more a rebellion than a nonviolent civil disobedience struggle. In the first week, militant Indians attacked 500 post offices, 250 railway stations, and 150 police stations, and derailed 60 trains. By the end of September, the authorities had arrested sixty thousand agitators—or freedom fighters, in the nationalist lexicon—and shot dead about a thousand.42

  The viceroy banned the Congress Party. He deployed fifty-seven battalions of regular British soldiers to contain and suppress the civilian revolt. He issued the Revolutionary Movement Ordinance, which further tightened his government’s control. “I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so concealed from the world for reasons of military security,” Lord Linlithgow informed Churchill in a secret telegram on August 31. “Mob violence remains rampant over large tracts of the countryside.”43 The viceroy’s iron fist strategy was applauded by Churchill. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire,” he thundered before the House of Commons on November 10, 1942.44

  By the time the one-eyed Field Marshal Archibald Wavell succeeded Lord Linlithgow in September 1943 as viceroy, British India had been pacified, its jails overflowing with Congress partisans.

  The Congress Party’s loss proved to be Jinnah’s gain, with the League filling some of the vacuum left by the banishing of the country’s leading political organization. Within two months of the Quit India campaign, the Dawn, founded as a weekly journal in Delhi by Jinnah, was turned into a daily newspaper as the official mouthpiece of the Muslim League.

  Jinnah toured the country propagating his two-nation theory. The League made solid gains, winning forty-seven of the sixty-one by-elections in Muslim constituencies between 1937 and 1943, with Congress Muslims securing a derisory four—the remaining seats going to unaffiliated Muslims. Nehru’s membership drive among Muslims, and the reelection of Maulana Azad as Congress president in 1941 and 1942, had left most Muslims unmoved. By contrast, in 1944 the League claimed a membership of two million.45 Part of the reason for Jinnah’s mushrooming success was his deliberate decision not to spell out the details of the Muslim homeland he had in mind.

  The Last Throw of the Dice

  After the February 1944 death of Kasturbai Gandhi, jailed along with her husband in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, the government eased off on the bereaved widower. It allowed him to receive Rajagopalachari, who had remained a free man. He discussed with Gandhi a plan for a joint League-Congress demand for a national government based on an understanding that “contiguous Muslim majority districts” could secede following independence, if separation was the preference of their adult populations. Gandhi endorsed this formula.

  Rajagopalachari met Jinnah in April and told him that Gandhi was ready to discuss secession. Soon after, Gandhi suffered a near-fatal attack of malaria. He survived. But fearing his death in prison, Viceroy Wavell released him on May 6. After conferring with Gandhi, Rajagopalachari informed Jinnah that Gandhi was favorably inclined toward his formula. Jinnah replied that if Gandhi dealt with him directly, he would refer the plan to the League’s Council.

  On July 17, Gandhi dispatched a missive in Gujarati, with a copy in English, to Jinnah: “Brother Jinnah . . . Today my heart says that I should write to you. We will meet whenever you choose. Don’t regard me as the enemy of Islam or of the Muslims of this country.” Jinnah’s reply, mailed from Kashmir, where he was on vacation, written in English—“the only language in which I can make no mistake”—read: “Dear Mr. Gandhi . . . I shall be glad to receive you at my house in Bombay on my return. . . . By that time I hope you will have recuperated your health fully. . . . I would like to say nothing more till we meet.”46

  As it was, both of them were old—Gandhi, almost seventy-five, and Jinnah his junior by only seven years—and in poor health. What kept Jinnah, suffering from lingering pneumonia in the base of his lungs, going were calcium injections, tonics, and shortwave diathermy.

  From September 9 to 27, they negotiated daily. Their seeming cordiality was captured daily by press photographers: the shorter, bald, jug-eared Gandhi, wearing moon-shaped spectacles and flashing an open-mouth, broken-teeth smile, placing his brotherly arm around the shoulder of the tall, reedy Jinnah, with sunken cheeks and a thatch of thinning gray hair, managing to bare his front teeth. This daily ritual raised hopes.

  In the end, nothing came of it. Gandhi proposed that the areas in which Muslims were in majority should be demarcated by a commission appointed jointly by the Congress and the League. Then their wish regarding secession should be tested through a referendum based on adult franchise. But the seceding areas could be consolidated into a separate state according to a treaty only after India had become independent, and that such a treaty should specify “an efficient and satisfactory administration of foreign affairs, defense, internal communications, and customs” between the two independent neighbors.

  Jinnah wanted the right to secede accorded only to the Muslim nation. That meant giving the right to vote in a referendum only to Muslims in the Muslim-majority areas. Also he proposed partition before independence. Aware of the Congress ministries’ neglect of Muslims’ communal interests, he did not trust Congress-governed independent India to implement the promise of Pakistan. But his proposal was unacceptable to Gandhi. A desperate Gandhi proposed that a third party be selected by them to arbitrate. Jinnah declined.

  On the whole, this exercise, conducted in good faith by both titans, raised Jinnah’s status. It was Gandhi who came knocking at his door. It was Gandhi who, after much resistance and rhetoric, conceded the principle of secession from the center. It became crystal clear to all that Jinnah now wielded a veto over the future status of India as a political entity.

  Within two weeks of the end of World War II in Europe on May 9, 1945, Viceroy Wavell announced a plan to transform his Imperial Executive Council into a national cabinet of Indian leaders. This was to be the first step toward self-rule for India with provisions for separate representation for Muslims and reduced powers for both Hindus and Muslims in their majority provinc
es.47 He lifted the ban on the Congress Party and freed its leaders on June 15.

  They and their League counterparts were invited to a conference in the summer capital of Simla on June 25. They were charged with nominating their representatives to the proposed national cabinet and discussing the rest of the Wavell Plan. The talks failed. Jinnah insisted on nominating all Muslim members of the cabinet, and Congress president Maulana Azad refused to abandon his party’s right to include a Muslim in its list. Earlier Jinnah had pointedly avoided shaking hands with Maulana Azad.48

  The failure of the Simla Conference scuttled the last viable opportunity for a united India whose chances of independence rose sharply when Britain’s Labor Party, led by Clement Attlee, won a two-thirds majority in the general election on July 26.

  As leader of the opposition in 1935, Attlee had proposed an amendment to the Government of India Act 1935 providing for a dominion status for the colony, only to see it defeated. Now he, instead of Churchill, had the honor to be among the leaders of the Allied powers to accept the unconditional surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945.

  4: A Rising Tide of Violence

  Starting in August 1945, the pace of Indian history accelerated. While the Labor government in London set out to withdraw from India against the background of the uncertain loyalty of its Indian military, tensions between the Congress Party and the Muslim League intensified and morphed into savage Hindu-Muslim violence.

  Stung by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s manifest discourtesy to him at the Simla Conference, Congress president Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad invited several Muslim groups opposed to the Muslim League to attend the Nationalist Muslim Conference in Delhi on September 8. This was a preamble to establish the Azad Muslim Parliamentary Board to contest elections starting in January 1946.

  Britain’s Indian Military Foundation Shaken

  In the interim, public attention turned to the military trials of General Shah Nawaz Khan and Colonels Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, which started in November. They were ex-officers of the British Indian Army who, as Japan’s prisoners of war in Malaya-Singapore, had joined the Indian National Army (INA) led by Subash Chandra Bose, a former Congress president. He had allied with the Axis powers after escaping his house arrest in Calcutta in January 1941. Khan, Sahgal, and Dhillon became the best known faces of the six thousand Indian POWs the British Raj decided to prosecute for treason.

  As symbols of Indians’ armed resistance to British imperialism, this Hindu-Muslim-Sikh trio mesmerized the public, which had so far been exposed almost exclusively to the virtues of nonviolent struggle against foreign domination.

  Reflecting the popular mood, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) session in September had passed a resolution warning that “it would be a tragedy if these officers were punished for the offense of having labored, however mistakenly, for the freedom of India,” and demanded their release.1 The Congress Working Committee (CWC) formed the INA Defense Committee. The proceedings of the trial in Delhi’s historic Red Fort took a dramatic turn when Jawaharlal Nehru appeared before the military judges in the barrister’s gown he had discarded a quarter century earlier. Jinnah expressed his readiness to defend General Khan if he dissociated himself from the other (non-Muslim) codefendants. Khan declined the offer.

  Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, an apostle of nonviolence, set aside his creed. “The hypnotism of the Indian National Army has cast its spell upon us,” he conceded in his article in the Harijan of February 24, 1946. “Netaji’s [Subash Chandra Bose’s] name is one to conjure with. His patriotism is second to none. . . . His bravery shines through all his actions. He aimed high and failed.”2

  By early 1946 the INA’s militant nationalism began to resonate among the hitherto loyal ranks of Britain’s Indian military. As it was, the discontent about food and working conditions among the enlisted of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) had been building up. It came to the fore on February 18, when disgruntled naval troops formed a Naval Central Strike Committee, led by M. S. Khan in Bombay. The mutiny at HMS Talwar, an onshore signals school, spread to the RIN’s seventy-eight ships and twenty on-shore establishments in Bombay, Karachi, Cochin, and Vishakhapatnam (aka Vizag), involving twenty thousand sailors. The next morning they lowered the Union Jack and hoisted the nationalist tricolor on most of the ships and establishments. In Bombay the mutiny on twenty-two ships was backed by workers’ strikes and commercial shutdowns. The effort to quell the resulting rioting and violence led to 228 deaths by police fire.3

  The naval mutiny shook the government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who ordered the Royal Navy to quash it. Admiral J. H. Godfrey, the flag officer commanding the RIN, went on air, bellowing “Submit or perish.” By then the mutineers’ demands had included the freeing of all ex-INA troops.

  The Bombay-based Congress leader Vallabhbhai Patel intervened to secure a peaceful end to the mutiny, an enterprise to which Jinnah also made a contribution. By February 21 a British destroyer arrived from Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) and anchored near the Gateway of India in Bombay. The mutiny ended two days later, with the authorities appointing five courts of inquiry to delve into the strikers’ demands.4

  Later, in Delhi, the INA officers’ life imprisonment sentences were cashiered by the Indian commander in chief Field Marshal Sir Claude John Auchinleck. His hand was forced by the intensity of the popular protest and barely disguised signs of discontent among serving Indian soldiers.

  The decisive roles of the naval mutiny and the widespread disapproval of the INA officers’ trials were conceded by Attlee a decade later as a guest of P. V. Chuckraborty, the acting governor of West Bengal. In his letter of March 30, 1976, Chuckraborty wrote:

  I put it straight to him [Attlee] like this: “The Quit India Movement of Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time, which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?” In reply Attlee cited several reasons, the most important of which were the INA activities of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British Empire in India, and the RIN Mutiny which made the British realize that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British. When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s 1942 movement, Attlee’s lips widened in smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, “Minimal.”5

  By espousing the INA’s cause, the Congress garnered the support of those Indians who had little faith in Gandhi’s nonviolent strategy. This became apparent in the electoral contests of January through March 1946.

  Electoral Mandates

  In the 103-seat election in the Central Legislative Assembly (CLA), the Congress won all of the 51 general (Hindu) seats plus 5 more non-Muslim seats. At the same time the Muslim League roared to victory, winning all 30 Muslim places and polling 86.6 percent of the Muslim vote. These elections were based on the extremely restricted franchise of the 1919 Act, with only 586,647 casting their ballots, representing almost exclusively the propertied classes.

  For the provincial elections, spread over late January to mid-March, the electoral base was over 35 million. The turnout of 26 million was an impressive 75 percent. The aggregate count gave the Congress 19 million ballots and the League 4.5 million. The Congress increased its total from 701 seats in the 1937 poll to 923. But the League quadrupled its strength, to 425 out of 485 Muslim seats. To Maulana Azad’s profound chagrin, the Nationalist Muslims scored a derisory 16.6

  Jinnah had masterminded the campaign while staying out of the feuds among provincial leaders. League candidates deployed Islamic symbols and slogans to garner support. In the Muslim-majority provinces they turned, successfully, to such traditional power centers and networks as feudal lords, clan elders, and religious notables. With this, Indian politics came full circle. A generation earlier, Jinnah had warned Gandhi against mixing religion with politics.
Now he presided over a political party whose candidates pulled religious strings unashamedly to win electoral contests.

  He hammered home the message that every ballot cast for the League was a vote for the welfare of one hundred million Indian Muslims and Islam. “Your votes are not for individuals but . . . for Pakistan,” he repeated in his election speeches up and down the country.7 Oddly, he articulated all this in English, which was translated into Urdu by an assistant. This and his traditional aloofness had become part of the mystique surrounding him, which enhanced his charisma among his coreligionists.

  By then the term “Pakistan”—an Urdu compound of pak, meaning “pure” and istan meaning “place”—had acquired a talismanic quality among Muslims of all classes. It was perceived as a panacea for all the problems Muslims faced. Its exact meaning was kept deliberately vague. “Muslim businessmen foresaw new markets [in Pakistan] free from Hindu competition,” notes Alan Hayes Marriam, an American academic. “Landlords hoped for a perpetuation of the zamindari system [which guaranteed perpetual ownership of vast, inherited agricultural plots] which the Congress had vowed to abolish. Intellectuals envisioned a cultural rebirth free from the British and Hindus. To the orthodox, Pakistan promised a religious state. . . . To officials and bureaucrats a new nation offered a shortcut to seniority.”8

  After the elections, the Congress formed ministries in eight provinces. As the largest group in Bengal’s legislature, the League led the coalition government, with Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy as chief minister.