Nehru, in a letter from the prison cell he frequently occupied, pointed out to the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, that his supporters had often held back from injuring the Raj: ‘In the summer of 1940, when France fell and England was facing dire peril, Congress … deliberately avoided [direct action], in spite of a strong demand for it … because it did not want to take advantage of a critical international situation or to encourage Nazi aggression in any way.’ He wrote likewise on the day after Pearl Harbor: ‘If I were asked with whom my sympathies lay in this war, I would unhesitatingly say with Russia, China, America and England.’ But for Nehru, there remained an essential qualification. Churchill refused to grant independence to India; in consequence, Nehru asserted, ‘there is no question of my giving help to Britain. How can I fight for a thing, freedom, which is denied to me? British policy in India appears to be to terrify the people, so that in anxiety we may seek British protection.’
Following Japan’s entry into the war, Mahatma Gandhi demanded that the British should leave forthwith, to make India a less desirable invasion objective. In 1942, the nationalists’ ‘Quit India’ movement gained widespread support, and stirred rising popular unrest. Congress moved from a policy of non-cooperation towards one of outright rejection of British rule. On 21 January Lord Linlithgow reported to London: ‘There is a large and dangerous potential fifth column in Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Orissa, and … indeed, potentiality of pro-enemy sympathy and activity in eastern India is enormous.’ To the nationalists’ surprise, even in this darkest hour of Britain’s eastern fortunes, the imperial power declined to negotiate. Most of Congress’s leaders were imprisoned, some for long periods; Gandhi himself was released only in 1944, on grounds of ill-health. Widespread violence erupted, most seriously in Bombay, the Eastern United Provinces and Bihar, with attacks on symbols of the Raj – government buildings, railways, post offices – and some sabotage.
In August 1942 spontaneous riots broke out, following the failure of Sir Stafford Cripps’s mission to persuade Congress to shelve its political demands until peace came. The British restored order with considerable ruthlessness: the Viceroy came close to authorising aerial strafing of the dissidents, an option he described only half-ironically as ‘an exhilarating departure from precedent’. There were mass punitive whippings of convicted rioters, and tens of thousands of troops and lathi-wielding police were deployed against demonstrators. There are credible reports of policemen in disaffected areas engaging in rapes and indeed gang-rapes of arrested women; several hundred demonstrators were shot down, many homes were burned.
In parts of north-west India, for some months a reign of terror prevailed. On 29 September in Midnapore, for instance, a procession led by a seventy-three-year-old woman named Matongini Hazra converged on Tamluk’s courthouse. An ardent follower of Gandhi, she had already served six months’ imprisonment for demonstrating in front of the Viceroy. Now, accompanied by several women blowing conches, she advanced on the police and army cordon securing the courthouse, carrying a flag. When the security forces opened fire, a bullet struck her left hand, causing her to transfer the flag to the right. She was hit again before a third bullet struck her full in the temple. Three teenage boys were among others killed before the demonstrators fled.
In the short term, repression was successful in restoring order. The Indian Army remained almost entirely staunch. But all save the most myopic British imperialists recognised that their rule had lost the consent of the governed. It was a source of embarrassment to thoughtful politicians that in 1942, in the midst of a war against tyranny, some fifty battalions of troops – more than were then committed against the Japanese – had to be deployed to maintain internal control of India. It may be argued that there were overwhelming practical objections against surrendering power to Congress when the Japanese army stood at the gates. But it was among the ugliest aspects of British conduct of the war that in order to hold India, it was necessary not merely to repulse external invaders, but also to administer the country under emergency powers, as an occupied nation rather than a willing co-belligerent. Some of the repressive measures adopted in India were similar in kind, if not in scale, to those used by the Axis in occupied countries. Reports of excesses by the security forces were suppressed by military censorship.
The British in India displayed a casual racism, and sometimes brutality, which caused sensitive witnesses to recoil. Troop-Sergeant Clive Branson was a peacetime artist born in the subcontinent, a former member of the communist International Brigade in Spain. He wrote of his compatriots’ behaviour: ‘Those bloody idiots in the regular army … treat the Indians in such a way which not only makes one tremble for the future, but which makes one ashamed of being one of them … Never will any of us … forget the unbelievable, indescribable poverty in which we have found people living wherever we went.’ If those at home knew the truth, said Branson, ‘there would be a hell of a row – because these conditions are maintained in the name of the British’.
There were grievances in the ranks of the Indian Army, mostly about soldiers’ inferior conditions of service compared to those of their British counterparts. One group of men wrote jointly to their commanding officer: ‘In the eyes of Mahatma Gandhi all are equal but you pay a British soldier Rs75/-and to an Indian soldier you pay Rs18/-only.’ Another man complained: ‘An Indian subadar salutes a British soldier, but the British soldier does not salute an Indian subadar. Why is this so?’ Nor were Indians the only victims of the Raj’s harsh governance: in December 1942, 2,115 Japanese civilian internees were held by the British at Purama Quila camp outside Delhi in scandalous conditions of squalor and privation; by the year’s end 106 of them had died, some of beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese empire presided over many worse things, on a vastly greater scale; but the deaths at Purama Quila reflected deplorably on British competence as well as humanity.
Americans, from their president downwards, never entirely forgave Churchill and his nation for the manner in which the peoples of the subcontinent were excluded from the ringing promises of freedom enshrined in the Atlantic Charter. Americans serving in India – performing liaison and logistical tasks, training Chinese soldiers and flying bomber operations against the Japanese – recoiled from British treatment of its inhabitants, and believed their own behaviour more sympathetic. Indians were less convinced: a letter-writer to the Statesman newspaper denounced the conduct of the Americans as vigorously as that of the British, describing them uncharitably as ‘venereal disease-ridden and seducers of young women’. The British saw hypocrisy as well as moral conceit in criticism of their imperial governance by an ally which sustained racial segregation at home.
Most of Churchill’s political colleagues recognised the inevitability of granting early independence to India, and hesitated only about the timing. But the old Victorian imperialist remained implacable: he clung to a delusion that British greatness derived in substantial measure from the Raj, and was disgusted by the perceived treachery of Indian politicians who sought to exploit Britain’s vulnerability and sometimes rejoiced in its misfortunes. Throughout the war, the prime minister spoke and wrote about Indians with a contempt that reflected his only acquaintance with them, as a nineteenth-century cavalry subaltern; his policies lacked the compassion which generally characterised his leadership.
By the autumn of 1942 more than 30,000 Congressmen were imprisoned, including Gandhi and Nehru. But British treatment of dissenters throughout their empire was incomparably more humane than that accorded by the Axis to domestic foes and occupied nations. For instance, Anwar Sadat was jailed after being implicated in his conspiracy with the German spies in Cairo, but so casually guarded that he was able to make two easy escapes; after the second, in 1944, he remained free, though in hiding, for the rest of the war. In India, Nehru could write letters freely, enjoy such favourite books as Plato’s Republic and play badminton during a relatively privileged fortress incarceration. But his weight fell dramatically, and confinement bo
re down as heavily upon the fifty-two-year-old Indian leader as on any other prisoner. In one letter, he told his wife Betty to abandon the notion of sending him Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy ‘when there is tragedy enough at present’.
Some nationalists believed that drastic methods should be employed to get the British out. In 1940 Subhas Chandra Bose, Congress president, demanded a campaign of civil disobedience. When Gandhi rejected this, Bose resigned his post and made his way to Berlin via Kabul. Once in Germany, he recruited a small ‘Indian Legion’ from prisoners captured in the Western Desert, which served the Third Reich without notable distinction. In the summer of 1943 Bose returned to South-East Asia. The Japanese granted his ‘provisional Indian government’ a nominal seat in the occupied Andaman and Nicobar islands, and he was soon attracting big crowds for public meetings under Japanese auspices. Wearing uniform and top boots, he spoke in terms that mirrored Churchill’s call for blood, toil, tears and sweat. Indian National Army recruits, he told his audiences, must face ‘hunger, thirst, privation, forced marches and death. Only when you pass this test will freedom be yours.’ INA soldiers called Bose Netaji – ‘Esteemed Leader’. One of them, Lt. Shiv Singh, said: ‘After being captured in Hong Kong, Gen. Mohan Singh and Bose said … “You are fighting for a very small sum of money indeed, now come and fight for your country.” We volunteered without any force being used … I thought Netaji … was number-one leader, above Gandhi.’
Bose formed a women’s brigade named the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, in honour of a heroine of the 1857 rising against the British, and marched with it from Rangoon to Bangkok. One recruit asserted in a radio broadcast: ‘I am not a doll soldier, or a soldier in mere words, but a real soldier in the true sense of the word.’ A contingent of five hundred reached Burma from Malaya late in 1943, but the women were disappointed to find themselves relegated to nursing duties. Men’s units were deployed against Slim’s army in Assam and Burma. One soldier, P.K. Basu, said later: ‘I did not believe that the INA would actually succeed, but I believed in the INA’; two INA regiments were named for Gandhi and Nehru. There was a yawning gulf between Bose’s rhetoric and the INA’s contribution to the Axis war effort. When its poorly armed units were deployed in battle, their Japanese sponsors treated them with disdain, and few showed stomach for serious fighting. Some imperial Indian troops shot INA prisoners out of hand, but the British were embarrassed by the renegade force’s very existence, and dismayed to find that a substantial number of Indians regarded Bose as a hero – as they do today.
The most serious blot upon the wartime Raj, and arguably upon Britain’s entire war effort, was the 1943–44 Bengal famine. The loss of Burma deprived India of 15 per cent of its food supplies. When a series of floods and cyclones – natural catastrophes to which low-lying East Bengal is chronically vulnerable – struck the region, wrecking its 1942 harvest, the population fell prey to desperate hunger. Much transport was destroyed, further impeding movement of food supplies. A Bengali fisherman named Abani was among millions who lost their livelihoods. ‘We could not afford to buy a net … The moneylender would not give me a loan. The moneylender himself had no money. Our family possessions had been destroyed in the flood: of eight cows we only saved one.’ By December, people were dying. In the following year, their plight became catastrophic. In October 1943 a relief worker named Arangamohan Das reported from Terapekhia bazaar on the Haldi river. ‘There I saw nearly 500 destitutes of both sexes, almost naked and reduced to bare skeletons. Some of them were begging for food … from the passers by, some longing for food with piteous look, some lying by the wayside approaching death hardly with any more energy to breathe and actually I had the misfortune of seeing eight peoples breathe their last before my eyes.’
Censors intercepted a letter from an Indian soldier embittered by his experience during leave: ‘We come home to our own villages to find the food is scarce and high-priced. Our wives have been led astray and our land has been misappropriated. Why does the Sarkar [government] not do something about it now rather than talking about post-war reconstruction?’ Why not, indeed? The British government refused to divert scarce shipping to famine relief; India secretary Leo Amery at first adopted a cavalier attitude. Even when he began to exert his influence in favour of intervention, the prime minister and cabinet remained unsympathetic. In 1943, sailings to Indian Ocean destinations were cut by 60 per cent, as shipping was diverted to sustain Allied amphibious operations, aid to Russia and Atlantic convoys; the British cabinet met only 25 per cent of Delhi’s requested food deliveries. Churchill wrote in March 1943, applauding the minister of war transport’s refusal to release ships to move relief supplies: ‘A concession to one country … encourages demands from all the others. [The Indians] must learn to look after themselves as we have done … We cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of goodwill.’ A few months later, he said: ‘There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.’
But the British diet remained incomparably more lavish than that of the Indian people. Bengalis use the phrase payter jala – burning of the belly – to describe hunger, and many bellies burned in 1943 and 1944. Gourhori Majhi of Kalikakundu said long afterwards: ‘Everyone was crazed with hunger. Whatever you found, you’d tear it off and eat it right there. My family had ten people; my own stomach was wailing. Who is your brother, who is your sister – no one thought of such things then. Everyone is wondering, how will I live? … There was not a blade of grass in the fields.’ Many women resorted to prostitution, and some families sold their daughters to pimps.
Even at this extremity there were no reports of cannibalism such as took place in Russia, but there were many child murders. The newspaper Biplabi reported on 5 August 1943: ‘In Sapurapota village … a Muslim weaver was unable to support his family and, crazed with hunger, wandered away. His wife believed that he had drowned himself … Being unable to feed her two young sons for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering. On [23 July] she dropped the smaller boy torn from her womb, the sparkle of her eye, into the Kasai’s frothing waters. She tried in the same way to send her elder son to his father, but he screamed and grabbed onto her … She discovered a new way to silence her child’s searing hunger. With feeble arms she dug a small grave and threw her son into it. As she was trying to cover him with earth a passer-by heard his screams and snatched the spade from his mother’s hand. A [low-caste Hindu] promised to bring up the boy and the mother then went away, who knows where. Probably she found peace by joining her husband in the Kasai’s cold torrent.’
There were widespread cholera outbreaks, with people dying in the streets and parks of major cities: by mid-October 1943, the death rate in Calcutta alone had risen from its usual six hundred a month to 2,000. Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister-in-law wrote from a relief centre describing ‘rickety babies with arms and legs like sticks; nursing mothers with wrinkled faces; children with swollen faces and hollow-eyed through lack of food and sleep; men exhausted and weary, walking skeletons all of them’. She was appalled by ‘the look of weary resignation in their eyes. It wounded my spirit in a manner that the sight of their suffering bodies had not done.’ In October Wavell, by now India’s Viceroy, belatedly deployed troops to move relief supplies. Thereafter, government efforts to assist the population steadily increased, but at least one million and perhaps as many as three million people were dead, and immense political damage had been done. There was no doubt of the logistical difficulties the British faced in assuaging the consequences of natural disaster while fighting a great war. But Churchill responded to Wavell’s increasingly urgent and forceful pleas for aid with a brutal insensitivity which left an irreparable scar on Anglo– Indian relations.
Nehru wrote from prison on 18 September 1943: ‘Reports from Bengal are staggering. We grow accustomed to anything, any depth of human misery and sorrow … More and more I feel that behind all the terrible mismanagement and b
ungling there is something deeper … the collapse of the economic structure of Bengal.’ He added on 11 November: ‘The Bengal famine has been the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India.’ Churchill stubbornly refused concessions to nationalist sentiment, dismissing objections from the Americans and their Chinese clients. Leo Amery recoiled in dismay from Churchill’s ravings: ‘Cabinet … [Winston] talked unmitigated nonsense, first of all treating Wavell as a contemptible self-seeking advertiser, and then talking about the handicap India is to defence, and how glad he would be to hand it over to President Roosevelt.’
Yet few British people, fighting for their lives, were much troubled by displays of Indian alienation or imperial repression. They cheered themselves with knowledge that the vast Indian Army, four million strong, remained loyal to the Raj. Indian divisions made a notable contribution to the East Africa, Iraq, North Africa and Italian campaigns, and played the principal role in the 1944–45 struggles for Assam and Burma. British wartime policy could be deemed a success, in that by 1944–45 disorder was almost entirely suppressed; strikes and acts of sabotage dwindled. But posterity can see the irony that while Britain fought the Axis in the name of freedom, to retain control of India it practised ruthless governance without popular consent, and adopted some of the methods of totalitarianism.
Britain’s wartime treatment of its subject races remained humane by German or Japanese standards; there were no arbitrary executions or wholesale massacres. But India was not the only imperial possession in which the exigencies of emergency were used to justify neglect, cruelty and injustice. In 1943, famines afflicted Kenya, Tanganyika and British Somaliland; at various moments there were food riots in Tehran, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. If these were caused by circumstances of war, the imperial power was parsimonious in apportioning resources to alleviate their consequences. While British rule reflected moderate rather than absolute authoritarianism, it scarcely sufficed to promote support – and especially Indian support – for retention of imperial hegemony. The only narrowly plausible defence of British wartime rule of India is that the country was so vast, with such potential for turbulence, that indulgence of domestic dissent would have threatened an irretrievable loss of control, to the advantage of the Axis. The common experience of battle forged some sense of battlefield comradeship between British and imperial soldiers white, brown and black alike. But the stress of war, rather than strengthening the bonds of empire as Britain’s jingoes liked to pretend, dramatically loosened them.
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