Congress demonstrators with black flags and shouts of ‘Simon go home’ greeted the commissioners when they disembarked at Bombay in December 1928. Mournful processions and a boycott were not enough; Congress had to seize the political initiative. It did so at its annual conference in late December, when delegates backed two audacious motions. The first, framed with moderate backing by Motilal Nehru, called for instant Dominion status, and the second, proposed by his son Jawaharlal and another younger generation radical, Subhas Chandra Bose, demanded complete British withdrawal from its new dominion by 31 December 1929. The alternative was a renewed campaign of protest and disruption. This was blackmail, and only the most artless could have imagined that Britain would give way. It was also an astute and well-calculated manoeuvre which shoved the Simon commission into the margins, and a timely reminder of Congress’s historic claim that it alone spoke for the whole of India. The last few years had witnessed signs of the fragmentation of Indian political life, as local and religious factions proliferated. The Sikh Akali movement in the Punjab, although at first concerned with the administration of temples, contained the seeds of a separatist, national movement. Militant Hindus were attracted to the Mahasabha groups pledged to defend and purify their faith, industrial workers to the rapidly expanding Trade Unions, and peasants to their rural associations, concerned with rents, tenure and tax. The growth of such groups gathered momentum during the 1930s as it became clear that the Raj would shed more and more of its power. Those who were waiting in the wings to pick it up needed to be organised beforehand.
Most significant of all was the gulf that was opening between Hindus and Muslims within Congress. Given the bitterness and recrimination which surrounded – and still surrounds – the process by which this rift widened and led to the partition of India and communal massacres, it is extremely difficult to analyse dispassionately the events and personalities involved. The issues are further blurred by Indian assertions that Britain deliberately exacerbated tensions in fulfilment of a policy of divide and rule, in the hope that it might somehow perpetuate the Raj. And yet it is difficult to imagine how successive viceroys could have resisted demands for special representation from the spokesmen for nearly a quarter of India’s population. To allege that the British could have disregarded or deflected this pressure assumes that the Raj was stronger than it was. A head-on collision with Muslim opinion would have invited calamity, since Muslims were disproportionately represented in the ranks of the police and army and the First World War had seen instances, admittedly on a small scale, in which soldiers had preferred their faith to their duty to the King Emperor. Moreover, fomenting religious antipathies ran counter to the purpose of a government which in large part justified its existence by its ability to restrain communal strife. For this reason, and against a background of a spiralling religious violence, Irwin supported efforts to foster tolerance. They failed, as did those of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Muslim Congressman, Dr Maulana Azad.
It was well-nigh impossible for two sophisticated members of the two communities to convince poor, credulous Hindus and Muslims that they had nothing to fear from each other. It required only one small incident or some snippet of hearsay to bring old suspicions to the surface, and they proved stronger than any calls for unity in the face of some external enemy. This is dramatically demonstrated in M. R. Anand’s novel Coolie, in which a strike meeting of Bombay mill-hands is interrupted by a rumour that a Hindu child had been kidnapped by Muslims, presumably for conversion or forced marriage. As the tale goes round, the number of victims grows, and there are calls for revenge and counter cries of ‘You black lentil-eaters! You Hindus!’ Brawls spill into the street and within a few minutes the city is convulsed by murderous riots.3 Fiction reflected reality. Music from Hindu processions which passed close to mosques, rows over cow slaughter and bazaar tales of forcible conversion were the commonest triggers for violence, but even something as trivial as a squabble between children could cause an explosion.4
At a high political level disagreements centred on the provision of seats for Muslims in elected assemblies. On this issue, the crunch came during the December 1928 session of Congress, when the prominent Muslim leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, proposed not only the reservation of places for his co-religionists in national and provincial legislatures, but the creation of three designated Islamic states – Sind, Baluchistan, and the North-West Frontier Province – within a future Indian federation. Here and elsewhere, he was anxious that the Muslim minority should have its rights guaranteed under what democratic calculus dictated would be a Hindu central government. Jinnah lost the argument and afterwards Muslim support for Congress began to dwindle. With hindsight, it has been said that this setback marked the parting of the waves, which assumes that the 1919–24 Hindu–Muslim accord between them had been cemented by conviction rather than convenience. In fact, the situation remained fluid for some years after Jinnah’s failure to secure his safeguards. Muslim militancy and demands for a separate state only emerged after 1937.
The strains created by the appearance of a host of smaller, political organisations made it imperative for Congress to re-emphasise its claim to speak for every Indian. If it did not, then the British would surely make deals with individual factions and play one off against another. It was, therefore, vital that Congress gathered as many as possible of the discontented under its wings, whatever their grievances. They had to be persuaded that their causes could only be advanced through Congress, which alone had the strength to stand up to the British. To prove this, it had to back up the bold challenge it had issued at the end of 1928 with a nationwide campaign of resistance the moment its deadline for British departure had passed. It would also have to maintain solidarity in the face of any counter-offer from the government, which was bound to fall short of the desired announcement of an evacuation on the last day of 1929.
Keeping the Congress ranks together proved hard, for in July 1929 a Labour government was elected in Britain. The new Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was sympathetic to Congress’s aspirations, as was the new Secretary of State, William Wedgewood, who in the past had been a Parliamentary scourge of the Indian government. Both warmly welcomed Irwin’s prosposal to announce Dominion status for India. There was support too from Stanley Baldwin, a bold step which distanced him from a substantial faction on the right of his party, which was determined to keep India, whatever the cost. Recent events indicated just what the cost might eventually might be: a strong, unswerving line in Ireland had led to a three-year partisan war against the Irish Republican Army, which had ended with a compromise in 1922. Likewise, prolonged resistance to British control over Egypt had ended with a bargain that took heed of Egyptian feelings. Whatever the diehards had said to the contrary, Ireland and Egypt could not be held by the sword alone, and nor could India.
Irwin’s promise of Dominion status was delivered in October 1929, accompanied by an invitation of Indian representatives to a Round Table conference in London, where they were to hammer out the arrangements for a new, federal constitution. Congress rejected an offer which was designed to trump its own proposals for India’s future. Two months after, at its annual conference in Lahore, it prepared for a new round of non-violent resistance, scheduled to begin on 26 January 1930, which was declared ‘Independence Day’.
An ‘All-India’ campaign was envisaged to reinforce Congress’s self-image as the tribune of the entire nation. Gandhi’s leadership was indispensable; quite simply he knew India and its masses knew him. His knowledge of the peasants was probably unique, and had been increased by his recent tours of the towns and countryside where he had explained how personal and national salvation could be achieved by spinning khadi (cotton cloth). To many of his listeners he was a messianic figure, a moral teacher whose image was already beginning to be carried alongside those of the Hindu gods in religious festivals. Those who did not know or care about Nehru or any other Congress leader had heard of Gandhi and his goodness.
Gandhi was also a consummate showman and a shrewd politician, with a knack of projecting himself in such a way as to attract the greatest possible attention in India and abroad. He gave press interviews in which he revealed a talent for self-dramatisation, which made striking headlines. On 22 January 1930 he told a Daily Express reporter that he was about to embark on a ‘life-or-death struggle’. India would soon witness a ‘great trial of strength’ which could only be averted if the British government caved in and delivered a blueprint for complete independence. Not long after, he predicted a civil war in India if Irwin’s Round Table conference proceeded.5 Again in melodramatic vein, he answered the question whether anarchy would follow Britain’s withdrawal by saying that he was unperturbed by the prospect of invasion or lawlessness. ‘It won’t be a new thing in the history of nations that have struggled for freedom.’6 Whether his Indian audience understood the implications of this statement for themselves and their families is not known. Even Gandhi’s now familiar loin cloth was a prop in a well-thought-out piece of political stagecraft. Wearing it, he appeared to the world as the living symbol of ‘the semi-starved almost naked villagers’ of India, for whom he spoke.7 Or so he said when he set out for Britain in July 1931; and then and later he was taken at his word.
Behind the façade of the simple prophet-cum-saviour was an astute political brain. Like the rest of the Congress leadership, Gandhi knew that attendance at the London conference would be political suicide. Congressmen would be forced to follow an agenda set by the British and they were certain to return home with far less than they demanded. Moreover, and this galled, Congress would have to sit alongside other ‘representatives’ of India, most notably the princes. They were forthrightly denounced by Gandhi as ‘pawns’ created and used by the British. Their vices were those of their masters: ‘As the Emperor so his vassals. Our Imperial Government is Satanic.’ And yet even the most depraved prince would be spiritually reborn when India became independent. ‘When the Imperial Government is replaced by a national government,’ Gandhi prophesied, ‘the rulers will become virtuous automatically.’8 As ever, Gandhi was struggling against demonic forces unleashed on India by the West. Vaccination against smallpox was, like the princes, a British invention and, therefore, wholly evil. It was ‘a filthy process . . . that is little short of eating beef’, and the smallpox victim was advised to cure himself with enemas, fresh air, sleeping in a damp sheet and a new diet.9 What became of those who took Gandhi’s advice can only be guessed.
II
Gandhi’s spiritual powers were invoked, like those of a god, by his followers when their satyagraha was tested. When Krishan Chander, the hero of M. R. Anand’s Confessions of a Lover, is set upon by lathi-wielding policemen, he implores the aid of Gandhi to give him inner fortitude:
‘Mahatma [Great Soul], make my body non-violent!’ I naively prayed.
And I pressed my body down to the earth. ‘Give him a taste of the lathi.’
A blow fell on my back, which was very painful.
I said to myself I was not to feel pain, or be angry if I felt the pain.
A third blow fell on my feet.
Each satyagraha who passed the assay of beating, humiliation, arrest and maltreatment in gaol became, as it were, Gandhi himself, and a spiritual particle of his yet-to-be-born India. The satyagrahas were also an exercise in political power which demonstrated that Congress, rather than the Raj or those invited to London, was the true voice of India and it was clamouring for immediate independence.
Gandhi’s own satyagraha was spectacular. He masterminded a mass defiance of the government salt tax, a survival of East India Company rule which cost the average Indian no more than three annas (1.5p) a year. The sum may have been a bagatelle, but what mattered for Gandhi was that the monopoly over one of the essentials of life symbolised the power and intrusiveness of the Raj. Followed by journalists and newsreel cameramen, he set off from his house at Ahmadabad on 12 March 1930 for a 240-mile march to Dandi on the Gujarat coast. Excitement increased as he walked southwards and thousands joined him, including at his request, Untouchables, which displeased many Hindus and led to some resignations from Congress. Muslims stood aloof. On 5 April, Gandhi reached the seashore, bathed and then picked up a token piece of sea salt from the beach. The government treated the episode with Olympian indifference and concentrated instead on mass arrests of national and local Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru. Cutting off the Hydra’s heads would, it was assumed, render the beast harmless, and its carcass could be disposed of by the police and the army.
In what Gandhi rightly emphasised as a trial of strength, the two sides were evenly balanced. Congress had reluctantly accepted that the ‘All-India’ protests could not be extended to the princely states, where its local organisations had made very limited headway. In any case, Congress shied away from provoking the princes, which would certainly push them further behind the government. Where there were flickers of unrest, some rulers reacted vigorously. The Maharaja of Kashmir forbade all meetings and displays of the Congress flag and the Maharaja of Gwalior shut down the local Congress offices.10 No coercive measures were needed in Mysore, a progressive state where Congress had yet to make any impact. Nor could Congress win ground in Travancore, a state run by educated Hindus where the literacy rate was 63 per cent, the highest in India.11 Elsewhere protest movements which threatened withholding rent as well as tax naturally scared the landowning classes, who rallied to the Raj. The Maharaja of Hyderabad offered 200,000 rupees to the government to assist the suppression of the disturbances, and a Monghyr zamindar threatened to fine his tenants 150 rupees if they actively helped Congress. The Maharaja of Darbhanga, who was also the Bihar Landowners’ Association representative at the London conference, founded and funded a pro-government newspaper.12 This solidarity was a bonus for the government and was acknowledged in one official report which suggested that: ‘The prestige and influence of the Chiefs can best be upheld by letting the peasantry see . . . there are two sets of Rulers, the British and the Native, but a single government.’13
Even where the local power-brokers were not hostile, popular participation in the protests was patchy and spasmodic, which was just as well since the police were thinly spread and their numbers were falling. There were approximately 215,000 policemen in India in 1930, over a third of them Muslims, which meant that on average there was one policeman to every 1,500 of the population. Police loyalty remained unshaken despite vicious intimidation of them and their families. But the force was aware of how the political pendulum was swinging and, in the wake of concessions made to the nationalists, there was apprehension about the future of the Raj. No one wanted to back a horse which was likely to lose.14 Although considerable efforts were made to include as many races and religions within the the police as possible, the gathering and evaluation of political intelligence was only entrusted to Europeans and Eurasians, at least in Madras.15 This was vital work, for, if forewarned of Congress’s plans, the police could deploy more effectively and prepare counter-measures. Evidence of success in this murky area is hard to find, let alone assess; nonetheless, by 1939 Madras Special Branch had penetrated the local Congress leadership to the point where it could secure copies of secret letters to Gandhi.16
The 1930 civil disobedience campaign followed the pattern of its predecessor. Congress adopted two complementary strategies. The first was an extension of the boycott of foreign textiles through the harassment and intimidation of anyone who bought or sold them. For instance, some sisters who had purchased imported silk for a wedding were pursued home by pickets who warned their mother that the marriage would be unlucky if the material was worn. Greatly distressed, she took the silk back to the dealer, who reimbursed her, no doubt fearing that he might be the next victim of the crowd.17 Another form of social bullying was the mock funeral for and cremation of the effigy of a merchant who sold foreign cloth. Congress’s second objective was the disruption of the machinery of government through withholdi
ng taxes, picketing liquor stores and mass infractions of the forest laws, during which peasants chopped down trees and grazed their stock at will.
Peaceful meetings and processions often became violent and each side blamed the other, although the question of who threw the first brickbat or delivered the first lathi charge was invariably pedantic. For every dedicated satyagraha there were hundreds, sometimes thousands, keen for a scrap with the police and a chance to use the breakdown in order to loot and settle old scores. The lukewarm attitude of the majority of Muslims towards the hartals, boycotts and mass marches added to the tension and led directly to communal riots, the worst in Bombay, Cawnpore and Benares. Official anatomies of the crowds singled out ‘loafers and the unemployed’ and ‘badmashes’ (petty criminals) as the mainspring of all the trouble and accused Congress agents of training their followers in the use of lathis, swords and spears.18 With equal predictability, Congress alleged that its peaceful supporters were provoked by police aggression.
The police just managed to keep the upper hand, save in Peshawar. Here political life was dominated by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the leader of the Khudai Kidmatgar or ‘Servants of God’. A tolerant Muslim who had been taught at a Christian mission, he believed, almost uniquely for a Pathan, in women’s rights and education. Their emancipation was part of his dream of a Pathan renaissance in which his people would unite and build a new identity, free of such ancestral shackles as blood feuds. He was sometimes called ‘the Frontier Gandhi’ and his apostles wore red shirts, which alarmed the authorities who thought these young men might be covert Communists. Spurned by the Muslim League, no doubt unhappy with his heterodoxy, Abdul Ghaffar Khan threw his weight behind Congress in 1930, and in April Peshawar was convulsed by a series of relatively peaceful demonstrations.
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