Meanwhile, the German and Italian armies were training specialist units for covert operations on the frontier. A German POW from the Brandenburg Leib Regiment revealed to British interrogators that during the summer of 1941 he had encountered NCOs from one of these groups who were undergoing instruction at the camp near Cassell. When they had completed their course, they were to be transported to Russia and then flown to the Afghan–Indian border, from where they were to ‘make their own way to India as agents and saboteurs’.31 Everything depended on a free passage across southern Russia. Another prisoner from the same regiment claimed that there had been nearly 300 men at Cassell in June 1942, a third of them Indians, who were receiving parachute training and were to be employed in the Khyber Pass.32 This was the suspected destination of Indians who were being given parachute instruction by the Italians at training camps in Greece during the summer of 1942. At least sixty-two had taken the oath of allegiance to Italy, and a group had been spotted in Rome dressed in uniforms adorned with Fascist insignia and shoulder-straps in the Congress colours of green, white and orange.33
These Indians were all POWs, captured in North Africa and subsequently lured into the German and Italian armies. Their story and subsequent fate forms part of the background of Paul Scott’s novel, The Division of the Spoils, in which they are depicted as tragic, misled creatures. No one was sure exactly how many changed sides: estimates made by British Military Intelligence during 1943 have their total as between 2,000 and 2,500, which was probably not far from the truth.34 All had been the subject of intensive propaganda by a handful of Indian renegades, including one who had worked for the Germans in the last war, and were promised preferential treatment. A few may have been threatened or roughly used. Many were sincere nationalists who believed that when they went into battle it would be for the liberation of their homeland. In November 1943, a party of 250, attached to the Italian army, was reported to have refused service against the British in North Africa and insisted that they would only fight in India.35 As the tide of the war turned against their new masters, there was little that the Free Indian Legion could do to help their country. Most ended up in penny packets among the forces defending Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in the summer of 1944.36
One name constantly cropped up in reports of the Free Indian Legion, Subhas Chandra Bose. Before the war he had been a prominent Congressman with a considerable popular following, which was strongest in his native Bengal. Military Intelligence in Simla rated him third to Gandhi and Nehru among India’s political heroes, and it was not far wrong.37 His nationalist credentials and record were impeccable. Born in 1897 to a prominent Bengali family, Bose passed from Calcutta university to Cambridge and from there to a place in the Bengal Legislative Council. In 1930 he was Mayor of Calcutta, but during the next decade he became increasingly disillusioned with Congress’s political tactics. Imprisoned during the 1931 non-co-operation movement, he was disappointed with Gandhi’s leadership, which he considered too hesistant. During the next five years Bose toured Europe, met Mussolini, and was impressed by the dynamism of the new politics of decisive action which were transforming Italy and Germany. Although a socialist, Bose warmed to the methods and sheer energy of the European radical right. In many ways, he closely resembled his contemporary, Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain’s self-appointed man of destiny. Like him, Bose was a young man in a hurry and dismissive of his elders whose ideas and methods were manifestly failing to solve modern problems. How, wondered Bose, would the British government have reacted if it had been confronted by men of Mussolini’s, Hitler’s and Stalin’s stamp, rather than Gandhi, who had left London with nothing more substantial than the goodwill of George Bernard Shaw and sundry Labour MPs?38
Hitler was strongly against any alliance between Germany and Indian nationalism. He was genuinely amazed by the lengths to which the Raj went to reach an accommodation with Congress. He once advised a dumbfounded Irwin (then Lord Halifax and Foreign Secretary) that Britain ought to shoot Gandhi and as many Congressmen as were needed to ‘make it clear that you mean business’. The Führer admired the Raj and feared that its collapse would create a vacuum which either Russia or Japan might fill; a view he still held in April 1942, when he refused to give even verbal support for the Indian national movement.39
Despite this, and the contemptuous views of Indians set down in Mein Kampf, Bose imagined that he might reach some sort of arrangement with Germany. By 1940, he had discarded Gandhian orthodoxy in favour of an ideology based upon Communist and Fascist notions of direct, violent action. Gandhi distrusted his militancy and had exerted behind-the-scenes pressure to curb his influence within Congress. Nehru was distressed by Bose’s plans to exploit Britain’s wartime difficulties which, he believed, were tantamount to offering a helping hand to the Fascist powers. Bose’s power base was now the radical, left-wing Forward Bloc and through it he appealed for a fresh campaign of civil disturbance. It was welcomed by the students and secondary-school pupils who had become his largest constituency. While Gandhi wavered, Bose preached popular revolution and seemed to be snatching the initiative and, incidentally, the limelight of the national movement. Freedom and independence on his terms demanded action inside India and help from outside. India’s way ahead was along the path that had been taken by Sinn Féin (Bose had met De Valera) and Lenin in the last war. Early in 1941, disguised as a Pathan bricklayer, he travelled by road and mule from Rawalpindi to Kabul, where he arrived on 1 February. His guide, Bhagat Ram Talwar, and accomplices were Forward Bloc men and, unknown to Bose, Soviet agents.
Bose’s first hope was Russia, but he was turned away from the Soviet legation. After a week of seeking an audience with the Russian minister, on Ram’s advice he went to the German legation, where he was warmly welcomed and offered a passage to Berlin. The paperwork took time and so Bose availed himself of Italian help, and with the appropriate documents set out for Rome and a new career as India’s Sir Roger Casement. All this and details of his and other Russian agents’ dealings with Nazi intriguers in Afghanistan were revealed to the Indian CID by Ram after his arrest in November 1942. His offer of service as a double-agent was accompanied by a lengthy confession, which offered no hint as to why Bose had first sought Soviet patronage, or why it was refused at a time when Communists were doing all in their power to hinder the Indian war effort.40
In Italy and then in Germany, Bose was employed as the Free Indian Legion’s recruiting sergeant. In one speech he assured POWs that ‘Hitler is your friend, a friend of the Aryans, and you will march to India as your Motherland’s liberators, maybe via the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, maybe by some other route.’41 Bose also broadcast to India on Azad Hind (Free India) Radio. It was transmitted on short-wave to an estimated 30,000 Indians who possessed the requisite receivers; a further 90,000 could have been reached if Berlin had possessed the technology for sending long-wave signals. Blending his own passionate nationalism with Dr Goebbels’s ‘perfidious Albion’ line of propaganda, Bose declared on 9 March:
Although British Imperialism is our particular enemy it is at the same time the greatest enemy of all mankind. By the needless exploitation of 500 million human beings and by a clever system of slavery, British Imperialism has prevented all true understanding between the various nations of the world and also a satisfactory solution of international problems.
Just over a month later, he promised Indians that his co-workers would soon be dropping from the skies and that patriots were to give these parachutists all the assistance they might need. On 22 May, Bose’s colleague, William Joyce (‘Lord Haw Haw’ to his British listeners), announced that the parachutists had safely landed a fortnight before.42 No trace of them was found but the news gave the jitters to the authorities, which was no doubt the Germans’ intention. Fifth columnists were suspected as the cause of a brawl in the Grand Hotel, Lahore on 4 May, in which a crowd of Indians, many of them students, rescued a girl who had allegedly been dragged into the hotel compound by three British NCO
s. She was whisked away in a tonga and the authorities wondered whether the incident had been deliberately manufactured by enemy agents, keen to stir up racial antipathy.43
III
Bose’s broadcasts were heard in an India in which the Raj’s position was becoming more and more precarious. Its prestige had disappeared, its army could no longer be relied upon, and it was doubtful whether it could defend its frontiers. Early in March, Linlithgow confessed that he lacked the forces to resist a Japanese landing on the Cuttack coast and could not prevent an advance into Orissa.44 Japan and Germany were preparing for a partisan campaign which might draw upon help from an unknown number of Fifth Columnists. One of their potential allies, the Faqir of Ipi, acting off his own bat, re-opened hostilities in Waziristan in the spring, tying down three brigades which were desperately needed elsewhere.
Disaster could be averted if, by some means, Congress could be induced to become a partner in the war effort. The will was certainly there in some quarters. On 16 March, Nehru told a rally in Delhi:
If today we were masters of our own destiny we would ask people to get ready and defend the country with all our might. Unfortunately obstinate worthless and incompetent Government still has its grip tight on us.45
The government which Nehru so despised was all too aware that its popularity would be immeasurably strengthened if, somehow, it could break the constitutional deadlock. Generous concessions to nationalist sentiment offered a remedy for the apathy and, in many instances, open hostility to Britain which infected millions of Indians. This was the view of President Roosevelt, who regarded the need to swing India behind the Allied war effort as a matter of great urgency. Like many Americans, he was also concerned about his country fighting a war in Asia and the Pacific which, on the surface, looked dangerously like a rescue operation for an embattled British empire.
American opinion and the pressure it could exert on Britain had become a factor in Indian politics. Even before the United States had entered the war, Roosevelt and Churchill had outlined their countries’ war aims in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941. The promise of liberation for all oppressed peoples struck a chord in India; the Bombay Chronicle welcomed the declaration as the ‘Magna Carta of the world’. This was not how Churchill interpreted the pledge; as he subsequently explained to the Commons it was inapplicable to India which, like Europe, was a patchwork of peoples and provinces. This casuistry angered Indians, and when it was discussed in the Viceroy’s Legislative Council one Indian member, Jammadas Mehta, pertinently remarked that the Indians were dying to emancipate others while their countrymen remained enslaved.46 Vinayak Savarkar, president of the Hindu Mahasabha, appealed directly to Roosevelt and asked him whether America would guarantee India’s post-war freedom.47
As Indians correctly sensed, Britain was now junior partner in the alliance and would find it hard not to bow to American pressure. This increased at the beginning of March and was augmented from within the War Cabinet by Attlee and Leo Amery, who had convinced himself that India’s future safety demanded the swift creation of a genuinely national, that is popularly supported, government. Pushed into a corner, Churchill relented and the upshot was the despatch of the Lord Privy Seal, Labour MP Sir Stafford Cripps, to India. A socialist of the lofty-minded tendency, he was well known and liked within Congress circles, where his integrity was respected. Linlithgow and the Indian administration looked on him as a trespasser who came from London with a mandate to settle India’s future over their heads. He was assisted by another interloper, Colonel Louis Johnson, a Virginian lawyer, who acted as President Roosevelt’s personal representative. He was not an ideal choice; an American diplomat then stationed in India recalled him as lacking grace, tact and knowledge of local affairs.48
Cripps arrived in India on 23 March and left on 11 April without any agreement. As sincere in his desire to reach a settlement as Churchill was half-hearted, Cripps offered Indians a bargain. After the war India would become a dominion and its people would elect an assembly which would frame its constitution. If any province or princely state wished to dissociate themselves from the new state, they were free to go their own way, which was encouraging news for the Muslim League, for it brought nearer the prospect of Pakistan. In return, all Indian parties were invited to join an interim government of national unity under the Viceroy and his council. Congress rejected the first part of the bargain, but was willing to join the proposed government so long as it functioned as a genuine Cabinet with the Viceroy acting as a prime minister. Churchill and Linlithgow jibbed at this suggestion; neither was willing to countenance any dilution of viceregal power at a time of crisis. Furthermore, they refused Congress’s demand that the defence ministry was given to an Indian. This question was highly sensitive, for there were fears that, given the perceived anti-British mood in India, there might be a move among Indian ministers to seek a separate peace with Japan.49 British insistence on the preservation of the Viceroy’s power and misgivings about Indian participation in the shaping of strategy proved insurmountable hurdles. Congress was affronted; ultimately Britain would cling to power come what may, and was unready to accept Indians as equal partners.
Churchill had got what he wanted: continued control over the direction of India’s war effort and a propaganda victory, for in the United States Congress was now seen as a dog in the manger. From Roosevelt downwards there was a temporary shift in opinion in Britain’s favour.50 Nonetheless, the Raj had to be prepared to face future American criticism and meddling while Congress welcomed a new potential ally. At the beginning of April, Nehru candidly admitted to Colonel Johnson that he was considering ‘hitching India’s wagon to America’s Star and not Britain’s’. He observed that Americans would back Britain to the hilt, and expected Congress to throw itself wholeheartedly into the war effort. If it did, then the United States would unreservedly support its post-war aspirations.51
IV
Uninvited but unavoidable United States meddling in Indian affairs was a disturbing prospect for the government. Secret measures were taken during the second half of 1942 to keep American journalists in the country under surveillance. Their private mail was regularly intercepted and read for evidence of anti-British sentiment. This was hardly necessary since it was plentiful in the American press. On 14 September, Time alleged that: ‘The British clung to the contention that Mohandas K. Gandhi was a pacifist traitor, an irrational screwball and a menace to India’s safety.’ Less than a month after, Life published an open letter to the British people with the warning that, ‘If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing all alone.’
The correspondence of individual American reporters revealed a deep hostility to Britain and its administration in India. William Fischer of the New York Nation wrote several pieces on India which reflected badly on the Raj, leading British officials to conclude he was a Fifth Columnist.52 Among the American journalists singled out as ‘objectionable’ by Military Intelligence was Mrs Soli Bilimoria, a sometime Seattle schoolmistress who ran the film section of the American Office of War Information. ‘I certainly dislike the thought that American men are going to be killed to fight for the defense of India,’ she wrote home. She was also irritated by the Anglo-Indian custom of dining at nine – ‘they [the British] think all Americans barbarians because we don’t like their damn eating hours’. On a graver note she likened Indian gaols to concentration camps.53 The authorities asked for removal of this tiresome woman, but were refused. There was no official love for her organisation, which was accused of producing advertisements and newsreels that exaggerated the United States’s war effort and belittled Britain’s.54 The latter, presumably, were seen in Indian cinemas.
Opening American mail also uncovered hints of post-war plans for the penetration of Indian markets, for as a price for its war aid the United States had secured trade concessions throughout the empire. The Westing-house Corporation asked its representa
tives in Delhi to procure useful business information from the Indian Department of Commerce and ‘educators and missionaries’.55 There were also enquiries about Indian air routes and future industrial investment. All this was clear evidence of America’s aim of ‘post-war world trade domination’.56
However vexatious it was, the Indian government had to take note of American anti-imperial prejudices. In June it took care to inform United States pressmen about punitive operations then under way against the Hurs of the Sind.57 They were the followers of a Muslim holy man, the Pir Pagaro, and combined piety with preying on their neighbours. Since the outbreak of the war, the Pir and his adherents had been behaving as if the Raj was already extinct. They adopted uniforms of khaki shirts and shorts, drilled and became increasingly bold in their robberies. On 16 May a gang of sixty derailed the Lahore–Hyderabad mail train near Tando Adam and shot twenty-two passengers, including two British officers. In another raid a bus was ambushed and thirteen passengers murdered. Condign measures were needed to re-assert the government’s authority and save the Sind from anarchy. Martial law was declared by Linlithgow and military columns, supported by aircraft, criss-crossed the Hurs’ stamping grounds during June and rounded up 2,000 dacoits. Eighty-one were killed in action, seventy wounded and a further seventy-nine hanged for murder and sabotage. Stolen goods and cash worth over a third of a million rupees was recovered and the Hurs’ families were confined in special settlement camps. The Pir Pagaro had already been taken, and was tried and found guilty of rebellion and murder. He was duly executed which, Linlithgow claimed, was the only way for the Hur ‘bubble to burst’. His corpse was buried secretly to forestall the growth of a cult.58 Gandhi deplored the violence in the Sind and gave guarded backing for the government’s efforts to overcome it, although he imagined that the Hurs could have been peacefully persuaded to change their ways.59
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