There were similar brief losses of control everywhere. At Ballia, where police were thin on the ground, the magistrate conceded defeat and burned banknotes worth 400,000 rupees in the local treasury to prevent them from falling into the rioters’ hands. Local officials were nervous about their forthcoming pay, and soon after charred notes were picked up and returned to circulation, as it were, by their new owners.18 At Sasaram, the strategically important railway line from Lucknow to Calcutta was attacked by a large body which included schoolchildren and students from Patna University, who were joined by local criminals.19 The station and signal boxes were fired and some students raised the Congress flag over the local court house. Hindu policemen refused to interfere and their sergeant warned Hugh Martin, the District Officer, that they would be swamped by sheer weight of numbers if they opened fire. Martin and his men retired to make their stand in the treasury and the gaol, from where they were rescued by the timely arrival of twenty British soldiers. There were not enough of them to make an impact, but the appearance of a battalion of the Bedfordshire regiment tipped the balance and order was restored.
There was a distinct Mutiny feel to many of the small-scale actions fought during August 1942, as parties of British and loyal forces withdrew behind makeshift defences. When he arrived at Madhuban in the eastern United Provinces, the Anglo-Indian District Officer, R. H. Niblett, was disturbed by reports that large bodies of nationalists were converging on the local fortified thana (police station). A defence was improvised by a force of just over sixty Indian policemen and chowkidars, who shared between them ten out-of-date police rifles, two sporting guns, a few revolvers, and some spears and lathis. Against them were ranged at least 4,000 villagers carrying lathis, spears, plough-shares, saws and spades, who claimed that swaraj had arrived and, in consequence, asked to hoist the Congress banner over the thana. They also wished to kill a local police superintendent who was British. After burning down the nearby houses of the postmaster and postman, the crowd opened its attack on the police station, supported by two elephants which were to be used to scale the perimeter walls.
A series of sallies followed. One was led by Ram Nachtar Tewari, who had a reputation as a local trouble-maker and possessed a touching faith in Gandhi. The Mahatma, he promised his followers, had miraculously rendered all bullets harmless. A few seconds after, he and eight or ten of those with him were shot dead. The contest lasted two hours and ended with the flight of the rebels. The defenders had fired 119 rounds, killed between forty and fifty and suffered no injuries beyond cuts and bruises from well-aimed brickbats.20 Elsewhere the weight of numbers told and police stations were overrun or abandoned. In Bihar, where Congress was strong, the police undermanned and scattered, and the unrest most intense, there were weathercocks among Indian civil servants and landlords who hedged their bets by adopting a calculated neutrality. And with good reason, for they believed that at some as yet unspecified date the Raj would be replaced by Congress and it therefore made sense to keep on good terms with its local bigwigs.21 Another form of insurance was a Congress flag hoisted over his house by an Orissa Congressman, who hoped it would provide immunity from Japanese air attacks.
II
As conceived by Gandhi, the Quit India campaign was a demonstration of Congress’s continued hold over the masses, and proof that Indians wanted an end to the Raj and were willing to risk their lives to achieve it. The form of the protests owed much to the party’s socialist wing, which had been advocating sabotage for some years. Communists within and outside Congress were divided; some threw themselves into the fray, while others stayed loyal to a government which, for all its faults, was still an ally of the Soviet Union. Among those who followed Moscow’s line was a group which, with party backing, volunteered for behind-the-lines operations in Japanese-occupied territory.22 The Muslim League would have no part in the Quit India campaign and, incidentally, Muslims were automatically exempted from the mass fines imposed by the government on the inhabitants of disturbed areas. On 31 July, Jinnah had asserted that, while Muslims were happy to see the dissolution of the Raj, he warned against any deal which appeased Congress at their expense. Two days before the Quit India campaign was launched he repeated his well-worn prediction that a precipitate British withdrawal would mean a Hindu Raj.23 As the campaign spread, the League contrasted Muslim support for the war with Congress’s disloyalty and demanded reward in the form of cast-iron guarantees for a post-war Pakistan. Sikhs also distanced themselves from the insurrections.
In geographical and demographic terms, the Quit India movement was an untidy affair. Support was confined almost entirely to Hindus, and the upheavals were most violent and persistent in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, northern Bihar, the eastern United Provinces, parts of the Central Provinces, West Bengal and Orissa. The princely states were no longer immune from large-scale unrest. Spontaneous street protests against Gandhi’s detention led, as these things always did, to clashes with the police in Mysore. Popular anger in Travancore was directed against an administration which was seen as repressive and collaborationist.24 And yet neighbouring Malabar remained quiet, even though it was notoriously fissile and had thrown itself behind Congress agitation ten years before. Another traditionally inflammable region, the North-West Frontier Province, was also quiet.
In many instances Congress provided a label for local dissidents whose immediate objectives had little to do with national self-determination. At the outset of the campaign, the leadership had hoped that overall direction would be in the hands of the educated élite, among whom Congress support was strongest. Professors, teachers, students, older schoolboys and girls were the yeast which would activate the peasants and labourers, who were, as it were, the movement’s dough. During the second week of August, students from Benares and Patna Universities, egged on by their pedagogues, attacked railway property and fanned out across the countryside, raising the ryots. As more and more from the bottom of the pile were drawn into the protests, they began to elbow out their predominantly middle-class leaders. Peasants and labourers had been the hardest hit by wartime price rises and their first instinct was to fill their pockets and bellies. Attacks on and looting of district treasuries and granaries were common, particularly in Bihar. Longer-term economic aspirations broke surface in some regions. ‘Raja Ku Manbu’ (Death to the Raja) and ‘Chesi-Muha Sarkar Gadhibe’ (We will build a peasant-worker state) were slogans shouted by peasants and labourers in the tiny state of Talcher.25 There were other, sporadic outbursts of class conflict, which Gandhi and the mainstream Congress leadership had wanted to discourage, not least because the movement depended upon support from the commercial community and landlords. Inevitably, a public emergency on this scale attracted the purely self-interested, and professional criminals soon joined in whenever there was a chance to loot.
But what did they, and the more nobly motivated, achieve? In March 1943, when the worst of the upheavals had been over for five months, General Lockhart chillingly concluded that henceforward India was ‘an occupied and hostile country’. The bulk of its inhabitants were ‘illiterate, superstitious [and] easily swayed by mischief mongers’.26 If there was a recrudescence of the troubles at least 100,000 soldiers would be needed, and at the moment only two-thirds of that number were available. In Berlin, optimistic intelligence analysts imagined that the Quit India agitation had come within a stroke of toppling the Raj.27 It was not a view held by Congress, which was disappointed by the results. An analysis of the campaign, which fell into the hands of Military Intelligence in March 1943, suggested that it had failed in its aim of paralysing the government, even in such highly militant districts as Bihar. The sole explanation was the loyalty of the army – ‘You can break the police, but what of the military?’28 There were other considerations. Where it existed, support had been passionate and individuals had shown an extraordinary courage and willingness to fight against the odds for the emancipation of India. Consider the 73-year-old Matagini Hazie, who advanced unflinchingly
into police fire at Tamluk, holding Congress’s flag in her hands, and was shot dead with several others.29 But the pool of would-be martyrs was limited. By no stretch of the imagination had the campaign been universal in terms of geography, caste or religion. Nor, for that matter, had been its predecessors in 1919 and 1930. But each spasm of protest had severely shaken the Raj and added to the impression that it was losing the consent and goodwill of its subjects.
As in 1857, the Raj had been saved by the sword. But the circumstances had been exceptional, for the counter-insurgency operations of August and September 1942 had been undertaken against a background of war, under a virtual press black-out, and had the support of a home government headed by a Prime Minister who loathed Congress. If Delhi embarked upon a similar course in peacetime, public opinion in Britain and the rest of world might compel the Indian government to adopt less severe measures. Nonetheless, many who lived through the turmoil during August and September 1942 believed that the Raj had gained a victory which it could repeat if it still had sufficient willpower.30
The Indian government had lost none of its predilection for statistics and, at the close of 1942, figures were produced that measured the scale of damage, human and material, caused by the uprising. Policemen and soldiers had opened fire 369 times, and had killed just under 1,000 and injured over 2,000. Congress challenged these figures and claimed that the death-toll had been between 4,000 and 10,000, which, of course, made a propaganda point. Nevertheless, many corpses must have been excluded from the official reckoning because they had been removed and cremated soon after the shootings. Ruins could not be moved and were duly counted: 1,318 government buildings and 208 police stations had been destroyed, and there were over 3,400 cases of damage to electrical installations, which included telegraph and telephone lines. The railway network had also been devastated, with 332 stations wrecked, 268 items of rolling stock damaged and lines torn up. All this had played havoc with the war effort. On 11 September, Wavell’s staff calculated that British and Indian soldiers had lost between six and eight weeks’ training, and railway sabotage had retarded troop movements by three weeks. The programme of airfield and base construction had been put back by three weeks thanks to shortages of coal, bricks and cement caused by strikes and transport delays. Deliveries of textiles had been held up for the same reasons, and the walk-out at the Tata steel works (the largest in the world outside the United States) had led to a shortfall of 10 per cent in steel production.31
Things could have been worse. No Japanese offensive materialised in the autumn, and at the end of the year the IGHQ decided to concentrate on the Arakan coastal strip, rather than the Imphal front, for its advance into India. It was strapped for men and transport and the big push was finally scheduled for the beginning of 1944. For the time being, the invasion threat was suspended. Churchill, in a speech on 10 September, had accused Gandhi and all involved in the Quit India movement of being no more than Fifth Columnists in the service of Japan. His charges distressed the moderate Congress leaders, Sir Tej Bahadur Shah Sapru and Chakravarti Rajagoplachari, who were still at liberty and officially considered to be figures with whom the government might do business. Their indignation was justified, for, in spite of intensive investigation, no links were ever uncovered between Congress and the Japanese. Absence of proof did not deter conspiracy theorists, who convinced themselves that the Quit India movement had been secretly scheduled to coincide with a Japanese offensive on 15 September. It was noted that the areas where the convulsions had been greatest lay in the path of an imagined Japanese advance, but there was no explanation, beyond incompetence, as to why the uprising had been mistimed.
III
Dr Goebbels had instructed Azad Hind Radio to give every backing to the Quit India movement and Subhas Chandra Bose obliged, despite his feeling that Gandhi was prepared, as ever, to temporise with the British.32 Any hope that Bose may have had of direct German assistance to the Indian national movement was dispelled by his meeting with Hitler in November. The Führer was still lukewarm towards Indian nationalism, fearing that if the Raj was overthrown Russia might occupy India. Bose had no further value in Berlin, and so it was agreed with the Japanese that he should be sent to the Far East to breathe fresh life into the flagging INA. On 3 February 1943 he boarded the U-180, which carried him to a rendezvous off the coast of Madagascar with the Japanese submarine, I-29. He reached Sabang on 1 May and was flown to Tokyo where, a fortnight later, he received Tojo’s renewed pledges of assistance for the liberation of India. Henceforward, Bose was India’s Netaji (Leader), a distinctly modern title which had the same resonance as ‘Duce’ or ‘Führer’. He also dressed for the part of a modern, dynamic and purposeful leader, wearing a tight-necked khaki tunic and jackboots.
The Netaji had arrived too late. The tide of the war was swinging irreversibly against the Axis powers; in October 1942 the El-Alamein offensive began and the German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad in February 1943, by when Japan had lost command of the Pacific and was struggling against the odds to cling on to its conquests there. The INA had become an irrelevancy in Japanese strategy, save as a source of agents for behind-the-lines sabotage and spying in India. Twelve hundred men and women underwent training and small groups of graduates were regularly taken by submarine and put ashore on the Indian coastline. Nearly all were quickly rounded up and willingly became British double agents; one party jettisoned their transmitter and arms and caught a train to get home. Only nine refused to change sides and were executed.33 Relations between the rump of the INA and the Japanese became more and more vinegary. The latter remained firmly in control; once when Indians grumbled about slights they were brusquely told: ‘You should be proud to be puppets of the Japanese.’ INA officers were not saluted by Japanese other ranks, while all Indians had to salute Japanese officers.34
Bose reversed the decline in morale by the force of his personality, rousing speeches and a slogan, borrowed from the 1857 mutineers: ‘Chalo Delhi!’ (Forward to Delhi). He fed his followers false hopes, with the promise of a grand victory parade before the Red Fort in the summer of 1943. The truth was that the Japanese had no intention of invading India; their plans were for a limited push against Imphal, which operational difficulties delayed until March 1944. While his followers kicked their heels and waited on the Japanese, Bose regularly broadcast to India. He denounced the rule of the new Viceroy, General Wavell, as a ‘military dictatorship’ and reminded his audience of how ‘the first Asiatic power to resist foreign aggressions’ had already granted independence to the Burmese and Filipinos. Challenging British allegations of Japanese atrocities, Bose claimed that the Indian government had hanged thousands, locked up leading nationalists and bombed ‘innocent Hindus’.35
The INA was relegated to a minor role in the Imphal offensive, with most of its men guarding supply dumps and lines of communication.36 An élite, known as bahadurs (fearless ones), was allocated to Japanese front-line units with orders to penetrate behind Anglo-Indian positions and distribute propaganda leaflets. These were vividly drawn and called on Indian soldiers to desert and turn their guns against the British. The image of Churchill was prominent. Surrounded by servants who polish his boots and bring him whisky, a uniformed Churchill-sahib leaps from an armchair, discomposed by the sight of Indians drubbing British soldiers outside his bungalow. In another cartoon he resembles a pugnacious Mr Toad, cigar clenched between his lips, a revolver in one hand and the other pushing a reluctant Indian soldier towards the front. Behind him Indian rebels wield lathis. Kites fly over starving Indians and corpses in a vignette of India under British rule, set alongside another in which a contented family enjoy a meal under a tree in ‘Free India’.37
The broken-down figures might easily have been INA men at the front. Of the 6,000 who eventually went into action with the Japanese in the spring of 1944, over a tenth deserted to the British, 400 were killed in action, 800 surrendered, 1,500 died from malaria and dysentery, and 1,400 were invalided.38 Th
ey had been under-equipped, irregularly supplied, lacked transport and wore uniforms of khaki, unlike the Japanese and Anglo-Indian army who wore jungle green.39 A growing flood of desertions to the British marked the INA’s end, and its last gasp came in April 1945, when the Anglo-Indian forces reoccupied Rangoon.
A leader without anyone to lead, Bose fled from Rangoon on 24 April, according to ‘Agent 1189’, a British spy who had penetrated the INA’s high command and accompanied Bose on his final journey. This agent also revealed that Bose and his closest followers had intended to make their way to Yunnan and set up a provisional Indian government with Chinese Communist assistance. The party flew to Bangok, Saigon and Formosa. It then left for Tokyo in an aircaft which suffered engine trouble and crashed near Taihoku on 18 August, a few days after Japan’s unconditional surrender. Several of the passengers were killed and others injured, including Bose, who had extensive burns to his head, thighs and legs and was semiconscious. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he fell into a coma and died within four hours. His body was later cremated.40 His last moments were witnessed by Captain Yoshida Taneyoshi and were revealed by him to British Intelligence officers in Stanley gaol, Hong Kong, in October 1946.
By this date, Bose was already a national hero in India. His name was a nationalist rallying cry and many Indians believed that he was still alive, which was why Military Intelligence went to such efforts to track down anyone who saw him die. In Indian mythology Bose had become a King Arthur figure who had gone into some secret retreat from which he might emerge to save his people. The folk myth of the lost saviour persisted until the 1980s, with tales of the Netaji seeking sanctuary in Russia, although no one knew exactly what he was doing there, or why the Soviet government and its successors have remained silent about his presence.41 In death as in life, Bose disconcerted his enemies. He survived in political folklore as a lost leader, a patriot warrior who had scared the British. Thus transfigured he became a Congress hero, even though at the end of his life he had rejected much that the party had stood for.
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