Raj

by Lawrence, James

  The living Bose had made the British very nervous about the loyalty of the Indian soldier. That instinctive Cassandra, General Lockhart, drew up a secret report in May 1943 in which he expressed deep misgivings about the present moral stamina of the Indian soldier. Lockhart’s prophecies of doom may have been unfair to the small minority whose motivation and loyalty remained steadfast, but on the whole his analysis was accurate. This unfortunate state of affairs was the result of the decline in influence of British district officers and the ‘negative attitude’ of a Raj which had refused to stand up to its traducers.42 Isolated and petty outbreaks of unrest before 1942, evidence that Congress agitators were attempting to tamper with troops, and Bose’s propaganda compelled Military Intelligence to monitor carefully the mood of the Indian army. Censors’ reports were studied for signs of discontent so that grievances could be anticipated, and soldiers were encouraged to submit complaints anonymously. One, from May 1943, asked ‘Why India is not set at liberty as the Government has done for Italy?’ Another from the same time observed that: ‘In the eyes of Mahatma Gandhi all are equal, but you pay the British soldier 75 Rupees [a month] and the Indian 18 Rupees.’43 Discrepancies in pay between British and Indians were a common and justifiable source of bitterness.

  There were also anxieties about India’s future. During the winter and spring of 1944–45, home letters included fears about government by the ‘bania’ class and ‘bad men’ in the villages vexing the families of soldiers.44 Mistrust of Indian officials was widespread and also justified. Soldiers were disturbed by letters from their families, which described the graft of the police and local officials in charge of food and cloth rationing. There were also allegations that soldiers’ families were being victimised by Indian local government officers, who were often Congress placemen.45 Close surveillance of Indian troops was part of a wider programme designed to stimulate their morale and prove that Britain and not Japan held the key to the happier future of their country.

  A psychological warfare initiative was begun early in 1943 with the formation of a special unit whose task it was to prepare men to resist Japanese propaganda. The antidote to Bose’s poison was called ‘Josh’, which may be translated as a ‘positive spirit’ or ‘zeal’. All staff involved in the promotion of Josh were given special instructions, which included a breakdown of the personnel (Bose was mistakenly described as a Communist), methods and ideology of the INA. All defectors were known by the general title of Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnist (JIF), since the government was anxious that as few Indians as possible knew about the nature of the INA. Wherever possible British troops were kept in the dark about the INA, to avoid tension between them and Indians. Colonel J. A. Heard, a former air-conditioning engineer who had lived in India for thirteen years, was part of the Josh programme from its inception. He worked at training camps in Lahore, Firozpur and Sialkot, where he addressed Indian officers and NCOs and explained to them how a Japanese occupation would overturn traditional Indian values.

  At the beginning of 1944, Heard took charge of a weekly news-sheet called Josh for circulation among all Indian units. It was written in English and Urdu, and he chose the image of the rat, which was both vermin and parasite for the Indian villager, as the symbol of Japan. As portrayed in the magazine, the rat had slit eyes, pebble glasses and buck teeth, wore a Japanese forage cap and carried a Japanese flag. The Japanese obligingly provided the Josh campaign with its most potent source of propaganda: random and hideous atrocities against civilians and POWs. On 8 February 1944 there was a report in Josh of how Japanese soldiers had raped Muslim women who had fled to a mosque in Hong Kong. A report of Muslim POWs forced to pray facing Japan rather than Mecca appeared on 15 November. Commonplace Japanese brutality towards civilians was rendered in a playlet that was performed for and by front-line units. It showed the Japanese occupation of a Burmese village, in which women are abducted and houses plundered. An India detachment arrives, expels the Japanese and fraternises with the grateful villagers. Discovery of a real outrage against a Burmese village made young Indian soldiers ‘veterans in hate’ according to Josh of 12 March 1945, and subsequent editions included details of the ways in which Indian POWs had been abused by their captors who had, among other things, forced Sikhs to shave off their beards. Great emphasis was laid on Anglo-Indian comradeship. The issue of 15 February 1944 described how recently Indian gunners had invited their British counterparts to dinner in their mess, where everyone had shared chapattis. And there were celebrations of the many acts of gallantry performed by Indian soldiers and details of the decorations they were awarded. Josh steered clear of political controversy and any possible postwar changes in India, and there was no mention of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.46

  Josh lectures, weekly leaflets and cartoons all helped to boost the Indian soldier’s fighting spirit and deflect Japanese-inspired propaganda. ‘I get inspired by a sense of duty,’ one sepoy wrote home, ‘and get excited by the brutal atrocity of the uncivilised Japs. Please do not worry about me. I have taken part in a national war and if I die I shall have the consolation that I perform my duties.’47 The warrior traditions of the Indian army were still as strong as ever. It must have been Josh which inspired the Indian soldier who, on hearing from a renegade in an opposite trench that the INA would be in Delhi within ten days, snapped back, ‘Not on these ruddy railways, you won’t.’ Railway delays were a constant source of complaints from Indian soldiers on leave.

  In the end the INA turned out to be a paper tiger, although its survivors have tended to exaggerate its importance on the battlefield and have sometimes been taken at their word.48 From the start, the INA’s fortunes were inextricably linked to those of Japan, which meant that from mid-1943, it was, in Von Ludendorff ’s famous phrase, ‘shackled to a corpse’. The Japanese high command might equally have used the same expression to describe the INA, given its dismal operational record. Its detritus was sifted through by British and Indian intelligence officers, who split the survivors into three categories. There were 3,700 ‘whites’, simple souls who had been misled and were always half-hearted; 5,000 ‘greys’ who had some degree of political commitment; and 2,500 ‘blacks’ who represented the hard-core followers of Bose. The latter were detained for further investigation and possible prosecution for treason and individual acts of murder and torture. A few INA men never reached the POW cages. When they surrendered, they were shot out of hand by Indian soldiers who had been incensed by Japanese outrages against the Burmese.49

  IV

  The Bengal famine of 1943–44 posed a greater threat to India’s war effort than the INA. Its propagandists recognised this fact and graphic representations of starving men, women and children were among Bose’s most potent anti-British images. They alarmed the military authorities, who feared the sepoy’s will to fight might be eroded by anxieties about whether his wife and children had enough to eat. At the same time, food shortages would divert energies away from the war effort, cut industrial production and delay the counter-offensive against Japan.

  The great Bengal famine of 1943–44 crept up on the administration slowly, taking it unawares and unprepared. In September 1942, official calculations predicted a shortfall in cereal production of 1.25 million tons for the following year and a further 1.47 million for 1943–44.50 Matters were made worse by the loss of the 1.5 million tons of rice which had been annually imported from Burma; a severe cyclone and tidal waves which hit Bengal in October 1942; and chronic wartime price inflation. Together these misfortunes added up to a crisis but not a disaster. Hitherto, domestic food production had kept narrowly ahead of the demand. Between 1936 and 1939 the average yield had been 53.5 million tons, and the total for 1942–43 was 54 million.51 From this amount an extra 485,000 tons had to be found to satisfy additional Allied troops and personnel serving in India and the requirements of an enlarged Indian army.

  The margin between subsistence and shortage had become dangerously tight
by the first six months of 1943. There might have been just enough food available if there had been effective machinery in place for rationing, the control of distribution and, above all, a willingness to cooperate among peasant farmers and entrepreneurs. None existed. Furthermore, the war had played havoc with normal market forces. Crash industrial expansion had created a boom in cities like Calcutta, where wages rose and to an extent cushioned workers against higher food prices. Primary producers in the countryside were likewise protected because they could feed themselves and wherever possible offload their surplus on to a sellers’ market.52 Those with capital exploited the market, buying up stocks and holding on to them in the hope of further price rises. This left the poorest exposed: unable to afford food they flocked towards the cities and towns where they hoped for some form of relief, either employment or charitable food hand-outs. Calcutta in particular acted as a magnet for the most vulnerable: landless labourers, widows, deserted wives, children and the aged flocked to the city in desperate hope of finding relief. Many died within sight of well-stocked shops. Beggars swarmed into the city, travelling by train but without tickets, and making it impossible for the authorities to discriminate between opportunists and the genuinely needy.53 Smallpox, cholera and malaria proliferated among the underfed, adding to a death toll which was officially put at 1.5 million between mid-1943 and mid-1944.54 It is more likely that the total was nearer 3 million.

  From the beginning of the crisis it was understood that localised dearths were the result of withholding or hoarding. In July 1943 Linlithgow unsuccessfully tried to discourage both by pledging to import grain which, he hoped, would drive peasants and dealers to disgorge their produce before prices fell.55 At the same time, the provincial and now largely Indian-run governments were attempting to impose rationing and regulate food distribution. Their efforts came in for much criticism from British officials. Sir Thomas Rutherford, the Governor of Bihar, accused the authorities there of corruption and allowing surpluses to be sent for sale to the industrial workers of Calcutta, while people in the countryside starved. In October, when he was acting Governor of Bengal, Rutherford denounced local politicians, including the former premier of Bengal, Fazl-ul-Huq, for feathering their own nests by crooked schemes, including the forgery of permits to buy government grain stocks. Allegations of racketeering, maladministration and ‘criminal incompetence’ were also levelled by Congress against Bengal’s government, and Britain was accused of partiality towards the Muslims by allowing it to remain in office.56 Reports of hoarding, venality and inefficiency also surfaced in the British press.57

  Provincial governments certainly dragged their heels. Of the 370,000 tons of rice promised to Bengal by the neighbouring governments of Bihar, Orissa and Assam in 1943, only 44,000 tons had been delivered by June. Bihar had sent only 1,000 tons of its 185,000-ton quota. According to Sir John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal, the chief obstacle was ‘a deadweight of opposition’ from the public, local politicians and district officials.58 Further south, in Hyderabad, ryots resisted the compulsory purchase of their surpluses because they feared the food would go to the government rather than the starving. They sang:

  Do not give brother, levy to the sarkar.

  The famine cannot be wiped out by levy payment.59

  Stockpiling by ryots and the middle classes, clandestine sales of food and graft among junior railway officials were blamed by the Governor of Madras for the shortfall in supplies in his province.60 After a tour of Bengal in September, Linlithgow reported to Amery his dismay at ‘the lack of public spirit’ in Bengal, where the rich were only concerned with looking after themselves. His successor, Field Marshal Wavell, was similarly depressed by conditions in the province and the lassitude of its officials.61 All this was undeniable; disheartening but unavoidable. Uncertainty was widespread and could not be dispelled by official propaganda. Regions which had an abundance were disinclined to deliver their excess produce to those where there was scarcity, for fear that they might suddenly face shortages. The imposition of an efficient nationwide system of rationing was beyond the capability of the administration and, even if the will and the machinery had existed, there remained the problem of convincing a largely illiterate rural peasantry to place national before personal interest. For food growers, dealers, anyone with cash to invest and many politicians and officials, a national emergency offered irresistible opportunities for gain.

  In these circumstances, what was to some extent an artificial deficit had to be made up by rice and grain imported from the Middle East and Australia. Linlithgow, Wavell and Amery had to persuade a far-from-sympathetic War Cabinet that India’s needs were so great and so urgent that already scarce shipping had to be diverted from such vital wartime duties as the transport of men and ammunition. It was a hard and heart-breaking task, made worse by the interference of Churchill’s courtier and adviser, Lord Cherwell, who held all non-white races in contempt and imagined himself an expert on Indian affairs. Wavell rated him ‘a fraud and a menace’, which was as good a judgement as any on Cherwell’s talents and value.62 But Cherwell’s capacity for meddling and the War Cabinet’s indifference were no match for Wavell’s dogged persistence. At the beginning of 1944 he asked for a million tons of the grain, and at the end of the year he had got it, although it was delivered under pressure and grudgingly.63 By early 1945 the worst of the famine was over.

  V

  Field Marshal Viscount (‘Weevil’) Wavell was probably India’s most underestimated Viceroy. Unlike his successor, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Wavell did not indulge in manic self-promotion, for he was by nature a thoughtful, taciturn man of cultured tastes. He compiled an anthology of his favourite verses (Other Men’s Flowers) and, when briefly recalled to London for consultations in the spring of 1945, he took the opportunity to see John Gielgud in Hamlet and Laurence Olivier in Richard III, both of which he greatly enjoyed. Wavell was also the admirer and biographer of another soldier-turned-proconsul, Viscount Allenby, who, in the early 1920s, had defied the government by making concessions to Egyptian nationalists. His study of Allenby’s career taught Wavell his pragmatism, a commendable impatience with bureaucratic procedures and an ability to recognise the forces of history. This virtue won him few friends among those old-guard Tories who shared Churchill’s hope that somehow the Raj could be perpetuated. The Prime Minister spoke fulsomely of its glories at Wavell’s farewell dinner on 6 October 1943. In a rambling oration he extolled the blessings British government had bestowed on the Indian masses, who would remember their benefactors warmly:

  . . . this episode in Indian history will surely become the Golden Age as time passes, when the British gave them peace and order, and there was justice for the poor, and all men were shielded from outside dangers. The Golden Age. And I trust we may claim the work we have done, the great work we have done, standing alone for a whole year under this storm; and we ought to be proud of the work we have done in India, as we are of the contribution which we have made, the great contribution which we have made to the salvation and freedom of the whole world.

  It must have come as a shock for Churchill to hear the new Viceroy speak ‘of our goal of a self-governing India’ and look forward to a time in the near future when India, at peace with itself, would be ‘a partner in our great Commonwealth of nations’.64 A year later, Wavell rebuked the Ministry of Information for setting so much store by what Britain had done for India. ‘The approach must be to boost Indian achievements, with the implication that the British Commonwealth is very lucky to have so valuable a member.’65 He warned Churchill that India could not be held by force, a policy which the British people would never tolerate and, in any case, British soldiers did not want to stay in the country once the war was over.66 And yet for all his political realism, Wavell shared the paternalism of his predecessors, once likening India to an adolescent whose waywardness could be subdued by a latch key, sympathy and ‘a good deal of freedom’. All of which he hoped he could provide at the same time as prese
rving India’s integrity as a nation.67

  In his dealings with India’s leaders, Wavell projected himself as a plain-dealing, honest soldier. This was his way of saying that he had little truck with the deviousness and deliberate obfuscation which, he believed, were the hallmarks of professional politicians, a class he instinctively mistrusted. His feelings, however soundly based, were a handicap when it came to negotiations with Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru, who were not only professional politicians but lawyers. Each was a product of the English Bar, where they had been trained in the techniques of combative debate in which compromise was always a poor second to outright victory. The adversarial dexterity of India’s tribunes encouraged captiousness and a tendency to get bogged down in legal trivialities, which was how they appeared to Wavell, whose job was to solve rather than dissect problems. But constitutional quiddities were of supreme importance to Congress and the Muslim League. Each was seeking power and could only secure it through a constitutional framework that accommodated their interests; the small print mattered because it could tip the future balance of political power within India.