Before the war that balance had been heavily weighted in favour of Congress. Like the Raj it had set out to remove, it was monolithic and extraordinarily resilient, having survived waves of mass arrests and the imprisonment of its leaders and thousands of its rank and file. In 1939 Congress was a well-organised, centralised movement with five million members and an army of dedicated local activists. It was generously funded by Indian businessmen and in Gandhi and Nehru it possessed two leaders who, for all the difference in their temperaments, enjoyed vast popular adulation. Congress could not overturn the Raj, but its record showed that it had the ability to paralyse India’s day-to-day administration and show, in a spectacular manner, that Britain no longer ruled with the consent of all Indians. Two wartime blunders shook its position. The mass resignation of Congress ministries at the end of 1939 achieved nothing save to deprive its senior members of the chance to gain administrative experience. The next folly was Gandhi’s Quit India campaign, which produced several weeks of murder and mayhem, did nothing to shorten the life of the Raj and left behind the impression that Congress was willing to jeopardise the war effort for short-term political gains.
The chief beneficiary of Congress’s miscalculations was the Muslim League, which went from strength to strength during the war. It avoided any action which might have been seen as disloyal, and was free to drum up support among Muslims. Congress’s monopoly of opposition was fractured and, as Jinnah never tired of proclaiming, the League had become the authentic voice of all India’s 90 million Muslims. They were already in a formidable position, thanks to previous British concessions which had granted them a disproportionate share of electoral power in areas where they were a minority. During the war, Jinnah had grown more confident and clamorous, seeking nothing less than Pakistan, a Muslim state which would embrace the Sind, the North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir, the Punjab and Bengal. There were already clear indications that inclusion in the new state would be rejected in the Punjab, where Muslims made up 55 per cent of the population, and in Bengal, where they comprised 53 per cent.
So far as Nehru and Gandhi were concerned, India was indivisible and any form of partition a violation of their motherland. Congress suspected that the League had been secretly fostered by the British as a device to maintain its paramountcy – a crude form of ‘divide and rule’. Even London and Delhi regarded the prospect of Pakistan with apprehension. Emphasising the essential unity of all Indians, Gandhi reminded Muslims that their ancestors had once been Hindus. But neither he nor any other Congress leader could ever quite convince the Muslim masses that the movement was not at heart Hindu and that, given the chance, it would impose a Hindu Raj on India.
Muslim fears of future Hindu dominance were matched in intensity by those of the Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs whom religious demography would bring within Pakistan’s sway. A time-bomb was beginning to tick away. In August 1944 the Governor of the Punjab predicted that the creation of Pakistan would provoke ‘a civil war’ in the province, with the entire Sikh and Hindu communities up in arms.68 Elsewhere, communal tensions continued to simmer and sometimes boiled over. The murder of a Sikh by a Muslim led to religious riots and murders in Ahmadabad in April 1941. A provocative ‘anti-Pakistan Day’ held the same month in Bihar was followed by a spate of disorders which left thirty dead and over a hundred wounded. Another flashpoint was Dacca, where there were Hindu– Muslim clashes in July and October 1941. A nearby village was looted and several Muslims murdered by a party of Sikh signallers in May 1942, which may have led to a two-day communal riot in Dacca four weeks later. Here and in Bihar a sinister pattern was beginning to emerge, with an outrage in one district being quickly avenged in another.69
Cohesion at the top might reduce tension in the towns and countryside and prepare the way for a single Indian government. In London there was no enthusiasm for any fresh projects to re-order the Indian polity until after the war; Churchill saw to that. Wavell thought otherwise and, on the eve of the 1945 general election, secured Cabinet approval for an initiative designed to open the viceregal executive council to Indians from all parties. Internees, including Nehru and and an ailing Gandhi, were released, and the Viceroy even approached the ex-Communist M. N. Roy, now leader of the Radical Social Democrats. It said much for the changed nature of the Raj that Wavell was now contemplating a former terrorist firebrand as a minister. He liked Roy, whom he thought possessed more ‘independence’ and ‘guts’ than the run-of-the-mill Indian politician, but Wavell always had a taste for the quirky. As it was, Roy was enough of a politician to ask for extra seats for his colleagues and a subsidy, and so Wavell turned him down.70
Wavell’s quest for an interim government of national unity ended in tears at Simla at the beginning of July. From start to finish, Jinnah had been unbending in his insistence that all the fifteen Muslims on the new council should be nominees of the League. The Quaid’s intransigence was part of a calculated political manoeuvre designed to exclude from power the League’s rival, the Muslim Unionist Party, which presently controlled the provincial government of the Punjab. The League desperately needed the Punjab, for without it Pakistan would be a house of straw. This explains why, when Wavell made his last appeal to Jinnah, he found the Quaid ‘in a high state of nervous tension’. ‘I am at the end of my tether,’ he told the Viceroy, and appealed to him ‘not to wreck the League’. Wavell did not budge and again rejected Jinnah’s demands; the League had wrecked the chances of a ministry which offered some hope of national cohesion in what would turn out to be a period of unprecedented trauma in India’s history.
At the end of July 1945 Labour won a landslide victory in Britain. Wavell was cautiously optimistic: ‘I think Labour is likely to take more interest in and be more sympathetic towards India, but they will have some weird ideas about it.’71 In fact, the ideas of Clement Attlee were close to Wavell’s. Britain would disengage from India after having agreed a political settlement which would transform the country into a friendly partner within the Commonwealth. No timetable had yet been drawn up for closing the Raj, although Indians were expecting the end to come within two or three years. And yet, if the pace of negotiations since 1930 was anything to go by, finding an equitable solution would take considerable time. The undertaking was known by an official euphemism as the ‘transfer of power’, which suggested a smooth passage of authority from donor to recipient. Nothing was further from the truth: the 1942 Quit India movement and Jinnah’s haggling at Simla were the opening rounds in a scramble for power. Indians now sensed as never before that the days of the Raj were numbered; as a Congress politician once remarked to Wavell: ‘No one worships the setting sun.’
7
What Are We Here For?:
September 1945 – February 1947
I
Winding up the Raj was rather like playing a convoluted and confusing board game, in which elements of chess were mixed up with those of snakes and ladders. Pure chance could wreck the most carefully-considered gambits and send a player sliding towards an abyss. Escape routes were rare and did not always lead to safety. To further complicate matters, each player followed a different set of rules and pursued different objectives, although partnerships of convenience were sometimes possible.
There were two teams of British players. The first was the Cabinet’s India committee, headed by Attlee, which defined Britain’s goal as a dignified transfer of power which would end with an undivided, independent India within the Commonwealth and a friendly partner in British foreign policy. This was to be accomplished in such a way that it would appear to the world as an act of consummate statesmanship, the natural and wholly admirable conclusion to a Raj which had always placed the welfare of India first. The committee also devised a strategy which was implemented by a subordinate team based in India. This comprised the Viceroy, the commander-in-chief, their staff, the administration, the police and the garrison of India, whose job it was to keep the peace.
The principal Indian players were the
working committee of Congress, dominated by Nehru and another veteran sardar (chief), Vallabhbhai Patel, and the Muslim League, which meant Jinnah. There were also the princes, still rulers of two-fifths of India, but now all but edged out from the political process. Last, there was a miscellany of players who occupied the periphery, but had the power to upset the moves of the rest. These were former INA men, Indian servicemen, the Sikhs, smaller political parties, the urban and rural masses and sundry scoundrels who hoped to turn a public emergency to their own advantage. Congress’s aim was to come to an accommodation with Britain that would preserve the integrity of India and install an elected central government for the whole country. The League demanded Pakistan, an independent Muslim state occupying north-western India and Bengal and embracing sizeable and largely unwilling Sikh and Hindu minorities. The princes were players to whom things happened, and when they did attempt positive moves it was to salvage something of their former powers and revenues. A few, like Osman Ali, the Nizam of Hyderabad, dreamed of setting up independent states, something that was frowned on by Congress, which was anti-monarchical, and the British, for whom a fragmented India was a vulnerable India.
A powerful moral impetus lay behind Labour’s Indian policy. It had its roots in the party’s libertarian philosophy and the late-Victorian and Edwardian idealism of the men who shaped it, the Etonian vegetarian, Lord Pethick Lawrence, the Wykehamist Cripps and the Haileyburian, Attlee. It was somehow appropriate that the Prime Minister had attended a public school which had been the nursery of so many Indian proconsuls and commanders, all of whom were imbued with a powerful sense of duty towards the country and its people. Attlee had seen India at first hand when he had been a member of the Simon commission and thereafter he, like his fellow committee members, had maintained a deep interest in Indian affairs. A concern for India’s welfare and a wish to protect its people from what they considered to be the excesses of its rulers had been traditional in the Labour Party. Its founding fathers, Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, had toured the country as guests of Congress and declared their support for its aims. For conservative Indians the working-class origins of this pair were a source of bewilderment; how was it, some asked when MacDonald became Prime Minister, that the King Emperor had chosen a ‘cooly’ to run his government?
Congress had deliberately and successfully cultivated an alliance with Labour since the beginning of the century. Labour MPs had been its voice in Parliament and a number of close personal friendships had been formed between British and Indian socialists. The most important was that between Cripps and Nehru, each a high-minded, middle-class political theorist dedicated to remoulding his country. Shared objectives and a common political outlook created a Labour–Congress axis which made it easier for men of Cripps’s cast of mind to deal with like-minded Indians and enjoy their confidence. Much was owed to the efforts of Khrisna Menon, a socialist based in London who glided through Labour’s intellectual circles, acting as a lubricant between the party and Congress and, at the same time, advocating Nehru as India’s future leader. This rapport between Labour and Congress made some problems easier to solve and others immeasurably more difficult. In its efforts to court the Labour Party, Congress had gone to considerable lengths to represent itself as a progressive, secular movement, whereas the Muslim League was portrayed as obscurantist and bent upon creating a theocratic state. Not surprisingly, the League suspected that, at heart, the Labour government was hostile, although it could count on some sympathy among Conservatives. As events unfolded, the Congress leadership convinced itself that there was a sprinkling of pro-League supporters among senior British administrators and the army’s high command, who were covertly delivering information to Jinnah.
Domestic opposition to Indian independence was muted and confined to right-wing Conservatives, with Churchill uttering sibylline warnings about Britain’s decline as a world power. The old arguments that Britain needed India no longer carried much weight. It was pointless to regard the Indian army as the bulwark for British power in Asia at a time when Indian politicians and some soldiers were vehemently protesting against the deployment of Indian forces in Indonesia and Indo-China, where they were upholding Dutch and French imperial pretensions. There were no British settlers in India, as there were in southern Africa, who could rally support in Parliament. Most important of all, India had ceased to be a commercial asset of any kind. The economic umbilical cord between the two countries had been effectively severed between the wars. During this period, India’s tentative steps towards self-government had been accompanied by an economic revolution. British investment in India fell, with the shortfall being made up by Indian capitalists, often in partnership with their British counterparts. Imports from Britain declined steadily: in 1928–29 Indians spent £83 million on imported British goods, in 1935–36, £39 million. Adverse Indian duties and Japanese competition all but squeezed out Lancashire cotton from what had hitherto been a captive and highly profitable market. British manufacturers were also under pressure and conceding markets to Japanese, German and American rivals. Between 1929 and 1936 Indian imports of British cars, buses and lorries rose from 2,887 to 7,726, and American imports increased from 6,352 to over 12,000.
With the establishment in 1931 of the Reserve Bank of India, the country was free to set the value of its own currency without reference to sterling. At the same time, heavy burdens were being lifted from the Indian economy: in 1933 Britain provided an annual grant of £1.5 million towards the Indian army, and six years after agreed to underwrite its programme of modernisation. Most significant of all was Britain’s acceptance of the bulk of the costs of India’s war effort, which meant that by 1945 the Indian government had built up a sterling balance of £1,300 million. India had passed from being Britain’s debtor to its creditor. By contrast, Britain was now £2,730 million in the red, mostly to the United States, and faced spiralling balance of payments deficits. ‘You have been living in a land of milk and honey, now you are going to a land £170,000,000 in debt to the world, where everything is rationed except air,’ national servicemen told sahibs and memsahibs as they carried their baggage for their final journey home in the summer of 1947.1
Britain’s obligation to India was the result of an Indian mobilisation for the campaign against Japan, and the bills for Indian troops who served in North Africa and Italy. Thirteen million Indians had been employed in some form of war work and, as in the First World War, there had been a rapid upsurge in industrialisation. Two and a half million Indian men and women had joined the armed forces and pre-war training programmes for Indian officers were rapidly expanded. By August 1945 there were 15,740 Indian officers, many of them drawn from what had hitherto not been regarded as the warrior castes. The loyalty of the new officer class was to India rather than the King Emperor, as their commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (‘the Auk’), appreciated. ‘It is no use shutting one’s eyes to the fact that any Indian soldier worth his salt is a Nationalist, though that does not mean . . . that he is anti-British.’2 Indian officers asked, with good reason, how, ‘If we had been a partner in war, could we revert to subjection in peace?’3 Just as Indians were taking over their army, they were coming to dominate every level of the civil administration; there were 429 British and 510 Indians in a now undermanned ICS.
The machinery of power was now largely in the hands of Indians; all that remained was for them to take the levers with as little fuss as possible. After consulations with Wavell at the beginning of September, the Cabinet’s India committee decided to call elections at the end of the year for the provincial and central legislatures. The results would indicate Indian opinion and prepare the way for negotiations for a final political settlement. As yet there was no decision on Pakistan, and Cripps hoped that there would be no need for one. Faced with the choice between partition and all-India government, he believed Congress would evolve a constitution that would satisfy the Muslims. Wavell was not so sure, and was willing to concede a P
akistan which consisted of areas where the Muslims were in an overwhelming majority, but not the Punjab and West Bengal.
Pakistan (the land of the pure) was a prospect fraught with strategic danger, for it would place India’s north-west frontier in the hands of a weak government, forever strapped for cash. The first chill of the Cold War against the Soviet Union was being felt during 1946, and once again strategists faced the old imponderables of Russian intervention in Afghanistan. As early as January 1945, British intelligence was keeping a watchful eye on Russian activity in Persia. Axis propaganda had promoted fears that the Soviet victory in Europe would be followed by a spread of Communism, and in September there were rumours of fresh Russian intrigue in Afghanistan.4 As the uncertainty within India added to tribal unrest on the frontier, there were fears that Russia might seek to exploit it.5 Whatever Russia’s regional plans, it was vital that the Indian army remained intact which was why, however much they may have privately sympathised with the Muslim League, Auchinleck and the army’s high command opposed the creation of Pakistan.
The election results of the winter of 1945–46 confirmed those of 1937. Congress retained control of Madras, Bombay, Orissa, the North-West Frontier (with stiff League opposition) and the United and Central Provinces. The League dominated the Muslim vote and secured Bengal and the Sind. It gained 79 out of 175 seats in the Punjab, but was excluded from power by a coalition of Sikhs, Hindus and the Muslim Unionist Alliance. The polls had been conducted against a background of collapsing public order, which perturbed Wavell. On 5 November he voiced his apprehensions in a letter to the government in which he predicted that Congress would attempt a violent coup the following spring. Its tactics would be those of 1942, with sabotage, rioting and the assassination of officials. In evidence he cited the inflammatory rhetoric of Congressmen on the campaign trial and the growing cult of the INA, which Congress was encouraging. A nationalist insurrection, of the sort which was occurring in French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, appeared imminent and the alternative to its suppression by British troops would be to surrender India to Congress.6
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