India

by John Keay

  The British, not unhappy about this evidence of nationalist disarray, quietly removed two long-standing grievances: access to the elite Indian Civil Service (the senior administrative cadre) and to officer-training in the army was made less difficult for Indian applicants; and by establishing India’s fiscal autonomy, much of the ‘drain theory’ critique was negated. Duties on imported cloth were soon raised, thus removing the preferential status enjoyed by Lancashire’s products. ‘The British still had a great economic interest in India, but the principle of tariff autonomy was established and the days of the old economic imperialism were over.’26

  Political advances remained much more contentious. The Montagu – Chelmsford reforms had contained provision for a review and further progress towards ‘responsible government’ within ten years. In 1928, therefore, a parliamentary commission under Sir John Simon arrived to assess the situation and make proposals. By what is sometimes described as an ‘oversight’, it contained not a single Indian. Moreover Baldwin’s Conservative government was known to be out of sympathy even with the ‘Montford’ reforms, let alone any advance on them. Massive demonstrations greeted the wretched commissioners throughout India. Congress united around a strict boycott of them, and Gandhi, released on medical grounds, at last returned to the political fray.

  Where all else had failed, British pig-headedness had again provided India with an issue on which most nationalists were in agreement. Anticipating the Simon Report, Congress had already called an All Parties Convention which demanded a dominion status for the ‘Commonwealth of India’ equivalent to that enjoyed by Canada or Australia. In late 1928 the young Jawaharlal Nehru went one better, piloting through Congress a resolution demanding purna swaraj, ‘complete self-rule’. This meant independence. At the December 1929 Congress the green, saffron and white flag was unfurled to shouts of ‘Long Live the Revolution’; the first Independence Day, when all endorsed a long pledge to resist British rule and assert purna swaraj, was celebrated on 26 January 1930.

  The tricolour is still India’s flag and, although independence had to wait another seventeen years, 26 January is still commemorated. But ironically this historic meeting of Congress, whence the Republic of India traces its genesis, took place in Lahore, a city which today belongs to Pakistan and which, but for strategic reasons, would probably be its capital. The green in the new flag was for Islam, just as the saffron was for Hinduism. But the Muslim League had had nothing to do with it. Jinnah had walked out of the All Parties Convention following its rejection of separate Muslim electorates. Without these safeguards, he said, there would be ‘revolution and civil war’. Meant as a threat, his words contained a prophecy. The ensuing decades would be as much about trying to decide the future political composition of the subcontinent as about evicting the British and adjusting to a post-colonial world.

  19

  At the Stroke of the Midnight Hour

  1930–1948

  SCALING THE BARRICADES

  SWADDLED IN JUST a shawl and a dhoti, with a long thin arm clutching a long thin staff, Mahatma Gandhi had quickly become the most recognisable symbol of anti-colonial protest. His flimsy cottons epitomised the defenceless apostle of non-violence, his stout staff declared the unbending champion of national rights. But if it was the near-naked Gandhi who alerted the world to India’s struggle, it was Jawaharlal Nehru, always impeccable even in homespun, who alerted India to world struggle.

  During a European tour in 1927 Nehru had attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels, been elected to the executive committee of the League Against Imperialism and been invited to Moscow for the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution. A socialist since his Cambridge days, he was already in close touch with the British Labour Party and looked a promising recruit to international Marxism. By making 1930 the year in which Congress ratcheted up its demand to full independence, then backed it with a new programme of civil disobedience, the brooding Nehru showed a keen awareness of how the international scene was changing.

  Elsewhere in Asia the struggle against colonialism was also entering its final phase. Sukarno, another young leader of undoubted charisma, was challenging the Netherlands in their East Indies or, as he preferred, ‘Indonesia’. Like the Indian National Congress, the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) had lately gained enormous support by demanding full independence. When in 1930 Sukarno stood trial for incitement he used the occasion to deliver one of the keynote speeches of the age. ‘The sun does not rise because the cock crows,’ he declared, ‘the cock crows because the sun rises.’ Emancipation from colonial rule was historically inevitable, the awakening of Asia’s peoples an irresistible phenomenon, not an invention of their leaders. Nehru could not have put it better. On the banks of the Ravi outside Lahore he had saluted India’s new flag at the midnight hour on New Year’s Night 1930. The dawn of the decade presaged a dazzling era of liberation and fulfilment all over Asia. ‘We can just hear the promise it holds,’ Sukarno told his supporters, ‘like the melody of a distant gamelan on a moonlit night.’

  In Manchuria it was already daybreak. The ‘Rising Sun’ flew over the start of a southward trail of Japanese acquisitions on the Asian mainland which would eventually engross Sukarno’s Indonesia and reach even Nehru’s India. Also in northern China and also in 1930, the first rehearsal for decolonisation took place when, with minimum publicity, the British hauled down the Union Jack at Weihaiwei, a coastal outpost sometimes known as ‘the other Hong Kong’. It was the first time since the American War of Independence that they had surrendered territory to a nationalist government. In the same year, in Hong Kong itself a group of Vietnamese exiles headed by Nguyen Ai Quoc founded the Indo-Chinese Communist Party. The party would eventually become the main component in the anti-French Viet Minh, and Nguyen Ai Quoc, after ten years underground, would re-emerge with the sobriquet of ‘Ho Chi Minh’.

  A year of high hopes for nationalists, for the imperial powers 1930 was darkened by grave doubts about the whole world order which they represented. In Malaya recession so reduced the demand for rubber that indentured Tamil labourers were being repatriated to India and European plantation-managers were said to be begging their passage money home. India’s capitalists were also badly hit, with Bengal’s export-dependent jute industry a notable casualty. Nor were things any better in London and New York. The markets had crashed in 1929; in 1930 the Great Depression bit hard. Dance-halls became soup-kitchens and the streets of the industrialised world filled with the angry armies of the unemployed. Elected governments took heed. Social spending at home assumed a higher priority; and those who championed it, like the Labour Party in Britain, criticised global defence expenditure and warmed to the idea of imperial disengagement. Western capitalism was in crisis, and so too was the colonial system which (according to the imperialists) it supported, or which (according to the Marxists) supported it. Either way, after 1930 the Western empires in Asia began to back off. Gears crashed as the great imperial juggernauts of the nineteenth century shuddered into reverse. Within three decades, but for a bogged American vehicle in Vietnam, all would have pulled out of Asia.

  Internationalists like Nehru itched to scale the barricades, but the other-worldly Gandhi seemed indifferent to the march of history and increasingly out of touch with these tumultuous times. For him, if 1920 had meant spinning, 1930 meant salt. Nehru was in despair. ‘Salt suddenly became a mysterious word, a word of power … We were bewildered and could not quite fit in a national struggle with common salt.’1 The Simon Commission had recommended no changes in the central government and had made no mention even of dominion status as demanded by the All Parties Convention and by a constitutional report prepared by Motilal Nehru. It seemed that even the drip-feed of concessions was drying up; hence the new Congress demand for full independence, or purna swaraj, and the carte blanche given to Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to implement another programme of action.

  But first Gandhi made a final appeal dire
ct to the viceroy Lord Irwin. He wanted the land revenue halved, the rupee pegged, alcohol prohibited, Indian cloth protected, the salt tax abolished, political prisoners released and much else besides. No one expected Irwin to deliver on such a package. The Mahatma, whose twinkle of compassion concealed a steely-eyed cunning, was testing the mass appeal of the weapons at his disposal. In late February 1930 he announced the winner, and therefore the focus of the new campaign, to be salt. Massive civil disobedience was to be launched in the name of man’s inalienable right to the untaxed enjoyment of a common condiment.

  Salt had traditionally been produced in coastal salt-pans whence it was traded inland. Since at least Mughal times production had been regarded as a state monopoly and a suitable subject for taxation. In the eighteenth century, East India Company employees had claimed that Emperor Farrukhsiyar’s farman entitled them to exemption from local salt duties. By extending this exemption to their agents, they had acquired a monopoly of the salt trade in Bengal even before Plassey. Clive had reclaimed this monopoly for the Company itself and, ever since, the government had enjoyed a salt revenue. The rate of tax was low; Curzon had tried to reduce it further and, although recently increased, it still came to less than a quarter of a rupee per head per year. The yield accounted for no more than 4 percent of government revenue. But its application was wide; everyone ate salt. And it was deeply resented. As Gandhi explained, ‘there is no article like salt, outside water, by taxing which the state can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes therefore the most inhuman poll tax the ingenuity of man can devise.’ Long a dispensable anachronism, it had suddenly become a deliberate iniquity; and since the salt monopoly had legal sanction, all who flouted it could expect to be prosecuted.

  With this in mind, Gandhi assembled his followers, alerted the press, and in one of the great set-pieces of the independence struggle staged a month-long salt march from his Sabarmati ashram near Ahmadabad to Dandi on the Gujarat coast. There, ‘on 6 April 1930, by picking up a handful of salt, Gandhiji inaugurated the Civil Disobedience Movement, a movement that was to remain unsurpassed in the history of the Indian national movement for the country-wide mass participation which it unleashed.’2

  Other marches were staged all over the country, from the north-west frontier to east Bengal and Tamil Nadu; some concentrated on industrial salt plants, where protesters in their thousands were beaten back by police and arrested. The government, pleasantly surprised that something as innocuous as the salt tax had been singled out, had at first responded cautiously. But active civil disobedience, as opposed to passive non-co-operation, directly challenged the law. As the movement spread to the non-payment of rents, of revenue and of taxes, distraints on land and property became commonplace and were bitterly contested. The movement also coincided with a startling revival of terrorist activity in places as far-flung as Chittagong and Peshawar. Less sensationally but much more effectively, there was mass participation in a host of non-violent activities like picketing liquor shops, swadeshi boycotts, commercial hartals, and rural satyagrahas (designed to contest forest restrictions). Jawaharlal Nehru later reckoned the number of those gaoled in 1930 at over ninety-two thousand (the official figure was nearer sixty thousand). He, Motilal, the rest of the Congress leadership and eventually Gandhi himself were amongst the detainees. Congress committees were declared unlawful, and special ordinances muzzled the press and restricted picketing.

  However, the campaign was comparatively short-lived; it barely lasted into 1931 and, although revived in 1932–4, would never regain its full momentum. Moreover, if ‘primarily designed to strengthen and unite Indians [and] to influence them rather than in a direct way to weaken the administration’,3 its success was limited. Unlike the 1919–22 Rowlatt-Khilafat protests, the 1930–1 protests did not enjoy Muslim support. The common condiment proved to be of less universal appeal than Gandhi had hoped, and Muslims seemingly preferred to take the government’s salt to that of Congress. In fact in late 1930 Jinnah and other Muslim leaders were amongst those heading for London. There, as with the ‘Montford’ reforms in 1919–20, protest was lending urgency to a new cycle of constitutional discussion.

  To offset the negative effect of the Simon Report, Viceroy Irwin had reinterpreted the goal of the ‘Montford’ reforms as eventual dominion status, and had proposed a Round Table Conference at which all parties and interests would be represented. Its discussions were not to be limited by the Simon Report. In fact the British hope was that it would lift critical Indian eyes from the contentious scrutiny of minor reforms to the nobler prospect of India’s future status and constitution as an autonomous member of, and dominion within, the British empire. In effect the participants were being invited to forget the trees and, standing back, to map out the shape of the whole wood.

  Congress, with most of its leading lights in gaol, declined to participate; it regarded dominion status as an unacceptable alternative to purna swaraj, and would remain deeply suspicious of all else that emerged from the Round Table Conference. The first session was thus, as Gandhi put it, much like Hamlet without the prince. But when the conference reconvened for its second session in 1931, Gandhi had undergone another of his sudden changes of heart. Following personal discussions with the viceroy – which prompted a piqued Winston Churchill to sneer at the King-Emperor’s representative stooping to parley with a ‘half-naked fakir’ – Gandhi and Irwin had signed a pact which brought the release of detainees and other concessions. Gandhi now trusted Irwin and was ready to join the Round Table Conference when it reconvened in late 1931.

  The first session had been attended by representatives of various Muslim parties including the League, and by those of the Hindu revivalist Mahasabha, the Sikh and Christian communities, the Harijans, the Anglo-Indians, various liberal nationalists, numerous professional groups and a strong contingent of British parliamentarians. It was an impressive cast even without the prince. There were, besides, other princes, plus a veritable army of Round Table knights. For it was at this point that representatives of India’s princely states, most of whom held honours from the British Crown as well as Indian titles, were for the first time brought into the constitutional equation – and thereby greatly complicated it.

  FEDERATION FIASCO

  Hyderabad, Jammu-and-Kashmir, Mysore, Travancore, the great Maratha states of central India, the phalanx of rajput states in Rajasthan, and the other princely archipelagos in Gujarat, Orissa, Bengal, Assam, UP and the Panjab were united only in their relationship with the imperial government. Like the vassal states of old they represented that ‘society of kings’ which had legitimised and gratified the pretensions of more traditional imperialisms. But together they still accounted for over a third of the subcontinent’s population and nearly half of its land-mass. An India without them would have been so moth-eaten as to disintegrate at the touch.

  So long as the British ruled the provinces which constituted the rest of India directly, it had hardly mattered that the princely states enjoyed internal autonomy, since they were subject to individual treaties with the British, to supervision by a political cadre of British officials, and to a vague doctrine of British paramountcy. But once the British began to devolve power to their provinces, to share it at the centre, and even to consider transferring it altogether, the anxieties of the princely states became acute. Would they become free agents if the British withdrew? Or would the British continue to uphold their treaty responsibilities after ceding power? Was paramountcy also transferable? And would its likely claimant, an increasingly left-wing Congress, be disposed to safeguard the autonomy, the territorial integrity and the dynastic rights of unregenerated feudal autocrats with a poor record for social justice and a far from hostile attitude to the British?

  In February 1931, at the height of the London talks, the British formally inaugurated their New Delhi capital. As a last imperial extravaganza, it smothered in bungalows and bougainvillaea the wasteland
between Shah Jahan’s metropolis and the bat-infested battlements of all those other old Delhis. It also embodied the imperial thinking of the day. At the ceremonial heart of the city, on a ruddy acropolis atop Raisina Hill, flanked by Herbert Baker’s classical secretariats and the domed temple of Edwin Lutyens’ Viceregal House, there had been erected four columns representing Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The columns supposedly welcomed India into the brotherhood of the British dominions. But it was noteworthy that each of these dominions comprised a federation of various provinces and protectorates which had subscribed to a single central government. For India’s patchwork of provinces and princely states, federation also looked to be the way forward.

  To progressive sections of British opinion and to moderate sections of Indian opinion, federation also appealed as a way of opening up central government (as opposed to the provincial governments) to greater Indian participation. When, unexpectedly, the idea also found favour with a majority of the princes, federal proposals suddenly soared like the Raisina columns to the top of the Round Table’s agenda. But they were not to everyone’s taste. By diehard imperialists like Churchill any infringement of British sovereignty, federal or otherwise, had to be resisted; they would fight federation tooth and nail. So would most sections of Congress, which saw in it an attempt not to unite British India with the princely states but rather to divide – and, of course, rule – an emerging entity which transcended both British and princely India, namely the Indian nation.

  Nor were such suspicions unjustified. For if the central government became a federal government representing both the provinces and the princely states, the British might expect to play a lasting supervisory role. The princes would continue to look to the British authorities for support against any encroachment on their autonomy. And with this support, plus that of the minorities (Muslims, Sikhs, etc.), the British would be able to command a majority at the federal centre. Given such a scenario, the arrangements whereby defence and foreign affairs were to remain under British control during a transitional period might be prolonged indefinitely; likewise a residual British presence which would ensure to the empire the services of the Indian army at minimal cost might also be preserved indefinitely. In short, federation, though a highway to integration and independence elsewhere, might in India become a congested thoroughfare leading to the exact opposite – disintegration and continued dependence.