Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  Gandhi may not have been negotiating, but he kept an eye on Nehru’s actions. He feared that the policy was a deliberate attempt once again to divide and rule, which would ultimately lead to the ‘Balkanization’ of India; consequently, he put pressure on Congress to reject it; consequently, they did.67 The Muslim League rejected it too, for it did not specifically designate a Pakistan – but the offer was a vindication for Jinnah’s strategy. The right of Muslim provinces to stay out of a Congress-dominated India had been acknowledged. In the course of just twelve years, Pakistan had gone from decorative acronym to a feasible prospect for millions of Muslims.68

  The failure of the Cripps mission was disappointing in India. But it was just as devastating in Whitehall. A rash deal had been made in 1940, whereby Britain assumed a heavy burden of financial responsibility for the defence of India. The Chancellor began to predict Indian sterling balances – the amount effectively owed by Britain to India – rising as high as £400 million, even £450 million, by April 1943; and no ceiling was in sight.69 By the end of 1944, the balances were so large that economist John Maynard Keynes thought that it might be necessary to take another large loan, or a gift, from the United States to cover them.70 Few were under any illusions about what the conditions might include. Lord Beaverbrook expressed the opinion of many in Whitehall when he said that, ‘It would be better to pay India a considerable tribute rather than permit the United States to intrude into the affairs of that country.’71 The United States had taken little interest in India until the rise of Gandhi had made it interesting. But, owing to the Americans’ own long memory of colonial rule, as well as the nation’s principles of liberty and democracy, there was a general feeling against empires – and against the British Empire in particular.

  Churchill’s trenchant refusal to give up on the Empire was leaving him increasingly isolated. By 1942, even the Viceroy was thinking in terms of an exit strategy. ‘We are not going to remain in India,’ Linlithgow told the American journalist Louis Fischer. ‘Of course, Congress does not believe this. But we will not stay here. We are preparing for our departure.’72

  CHAPTER 8

  A NEW THEATRE

  IN JUNE 1942, LOUIS FISCHER SPENT A WEEK AT GANDHI’S ashram, and observed the preparations for a new campaign under the slogan ‘Quit India’. The slogan was not only catchy, but accurate: the British administration was to be harried, disobeyed and besieged until it simply upped and left, war or no war, economy or no economy, responsibility or no responsibility. The Quit India resolution, passed by Congress on 8 August 1942, announced that Congress would ‘no longer [be] justified in holding the nation back from endeavouring to assert its will’ against the British administration, and sanctioned ‘a mass struggle on non-violent lines under the inevitable leadership of Gandhiji’.1 The struggle would only begin at Gandhi’s word; but this was a call for treason as far as the British were concerned. The first arrests were made in the early hours of the morning of 9 August.

  Over the following days, India exploded in violent uprisings, described by the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, as the ‘most serious since that of 1857’.2 There were Quit India hartals across the country, which turned into riots. The police and the army fought back, often brutally, leaving an official civilian death toll of 1028; bazaar gossip put the total at 25,000.3 Effectively, Congress had given the raj an excuse to imprison hundreds of its leaders, including Gandhi himself and Nehru – who, according to his sister, was almost thankful for it, so uncomfortable had he felt opposing the war effort.4 The resolution could never have succeeded. Britain could not evacuate India in the middle of the Second World War, with Japan looming on its eastern front. But the empty space created in politics by the Congress leaders being in prison gave the Muslim League its chance to rush in.

  According to Jinnah, it was not in the interests of the Muslims for the British to abandon them in a potentially hostile swamp of Hinduism.5 The logical position of the League was actually to keep the British in India – at least for as long as it took to convince them of the case for Pakistan, and perhaps indefinitely. The effect of Gandhi’s Quit India misstep, and the League’s hugely successful campaign during the 1940s, can be seen from the election statistics. In the general election of 1945–6, the Muslim League would win about 75 per cent of all Muslim votes. In every previous election, its share of the Muslim vote had hovered around 4.6 per cent.6 During the war years, Gandhi and Congress handed Jinnah a sixteenfold increase in his support. Quit India damaged the chances of a united India at least as much as any single act of the British administration ever had.

  Linlithgow wrote to Churchill, admitting that he was concealing the severity and the extent of the violence from the world. But the Americans found out, and sent their own mediators to Delhi. The Americans’ ‘zeal in teaching us our business is in inverse ratio to their understanding of even the most elementary of problems’, Linlithgow complained to the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. It would be bad if the Americans came, he averred; it would be worse still if they tried to talk to Gandhi or Nehru. He pleaded with Amery ‘to arrest at least for a time this flow of well meaning sentimentalists’.7 But the flow of Americans continued, and Indians delighted to see them spoiling official occasions for the British by wearing the wrong clothes, disregarding procedure and cheerfully ignoring distinctions of rank.8

  But the imprisoned leaders of Congress were impotent. After five months in prison, Gandhi’s frustration grew to the point where he threatened to fast.9 The British had been expecting this very move. ‘He is old, and you know you can’t feed the old man,’ Linlithgow had told Louis Fischer. ‘He is like a dog and can empty his stomach at will … I cannot permit the old man to interfere with the war effort.’10

  Gandhi scheduled his fast to begin on 9 February, and continue for twenty-one days. ‘This fast can be ended sooner by government giving the needed relief’, he wrote to Linlithgow.11 The Viceroy replied that he held Congress leaders responsible for the terrorism that had followed Quit India, and that he could not give into terrorism. On the point of the fast, he was softer. ‘I would welcome a decision on your part to think better of it,’ he wrote, ‘not only because of my own natural reluctance to see you wilfully risk your life, but because I regard the use of a fast for political purposes as a form of political blackmail (himsa) for which there can be no moral justification, and understood from your own previous writings that this was also your view.’12

  This argument provoked an angry letter from the Mahatma, by return of post. ‘Posterity will judge between you as the representative of an all-powerful government and me as a humble man who has tried to service his country and humanity through it’, he wrote.13 But the government’s opinions on how to deal with Gandhi and his fasts had hardened. ‘My own views have always been clear’, wrote Linlithgow. ‘They are that Gandhi should be allowed to fast to death.’14 No negotiation would be entered into: ‘Important thing is to avoid parleying with him or giving him an excuse for that hair-splitting correspondence at which he is so expert.’15

  Gandhi’s fast began at the Aga Khan’s palace in Poona, in which he was imprisoned, with the world’s media clustered expectantly around. Three days later, the Hindus in the Viceroy’s council had still not resigned in sympathy with the Mahatma, for fear that Jinnah would make the most of it if they did. ‘Fast is falling rather flat,’ reported Linlithgow with satisfaction.16 Churchill, meanwhile, found the whole business irritating. ‘I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics’, he wrote to Linlithgow. ‘Would it be possible to verify this?’17 ‘This may be the case,’ replied Linlithgow, ‘but those who have been in attendance on him doubt it, and present surgeon general Bombay (a European) says that on a previous fast G was particularly careful to guard against possibility of glucose being used.’18

  From that day on, Gandhi began a marked deterioration. As he weakened, the Americans became increasingly upset at the distress of Gandhi’s f
ollowers and the stubborn inflexibility of the British. Roosevelt – ‘probably under the influence of Madame Chiang-Kai-Shek and Mrs. Roosevelt’, the British thought19 – asked his envoy to persuade the Viceroy to release Gandhi. Linlithgow refused to see the envoy, and told him that intervention by the United States government would be ‘disastrous’.20

  On the night of 21 February, Gandhi suffered a seizure. General Smuts, who had dealt extensively with Gandhi in South Africa many years before, sent Churchill a personal message. ‘Gandhi’s death should be avoided by all means if possible,’ he advised, ‘and it is worth considering whether forcible feeding by injections or otherwise should not be applied to him, as in previous cases in English practice.’21 ‘I do not think Gandhi has the slightest intention of dying,’ replied Churchill, ‘and I imagine he has been eating better meals than I have for the past week.’22 This was something of an overstatement – even outside his fasts, Gandhi was not known to open a bottle of hock at breakfast. But the apt timing of Gandhi’s heart failure to coincide with a conference of Congress leaders in Delhi, and his recovery immediately afterwards, appeared to confirm British suspicions. ‘It now seems almost certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast’, Churchill wrote to Linlithgow, advising that ‘the weapon of ridicule, so far as is compatible with the dignity of the Government of India, should certainly be employed.’23 To this, the Viceroy replied at length. ‘I have long know Gandhi as the worlds [sic] most successful humbug’, he wrote. ‘I am suggesting slyly to certain American correspondents here that it has not been so much a matter of having their heartstrings plucked as of their legs being pulled.’24 Churchill was satisfied. ‘What fools we should have been to flinch before all this bluff and sob-stuff.’25

  A further tragedy awaited Gandhi that year. In December 1943, while he was still in prison, his wife Kasturba fell ill with bronchitis. The disease was soon compounded by pneumonia. Her doctors advised that Gandhi stay away from Kasturba, or at least keep his face a distance from hers. ‘But no one dared say even that to him,’ remembered his devotee Sushila Nayyar, herself a qualified doctor. ‘Gandhiji did not believe in germ theory. So the best course I felt was to say nothing.’26

  As Kasturba neared death, Mohandas took over her care. Two days before she died, she pleaded for castor oil; he would not give it. ‘A patient should never try to be his or her own doctor,’ he told her. ‘I would like you to give up using medicine now.’27 The last battles of the Gandhi family took place over Kasturba’s deathbed. Devadas had penicillin flown in from Calcutta to treat his mother. Gandhi was opposed from the outset and, when he heard that the penicillin was to be given by injection, forbade it. Devadas and his father had a fight, with Gandhi pleading, ‘Why do you not trust God?’28 Kasturba had no penicillin. Instead, her husband filled the room with his followers, who sang devotional songs.

  On 21 February, the black sheep of the family, Harilal, turned up. He had been invited to the prison by the government, not by his family – though Mohandas had recently caught Kasturba praying to an icon of Krishna for her eldest son to visit. When Harilal arrived he was drunk. Gandhi’s entourage ushered him out of his mother’s presence, while she sobbed and beat her forehead with her hands.29

  The next day, Kasturba died, after a long, slow and painful illness, her suffering unrelieved except by prayer. That night, Sushila Nayyar visited Gandhi as he lay in his bed. ‘How God has tested my faith!’ he exclaimed. ‘If I had allowed you to give her penicillin, it could not have saved her. But it would have meant bankruptcy of faith on my part … And she passed away in my lap! Could it be better? I am happy beyond measure.’30 Only Mohandas’s closest disciples were permitted to glimpse his real feelings. After the cremation his sons gathered their mother’s ashes to throw into holy rivers. Gandhi’s disciple Miraben, formerly Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British admiral, walked back to the prison with the Mahatma. On that walk, she saw him cry for the first time.31

  Back in England, Dickie Mountbatten, amazingly, had kept his job. Churchill was not especially perturbed by the horror of Dieppe. He had proved his point, which was that to invade across the Channel at this point was impossible. Instead of being sacked, Mountbatten was given a new set of toys to play with. ‘Winston adored funny operations,’ remembered an intelligence liaison officer.32 Mountbatten planned a raid on the Channel Islands, leading General Brooke to complain that he ‘was again putting up wild proposals disconnected with his direct duties.’33 He planned to sneak troops into the north of Norway, whence they would descend on Axis forces like valkyries in little armoured snow-carts. He puzzled over the anchorage of the Mulberry harbour, demonstrating models to Churchill in his bathtub aboard the Queen Mary.34 At one stage, he championed an enormous, rolled-up spiral of roadway, called the Swiss Roll, which would be released by rocket propulsion. Unfortunately, when he invited a group of admirals and generals to watch him demonstrate it, the Swiss Roll went off-course and rolled most of them into the sea.35

  Geoffrey Pyke, one of a group of scientists Mountbatten nurtured at Combined Operations, was his co-conspirator in the greatest of all his flights of fancy. Habakkuk was to be an aircraft carrier, fashioned out of a colossal, moulded iceberg. It could be frozen in Canada or Russia, and then dragged to the North Sea to fight Hitler. Pyke invented a special extra-strong ice, which he named Pykecrete, made from paper pulp and seawater. A prototype Habakkuk, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep – about the size of twelve double-decker buses – was set up on Canada’s Patricia Lake, so that Mountbatten could sell the idea to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Quebec. With typical theatrics, Dickie produced two blocks of ice – one standard, one Pykecrete – pulled out a revolver, and shot each one. The standard ice exploded; the Pykecrete survived, and so impressively that the bullet glanced off it and stung the American Chief of Naval Operations in the leg before lodging in the wall. The Americans vetoed the project.

  In August 1943, Mountbatten had confessed to Churchill: ‘I have a congenital weakness for feeling certain I can do anything.’36 Churchill seemed to believe he could do anything, too, for he proposed Mountbatten for the new role of Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia. Roosevelt agreed: he had met Dickie during the latter’s propaganda tour of the United States in the autumn of 1941, and liked him.37 In the military, it appeared that Churchill and Roosevelt were more or less the only two men who did. ‘Dickie Mountbatten is, of course, quite unfit to be a Supreme Commander,’ said Montgomery. ‘He is a delightful person, has a quick and alert brain and has many good ideas. But his knowledge of how to make war is really NIL.’38 ‘Seldom has a Supreme Commander been more deficient of the main attributes of a Supreme Commander than Dickie Mountbatten,’ agreed Brooke.39 But it was Admiral Cunningham, the new First Sea Lord, who summed up the reaction most succinctly. ‘I think most people in the Service have just laughed.’40

  Mountbatten left for Delhi, brimming with delight at his appointment. ‘It is the first time in history that a Naval officer has been given supreme command over land and air forces,’ he wrote to Edwina. ‘It will mean another stripe.’41 But the person to whom Dickie most wanted to show his stripe was nowhere in evidence. His wife was now Superintendent-in-Chief of the St John Ambulance Nursing Division, and had no interest in going out to Asia to act as the Supremo’s hostess. ‘I really don’t know how I will be able to do this job without you’, wrote Dickie plaintively to her. ‘Wouldn’t it be romantic to live together in the place we got engaged in, and in a job which is really more important in the war than our host’s was …’42 But Edwina stayed put in London.

  Mountbatten’s role at South East Asia Command (SEAC) was ill-defined, and he was regarded with suspicion by much of the existing hierarchy. His own superiors had conflicting interests: the British Chiefs of Staff intended for SEAC to recapture Burma, Malaya, Singapore and the rest of the former European colonies; the Americans only really cared about helping China and were wary of imp
erialist tendencies among their European allies.43 In the absence of strong direction, Mountbatten decided that morale needed the boosting power of a new logo. He dedicated many hours to sketching a Japanese rising sun impaled on a sword before someone informed him that the branding of Allied uniforms with such an emblem would, in the event of capture by the Japanese, guarantee the immediate execution of the soldiers in them. His final design of a phoenix was less controversial, though no more lauded: the troops nicknamed it the ‘pig’s arse’. Still, that probably cheered them up, which was the point. To boost morale further, Mountbatten attempted to persuade his cousin, King George VI, to visit. The King was receptive to the idea, but Churchill blocked the trip. Anglo-American relations were now very prickly over India, and a triumphant tour by the King-Emperor would have been provocative.44 Mountbatten, meanwhile, was reduced to visiting hospitals, and making careful notes on any lack of staff or equipment. ‘I really can’t bear to see someone’s stomach being cut open and all their guts pulled out,’ he noted, ‘but it is difficult to refuse what is evidently regarded as a great privilege.’45 It escaped no one’s attention whose example had inspired this initiative, though there was a general consensus that she was better at it, and some even thought she might have been better at the rest of the Supreme Allied Commander’s job, too. ‘There wouldn’t have been 7,000 of us in Command HQ if Edwina had been “Supremo”,’ said one of Dickie’s staff at the time. ‘There would have been 700, and we’d have been in Singapore six months before Hiroshima instead of after.’46