Indian Summer
Page 17
By 1946, the subcontinent was a mess, with British civil and military officers increasingly desperate to leave, and a growing hostility to their presence among Indians. In January British RAF servicemen mutinied in India and the Middle East, demanding to be sent home. Soon after, there were a couple of small anti-British rebellions in the Royal Indian Navy, but these were swiftly crushed and the officers court-martialled. Graffiti began to appear on Navy property in Bombay: ‘Quit India’, ‘Revolt Now’, ‘Kill the British White Bastards’. In February, the crews of HMIS Talwar, Sutlej and Jumna refused to work or eat. HMIS Narbada turned its guns on the Bombay Yacht Club. The Congress flag was raised, and a riot broke out in the town. In Karachi, the crew of HMIS Hindustan shouted ‘Jai Hind’ – the old INA slogan, ‘Victory to India’ – and opened fire on the town, but were quickly arrested. The next day, the Army fired on the mutineers at Bombay and crushed them swiftly too.15
The reaction to these mutinies had shown that the British could still put down dissent if they wished. That would not be the case for much longer. The granting of leave to civil and military officers after the war would mean that many parts of India had to be run by a skeleton staff. More importantly still, as one civil servant pointed out, to reassert British power physically after the war would have been politically impossible: ‘neither British opinion nor world opinion would have tolerated it.’16
Now that they were gearing up to leave, though, the British authorities decided to turn some of the politicians they had previously imprisoned to good use, and it was in this spirit that Wavell suggested Nehru go to Malaya at the beginning of 1946. Malaya had seen strikes and unrest among its Indian population, on account of the treatment accorded to the INA prisoners. Nehru had been released from prison only nine months before. Now he was to be the emissary of cohesion and calm, but apparently not everyone had been informed. The Malayan administration planned to line the streets with armed soldiers. The Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia, Dickie Mountbatten, put a stop to that. He insisted that Nehru be received as a distinguished statesman, and that, rather than policing the streets to warn people off, lorries be sent to bring Indians in from the suburbs especially to see him.17
The visit was an extraordinary and unexpected success. Nehru arrived at Government House in Singapore on 18 March 1946, accompanied by his sister Betty’s husband, Raja Hutheesing, and it was there that he met Mountbatten for the first time. He was given tea, and driven by Dickie to meet Edwina and other welfare workers at the YMCA Rest Room for Indian Servicemen on Waterloo Street.18 There he was greeted by the public with the sort of reception more usually reserved for the likes of Bing Crosby or Rita Hayworth. The YMCA building was surrounded by cheering and shouting Indians, in crowds so dense that Mountbatten and Nehru had trouble getting in. As the two men disappeared inside, dozens of Nehru’s fans surged forward and began to clamber through the windows after them.19
In the St John Ambulance canteen, which Edwina had set up in a Nissen hut, the crowd surged forward and knocked Raja Hutheesing over. Edwina was knocked down too, and fell flat on the floor under the stampeding crowd. ‘Your wife; your wife; we must go to her,’ shouted Nehru to Mountbatten. The two men linked arms and barged forward to find her, but she had already scrambled out of the crush. Nehru and Mountbatten helped her up and carried her to safety.20 As first meetings go, theirs could hardly have established a greater informality.
Afterwards, Edwina was the first to emerge from the YMCA, which she did to a roar of approval from the crowd. The roar intensified as Dickie appeared, and the two of them, laughing, pushed through to their car. They turned to watch with amusement how Jawahar would fare. There was a pause before he appeared; when he did, the crowd reached an almost frightening peak of frenzied adulation. The fans still in the building rushed forward and Jawahar, along with a small clutch of officials, was shoved roughly down the steps.
That night, Nehru and Hutheesing dined informally at Government House with the Mountbattens. At Mountbatten’s request, Nehru agreed to forgo the planned jamboree around the laying of a wreath on the INA memorial the next day.21 His conciliatory attitude was demonstrated again later that morning, when he held a meeting in the Jalan Besar stadium. A flag was hoisted to the singing of anthems and the shouting of slogans. Soon this deteriorated into the INA’s trademark cry: ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ But, instead of feeding the crowd’s frenzy, Nehru took the microphone to rebuke them. He told them that the time for violence had passed, and that the peaceful, constitutional route was now the clearest path to Indian freedom. (Never a complete Gandhian, he added that he would not hesitate to call on them should the need for violence arise.) As the Director of Intelligence for SEAC commented, ‘His tone throughout was conciliatory and calming, and undoubtedly caused a measure of disappointment.’22
Nehru’s trip, and Mountbatten’s reception, had set a new tone of civility in Anglo-Indian relations. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mountbatten’s omnipresent press attaché, remembered that ‘the two men made a deep personal impression on each other.’23 Nehru had felt warm enough to send Mountbatten a copy of his new book, The Discovery of India, inscribed ‘in memory of a pleasant evening and with all good wishes’.24 On 25 March he went on to Penang, but media attention had moved back to Delhi – where the Cabinet Mission was arriving to negotiate the end of the British Empire.
The arrival of the Cabinet Mission was greeted by Time magazine with a front cover showing a scowling Jinnah with the caption, ‘His Muslim tiger wants to eat the Hindu cow’. Time‘s pro-Congress line reflected a widespread opinion in the United States that India should remain as one nation. As Roosevelt had told the British chargé d’affairs in New York a few years before, any partition of India ‘sounded terrible’ in the United States, echoing as it did their own civil war.25
It is obvious from the records of the Cabinet Mission that, by this point, the British were desperate for a settlement. The Mission’s plan proposed a federal India, with a ten-year constitutional review which would have allowed Muslim provinces to leave the Indian Union if they wished. To the astonishment of everyone, including his own supporters, Jinnah accepted the plan – effectively giving up his campaign for an immediate Pakistan. It has been suggested that he was bluffing, because he knew Nehru would reject the plan. If so, it would have been an extraordinary risk to take.26 It is more plausible that Jinnah actually meant to accept it. His intention, since the very beginning of his career, had been to prevent minority Muslim interests from being submerged under a Hindu-majority government. The Cabinet Mission’s plan did indeed provide for that, and paved the way for Pakistan in a decade. It may simply have been good enough.27
Almost everyone on the Mission regarded Gandhi as the biggest culprit in holding up negotiations. Sir Francis Fearon Turnbull, a civil servant, was impressed with Gandhi’s clever drafting and legal mind, but not in the least with his attitude. ‘The nasty old man has grasped that he can get what he asks for’, he wrote, ‘& so goes on asking for more & more.’28 Wavell, the Viceroy, agreed. ‘Gandhi was the wrecker’, he wrote to the King.29 Even Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the new Secretary of State for India noted for his mild manners and cruelly nicknamed ‘Pathetic-Lawrence’ on account of them, became exasperated by the Mahatma. He ‘let fly in a way I have never heard him before’, wrote Turnbull. ‘Said he was coming to believe Gandhi did not care whether 2 or 3 million people died & would rather that they should than that he should compromise.’30
In the middle of June, Wavell got fed up with negotiating. ‘O! dear, my poor Archie does wish himself back among soldiers’, wrote his wife, Queenie, to her friend Edwina Mountbatten. ‘It is very difficult and trying when all your life you have dealt with men who mean what they say and know what they want, to talk and talk and talk with those who almost invariably say what they don’t mean.’31 Wavell announced his intention to form an interim government of six Congress Hindus (including one Untouchable), five Muslim Leaguers, a Sikh, a Parsi and an Indi
an Christian. Jinnah had already accepted the plan, and it was rumoured that Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel were ready to acquiesce. But Gandhi lent heavily on Congress to reject it, on the grounds that there was no Congress Muslim in the government. Gandhi meant well: he hoped to demonstrate to Muslims that Congress was their party too. In retrospect, though, most commentators have agreed that his derailment of the plan was a point of no return. The Muslim League’s mistrust of Gandhi reached a fever pitch: from then on, the partition of India was inevitable.32 It fell to Nehru, on 10 August, to inform Wavell that he was prepared to form a government.
As soon as Nehru accepted the premiership, Jinnah dropped his support for the plan. The council of the Muslim League declared a Direct Action Day for 16 August. ‘We will have,’ Jinnah announced, ‘either a divided India or a destroyed India.’33 It looked like he might get both. On the morning of 16 August, Calcutta erupted into a frenzy of violence. Groups of Muslims, Hindus and the small community of Sikhs attacked each other in the streets. Others formed murder squads to venture into different quarters of the town, killing, beating and raping anyone they could find. Their sadism knew no bounds. Nirad Chaudhuri, a Calcutta resident, described a man tied to the connector box of the tramlines with a small hole drilled in his skull so he might bleed to death as slowly as possible. He also heard of a boy of about fourteen years old, who was stripped of his Hindu clothing so that the mob might ascertain that he was circumcised – proving he was a Muslim. The boy was flung into a pond and held under with bamboo poles, ‘with a Bengali engineer educated in England noting the time he took to die on his Rolex wristwatch, and wondering how tough the life of a Muslim bastard was.’34
For the next week, gangs terrorized the city. The riots spread through Bengal and Assam, and triggered copycat killings in the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. By the time the bloodshed finally subsided, deaths and serious injuries in Calcutta alone were estimated at 15,000 or 20,000, and the streets were piled with corpses to the height of two storeys in some areas.35 The bloated carcasses of holy Hindu cows lay stinking and fly-covered beside the bodies of their owners. The American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White arrived to see ‘a scene that looked like Buchenwald’; no light comparison, for she had herself seen that, too.36 Nehru went to Calcutta with his younger sister, Betty, to spearhead the government’s effort to open first-aid camps and canteens. ‘Many of these people who came to us seemed utterly bewildered,’ Betty remembered; ‘even those who had taken part in the killings seemed not to know why. Often they said to Bhai [Brother], “We don’t know. It’s you politicians who have done this, because we have lived in peace for years”.’37 Those politicians were still not prepared to compromise. When Nehru officially became Vice President of the Viceroy’s interim government on 2 September 1946, Jinnah instructed all Muslims to display black flags and declared a day of mourning.38
Catapulted into a position of responsibility over a dramatically deteriorating nation, Nehru needed more than ever the steadying hand of his guru. But the Mahatma Gandhi was in no mood to lead Congress. ‘I have no power,’ he told journalist Louis Fischer. ‘I have not changed Congress. I have a catalogue of grievances against it.’ Nor had he much more patience for compromise with the Muslims. Fischer interviewed Gandhi in the summer of 1946, and found him at his most intemperate. ‘Jinnah is an evil genius,’ Gandhi told him. ‘He believes he is a prophet.’ He alleged that Jinnah had ‘cast a spell over the Moslem, who is a simple-minded man’. He concluded that he thought the Muslim League would ultimately join the interim government. ‘But the Sikhs have refused. They are stiff-necked like the Jews.’39
Many of Gandhi’s acolytes were untroubled by these incendiary comments. But serious dissent was caused among even the most loyal of them by his ‘brahmacharya experiments’ during 1946 and 1947. The aged Mahatma had been ‘testing’ his vow of celibacy by sleeping at night in bed with a naked or partially clothed woman. The object of the experiments was to transcend physical arousal. One night, when the police turned up to arrest him, they found him in bed with a girl of eighteen. The British authorities decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and hushed up the police report.40
Nirmal Kumar Bose, a distinguished anthropologist who had volunteered his services to Gandhi as a secretary, wrote a detailed memoir of the experiments. According to him, several women were involved, and many among them became personally possessive of Gandhi, some to the point of emotional crisis. Gandhi’s grandniece, Abha, who started sleeping next to the Mahatma when she was just sixteen and he seventy-four, spoke of the experience in later life. ‘I don’t remember whether he had any clothes on or not,’ she told an interviewer. ‘I don’t like to think about it.’ Sushila Nayyar said that Gandhi had told another of his young relatives, Manu, that they both needed to be naked to offer the purest of sacrifices, because ‘We both may be killed by the Muslims at any time.’41 There was a disquieting incident with Nayyar herself, when cries and two loud slaps on flesh were heard from Gandhi’s hut. The ashramites who ran to their aid found Gandhi and Nayyar both in tears, though neither would explain why. Bose later asked Gandhi whether he had struck Nayyar. Gandhi denied it, and insisted that his behaviour was above board.42 But even if the Mahatma’s intentions were pure, the objectors argued, it was disrespectful to treat women as instruments. He responded with more denials. Bose remembered that, ‘If anybody questioned Gandhiji’s purity in respect of sex, he could fly into an anger.’43 Along with several others, Bose felt he had no option but to resign from Gandhi’s service. The Mahatma was unmoved. ‘If I can master this,’ he is supposed to have said of his experiments, ‘I can still beat Jinnah.’44 But at seventy-seven, Gandhi had been sapped of political power. His importance to the independence process was by then talismanic.
Whitehall was awash with intrigue. In the House of Commons, Churchill had replied to the Cabinet Mission plan by arguing that, ‘We cannot enforce by British arms a British-made Constitution upon India against the wishes of any of the main elements in Indian life.’45 By the main elements, he meant eighty million Muslims, sixty million Untouchables, and the princely states that comprised a third of the land and a quarter of the population: all of which feared for their fate under a caste-Hindu majority rule.
‘To my mind, the most important point is that we should do all we can to persuade and encourage the principal elements in India to remain attached to the British Empire,’ the lawyer Walter Monckton had written to Churchill two days after the Cabinet Mission Plan was announced. ‘I see little prospect of inducing Congress to take such a line … The Muslim League, on the other hand, are naturally ready – though they will not be anxious to express their readiness publicly – to see the British connection retained.’46
Churchill read Beverley Nichols’s controversial Verdict on India, a profoundly conservative book which argued that the British could not quit without creating a separate homeland for the Muslims. Afterwards, he declared to his wife that he was depressed by the scorn with which the raj was viewed in India and America; that ‘out of my shadows has come a renewed resolve to go fighting on as long as possible and to make sure the Flag is not let down while I am at the wheel’, he wrote. ‘I agree with the book and also with its conclusion – Pakistan.’47 Churchill’s vocal support of Pakistan would be instrumental in creating the world’s first modern Islamic state, and in sabotaging any last hopes of Indian unity.
Exactly how far the alliance between Churchill and Jinnah went is hard to tell from the few remaining records. It has been rumoured that they had formed a secret pact several years before. Churchill, then Prime Minister, was said to have pledged to grant Jinnah Pakistan in return for Muslim League support of the Allied war effort. It is true that Jinnah repeatedly offered deals of this kind to the Viceroy, but there is scant evidence that he corresponded directly with Churchill on the matter.48 Of course, any such letters would have been very unlikely to survive: for not only would they show Jinnah conspiring t
o keep the British in India, but they might have opened Churchill to charges of treason.49
Extensive letters between Churchill and Jinnah from 1946 survive in both men’s papers.50 They do not reveal a particularly close friendship, but do show Churchill’s keen interest in the Muslim League. He wrote to Jinnah that any Muslim state ought to remain in the Commonwealth. ‘Having got out of the British Commonwealth of Nations,’ he wrote, ‘India will be thrown into great confusion, and will have no means of defence against infiltration or invasion from the North.’51 This statement was unqualified. Perhaps Churchill was pointing out the vulnerability of the north Pakistan border against the Afghans and the Russians; perhaps he was implying that a future Pakistan – to the north of India – might be able to invade India. Either way, the implication that Pakistan needed British help was there.