It goes without saying that they [the HMG] could not contemplate transfer of their present responsibilities for the peace and welfare of India to any system of Government whose authority is directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life. Nor could they be parties to the coercion of such elements into submission to such a Government.43
The British forever afterwards interpreted the aforementioned statement as His Majesty’s Government’s firm commitment not only to the Muslims of India but also to Jinnah as the sole spokesman of the Muslims of India, thus virtually according him veto powers over future Indian constitutional developments. The declaration therefore turned out to be an important milestone in the British efforts to build up Jinnah and forge the Anglo–Muslim League alliance. In all subsequent negotiations for Indian independence, Jinnah flung this declaration at the British negotiators who questioned his demand for Pakistan or suggested a settlement of communal differences in an elected Constituent Assembly instead of directly with him. And after the Labour Party replaced the Conservative Party in power in England in 1945, British civil servants in London and New Delhi were ever ready to point to this British declaration in order to curb any propensity on the part of their new masters to bypass Jinnah.
Jinnah and his party in 1940 did not, in fact, represent all the Muslims of India and even within the Muslim League there was serious opposition to his separatist policies. Sikandar Hayat Khan and Fazal-ul-Haq, the Muslim League premiers of the Punjab and Bengal – the major provinces claimed by Jinnah for Pakistan – were totally opposed to the concept of a Muslim nation. Sikandar Hayat Khan called it ‘Jinnahstan’. It was therefore not unreasonable for the Congress Party to insist that unless a settlement was reached with the elected representatives of the Muslim community as a whole, preferably in an elected Constituent Assembly functioning outside British influence, there could be no finality to it, since Jinnah could not be considered the sole representative of the Muslims.
The British declaration of 8 August 1940 came as a rude shock to the Congress leaders. The veto power given to Jinnah on India’s constitutional developments would increase his intransigence. Their reaction was to revoke their own offer made after the fall of France to lay aside their creed of non-violence for national defence, which they had hoped would clear the way for cooperation with the Allies during the war. However, Gandhiji was worried that in their frustration some Congressmen might go too far and start an agitation against the government, which he had promised the viceroy he would discourage. So he worked out a strategy that would enable the Congress Party to show to the public that it was giving no quarter to the British authorities and yet take no action that would really hinder the war effort, which stand Subhash Chandra Bose compared to ‘running with the hare and hunting with the hound’.
To prepare the ground for his new approach, Gandhiji wrote to the viceroy on 29 August 1940 that his desire not to embarrass the British Government during the war ‘could not be carried to the extent of the Congress Party committing hara-kiri’. And when he saw Linlithgow on 27 September 1940, he reiterated his view and insisted that he had the right of freedom of speech to dissuade the people from recruitment on the ground that his party was committed to only non-violent action. ‘A person had a right not to join the army but not the privilege to propagate the same’, Linlithgow argued back, reporting to London that ‘to preach non-violence in this way was unlikely to remain an academic question but impinge on the war effort’.44 Making an issue of his freedom to preach non-violence, Gandhiji, on 17 October 1940, launched what was termed ‘Individual Peaceful Disobedience’.
Under this movement, important Congress leaders, one after the other, would speak in public to protest against recruitment into the Army, and get arrested. There would be no mass stir; merely protest by selected individuals. The Congress Party opened its innings by sending in Vinobha Bhave, Gandhiji’s staunchest disciple of non-violence, who got promptly ‘stumped’; in other words, he was put behind bars. Nehru followed as number two. After he too landed in jail, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was sent in. And so on and so forth till all the top stars of the Congress Party got themselves picked up and packed into British prisons. Gandhiji then retired to his ashram and devoted himself to social work and the spinning wheel, leaving the viceroy to handle the complexities of defence preparedness without any embarrassment from the Congress Party’s side.
Louis Fisher characterized this agitation as one launched ‘to save face’. The director of British Intelligence had a different view of the Gandhian policy in 1940. In one of his reports, he quotes Nehru as saying: ‘No one expects Gandhiji’s movement to bring success, but its moral value is what counts.’ The director then added: ‘After the war is over any ban [on the Congress] will be lifted, Congress leaders will be released and at the next elections Congress will sweep the polls. Today they want to embarrass the Government morally. Gandhiji’s plan serves this purpose.’45
Some Indians at least were less than convinced about the moral ascendancy of the Congress Party’s policy. Chimanlal Setalvad, a well-known barrister, wrote in the Statesman on 7 October 1940 as follows: ‘Gandhiji says that the Congress [Party] is as much opposed to victory for Nazism as any Britisher can be, nevertheless he demands liberty to carry on anti-war propaganda that must weaken the war effort and thus assist the enemy. Gandhiji proclaims the Congress [Party] would rather die in the act of proclaiming its faith in the creed of non-violence than departing from it. Had Mr Gandhi momentarily forgotten this creed when on the outbreak of the war he expressed himself to the effect that India would give unconditional support to Britain in the prosecution of the war? The Congress [Party] says in the Poona Resolution that they will give all help to Britain in the war if there was a declaration of the independence for India and responsible government was set up at the Centre. If these conditions can be fulfilled then the Congress [Party] was prepared to give the go-by to their creed of non-violence and participate in the war.’
The number of Congressmen arrested during Gandhiji’s ‘Individual Civil Disobedience’ reached a peak of 15,000 by the summer of 1941. ‘The movement caused no excitement and attracted little attention and owing to the muzzling of the press was hardly known to be in progress. So the movement dragged on for a year with dwindling numbers participating. The effect on India’s war effort was nil.’46 Nor did Gandhiji’s movement deter Indians from taking advantage of the opportunities for employment: ultimately, the strength of the British Indian armed forces rose from about 190,000 at the beginning of the war to almost two million towards the end. And when it was decided to release the demoralized Congressmen at the end of 1941 – Nehru and Azad were released on 3 December – Churchill called it: ‘Surrender at the moment of success.’
Whatever the conceived benefits of the ‘Individual Peaceful Disobedience’ to the nationalists, it led to considerable gains for Jinnah and the Muslim League. According to one Muslim leader: ‘While the Congress civil disobedience was lingering along [sic], the Muslim League through speeches, pamphlets and personal contacts had started making rapid progress in the cities and towns.’ And believing that in the final reckoning violence, not non-violence, would pay, the League started to build up a force called the Muslim National Guards whose volunteers took to escorting Jinnah to public functions with drawn swords47 – the sword of Islam. Linlithgow repeatedly turned down Jinnah’s pleas to accept the principle of Pakistan, insisting that this must be left ‘as an open question for post-war discussion’, but did everything possible to bolster Jinnah and ‘to shepherd all the Muslims into the [Muslim League] fold’, as he put it, in a report to London.48 This was no easy task considering the personal and policy differences among Muslim leaders. According to Linlithgow, Sikandar Hayat Khan told him that Jinnah was frightened that Hitler would win the war and he would find himself in trouble. He gave other instances of Jinnah’s chickenheartedness. Linlithgow faced opposition to Jinnah from the Bengal Muslim League premier, Fazal-ul-Ha
q, as well. But the viceroy’s faith in Jinnah as the best instrument to fight the Congress Party never wavered.
Lord Linlithgow, the son of a former British governor of Australia, was sent out to India in 1936 to inaugurate the 1935 Constitution that he had taken the lead to finalize as chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee. It was ironical that circumstances instead led him to bury the same. Nehru described Lord Linlithgow as ‘slow of mind, solid as a rock and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness’.49 Leo Amery compared the six-and-a-half-foot-tall and pernickety Scottish peer with a huge double chin to a ponderous elephant who possessed ‘an elephant’s cunning’. According to him, Hopie (as Linlithgow was called by his friends) did ‘a great piece of work in all essentials; he had broken the Congress attempt to force it into a disastrous surrender’.50 With the help of the Congress Party-hating civil servants who surrounded him – and with no little help from the Congress Party itself – he had indeed built up the Anglo–Muslim League alliance and headed off any possibility of an Anglo–Congress Party rapprochement. Disbelieving that the British would have to leave India in the foreseeable future, he displayed no real enthusiasm for Pakistan, but by making concessions to Jinnah, to keep him in play against the Congress Party, he created the conditions on the ground that made partition possible a few years later. ‘It is possible, though by no means certain,’ contends a British historian, ‘that if from the outset the British had made it clear that they would never countenance the partition of India, the demand for Pakistan would have been dropped.’51
Under the British system, everything that was discussed with Indian leaders was communicated day to day to London almost verbatim. If the viceroy saw Jinnah and Gandhiji the same day, his dispatch might run into twenty-five to thirty pages. Hence, Jinnah’s repeated pleas for the prolongation of the British presence in India and his sallies against the ‘Hindu Congress’ – the enemy – were reaching the highest echelons of the British Government and creating a niche for Jinnah in British hearts, more so because they knew he was dependent upon them. Jinnah’s reach on the ground did not extend to all the Muslims in India, leave alone that enjoyed countrywide by the Congress Party. But his consistency and directness, as opposed to the contradictions and confusability of the Congress Party policies, particularly as they appear in cold print in Linlithgow’s telegrams and letters, created an aura of his strength and integrity. These meticulously maintained records were always available to British ministers and viceroys who dealt with India then and in subsequent years and played a part in firming up Britain’s position in favour of the Muslim League and against the Congress Party.
It would be appropriate to end this chapter by quoting how V.P. Menon viewed the situation:
The Congress opposition to the war effort and the [Muslim] League’s de facto support for it had convinced the British that Hindus generally were their enemies and the Muslims their friends. And this consideration must have added force to the silent but effective official support for the policy of partition.52
Soon Japan would strike Pearl Harbor and, in one fell swoop, conquer the British Empire in Asia, east of India. This would change the ball game for the British as well as for the Indians, not the least because it brought the USA into the arena. However, before we come to that, let us cast a glance at Jinnah’s scheme for a separate state or states for the Muslims of India, as proposed by him on 24 March 1940, and at Jinnah’s own enigmatic personality.
Notes and References
1. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom (Orient Longman, Delhi, first published 1958, p. 35; revised edition 1988).
2. V.P. Menon, Transfer of Power in India (Longman Green, London, 1957, p. 52).
3. Ibid.
4. MSS/EUR F 115/8, Vol. V, p. 96 [Oriental and Indian Collection (OIC), British Library, London].
5. Ibid., pp. 149–50.
6. Ibid., pp. 100–02.
7. Ibid.
8. Khaliq-uz-Zaman, Pathway to Pakistan (Longman Green, London, 1961, p. 206).
9. MSS/EUR 125/8, Vol. IV, pp. 161(a) to (k) (OIC, British Library, London).
10. Ibid., pp. 169 (a) to (e).
11. Ibid., pp. 169 (e) to 170.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. V.P. Menon, op. cit., p. 66.
15. Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, Vol. 2 (India Research Press, Delhi, 1999, p. 1088).
16. MSS/EUR/125/8, Vol. IV, viceroy to secretary of state, 26 October 1939 (OIC, British Library, London).
17. Desmond Young, Try Anything Twice (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1963, pp. 245–46) and Sir Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1961, p. 25).
18. MSS/EUR/125/8, Vol. IV, p. 199 (i), note of viceroy’s interview with Gandhiji, 4 November 1939 (OIC, British Library, London).
19. Ibid., note of viceroy’s interview with Jinnah.
20. Ibid., pp. 199 (j), (k) and (l).
21. MSS/EUR F 125/9, Vol. V, pp. 41–45 (OIC, British Library, London).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. MSS/EUR F 125/12, TOP (transfer of power), Vol. III, p. 769 (OIC, British Library, London).
25. MSS/EUR F 125/9, Vol. V, pp. 45–49, note on viceroy’s talk with Jinnah in Bombay, 13 January 1940 (OIC, British Library, London).
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 91, viceroy’s telegram (Para 6) to secretary of state, 6 February 1940, on his talk with Gandhiji and Jinnah on 5 February 1940.
28. Ibid.
29. MSS/EUR F 125/8, Vol. V, pp. 191–95, note of viceroy’s interview with Jinnah, 13 March 1940 (OIC, British Library, London).
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., telegram from viceroy to secretary of state, 4 April 1940.
32. Ibid., p. 140, telegram (Para 3) from secretary of state to viceroy.
33. MSS/EUR F 125/9, Vol. V, pp. 91–92, viceroy to secretary of state, 6 April 1940.
34. See V.P. Menon, op. cit., p. 85, for text of Zetland’s statement in the House of Lords, 18 April 1940.
35. W.J. Barnds, Pakistan and the Great Powers (Pall Mall, London, 1972, p. 993).
36. Lord Archibald Wavell, The Viceroy’s Journal (Oxford University Press, London, 1977).
37. Koenraad Elst, The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of ‘Hindu Fascism’, Vol. 1 (Voice of India, New Delhi, 2001, p. 532).
38. Robert Payne, Life and Death of Gandhi (Rupa, Delhi, 1979, pp. 486–89).
39. Ibid.
40. MSS/EUR/9/5, p. 127, viceroy to secretary of state (OIC, British Library, London).
41. Ibid., p. 124.
42. File L/P&J/8/507, Jinnah’s interview with Linlithgow, 27 June 1940, at Simla.
43. V.P. Menon, op. cit., p. 93.
44. MSS EUR F 125/19, Vol. V, viceroy’s telegram, 27 September 1940.
45. Director, Intelligence Bureau, commentary, 21 May 1940 (OIC, British Library, London).
46. Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, Vol. 2, p. 1097.
47. Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (HarperCollins, London, 1995, pp. 132–33).
48. MSS/EUR F/125/9, Vol. V, p. 291.
49. Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1990, p. 437).
50. Amery to Anthony Eden, TOP, Vol. III, S.No. 695, L/PO/8/9a–9, May 1943, pp. 109–15.
51. Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, Vol. 2, pp. 109–23.
52. V.P. Menon, op. cit., p. 438.
* India was divided into eleven provinces, ruled directly by the British, and 350 princely states controlled indirectly. By 1939, each British province had an elected legislature (on 14 per cent franchise) and the leader of the majority party ran the government and was called chief minister. The British governors of these provinces had the power to dismiss the ministries and assume control. The chief secretaries in the provinces were mostly British members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS).
* As part of the Stafford Cripps’ mission to India in early 1942.
* Both socialists.
3
The Pakistan Scheme and Jinnah
IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, LEOPOLD AMERY, THE SECRETARY OF STATE for India, wrote a secret private letter to Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, in which he noted:
If our [British] tradition is freedom-loving and our domestic development centuries ahead of the continent, that is largely because we are an island. If the Prussian tradition is one of militarism and aggression, it is largely because Prussia had never had any natural frontiers. Now India has a very natural frontier at present. On the other hand, within herself she has no natural or geographic or racial or communal frontiers – the northwestern piece of Pakistan would include a formidable Sikh minority. The northeastern part has a Muslim majority so narrow that its setting up as a State or part of a wider Muslim State seems absurd. Then there is the large Muslim minority in the United Provinces, the position of Muslim princes with Hindu subjects and vice versa. In fact, an all-out Pakistan scheme seems to me to be the prelude to continuous internal warfare in India.1
Britain, in 1940, hoped to stay on in India for many decades more. Therefore, its leaders had no interest in the creation of a sovereign state of any denomination in the subcontinent, Muslim, Hindu or any other. Also, at the beginning of the war the Muslims of India had not yet been linked up in the British mind with its post-war defence strategy. That came later. The reason why the viceroy was befriending Jinnah in 1940 was with the limited aim of encouraging him to oppose the Congress Party’s demands that Britain make an unambiguous commitment to grant independence to India at the end of the war and, in the meantime, to include members of political parties in the Viceroy’s Executive Council.
The Shadow of the Great Game Page 6