Churchill’s refusal to release shipping has been blamed for causing more deaths in Bengal. In fact the issue was something of a red herring given that there were adequate stocks and that the problem was one of distribution and price. Even had 1.5 million tons arrived in 1943 it would not have reached those who needed it. Rutherford complained to Wavell on 4 November that eighty wagons of corn had arrived in Dacca but as no one had made any arrangements for distribution, it was beginning to rot.74 Yet what Churchill’s attitude did show was an apparent lack of concern for India and reinforced the view that he regarded Indian lives as in some way inferior to British ones. His attitude, although not that widely known at the time due to wartime censorship, seemed typical of a British administration now not only callous but also hopelessly inefficient. Wavell summed it up when he complained to Amery after his first visit to Bengal that:
In the old days the senior members of the ICS were to some extent public figures . . . regarded as ministerial. They held themselves morally and personally responsible for the welfare of the people in their charge. And would not have tolerated in Calcutta, than you would in London, the disgraceful episode of the destitutes. The officials do not seem to me to be conscious of the disgrace brought upon the administration.75
The Bengal famine was, he concluded later, ‘One of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation here is incalculable’.76
Why had it all gone so wrong? The answer lies back in the early 1920s, in the gradual lack of moral confidence that crept into the ICS, in the various Acts that had resulted in no one really knowing where power and responsibility lay and in the British insistence on staying on long past when they should have handed over power and gone. Although the 1935 Act had supposedly done away with ‘dyarchy’ – that system of dual control that dated from the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms – it had still left a muddle. Who was in charge in Bengal? Was it the inadequate Jack Herbert, unwell and incapable of grip, and his vestige of a British administration, or was it Nazimuddin’s ministry? The active Non-Mohammedan member for Dacca Division (Rural), Mr. K. C. Neogy, went on to say that it was the unclear division of responsibility between the various branches of government that had made dealing with the famine so difficult.77 And who was there at a more junior level who could oversee those poor rural areas where so many died and which traditionally were the preserve of the ICS District Officers?
W. H. Saumarez Smith joined the ICS from Cambridge in 1934. On his application form he was asked to list his preferred province for his first posting. He listed all nine – Sind and Orissa were not then separate provinces but created under the 1935 Act – with the Punjab first and Bengal last. He was promptly posted to Bengal on the not unreasonable basis that no other candidates had mentioned it. It had always been an unpopular posting, partly because of its hothouse climate and partly because there had been a terrorist campaign that had seen six senior British officials murdered between 1930 and 1933 and the governor narrowly escaping an assassination attempt.78 It was hardly surprising that, with the lack of ICS officers and the added pressures of the war, the system creaked a bit but ‘there was’, wrote Sir Frederick Burrows, Governor of Bengal in 1947, ‘during the famine an almost complete breakdown of the administrative machine’.79
But more telling is reading between the lines of Linlithgow’s, Amery’s and Herbert’s letters. There is a refusal to accept responsibility, a feeling that it is all too difficult to deal with and a naive hope that everything will turn out to be all right, which is symptomatic of a system that has lost its bite. Would the great early administrators of the East India Company have behaved in the same way? Would Clive or Hastings have contented themselves with drafting elegant memoranda? One suspects not. The Raj had lost its ability to govern. Gandhi wrote, in his direct, polite but biting prose, to Linlithgow as he left India. ‘Of all the high functionaries I have had the honour of meeting, none has been the cause of such deep sorrow to me as you have been. I hope and pray that God will some day put it into your heart to realize that you, a representative of a great nation, have been led into a grievous error.’80
The war would end well for the Raj. Through 1944 and 1945 General Bill Slim’s 14th Army swept the Japanese out of Burma and retook Rangoon. Allied forces under Mountbatten (as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia), working in conjunction with American forces in the Pacific, led to Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945. It was in many ways a triumph for India and Indian arms but any euphoria was short-lived. Wavell had now to turn his attention to demobilising the 2 million men and women in the armed forces, and to the handover of power, relying on a British administrative class who realised there was no future for them in India.
There had been some moves towards trying to advance the transfer of power during the war before the Quit India movement started. Churchill had, grudgingly, and under pressure from the Americans and his Labour coalition allies, sent out Sir Stafford Cripps in March 1942, just after Rangoon fell when it became clear that a superhuman Indian war effort would now be necessary. Although Cripps was a strong supporter of Congress – he and Nehru were both upper-class socialists – his mission was a failure. He did not get on with Gandhi, who famously described his report as being ‘a postdated cheque on a failing bank’.81 Cripps’s mission left bitterness and confusion and led directly to the Congress meeting in Bombay in the summer of 1942 at which Quit India was launched. Soon after the Raj locked up the Congress leadership who would spend the rest of the war in jail, except for Gandhi whom Wavell released in mid-1944. Churchill had said in Westminster that the failure of Quit India had shown Congress’ powerlessness,82 but now the war was over Wavell was about to discover just how much support they commanded.
Wavell flew back to London in March 1945, spending three difficult months being kept hanging around by Churchill as he tried to get his authority to start a new political approach. Even at this late stage, when it had become clear to most people that the Raj must end, Churchill seems to have harboured notions that a grateful India would reject Congress and return happily to live under their British masters. Wavell returned to Delhi in June 1945 and released the remaining Congress leadership from jail. He invited them to Simla, the hill station where the government retreated during the summer from the unrelenting heat of Delhi, to see whether it was possible to establish a way forward. Wavell proposed a simple sharing of power in the Assembly on a communal basis but the conference failed because of disagreement over who could represent Muslims. Congress, increasingly seeing itself as a pan-Indian party, claimed it could speak for all Indians while Jinnah insisted that only the League could nominate Muslim candidates; he strongly objected to the inclusion of Maulana Azad, a Muslim and previous Congress president, as a Congress nominee.
Two things then happened on 15 August that changed the course of events. First, in July 1945 the Labour Party had scored a convincing and unexpected win in the British general election. In the King’s Speech on 15 August, the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, published that the government ‘would do their utmost to promote, in conjunction with the leaders of Indian opinion, the early realization of self-government in India’.83 Wavell subsequently announced elections for that autumn. The same day victory was declared over Japan.
There had been no elections in India for nine years and the results were now very different from 1937. Jinnah had not wasted the wilderness years for Congress when its leadership had been jailed. A revitalised League won all Central Assembly seats reserved for Muslims with 86 per cent of the vote. In the provinces they won 428 of the 492 Muslim seats and 79 per cent of the Muslim vote. They formed the government in Bengal and Sind. Congress formed the government in eight provinces, including the North West Frontier Province and Assam, with the Punjab again governed by a coalition, but it was undoubtedly a triumph for Jinnah. The League had fought the elections on the issue of Pakistan. The question now was how could it be delivered, coupled with a growing r
ealisation that the British might, finally, be leaving.
With India becoming increasingly polarised between two competing communities, Attlee dispatched a Cabinet Mission consisting of Cripps again, with Alexander, the defence secretary, and the rather marginal figure of Lord Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, the seventy-two-year-old new Secretary of State for India, to attempt to find a solution. Wavell was not at all sure he wanted them, mindful of Cripps’s previous failure, and the mission did tend rather pointedly to ignore the opinions of the British Indian establishment. On 5 May they held a second conference at Simla. The plan that emerged was to some extent a statement of the obvious. It concluded that India must attain independence ‘in the shortest time and with the least danger of internal disturbance and conflict’, but it did manage to achieve some sort of consensus on the form this might take.
The Cabinet Mission Plan, as it was always known, effectively recommended a federal India, with a strong ‘centre’ responsible for defence, foreign affairs and communications but with respective communal differences accounted for by provincial governments. There were three groups of provinces. In Group A were the five Hindu majority provinces; in Group B the Punjab, North West Frontier Province and Sind and in Group C Bengal and Assam. The idea was that all powers beyond those reserved for the centre should be exercised by the elected provincial governments. A province could, after ten years, vote to call for a reconsideration of its status.
The League assumed this implied that the provinces would be compulsorily ‘grouped’ to give a Muslim bloc in the north-west and north-east; in other words they would, by virtue of the Muslim majorities in the Group B and C provinces, effectively control all five. Congress, on the other hand, thought it implied something looser. They wanted the provinces to be able to opt out, arguing that although there may be a numerical Muslim majority in the Group B and C provinces, this did not imply that the League commanded it. It was the old argument that Congress spoke for all Indians regardless of religion. They also argued that they spoke for the Sikhs who would inevitably find themselves under permanent Muslim governance.
Part of the Cabinet Mission Plan also recommended establishing a Constituent Assembly, elected by the provincial legislatures, whose job would be to turn the plan into an actual constitution and that, while this was going on, an Interim Government should be set up. For a short period it looked as if the plan might just work. Jinnah accepted it on 6 June but, encouraged by Gandhi, Congress prevaricated. Perversely, they accepted the long-term constitutional arrangements but rejected the idea of an Interim Government. A deeply frustrated Wavell and the Cabinet Mission then announced, on 16 June, that they were setting it up anyway and would invite ministers to participate on the basis of six from Congress, five from the League, one Sikh, one Parsee and one Christian. Again, for a few days, it looked as if both Congress and the League might accept this but once again Gandhi argued that Congress must have the right to nominate a Muslim; they could not accept Jinnah’s claim that only the League represented India’s Muslims.
Elections for the Constituent Assembly took place in July. Congress won 205 seats and the League 73. But it was to little effect. Jinnah thought he had been double-crossed by both Congress and Wavell. At the end of July the League met in Bombay and withdrew their previous support for the plan in its entirety. ‘This day’, he said, ‘we bid goodbye to constitutional methods’.84 He called the Direct Action Day in Calcutta, and by the autumn of 1946 both sides were as far apart as ever despite the Interim Government actually forming without any League participation on 2 September. Those few months – July to September 1946 – were to prove decisive. Was it then that Congress concluded they could not work with Jinnah and decided on the path leading to the coming tragedy? The League did finally take up its five places in the Interim Government in October but refused to cooperate with Congress.
In December, in an attempt to break the deadlock and breathe some life back into what was seen by many as a perfectly sensible plan, Wavell led the delegation to London. They made little progress. Unblocking the Constituent Assembly was the immediate issue now confronting him in the cool of January 1947 but he was always haunted by the fear that India would break down, that the Raj would lose control and end in chaos. In 1946 there had been 1,629 strikes involving the loss of 12 million man-days.85 Already, as demobilisation took longer than expected, there had even been trouble in the armed forces. In January that year the Royal Air Force had ‘mutinied’ in Karachi, a protest that quickly spread across India. It wasn’t a violent mutiny, more a series of sit-down protests at how long it was taking to get wartime airmen home, and it petered out after ten days. There were few immediate repercussions, but Wavell blamed the RAF for encouraging the more serious Indian Navy Mutiny in February.
On 18 February 1946 the sailors on HMIS (His Majesty’s Indian Ship) Talwar went on strike over their conditions, complaining about the food. Admiral Chatterji, later chief of the Naval Staff but then a junior officer in Karachi, thought the mutiny was really caused by bad officers although Commander King, who commanded Talwar was, he felt, a decent man. But like many he felt the deeper reason was because the whole process of demobilisation was proceeding too slowly and being badly managed. There were, he thought, a lot of bored sailors who wanted to go home.86 The mutiny quickly spread from the ship to the Bombay shore establishments and had to be put down by force. The mutineers fired on a Mahratta battalion sent in to disarm them and it took two more battalions and a squadron of RAF Mosquitos before they surrendered. Congress sent Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to negotiate with them. He asked for clemency, which was agreed.
In Karachi, mutineers turned a ship’s guns onto an army barracks but in the end were quite quickly disarmed by a British infantry battalion of the Black Watch. The local Indian naval commander had imaginatively told them they could all go on leave so they wouldn’t technically be on duty and therefore liable to court martial but they refused. Ultimately there were few casualties, Congress did not support the mutineers and in practical terms neither mutiny amounted to much. Later in May the police in Bihar also mutinied, again requiring British troops to intervene. The British establishment was becoming alarmed.
The British were also dealing with an Indian Army whose wartime experience had changed it from the carefully recruited ‘class’-based army of 1939 where soldiers had been selected according to religion, caste and often the district where they lived. It was also an army that regarded the British rather differently. D. K. Palit recalled that before the war there was no social mixing between British and Indians; he was never asked into the houses of any of the British officers he served with in his battalion. ‘That all changed in the war’, he recalled, ‘lots of Brits came who were not stuck in a colonial time warp. They couldn’t give a damn who we were as long as we did the job’.87
Many of those ‘Brits’ were fairly shocked at what they found in India. Clive Branson, an articulate and brave soldier who would be killed in Burma, recalled how on arriving in Bombay in 1942 ‘everyone was filled with amazement at the appalling conditions in which the people live . . . after 175 years of Imperialism . . . the conditions are a howling disgrace. The slogan among the British Other Ranks of “India for the Indians” is universally popular’. Branson was a member of the Communist Party, so possibly coming at things from a certain perspective, but his father had been an Indian Army officer and his views were shared by many.
By the end of the war there were very few of the ‘old’ Indian Army officers left serving with their regiments and during 1946 occasional agitation had developed among Indian soldiers. Muslim soldiers were affected by British policy in Palestine, which they thought unfair, and regiments returning from Indonesia had seen the independence struggle there against the Dutch. Seemingly small things, such as a tactless issue of free cigarettes to British troops but not to Indian, became major issues, blown up in the press. Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tuker, already feeling uncomfortable at having to stand up in a Bren
-gun carrier during the VJ Day celebrations in Delhi in March ‘like some sort of carnival float’ was even more uncomfortable when he was showered with bricks as the procession passed through Connaught Circus.88
Another sensitive issue was what to do about the Indian National Army, the INA. This was the organisation, founded by Subhas Chandra Bose in 1943, which had recruited Indian soldiers captured during the Japanese victories in 1942, and from the large Indian civilian population in Burma, to fight against the Raj alongside the Japanese. Militarily it had been something of a distraction and Bose himself had been killed in August 1945 but the very existence of the INA had made a significant political statement and attracted Congress support. The immediate issue that confronted Wavell was what to do about INA prisoners. Were they to be treated harshly as traitors, which is what both the Indian and British officers of the Indian Army who had fought against them demanded but which would have made them into nationalist martyrs, or were they to be quietly ignored? It was to prove a much more difficult issue than anyone had anticipated.
And could he continue to rely on the rapidly dwindling ranks of the ICS? By 1947 ICS officers fell into three categories. There were those long-term, loyal servants of India, who saw themselves as part of the Indian government of whatever persuasion it might be. They were men like Norval Mitchell, posted in 1946 to be chief secretary to Sir Olaf Caroe in the North West Frontier Province, who had made his commitment to India back in the 1920s, and John Christie, soon to join the viceroy’s staff and who was in India because he and his family saw it as home. Many of these men had already been working for Indians, the second category of ICS officers, those Indians who had been recruited alongside the British, albeit in much smaller numbers. They were men like Sir Chandulal Trivedi, Governor of Orissa, who would play such an important role in the coming months, as would V. P. Menon, the reforms commissioner to the viceroy, who had started life as a railway stoker, and to whom the Raj would become much indebted. These were the men who would soon be the backbone of the government of the new India.
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