Violence exploded in the city after the arrest of its most prominent Congress activitists on 22 April. Trouble had been expected, and the civil authorities had troops on stand by, supported by a novelty in Indian crowd control, four armoured cars. (They were named after First World War battles, in the manner of warships, e.g. His Majesty’s Armoured Car ‘Bapaume’.) ‘Bapaume’, ‘Bray’, ‘Bullicourt’ and ‘Bethune’ trundled into the streets of Peshawar on the morning of 23 April, and were immediately beset by a mob which murdered a motorcycle despatch rider. Three cars collided, one was set on fire and only with difficulty was another able to lower its machine-gun to fire a couple of bursts, which drove off the rioters. The situation was saved by the arrival of several companies of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry who fired over, and sometimes into, the crowds. It was a nerve-wracking experience for the troops, as one remembered long after. ‘They came like a plague of locusts from nowhere’, but ‘we were soldiers paid to do these kinds of jobs’ and ‘under iron discipline’. When the volley had been fired, ‘it was exciting seeing them running away for their lives’.19 Thirty-three demonstrators died and thirty were injured before order was restored and it was safe to withdraw the soldiers.
The bloodshed in Peshawar had repercussions throughout the region. Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Red Shirts converged on the city from the countryside and Pathans, thinking that the Raj was on its last legs, snatched the opportunity for a fresh bout of mischief. The tribesmen had been puzzled by official tolerance of Congress and Red Shirt agitation and the steps already taken towards self-government. Pathans again wondered why the British would entertain ceding their power in India.20 There was a further sign that the Raj might be entering its final days: two platoons of the Royal Garwhal Rifles refused to take part in operations at Peshawar. Thereafter, special care was taken to see that Indian troops were isolated from anti-government propaganda, but it proved unnecessary, for ‘they were composed of the types of fighting men who thought and spoke in contempt of the townie “bunnia” [moneylender] caste and local pleader who went to make up the ranks of the Indian political bodies’.21
This was reassuring, since large numbers of Indian troops were needed during the second half of 1930 to quell what had quickly become a full-scale Mohmand and Afridi rebellion. It took over a year to suppress. As usual, there were plenty of collaborators on hand; 3,000 Kurram Valley ‘militiamen’, well-armed and under British officers, repelled an Afridi attack on their homeland and were afterwards rewarded with a year’s remission of tax. Aircraft were extensively used during these and other operations, bombing concentrations of tribesmen and Red Shirts and defiant villages. Despite elaborate precautions, intelligence errors led to the wrong targets being chosen and the deaths of innocent non-combatants.22
The outbreak of war on the North-West Frontier added to the headaches of a government already distracted by large-scale civil disobedience. It was also contending with a sudden upsurge in terrorism, which had included an attempt to derail Irwin’s train by a bomb at the end of 1929. He displayed commendable viceregal sang-froid, afterwards remarking that he was ‘inured to that kind of thing by the Cona Coffee machine, which was always blowing up’.23 Irwin was less collected at the beginning of August 1930, when he was seriously contemplating the imposition of martial law on the most disaffected regions as the only means of preserving order. Surrendering power to the army was both an admission of failure and, in the light of Amritsar, a hazardous resort. Irwin was spared the decision because Congress was also feeling the strain in what had turned into a war of attrition.
From the start, the quality of Congress’s local organisations had been extremely variable and, as the campaign unfolded, it emerged that many were incapable of sustaining the effort needed. There was incapacity at the top as well, which had been revealed by the inability of the Congress high command to co-ordinate actions across the country. Furthermore, funding mass resistance was proving a problem, with cash needed to transport demonstrators by train and motor lorry and pay for the victuals of protesters in prison. These numbered 29,000 in November (revealingly, only 1,152 were Muslims), but for the moment there was no lack of volunteers, particularly schoolboys and university students. Women were also very much to the forefront in demonstrations and they were proving peculiarly effective when it came to the ‘social’ boycott of those, often of their own sex, who purchased forbidden, imported goods. But as the struggle dragged on into the winter with no end in sight, popular support began to dry up. Congress would face the new year with depleted ranks.
III
By the autumn of 1930 the Raj and Congress were in a stalemate, from which the only escape was a truce. It would require the consent of Gandhi who, since his arrest in May, had been a prisoner, enjoying a most comfortable régime by the standards of Indian detention. Conditions were such that he was able to devote himself entirely to his spiritual and dietary preoccupations. In the meantime, and in acknowledgement that the present campaign was foundering, the more extreme Congress leaders were considering new, openly aggressive tactics. After his release from gaol in October, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of a new phase in the struggle, in which Indians would undertake ‘the conquest of power’, words which landed him back in prison. They disturbed Irwin, who feared that Congress might seek a way out of the present impasse by stepping up violence. Another course was a compromise with the government which would allow Gandhi to proceed to London and plead Congress’s terms at the Round Table conference, which was opened by George V in November. Fully justifying his later nickname, the ‘Holy Fox’, Irwin had correctly identified two Gandhis. One was the saintly metaphysician prone to exaggerated rhetoric and postures, and the other a canny, hard-bargaining politician who fully understood reality. Irwin appealed to the latter and eventually got what he wanted, but it was not easy.
Conciliation took time and relied heavily on the goodwill and energies of moderate nationalists and businessmen, who were disturbed by the damage being inflicted on the Indian economy by the unrest. The first approaches to Gandhi were made in July, and it was only in February 1931 that he and Irwin met at Delhi to hammer out the terms of an armistice. The discussions were frank but courteous. In his reports of what passed, Gandhi referred to the Viceroy’s belief in God and a universal moral order. ‘He desires peace because he has been touched by the struggle.’24 A common will for an accord existed, but it took many hours of tough horse-trading before it took shape. Irwin was in the slightly stronger position, for his intelligence services had alerted him to Congress’s manpower and cash problems.25 In the end he got what he was after: the suspension of Congress’s civil disobedience and Gandhi’s agreement to attend a second conference in London. In return, 19,000 Congressmen and women were set free, confiscated property was returned to its owners and there was a relaxation of some of the emergency coercive powers. The Raj had publicly acknowledged Gandhi’s pre-eminence within Congress and India as a whole, and he had recognised that it would be better if it secured its independence relatively peacefully – with British co-operation rather than without it.
The Gandhi–Irwin pact provided everyone with a breathing space. The centre of political attention shifted from India to London, where the Round Table conference was adjourned in February. It represented every complexion of Indian political opinion save Congress, and had made considerable headway. It had been decided that India would acquire a form of Dominion status as a democratic federation that would embrace the princely states and the eleven British provinces. Indian participation in all levels of government would be accelerated. The second session, attended by Gandhi, opened in September 1931 and was soon in trouble. It was derailed by bickering over the balance of electoral power, involving the reservation of seats for racial and religious minorities which was considered essential for stability. This was already a well-chewed bone of contention which again led to divisions. Hindus and Muslims could not agree terms and Congress was apprehensive about the possible emergence of an
axis between the Muslims and the princes.
The inability of this and a subsequent Round Table conference to produce a workable constitution placed the onus on the British Parliament. During the next two years the future governance of India was decided by Parliamentary committees, and the result was the India Bill which was introduced in November 1934 and passed the following August. Under its terms, the provinces of British India became self-governing and there was provision for an Indian federation. This would come into existence if and when a substantial number of the princes agreed to join, something they were presently disinclined to do, even though it was the expressed wish of their King Emperor. Like his ministers, George V hoped that the princes would join the federation to give it a ballast that would counterbalance Congress’s headstrong professional politicians.26 Until the princes complied, central authority in India, and with it control over defence and foreign policy, remained in British hands. The country was also finally relieved of the obligation to pay for its British garrison, whose costs were henceforward met by the Treasury.
At every stage of its evolution, the Government of India Act had been fought tooth and nail by a knot of determined Conservatives who joined forces with former generals and civil servants to form the India Defence League. Kipling, who seems to have forgotten his youthful notions of the Raj as the trustee for the people of India, was one of its vice-presidents, and Winston Churchill its most forceful spokesman. His view of India had been formed thirty-eight years before when he had been a subaltern there, and it remained substantially the same for the rest of his life. He could never bring himself to believe in complete equality between the races or the fitness of Indians to manage their own affairs honestly and efficiently. Hindu politicians and Gandhi in particular aroused his spleen:
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.
Press support for the India Defence League came from Lord Rothermere, the proprietor of the Daily Mail, who dictated a series of explosive editorials under the general title ‘If We Lose India —!’ between March 1930 and April 1931. These polemics were published as a penny pamphlet which was illustrated by photographs of Gandhi, British troops on riot duty and corpses piled on a lorry after the recent communal riots in Lahore. At the beginning there was a compendium of ‘facts’, of which the first was: ‘India never had unity, security, justice, communications, public health until the British came.’27 The arguments that followed set out to prove that Gandhi and Congress were unrepresentative of India (‘a numerically insignificant group of 400,000 semi-educated Babus who hanker after the spoils of minor office’), and had been pandered to for too long by a government that had lost the stomach to rule firmly. Indians understood the benefits of British rule and the British ought to understand the value of Indian trade at a time when their economy was in recession. If, as now seemed likely, the British withdrew from India, their departure would be the signal for ‘carnage and chaos’.
More was at stake than the internal security of India. ‘England, apart from her Empire in India, ceases for ever to be a Great Power,’ claimed Churchill, echoing Curzon’s words. Christian civilisation was in jeopardy, for, as Rothermere and many India Defence League members believed, Britain ruled India under a Divine dispensation. If Britain resigned this responsibility, then India would morally degenerate under Hindu government and might easily fall prey to Communism; the fear of a Russian invasion had never quite passed away.28
The India Defence League conducted a bad-tempered campaign from the backbenches, where Churchill now sat, and through public meetings and the editorial and correspondence columns of the press. It failed because of the moral courage of Baldwin, that most under-estimated of British Prime Ministers, who stuck resolutely to the position he had taken in 1929 when he had approved the Irwin declaration. His strength lay in his quiet pragmatism, which enabled him to convince his traditionally imperialist party that the empire was an organism which would have to change in order to survive. Moreover, the measures of the India Act were, in a sense, a fulfilment of that nineteenth-century vision of the Raj as an agent for the elevation of the Indian people. As John Buchan, the novelist and Independent MP argued, India deserved Domininion status because it had fought alongside Britain and the other dominions during the war. ‘The Dominions are equal and independent partners; so also must India be, but not necessarily likewise.’ India would, he predicted, evolve its own forms of government in response to its peculiar needs, a task for which its own politicians were more than equal.29 In essence this was the liberal imperialist philosophy as followed by Baldwin and, under his influence, the bulk of the Conservatives. No more than fifty ever followed Churchill into the lobbies.
Privately, Baldwin thought Churchill was ‘quite mad’.30 His unbending opposition to the India Act and his frequently lurid predictions of its consequences divorced him from his party and, some imagined, ruled out for ever his chances of continuing his ministerial career. The public showed little interest in the India issue; its mind was consumed with other matters of greater urgency and closer to home: recession, unemployment, rearmament and Britain’s relations with Germany and Italy. Even if the British people had not been so distracted, there is no reason to believe that they would have endorsed a policy which would have transformed India into an occupied country, ruled by the sword and against the wishes of its population. This was, after all, the India Defence League’s alternative to Dominion status.
IV
The force available to the Raj was sufficient to handle the disturbances which flickered on during 1933 and 1934. A formula for their containment had been devised which meant that the police never lost control on the streets or in the countryside for very long. Congress leaders and local organisers were arrested and imprisoned, and crowds broken up by lathi charges and sometimes, when matters looked like getting out of hand, by police volleys.
The energies of Congress were becoming increasingly consumed by finding ways in which to respond to political initiatives which were coming from London. In August 1932 Ramsay MacDonald issued the Communal Award, which designated the Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Untouchables as separate electorates with the same right to reserved seats as the Muslims. Gandhi interpreted the inclusion of the Untouchables or ‘depressed castes’ in this special category as a device to split the Hindus. Again in detention, he reacted with a dramatic gesture, a fast to death which, he announced, had been directly inspired by God.31 He hoped both to draw attention to the iniquities of Untouchability, which he found deeply repugnant, and to blackmail the government into revoking the award. Neither Lord Willingdon, the new Viceroy, nor Congress wanted his death; for one he would be a martyr (which was why plans were in hand to release him from prison if he passed the point of recovery) and for the other an irreplaceable loss. In the end it was the Congress leadership which came up with a settlement that allowed the Untouchables to choose for themselves whether or not they remained attached to the Hindu electorate. Afterwards, Gandhi devoted himself to a nationwide personal campaign against Untouchability, which some Congressmen regarded as an irrelevancy in the struggle against the Raj and others as an assault on Hinduism.
Arrangements for voting were a prelude to the imposition of the federal constitution. Elections to the provincial assemblies were due at the end of 1936 and posed a dilemma for Congress. On one hand, the new arrangements fell far short of its demand for pura swaraj (complete independence), but on the other they offered an opportunity to secure it by working within the system. A total boycott would leave the field open to other parties and sever its links with the government. For these reasons it agreed at its Lucknow conference in April 1936 to participate in the elections, but with an important caveat whi
ch was explained by Jawaharlal Nehru:
We go to the Legislatures not to co-operate with the apparatus of British imperialism, but to combat the Act and to seek to end it.32
Next to Gandhi, Nehru was now Congress’s most widely known and popular leader and an invaluable asset in the election. What he called his ‘hurricane tours’, a hectic progress across India marked by rallies, speeches and processions, helped sway the electorate towards Congress. Alone of all the parties, it had a national organisation whose tentacles stretched everywhere and was enthusiastically served by an army of local activists, many of them students, who recruited members, collected funds and arranged meetings. Above all, Congress possessed Gandhi. His universal appeal was cunningly exploited to seduce peasant voters, who were told that each Congress candidate was personally endorsed by the Mahatma. Messages to Gandhi were found among the voting slips, written by voters who imagined that the ballot box was also a letter box through which they could contact him.33
The cult of Gandhi in part offset Congress’s lack of a clear-cut programme. In terms of political tinctures, the party ranged from crimson to pale blue, embracing socialists, like Bose and Nehru, and moderates and conservatives who looked to Gandhi as a brake on the left. The manifesto which emerged reflected Nehru’s preoccupation with the elimination of rural poverty and was designed to have the widest possible appeal. It did, but at the same time raised expectations which were beyond fulfilment. The ingenious beguiled the ingenuous: once a Congress worker collected a pile of grass, set fire to it and promised villagers that, ‘As this grass burns, so will your debt disappear.’34 Such stratagems were, perhaps, necessary to counter the intimidation of the regional landowners’ parties: the National Agrarian Party of the United Provinces, the Unionists of the Punjab, and the Madras Justice Party. It was relatively easy for Congress officials, zamindars or their servants to threaten voters, since at many polling stations the parties were identified by different coloured boxes. In at least one polling station in Bihar, a Congress worker guided peasants towards his party’s box, which was yellow.35 All this was part of the Indian political tradition, as it had been of Britain’s during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries. In 1931 electors in Lahore were impersonated, bribed and threatened by ‘bosses’ and a fifth of the votes cast were subsequently invalidated.36
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