The result of the 1936–37 elections was a sweeping victory for Congress. Fifteen and a half million Indians voted, just over half of those eligible, to give Congress overall control of the United and Central Provinces, Orissa, Bombay and Madras and make it the largest single party in Assam and the North-West Frontier Province. In practical terms, it had now become a partner in government, albeit without conviction. An analysis of the poll showed that Muslims had very little confidence in Congress, but scarcely more for the Muslim League, which had yet to present itself as a mass party.
The catalyst which transformed the League into a nationwide, popular party was the behaviour of Congress in power. A political spoils system operated, by which incoming Congress ministers distributed offices to party supporters, forcing Muslims out of jobs and diminishing their local influence and access to power. As Congress’s capacity for patronage grew, so did its membership, which in 1939 stood at five million. In some states Congress’s fiscal policies hurt Muslim landowners who were also being discountenanced by Nehru’s attempts to draw poorer Muslims within his party’s orbit. In Bihar the Congress-dominated legislature banned cow slaughter. And then there were the pinpricks: the hoisting of the Congress flag over public buildings and insistence on the singing of ‘Bande Mataram’ in schools. Many Muslim grievances were exaggerated, but this did not prevent the complainants from believing that they were witnessing the first stages in the creation of a Hindu Raj.37 Now, as never before, Muslims would have to insist on the electoral safeguards that Jinnah and the League had long been demanding.
The only counterweight to Congress was a toned-up, vastly expanded Muslim League. At the head of this popular movement was Jinnah, who had been at the heart of the Congress movement for nearly thirty years. He was an imposing figure with aquiline features who chain-smoked, wore well-cut English suits and sometimes sported a monocle. His greatest strengths were his single-mindedness, tenacity and a rigorous legal mind. When he became president of the League in 1935, Jinnah still believed that a united, independent India was only possible if Muslim rights were properly protected. On this he never wavered. He was not prepared to tack or compromise under pressure, which made him a formidable adversary. His resolution was often exasperating for the British government and Congress, but after 1939 neither could afford to ignore or bypass him, for he had made himself the voice of the Muslim community.
The cult of Jinnah, like that of Gandhi, was carefully orchestrated through personal appearances, mass rallies, processions and press interviews. In October 1938 his supporters marched through Karachi accompanied by Muslim ‘National Guards’ (in the manner of contemporary European mass movements, those of India were beginning to develop paramilitary units) and several brass bands. At Quetta in 1943 over 50,000 turned out to hear Jinnah, who now represented the embodiment of Muslim unity and dreams. Those who contrived the League’s public spectacles deliberately harked back to the time of the state pageantry of the Mughal era. Former Muslim glories were resurrected; a ‘Tipu Sultan Day’ was celebrated in Mysore in 1946.38 Jinnah made a point of cultivating the students of the Islamic university at Aligahr, long a powerhouse of Muslim thought and aspirations. His visit there in 1938 was recalled by a student, Ata Rabanni:
Suddenly there was a lot of commotion and a burst of slogans from thousands of throats, and the whole crowd was on its feet. Amongst this uproar and shouts of Allah-o-Akbar [God is Great], a tall and elegant figure appeared from behind the dais and ascended the improvised steps from the rear of the raised platform. He was no other than Mr Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam [great leader], my leader, our leader, everybody’s leader. The public gave him a standing ovation, shouting slogans of welcome. I was overwhelmed and made my self hoarse shouting Zindabad [long live] slogans.39
Congress supporters had and were giving similar receptions to Nehru or Bose. But their prevailing atmosphere was always Hindu. In spite of all the endeavours of its leaders and, for that matter, Jinnah, Congress had never been able to persuade the Muslims that it was truly bipartisan. Their enthusiastic response to the League’s mass rallies of the late 1930s and early 1940s were an indication of the extent to which Muslims had, rightly or wrongly, imagined themselves excluded from a national movement whose rhetoric and theatre was always distinctly Hindu. Whatever else he may have achieved, Jinnah had at last given the Muslims a sense of identity and purpose. The swiftness of his rise to power suggests that they had been seeking both for some time.
V
The success and stridency of the Muslim League was regarded with alarm in London and Delhi.40 Its emergence was an unwelcome complication which added to the burdens of the Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, who was endeavouring to make the federation work. He was a Viceroy very much in the traditional patrician mould: he was six feet five inches in height, dropped the final ‘g’ from participles when he spoke, and, once during a tour of Kashmir, chased butterflies on horseback.41 He prized wisdom above cleverness, had a high sense of personal honour and a taste for the knockabout comedy of Bud Flanagan and ‘Monsewer’ Eddie Gray. Since his arrival in April 1936, Linlithgow had listened to, charmed and cajoled Indian politicians, but to little avail. The attitude of the princes towards the new constitution gradually began to soften, and by the summer of 1939 a trickle of states agreed to join the federation. Fortified by his mass support, Jinnah insisted that the Muslims would never agree to any form of central government until the problem of their representation had been solved to their satisfaction. Congress was equally adamant in its demands for full independence and a democratically elected national assembly.
The outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 interrupted this protracted, three-cornered and, as it turned out, sterile debate. On that day and acting within the letter of his powers, Linlithgow declared war on Germany. Congress was initially indignant. The Viceroy had committed over 300 million Indians to a conflict without consulting a single one, and shown beyond question that Britain was ultimately still master of India. Once the shock of having been propelled unasked into a war had passed, Indian politicians began to seek ways in which they could gain advantage from the emergency. The League committed itself to support Britain for the duration of war as much out of hope for future favours as conviction. In broad principle, Congress was against Nazism and Fascism and, therefore, behind Britain. Gandhi was downcast at the thought of London being bombed and gave his sincere, wholehearted sympathy to the British people. ‘We do not seek our independence out of Britain’s ruin,’ he declared shortly after the outbreak of war. ‘That was not the way of non-violence.’42
The war did not change Indian political life. The haggling went on with Linlithgow inviting Congress and the League to participate in an executive that would direct the national war effort. Neither would agree, save on their own terms. Congress wanted an unconditional pledge that India was free to write its own constitution once the war was over, and Jinnah insisted that the League was recognised as speaking for every Muslim. In what was a fit of pique, the Congress leadership asked all its provincial ministries to resign on 22 December, which they did. Jinnah was jubilant and called upon Leaguers to celebrate their release from Hindu bondage on what he designated ‘Deliverance Day’. It was also the day on which India’s provinces reverted to a form of direct British government, something they had not known since 1919.
The Secretary of State, the Marquess of Zetland, suggested in February 1940 that the deadlock might be broken if Indian political leaders of all persuasions were brought together and asked to work out a constitution. This was wormwood to Churchill, now back in the Cabinet, where he made no bones about his pleasure at the fissure now opening up in India:
. . . he did not share the anxiety to encourage and promote unity between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Such unity was, in fact, almost out of the realm of practical politics, while, if it were to be brought about, the immediate result would be that united communities would join in showing us the door. He regarded the Hindu–Muslim feud
as the bulwark of British rule in India.43
Churchill became Prime Minister in May and made it abundantly clear, then and later, that he wished to extend the life of the Raj for as long as possible. Flirting with Congress would, he believed, undermine its authority and prestige and was to be avoided at all costs.
India’s internal divisions widened even further when Jinnah, speaking in Lahore on 27 March 1940, explained why the divergence between the Muslim and Hindu communities was permanent. ‘They are not religious in the strict sense of the word, but are in fact different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality.’ Each had their own history and culture and refused to intermarry or eat together. His words were a call for a separate Muslim state, already spoken of as Pakistan, although he said nothing as to what might be its future relationship with India.
As he had intended, his language and the League’s activities had cut Congress’s scope for action. When its working committee met at Wardha in the third week of April, Rajendra Prasad warned that to challenge the British government would invite a counter-attack from the Muslim League and the onset of a civil war. Others, including Gandhi, felt that the rank and file were unready for a further bout of civil disobedience.44 Nehru was more vehement and keen for a showdown with the government. He denounced Pakistan as a ‘mad scheme’, and began touring the country to stiffen the nerve and sinews of Congress supporters. The young were highly receptive; they were already forming volunteer bands who wore uniforms, marched and drilled. Nehru reviewed one body holding an imitation field-marshal’s baton. In October he was arrested and given another spell in gaol. Subhas Chandra Bose, whose fiery temperament Gandhi mistrusted, abandoned Congress completely and formed the Forward Bloc, which aimed to direct India along the course which had been followed by Sinn Féin and the Russian revolutionaries in the last war.
External events during the early summer forced Congress’s hand. The fall of France in May and Britain’s isolation turned Indian minds to national defence, and a degree of co-operation with the government. This did not extend to acceptance of an offer of places on the Viceroy’s council in return for yet another committee to discuss a constitution. Gandhi was drifting into a world of self-indulgent moral fantasy. At the end of June he suggested that if Europe had adopted his principles of non-violence in dealing with Hitler, ‘it would have added several inches to its moral stature’. He advised Britain not to resist invasion and so ‘confound Nazi wisdom and put all the Nazi armaments out of use’. Unconditional surrender would leave the British with their souls and minds intact, but he did not say what it might do for India.45 Like so many of his contemporaries, he did not then fully understand the nature of Nazism and its unlimited capacity for cruelty and evil.
If its overriding purpose was holding on to power, the Raj at the close of 1941 seemed to be in a superficially strong position. After twenty years of wrangling and concessions, India, in the words of a group of Congress moderates, was still ‘a dependency’ which was ‘ruled from Whitehall’.46 At the insistence of Congress nearly all the provincial assemblies had dissolved themselves in 1939, leaving the way clear for the restoration of the old bureaucratic system they had superseded. There were significant differences, however, for the administrative machinery had quietly passed into Indian hands: less than a tenth of India’s 2,500 judges were now British, and Indians outnumbered Britons in the ICS. In London and Delhi, the makers of policy were thinking in terms of a final handing-over of power to Indians. As yet no one knew for certain how the transfer might be achieved without chaos and bloodshed, or, and this was the knottiest of India’s problems, who would receive power. The only two contenders, Congress and the Muslim League, refused to work in tandem and the British government refused to contemplate any arrangement that would involve the partition and, therefore, the weakening of India. Nevertheless, the majority of Indians imagined that once the war ended, their country would gain its freedom. This was the belief of nearly two-thirds of the Indian officers serving in Malaya in 1941.47
VI
India’s mobilisation for war had proceeded remarkably well, considering the unrest of the past twenty years. By January 1941 the full strength of the Indian army was 418,000, of whom 37 per cent were Muslims and 55 per cent Hindus, mainly Rajputs, Jats and Dogras, whose warrior traditions remained strong. Congress did nothing actively to impede recruitment and no mass satyagraha materialised, largely because Gandhi feared that it would lead to violent collisions with Muslim Leaguers. Nevertheless, General Sir Robert Lockhart, who supervised recruitment to the Indian army, noted that only a trickle of volunteers was coming forward from Congress’s strongholds: the United and Central Provinces, Bihar and Bombay.48
An Indian soldier of the old school, Lockhart suspected that the bulk of recruits were joining up only to make more money or learn a trade, such as driving, which would help them prosper after the war. ‘The bulk of the Indian army are thus pure mercenaries, not actuated by love of country or devotion to a distant throne or hatred of the enemy,’ he gloomily concluded in May 1943.49 There was a distinct lack of fighting spirit in the impertinent request for a discharge delivered to his colonel by Lok Nath Pande of the 17th Dogras in the March of that year:
I have paid fifty rupees for my membership of Congress. So I hope that you will kindly grant my application for discharge, or I will do some Congress work in your military. Then you will shoot me. But I do not care for it . . . I come here only to see the enjoyment of soldiership. But it is not good for myself. I cannot say it is bad. I will congratulate you with all my heart for my discharge.50
Pande was released from his obligations on the sensible grounds that the army was better off without grumblers whose discontent might prove infectious. To counter sedition, police recruitment was stepped up and an Emergency Powers Act was introduced in 1940 to crack down on any political activity which imperilled the war effort. Special care was taken to prevent interference with the armed forces. Here, the greatest danger lay not with the major political parties, but with the smaller extremist groups which had mushroomed over the past twenty years. The loyalty of the Indian soldier was a delicate matter, and the Indian army was extremely touchy about allegations that its men were even susceptible to subversive propaganda, let alone willing to give it the time of day. Even so, morale was diligently monitored, which was not always easy given the influx of new, inexperienced British officers.
Communist and Sikh ultra-nationalist agitation was responsible for two significant outbreaks of unrest in 1939–40. Both were blamed for a mutiny by over 300 men of the RIASC (Royal Indian Army Service Corps) in Cairo in January 1940, where they refused to load stores on to lorries. Among those arrested were several Sikh reservists who had pre-war connections with the Communist journal Kirti Lehr, and others from a village where Ghadrite sympathies were still strong. Army intelligence suspected that local German agents had had a hand in the mischief, but could find no direct evidence. A number of men from the RIASC were among the POWs who were reported to have defected to the Germans by the spring of 1942, but whether they were from the mutinous unit is not known.51 Congress demands that Indian troops should be kept solely for Indian defence were among the complaints of just over a hundred men from Central Indian Horse, who mutinied on the quayside in Bombay in July 1940 in protest against being ordered to the Middle East. Investigation revealed that the ringleaders were Communist sympathisers who had manipulated the sepoys’ grievances for political ends. India’s Communists did as Comintern commanded and, after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, they became fervent supporters of the war, as did their equally biddable British counterparts. At the end of the year, the Communist wing of Congress was clamouring for India to join the war against Fascism.52
Undercurrents of sectarian animosities broke surface during the mutiny of the Central India Horse. Some Punjabi Sikhs imagined that Muslims would raid their villages and rape their women if the reg
iment went on foreign service.53 These sowars’ anxieties were shared by many other Sikh soldiers, who feared that future shifts in power within India would leave them, their families and communities exposed to abuse by a ‘hostile’ Muslim government in the Punjab.54
Religious misunderstanding lay behind another serious outbreak of unrest in the army, the mutiny by Sikh artillerymen stationed in Hong Kong in December 1940. It was triggered by orders for the gunners to replace their turbans with regulation steel helmets. This and poor communications between officers and men was the army’s explanation for the disturbance, but it was not the whole truth. There was evidence which pointed towards subversion by Indian agents employed by Japanese intelligence. At least one, who possessed three aliases, was a Ghadrite sympathiser. The presence of these shadowy figures on the fringes of the protest may have been why some of the mutineers expected Japanese assistance.55 Britain was still at peace with Japan, but Military Intelligence felt certain that:
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