Viceregal pessimism was confirmed during the next three months. On 5 November the first of nine courts martial of INA leaders began in the Red Fort in Delhi (echoes of Bahadur Shah’s trial and Bose’s boast) against a background of nationwide rallies. ‘Patriots not Traitors’ read some of the placards brandished by demonstrators outside the Red Fort and, since some of the accused were Muslims, the League added its voice to the clamour. Street-level unity was brittle and to avoid brawls, protesters in Madras agreed not to shout ‘Jai Hind’ (Long live India) and ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ (Long live Pakistan), but instead called out for the release of the INA prisoners.7 Prominent Congress lawyers, including Nehru, defended the first quartet of prisoners, at least one of whom (Dhillon Singh) was suspected by Military Intelligence of having tortured sepoys who had refused to join the INA. The four were found guilty and, on 1 January 1946, Auchinleck placed expediency before justice and quashed their prison sentences. As matters stood, the prosecution and punishment of the INA leadership would play into the hands of Congress and might lead to restlessness within the Indian army. Here, feeling against the INA was not as strong as might have been expected, although British officers were bitter about the Auk’s decision.8
One of those released, Shah Nawaz, threw himself into politics. In January 1946 he addressed several meetings in Calcutta, where Bose’s reputation was high. A non-League Muslim, he appealed to his co-religionists to join the Hindus and Sikhs and ‘kick the British out of India’. On another occasion, he claimed that in Malaya swimming pools had notices which banned ‘Indians and dogs’.9 Nawaz soon fell foul of the Muslim League, whose members pelted his car in Jhansi, and his political career was suspended until after independence. Other INA men, now popular heroes, were in the forefront of agitation and Wavell feared that they might put their military training to use and become the ‘spearhead’ for a Congress uprising. In fact, by the spring of 1946 the Congress leadership was beginning to recognise that in exploiting the INA it had opened a Pandora’s Box and released spirits which were hard to restrain.
Disturbances erupted against a background of post-war dislocation. At the beginning of 1946, between five and seven million Indians were in the process of demobilisation or being made redundant by war industries. The harvest forecast was bleak: in February there was a drought in southern India and the government estimated that 4.27 million tons of imported grain would be required to avert famine. In preparation for an emergency, the daily grain ration was reduced from fourteen ounces to twelve.10 Political and racial tension began to increase, and it was not significantly relaxed by the announcement on 19 February that a four-man ministerial mission would leave within a month to arrange the final transfer of power. In the meantime there were disquieting signs of frustration: ‘bitter racial feeling’ was reported from Calcutta, where British and Anglo-Indian women were assaulted in the streets and a mob of youths pelted an American military convoy. There were also the by now routine attacks on trams, a tram depot, police stations and post offices. A mood of panic infected service wives in Delhi, where the atmosphere was said to have been ‘worse than the Mutiny’.11 Allowing for the exaggeration which often crept into police and miliary intelligence reports, there was a strong sense that things might suddenly get out of hand, and it was not confined to the British. As India moved inexorably towards self-government, Congress had everything to gain by not unduly rocking the boat and everything to lose from a conflagration in which alternative sources of political power were bound to emerge.
II
The expected explosion erupted in the third week of February, and took the frightening and unlooked-for form of a mutiny by thousands of Indian sailors. The Royal Indian Navy (RIN) had an unenviable record for discipline, with nine minor mutinies between March 1942 and April 1945 and, as always in such cases, poor command was in large part to blame.12 Service grievances were uppermost to begin with, but there were strong indications that the sailors had already been politically subverted, apparently by the better-educated, English-speaking signallers.13 The slogans ‘Jai Hind’ and ‘British Quit India’ had been painted on the walls of the naval dockyard at Bombay (similar graffiti were appearing everywhere) and, on 31 January, two off-duty RAF officers had been attacked and robbed on a Bombay quayside by a gang which included two ratings in uniform.14 On 18 February, Indian seamen were spotted among a crowd which tore down and burned the American flag from the United States Immigration Service office in Bombay, and in the evening several Congress flags were hoisted on warships in the harbour.15
Just after nine on the morning of the 19th, there was a commotion at the shore signals school, HMIS Talwar, which had once been a railway station. Angry sailors smashed a signals bicycle (surely the most bathetic start to any uprising) and within minutes they were arming themselves with hockey sticks and commandeering trucks. They were confronted by Rear-Admiral Arthur Rattray, the flag officer commanding Bombay, who listened to their grievances. The mutineers demanded the dismissal of Talwar’s commanding officer, Commander F. W. King, an acerbic officer who commonly called his men ‘black buggers’, ‘coolie bastards’ and ‘jungli Indians’.16 Such insults were a symptom of a style of leadership which extended to Indian as well as British officers; one engineer rating later complained of being called a ‘bastard’ by his Indian superior.17 Other complaints concerned the abominable conditions on Talwar. The latrines were foul, cook houses filthy, water supplies contaminated and men were often forced to sleep on the floor for lack of mattresses. Pay and allowances were low (Indian sailors had compared these with British and Australian ratings) and there was no civilian clothing for demobilised men.18 There were also allegations that British sailors had urinated on an area at the foot of a signal tower where Muslims regularly prayed. Rattray’s response to the crisis was inept and fumbling. He did not investigate the extent of the discontent and refused to offer any redress beyond replacing King.19 But he did take precautions to prevent the mutineers from securing firearms.
News of the disturbance spread quickly and other sailors joined in. Soon after midnight ratings from another shore station, HMIS Hemla, led by an officer, tried to break into a wireless communications centre. The naval authorities were reluctantly forced to admit that they could no longer control the situation unaided and so requested army assistance. By dawn on the 20th the 18th Maratha Light Infantry had been deployed in readiness for further trouble.
By the morning of the 20th, the mutiny was taking on a distinct political complexion. Leaflets began to appear. One announced that officers who called their men ‘sons of coolies’ had dismissed two merely for putting up ‘Jai Hind’ posters. ‘We have been through all these years the helpless victims to the racial complexes of the British officers, maltreatment, harassment and insufferable persecutions,’ the flysheet continued. It ended with an appeal to soldiers, workers and students to join them, united by the slogan: ‘Long live the solidarity of workers, soldiers, students and peasants. Inqilab Zindabad [Long live the revolution]!’20 The plea to Indian soldiers was ignored by all save a detachment of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, stationed in Bombay, which unsuccessfully tried to join the mutiny.21 When British troops began to appear on the streets, their sympathy was solicited ‘in the name of the great tradition of Britain’s working class!’ ‘Brothers in the British Army’ and former comrades-in-arms in the defence of Britain and India were implored not to fire on the mutineers. ‘To use bullets against a democratic movement is the way of imperialism, not of the people.’22
The phrases had a distinct Communist ring. The naval uprising was a godsend to Bombay’s Communists and they moved swiftly to exploit it, mobilising the city’s working classes. On the morning of 21 February there were strikes at all but four of Bombay’s seventy-four cotton mills and crowds were gathering on the streets, where they began to set up barricades. Europeans were manhandled and hustled off buses and trams, and Indians in Western-style dress were forced to remove their hats and ties, presumably as
a token of class and national solidarity. Robert Stimson, a BBC correspondent, was forced to dismount from his bicycle by a crowd of students armed with clubs. He said he was a newspaperman, and Gandhi always treated journalists with great courtesy, because he believed that two sides of any question should be freely aired. Mention of Gandhi’s name had a magical effect on the students, who allowed Stimson to pass, having asked whether he had ever interviewed the Mahatma.23 Such behaviour struck Stimson as out of character, for in his experience nationalist demonstrators were usually courteous towards the British. Nonetheless there was a mood of racial antipathy abroad in Bombay, as there had been in Calcutta a fortnight before: on 28 February a flybill found at the Victoria railway terminus had the slogan ‘Kill the White Dogs’ while another announced ‘Bombay is Free’.24 Over 7,000 sailors had joined the uprising and just before ten on the 21st the four-inch guns of the sloop Jumma were trained on the Castle Barracks. Other targets in the mutineers’ sights were those twin bastions of the European community, the Bombay Yacht Club and the Taj Mahal hotel, but neither they nor the barracks were shelled. Ashore, mutineers and civilians were holding mass rallies under Congress, League and Communist banners. As ever, the meetings were a prelude to riots, and by the afternoon mobs were attacking, looting and setting fire to shops, banks and post offices and clashing with patrols of police and troops.
Counter-insurgency operations were placed in the hands of General Lockhart who, as he later admitted, was lucky in that he could deploy a substantial force of British troops, backed by Mosquito fighter-bombers based at Poona and the heavy cruiser, HMS Glasgow, which was heading for Bombay at full steam. Furthermore, he had the backing of Auchinleck, who was determined to put down the insurrection with whatever force proved necessary. Congress too was resolved to stifle an uprising which was not of its making and, therefore, an embarrassment. Furthermore, it had been discountenanced by the ease with which the Communists had been able to whip up and control what amounted to a mass insurrection. Vallabhbhai Patel was among the Congress leaders who successfully pleaded with the sailors for restraint, although, mindful of his nationalist credentials, he also asked Lockhart to show leniency to the mutineers, who were not to be victimised. His influence may have led to the cancellation of a stern broadcast by the General, scheduled for six in the afternoon of the 21st. Lockhart had intended to demand an immediate, unconditional surrender by the sailors and warn those who resisted that they would face courts martial and possibly execution.25
This robust admonition was not needed. The mutineers surrendered at six on the morning of the 23rd and were taken into custody. Within the next two days order was restored in Bombay by a mixed force of Marathas and men from the Royal Marines and the Queen’s, Essex, Leicester and Gloucester regiments, supported by armoured cars. It was a bloody, one-sided affair in which 223 demonstrators were killed and over 1,000 injured, and the sailors suffered 9 dead and 51 wounded. British casualties were 1 dead and 12 wounded. As the figures suggest, British units were compelled to open fire frequently, and one eyewitness, a civilian, thought the men were ‘trigger happy’, having been hardened to killing by their wartime experiences.26 Another onlooker, an officer with left-wing views, claimed to have seen an open lorry in which troops armed with rifles and a Bren gun fired at random into what he alleged was a harmless crowd, killing four and wounding twenty-five. This version of the incident was passed on to a Labour MP by an artilleryman, Sergeant A. B. Davies, in a letter which contained some grousing about the slowness of demobilisation. According to the sergeant an Indian bystander had commented: ‘There is British socialism in action.’ ‘Many of us sympathise with the Indian cause,’ Davies added. ‘We Socialists in the Army, and there are many, are in a difficult position. Let not the people at home, therefore, blame us if “authority” finds that it has to deal with us, as well as with the Indian people.’27 An official investigation revealed that the firing had been justified in so far as the crowd was engaged in arson and looting.
To judge by their propaganda, the RIN mutineers were aware that there were national servicemen of socialist inclinations whom, they mistakenly imagined, might desist from firing on Indian demonstrators. The sailors also knew about a spate of strikes which had broken out recently among RAF ground staff dissatisfied with the progress of demobilisation. Some were fearful that they might be transferred for duty in Indonesia – hence the slogan ‘Ships for Blighty but not Java’.28 The airmen’s bad example was followed by 1,600 disgruntled men from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) at Madras on 23 February. Again grievances concerned the pace of demobilisation and were settled without undue disorder. Everyone involved believed that, since the war was over, they enjoyed civilian rights, including that to strike whenever faced with unpalatable duties, and that Labour was somehow on their side.29 For this reason there was an upsurge in writing letters to MPs.
This cussedness provided an additional headache for the army authorities, not least because Indian servicemen might take it into their heads to imitate their British counterparts. British morale had certainly drooped during February, largely on account of hitches with demobilisation and resentment as to the fact that, for practical reasons, men serving in the East were unable to have the same home leave allowances as their comrades in Europe.30 What seemed like an extended exile was a source of anxiety about jobs, broken marriages and errant girlfriends. But at no time was there any indication that British troops were unwilling to undertake policing duties in India, rather the contrary. There were some gung-ho young officers in one Bangalore mess who expressed a wish to lead ‘black and tan units’ against the ‘wogs’.31 It was with some pride that Private Blackie told his parents on Tyneside of how Trimulgary strikers took to their heels when British troops appeared: ‘If there is one thing that makes an Indian’s legs turn to water it is the sight of a bayonet.’32 An official investigation into soldiers’ attitudes undertaken after the Bombay communal riots in April revealed that they had little interest in the political background to the trouble. Indians were always ‘most respectful’ towards them and they vaguely imagined that the Hindus were now masters of India and the British were their protectors. There was also a groundswell of sympathy for the Muslim, ‘with his sense of decency, clean fighting and even numbers’.33
Any romantic illusions the Tommy may have had of India did not last long. At the height of the Bengal famine, soldiers had told a visiting Tory MP: ‘If this is what India is like and the Indians do not want us, what are we here for and why do we bother to fight?’34
On the march, men of the 1st Cameron Highlanders and perhaps other regiments chanted:
Land of shit and filth and wogs
Gonorrhea, syphilis, clap and pox.
Memsahibs’ paradise, soldiers’ hell.
India fare thee fucking well.
‘Cheer, wogs, we are quitting India!’ was chalked on railway carriages by men about to be shipped home.35 Grumbling apart, the British garrison in India remained in good heart and ready to undertake the tricky duties that would be required of them if, as seemed likely, the unrest continued.
During the unquiet days of February and March 1946 the same was not true of the Indian services. The RIN mutiny had been a shock, and its repercussions added to fears that the government was about to face an epidemic of indiscipline. Sailors at other bases took their cue from the Bombay men. At Karachi on 21 February there was a two-hour duel between shore batteries and the guns of the sloop Hindustan before its crew surrendered. In his analysis of the troubles in Bombay, General Lockhart laid responsibility at the feet of the RIN’s senior officers, Rattray and Admiral John Godfrey, its commander-in-chief. The latter was indecisive and lacked the ‘human qualities necessary in a commander’, which was why Lockhart concluded: ‘I have not heard one good word spoken of him by naval or military officers nor by civilians.’36 Both admirals were shunted on to the retired list. Godfrey blamed ‘strong subversive political influences’ with Congress conne
ctions for his men’s disaffection, and believed they had never been adequately investigated.37 Under Congress pressure, the mutineers were not punished and, in time, were discharged.
During the last week of February and the first of March there was a sequence of copycat mutinies among other Indian servicemen. The largest was of ground crew of the Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) who, like British airmen, were protesting against slow demobilisation. The trouble affected bases at Madras, Karachi, Poona, Allahabad and Delhi, and was officially blamed on ‘unreliable’ Indian officers and the acute political awareness of the better-educated men who were employed in technical units.38 Pro-Congress elements were believed to have had a hand in the mutiny by over 1,700 men from the Royal Indian Army Signals Corps (RIASC) at a training centre near Jabalpur on 28 February. Some of the signallers marched into the nearby town ‘in ugly mood’ and were eventually rounded up by detachments from the 27th Jats and the Somerset Light Infantry using rifle butts and bayonets.39 There was simultaneous unrest among a detachment of Indian gunners at Madras, signallers at Allahabad, and Indian clerical staff at army headquarters in Delhi. Here, the source of the unrest was indignation at what was regarded as over-enthusiastic fraternisation between British other ranks and girls from the Indian Women’s Army Corps. In one distasteful incident a girl who had been photographed with a British soldier was abused by 400 babus, who promised to beat up anyone else similarly compromised.40 Curiously, the restless mood also infected Japanese POWs at camps near Deolali and Nasirabad, where there were riots on 25 February in which twenty-five were killed.41
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