by Jon Wilson
The Viceroy was worried about the escalation of violence, too. Concerned that British officers might respond to riots with another Amritsar, Lord Irwin wanted to entice Congress to support law and order with a further wave of liberal reforms. In February, a group of Indian businessmen engineered negotiations between the two sides. The result was a pact, and a short visit by Gandhi to London to negotiate with British politicians. But having successfully gaining the support of millions of peasants in the countryside, Congress activists saw little reason for compromise. The mood among many British officers was similarly against anything which could be considered ‘surrender’. Gandhi and Irwin conceded too much as far as their foot soldiers were concerned.
The ‘backbone’ of imperials officials was particular strengthened by the stand of die-hard Conservative Members of Parliament in London, now led by the perennially opportunistic Winston Churchill. In the middle of Gandhi’s negotiations in March 1931 Churchill famously raged that there should be no surrender to this one-time ‘Inner Temple lawyer, now become a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East’. ‘The truth is,’ Churchill said to the West Essex Unionist Association, ‘Gandhi-ism and all that it stands for will have to be grappled with and finally crushed.’8
Gandhism was indeed crushed, temporarily. Pressure from the nationalist and imperialist rank and file led peace to break down. Congress resumed its campaign of civil disobedience at the beginning of 1932. Gandhi was gaoled, and government officials were given tacit permission to use force to preserve British authority. This time, there was no question of the kind of embarrassing inquiries which had caused Reginald Dyer’s downfall. Congress’s organization was smashed by lathi charges and mass arrests. The Indian Civil Service officer C.S. Venkatachar, by now Deputy Commissioner of the Gonda district, noted that it seemed as if ‘the Civil Disobedience movement had been crushed. Repression and reaction were in the ascendant. The bureaucracy was on top.’9
But even in the midst of the last great assertion of conquering violence against Indian protest, the imperial bureaucracy knew it could not govern alone. The protests in 1930–32 made clear how much damage Indian resistance could do to the financial position of the Raj. The fiscal consequences of depression, particularly the rapid collapse of British India’s tax take, led ministers in London to see that India’s business leaders and middle classes needed to be involved in making policy for the Raj to survive.
Between 1931 and 1934, a succession of round table conferences, perambulating committees and joint sessions of the houses of parliament slowly and fractiously sketched out a new constitution for India. Churchill and the Tory die-hards opposed the formation of this constitution every step of the way. They wanted the massive reassertion of Britain’s conquering despotism instead. Their argument was based on a passionate commitment to a vague idea of British sovereignty across the globe, not a realistic assessment of Britain’s effective power throughout the world. But Stanley Baldwin, the steel manufacturer turned Conservative politician who had been appointed Prime Minister in 1935, did make the calculations. Baldwin saw that, in strained economic times, the British state’s capacity to marshal human and material resources would collapse without Indian involvement.10
Midway through the joint-parliamentary committee on Indian reforms, a group of Conservative peers complained that if Britain gave up control of Indian finance, the creditworthiness of the Government of India would be corroded. The government’s riposte cut to the core of a more pressing interest: unless India controlled its own tax policy there would not be enough money to pay the pensions of retired Indian civil servants. In August 1935, in the longest piece of legislation ever passed by Parliament, a new constitution was created which gave elected politicians full control of governments in India’s provinces and created a power-sharing executive at the centre. This was, though, no great strategic realignment. The reforms of 1935 were another compromised effort to stave off crisis.11
No peace with the conqueror
The depression provoked a turn to the left for many Congress leaders, as a need for stronger collective action to tackle India’s growing inequality became paramount. By the time the Government of India Act was passed in 1935, Jawaharlal Nehru had become the most prominent member of the socialist grouping within Congress. His rise was partly based on his role channelling the campaigns of north Indian peasants into anti-British protest, but partly also on Gandhi’s patronage. Gandhi was critical of Nehru’s belief that social change could be led by a potentially coercive state. But he thought the younger man’s instincts led him towards consensus rather than conflict. Radical in rhetoric, Nehru developed a more accommodating political style under the patronage of Gandhi. Nehru thought Congress needed to be the sole organization speaking for the Indian nation; in practice this meant it should incorporate conservative as well as radical opinion.12
Nehru’s wife, Kamala, was being treated in Europe for tuberculosis. He was released early from a two-year prison sentence in September 1935 to visit her. He spent a few weeks in Lausanne, and, when he was not sitting with his wife, chatted to communist intellectuals who happened to be passing through. Nehru was not allowed to return to India before the expiry of his sentence in February 1936, so he visited London meanwhile. There, the British spies who trailed him were disappointed by the Congress leader’s lack of radicalism. Nehru appeared alongside socialists and communists, speaking on platforms with Victor Gollancz, Paul Robeson and Erskine Caldwell, but his speeches were ‘dull’, ‘colourless’ and even to left-wing audiences ‘moderate in tone’.
Nehru’s demeanour was partly influenced by his wife’s illness – Kamala died on 26 February – but his gloom was also provoked by a sense of the impossibility of meaningful conversation with India’s imperial rulers in London. On 6 February 1936, Nehru was persuaded to speak to members of both Houses of Parliament. He began by explaining his reluctance to come. ‘Our premises . . . are so utterly different,’ he said. ‘[I]t would be impossible to discover a common ground on which we can understand each other.’ Indians and the Britons who ran the Raj had an ‘entirely different appreciation of India’s present and past’, Nehru said. What’s more, ‘the forced and unhappy union’ between the two countries ‘left a background of hostility between India and England’. ‘There can be no peace with the conqueror and the way of the conqueror must always create conflict.’13
In his speech, Nehru condemned the new constitution as a conservative effort to keep the vested interests which ran India in power. The 1935 Government of India Act handed the functions of government to politicians accountable to Indian voters for the first time. But it fragmented the actions of the state between provincial ministries, ensuring there was no single focus for nationalist power. At the centre, the reforms proposed that power would be shared by elected politicians, British officials and the rulers of India’s 500 ‘native states’. But because India’s princes were reluctant to participate in the new system even this element of self-government never started. Nehru and the Congress left saw the reforms as a device to block the creation of any nationalist state power capable of challenging British interests.14
Nehru’s constant theme was that this imperial effort to fragment the subcontinent contradicted the historic fact of the unity of India. India was a plural society which nonetheless had a single culture and civilization, and only thrived when ruled by a single power he believed. India’s problems now, Nehru argued, were ‘fundamentally economic’. A strong, centralized state government was needed to redistribute land, stimulate industrial development and ensure every citizen had a good education.
Nehru talked about ‘the decay of British imperialism’, and thought the British regime would not last long. Protecting their last embattled bastions of power, the British had developed ‘over-sensitive skin’ and responded to criticism with the ‘fiercest repression’. ‘British imperialism’ had reached a final vicious stage, and needed a small push to shove it out altogether. All this meant Nehru t
hought there was no point in nationalists participating in the flawed constitution. In the winter and spring of 1936, he wanted Congress to fight on until the British were forced to hand over full independence.15
Nehru returned to India in March 1936 ‘like a tired child’, as he put it, ‘yearning for solace in the bosom of our common mother, India’. But instead of peace he found argument and crisis. The Bengali radical Subhas Chandra Bose was captivating urban lower-middle-class audiences with his call for a socialist transformation of India. But the rise of socialism was challenged also by a resurgent Congress right wing, fuelled particularly by the increasing involvement of big business in nationalist politics.
Small merchants and factory owners had supported Congress from the early 1920s, setting up a nationalist commercial organization, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, in 1927. But India’s growing cadre of large factory owners had been wary of publicly opposing British power. Tata Steel and the big Bombay mill-owners had been too worried about losing government orders to support Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign, for example. But these were men who had done well out of India’s disconnection from the global economy during the depression. They were angry with Britain for financial policies which kept domestic demand low. As a result, they began to think of the economic possibilities of a nationalist government interested in expanding consumer spending. Despite his hostility to industrialization, Gandhi’s belief that the rich held their wealth as trustees of the community as a whole legitimized business involvement in Congress. Business leaders were a vital source of money for nationalist campaigns, but the price of their support was that the left’s anti-capitalist rhetoric needed to be toned down, and that Congress participate in the new constitution. Unlike Nehru, Congress’s pro-business right wing thought the organization should form ministries in India’s soon to be self-governing provinces.
In the spring and early summer of 1936, a war for the soul of India’s leading nationalist organization raged in the meeting halls and committee rooms of India. Nehru and his socialist allies urged Congress to support radical social change. It should, they argued, refuse to participate in provincial ministries which didn’t give them enough power. In particular, Nehru argued that national, central state planning of the economy was essential. Congress-supporting urban business leaders were frightened that meant the Soviet-style nationalization of private assets. Similarly, the dominant farmers encouraged to support Congress by the depression in the countryside worried that the leftward turn would cause their private property to be collectivized. In a movement the Times of India called a ‘revolt of Congressmen against their President’s socialistic views’, moderates called for unity, stood up for the defence of property and argued that Congress ministries under the imperial constitution could assist in a peaceful transfer of power.16
With opposition to their platform from such powerful forces, the socialists were forced to compromise. Unwilling to let the organization split, Nehru did indeed tone down his rhetoric, and reluctantly agreed Congress should stand candidates in the provincial elections and form ministries if elected. By 1939, he supported the right-wing candidate for Congress’s presidency to ensure the organization did not split. For their part, business leaders were willing to accept central planning, as long as it did not mean the mass expropriation of private capital.
Conscious central control
The idea of central state planning had become the unifying concept around which the different ideological strands of Congress could unite; it also played a critical role alienating Congress from other political forces in the subcontinent, particularly those representing Muslims. Socialists focused on the use of planning to reduce poverty and inequality, and believed it needed the government to take over the ownership of large firms. The Congress right thought it involved the regulation of production and the distribution of goods, ownership of assets, not nationalization. For them, planning was about controlling the flow of money and encouraging business to coordinate better. Despite these differences, planning came to dominate the language which almost all Indian politicians used to think about political power. As a committee full of industrialists put it in a letter to Nehru, ‘with the present accepted conception of a modern state, some form of state control regarding all industries is now necessary’. But the idea of planning made Congress believe it needed to possess exclusive power over every facet of government. If it needed to engage in messy negotiations with other parties, it would not be able to coordinate the economy with a single rational mind.17
These arguments were made in response to the chaos and disorder observers saw in the world around them, as much as they were a reaction to poverty. In the 1930s and early 1940s, figures from across the political spectrum saw planning as the only way to stave off the collapse of society, on an international scale, into anarchy. Speaking to an audience at Madras University in 1933 the liberal economist Nanjangud Subba Rao thought that the turn to planning was stimulated ‘by the disorders and maladjustments in the economic life of the world’ which led to depression and war. Like Beni Prasad in his presidential lecture at Mysore, commentators associated global crisis with the pursuit of irrational passions throughout the world. Even socialists emphasized the importance of structure above anarchy. Jawaharlal Nehru professed that ‘my own predilection is entirely for order’. ‘I dislike a mess,’ he wrote to a British friend in 1941. From right to left, planning purported to replace chaos with order, passion with the calm effort of reasonable beings to rationally shape their world.18
This new emphasis on central state planning changed thinking about the relationship between the Indian nation and the state. Before the 1930s, political leaders had urged their compatriots to regenerate national life through social action. Figures from Lajpat Rai to Rabindranath Tagore, Bipin Chandra Pal to M. K. Gandhi associated the effort of the state to intervene and unify with empire and despotism. But speaking in 1933, Subba Rao thought that democratic elections meant there was ‘no longer any terror of the State’. As ideas about planning spread, the apparent need for a single ‘collective mind’ to coordinate economic life allowed India to be reimagined as a ‘single whole’ with a single ‘unifying centre’; not as set of different communities loosely coordinated in a federal structure. Planning required a single force which could act, as Subba Rao put it, ‘as the agent of the community at large’.
The new emphasis on a government acting as the voice of a supposedly homogeneous community made those who did not feel part of that ‘single whole’ anxious. New ideas about the state emerged alongside the increasingly centralized management of the organization most likely to run an independent Indian state, the Indian National Congress. In the mid-1930s commentators began to speak of ‘the Congress High Command’, an entity one political scientist called ‘the Leviathan of [the] Indian freedom movement’ associated with ‘just a few individuals or families’. Congress was by far India’s most popular political body, with the support of a majority of voters in most provinces. But its claim to incorporate all Indian communities and act on behalf of everyone was unrealistic; its opponents saw these claims as an instance of tyranny paralleled only by the ‘despotic’ British regime.
Lower caste leaders, in particular the untouchable politician B. R. Ambedkar, argued that Congress merely wanted to institutionalize rule by India’s upper castes. Ambedkar tried to persuade the British government to introduce separate electorates for the ‘depressed classes’ in the new constitution. In 1932, he compromised after Gandhi fasted against an attempt to fragment the Hindu community; Ambedkar agreeed that a certain number of places should be reserved for untouchables in seats voted for by the general population, but the criticism of Congress as an upper caste body continued long after 1947. Muslims similarly felt frightened by Congress’s claim to speak on behalf of a homogeneous Indian society. Convinced of the rational need to centralize, Congress leaders had no conception of the fearful passions their attempt to monopolize power stok
ed in their rivals.19
Hindu Raj
The first elections to form entirely Indian-run provincial ministries were held in January and February 1937. A quarter of the adult male population of India was entitled to vote, and roughly half of those did so. Congress won by a landslide, winning 62 per cent of the seats it contested, taking 716 out of 1,585 seats in total. In the remaining seats a scattering of parties were victorious, representing a fragmented variety of groups which thought Congress did not represent their interests: Muslim Bengali peasants; Punjabi landlords; low castes in the south. Congress’s success and the fragmentation of its rivals meant it was able to form ministries in nine out of eleven provinces in British India, six alone, three as the dominant partner in a coalition with other parties.
Congress’s decision to rule alone in the old Mughal heartland of the United Provinces created the greatest resentment. With its massive volunteer network and highly organized system for engaging with voters, Congress won 134 seats in India’s most populous province, giving it a majority of twenty. During the elections, Congress worked with the Muslim League to defeat candidates backed by the British. But the League in north India was largely a body made up of the region’s old urban Muslim gentry. Nehru and his socialist allies worried that forming a coalition with aristocrats would block their socialist plans. Led by Nehru’s close ally Govind Ballabh Pant, the United Provinces’ new Congress government claimed its majority gave it a mandate to govern on behalf of every group in the province, Muslims included. Pant called for ‘complete organic unity’ between all nationalist forces, arguing that the reduction of social inequality needed the province to be ruled by a strong, united political will. Pant was particularly enthusiastic about Congress adopting central state planning.
