The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  The last three years of war saw a massive increase in Indian mobilization, with the Indian army growing from 900,000 in December 1941 to 2.3 million by the end of the war. It also saw the creation of an administrative infrastructure which tried to impose the government’s will on the Indian economy to a degree never before imagined. The manufacture and supply of the 60,000 different items needed to keep soldiers in battle was organized with greater central control. From 1941, government orders fixed the quantity and price of everything from steel rail and cotton shirts to cigarettes and geometry protractors. Government spending expanded five times. The government’s supply department increased its staff from twenty to 17,000. New technologies were deployed to organize production. There was a rapid increase in the collection of statistics, in surveying and in the use of scientific managerial techniques such as operational research. India’s scientific infrastructure expanded quickly, too, with the creation of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in July 1942. The CSIR was founded to develop the chemistry and physics needed to ensure military hardware kept working; it still exists today as the organization which coordinates India’s system of national laboratories.32

  This new state infrastructure tried to put Indian calls for a nationally planned economy into practice. It created unprecedented structures to involve Indian business leaders in decision-making for example, as panels of industrialists were appointed to coordinate production throughout India. Alongside the massive expansion of the army the state also recruited millions of workers from hitherto unmobilized groups into India’s industrial economy. Hindu and Sikh peasants from Punjab refused to sacrifice their growing income from rising wheat prices to fight the Japanese and stayed to defend their homeland. The military had no choice but to enlist beyond its usual recruiting ground of Punjab, low-caste men from Madras presidency finding the army particularly attractive. Similarly, millions of ‘tribal’ and lower-caste men and women were recruited into factories, and then often also drafted into pioneer labour corps which laid roads. The civilian labour corps ended up with fifteen million members. Strikingly, it was the lower-caste leader B. R. Ambedkar who was appointed minister of labour in the executive council which Lord Wavell appointed in July 1942.

  By 1944, the British began to present the war effort as a national project. British propaganda intensified, portraying the conflict as the united struggle of Britons and Indians to defend a self-governing India. Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief, created ‘josh groups’, where soldiers debated their pay and conditions as well as politics. Indian troops ‘were empowered as thinking individuals who were capable of taking the initiative’, as Bayly puts it. The military high command banned British officers from criticizing leaders like Nehru or Gandhi for fear of alienating Indian soldiers. Volunteers were encouraged to enlist not as subjects of empire, but as ‘citizens of India’. Citizen militias were recruited to the defeated north-eastern regions. Air Raid Precaution volunteers signed pledges to ‘face and defy every peril threatening India’s national security’ ‘[b]ecause I am proud to be a citizen of India’.33

  The greatest changes occurred in the army itself. The worst forms of discrimination were outlawed. Training was much better organized, with Indian and African recruits spending nine months away from the front line developing the skills and attitude to fight, with every member of a division, from the British commander to the lowliest Indian private, attending lectures together. India Command created clear strategies focused on fighting in the conditions of South East Asia. Wavell recognized the futility of trying to drive heavy trucks through jungles so infantry battalions were demechanized. As recruitment expanded, the army was forced to accept recruits in poor physical condition. Military scientists conducted experiments with different kinds of food. The change in diet was so great that some emaciated recruits found it difficult to digest the increase in the then usual two mealtimes, so the army added two rounds of sweet milky tea with biscuits during the day. The effect of these changes created an effective fighting machine that halted the Japanese advance on the borders of north-east India. Better supply networks and high morale allowed the Allied army to stop the Japanese army in the battles of Imphal and Kohima in the spring of 1944, and then, in November 1944, drive on to reconquer Burma.34

  But – and this is the important point – mobilization was patchy and uneven. It occurred in separate institutions and enclaves, the army being the largest and most important. Overall British political leadership was weak and ridden with anxiety, incapable of creating shared purpose or national will, and Indian political leaders were unwilling to step in to help mobilize a war they did not feel was their own. People supported the state when doing so suited their particular interests.

  Few who had the choice voluntarily contributed to the war effort. Any shared sense of purpose did not extend far enough to encourage wealthy Indians to limit their living standards, for example. With a guaranteed market, the war was boom time for industrialists. The Raj’s desperation for Indian cooperation meant business leaders were appointed to the committees responsible for setting the prices at which their own goods were bought. But the imperial state did not then increase taxes on corporate profits. Similarly, farmers able to invest in producing surplus rice or wheat made big profits, and the government’s rural tax machinery was not capable of taking a contribution from them. Unlike the national government in Britain, the Raj’s limited connection with Indian society made it too anxious about increasing taxes or investigating undeclared sources of profits. The number of people paying income tax doubled between 1938 and 1945, but it was still less than half a million by the end of the war. The government could not even persuade wealthy Indians to sacrifice consumption in favour of buying government bonds. In 1947, the economic historian D. R. Gadgil wrote about the ‘inability of the Government to take a firm stand against important interests’. The reason was explained by the Secretary of State in 1943: ‘The Indian war effort . . . is pretty frankly a mercenary undertaking so far as the vast majority of Indians are concerned,’ he said. Anxious as ever, the government thought it was too dangerous to squeeze people whose support it relied on.35

  This lack of civilian support meant that the Raj was in financial difficulties throughout the war, despite the government’s creation of an elaborate machinery to control the economy. Its solution was to print money. The war was financed by what economists at the time called a ‘deficit-induced, fiat money inflation, the worst kind of inflation’. The massive expansion of the money supply did have a theoretical basis in real assets. The production of goods for the war effort had led to the accumulation of large but debts owed to the Indian government in pounds sterling; no one knew if they would ever be paid back. But they were treated as notional property against which rupees could be printed, much to the despair of Indian economists. As during the depression, the currency was the last tool that an imperial state with no capacity elsewhere could manipulate. But unlike the 1930s, the money supply was deliberately expanded, from 1.7 to 11.4 million rupees between 1938 and 1945, and prices rose accordingly, double or even treble in many cases.36

  Inflation was good for rich farmers and factory owners, but most people suffered from an increase in the cost of living. Middle-class government employees struggled to make ends meet. Factory workers suffered, but the government’s demand for industrial goods ensured there was some minimal assistance for them. Labourers starved in rural areas where there was no relief. Rural Bengal was worse hit. There, as we have seen, government-induced inflation was compounded by the destruction of the boats used to transport food, the unwillingness of the government to institute famine works and Winston Churchill’s refusal to send grain despite Wavell’s insistent requests. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed between two and three million people, but famine stalked the rest of India on a smaller scale. As in India’s previous famines, millions left the countryside. In many places the source of a rural livelihood had completely broke down. Millions staggered, starving
and, because of the price of clothes, naked into towns. People ‘were moving towards towns in crowds’, an observer noticed on the train journey between Cochin and Bombay in 1943. In Bengal local infrastructure totally collapsed, with schools and hospitals closing, and family ties being destroyed by death and migration.

  Unlike previous famines, the war at least meant the destitute had a chance of finding work in munitions or textiles factories.37 But the imperial home front in India was very different from the home front at the heart of the empire. Conditions in slums and workplaces were terrible. People were mobilized and classified, whether working, ill or dead, in narrowly defined communal groups, and the division and fragmentation of Indian society intensified. In Bengal, Hindu and Muslim organizations competed in their ability to save their own folk, and castigated their opponents for neglect. Muslims and Hindus were divided from each other by many means. Volunteer militias formed to help famine relief but also to defend through force. Different state organizations were dominated by different communities, with accusations and anxieties about being forced to submit to the dominance of others. In Calcutta, for example, the Muslim League ministry in Bengal appointed the firm of M. M. Ispahani to supply grain to relieve starving city-dwellers. Ispahani was a staunch support of the Muslim League, and a friend of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His appointment was fiercely criticized by the Hindu Mahasabha as an effort to create ‘Pakistan’ by stealth. As Hindus complained about the provincial ministry of Bengal becoming a Muslim stronghold, Muslims criticized the institutions run by the central government for being dominated by Hindus. Calcutta’s Air Raid Precautions volunteer force was said to be 95 per cent Hindu. The system of shops selling commodities at controlled prices run by the Department of Supply was accused of being dominated by Hindus as well. Starkest of all was the fate of the famine dead. The police did not have the capacity to deal with corpses piling up in Calcutta. Where no relatives were quickly found bodies were labelled as Hindu or Muslim and handed over to respective private religious organizations. Long before 1947, the social and political fabric of India was being divided. Depression, war and the failings of the Raj, were doing their work.38

  The transfer of power

  A regime that had been recast to win the war had no purpose once the Japanese were defeated. A society mobilized, however haphazardly, to defend itself against an enemy had no need for foreign rule once it achieved victory. In the last years of the war, Wavell reported a south Indian liberal politician telling him ‘the present régime could carry on quite comfortably till the end of the war . . . unless we get into serious difficulties over food’. But once wartime passions to defend the homeland had abated, the fragility of the British presence in India was obvious. Despite being armed and organized as never before, the imperial state could only project power overseas, not over India itself.

  The British presence had been weakened first of all by an ever-shrinking number of Britons in India to sustain British power. After years in which small numbers of British candidates put themselves forward, and were usually beaten in examinations by Indians, the elite civil service stopped recruiting entirely in London in 1943. By the end of the war there were 510 Indians to 429 Europeans in the ICS. The Britons who led empire’s everyday administration were ‘tired and have lost heart’, British cabinet members admitted in 1946. The senior Indian officials on whom the British relied often had nationalist sympathies. Jawaharlal Nehru had three close relations in the Indian Civil Service. When nationalist leaders were on the run from the British during the war, it was not unusual for them to stay with ICS officer friends or relatives.39

  The decline in the numbers of British officers in India reduced the population with a direct interest in maintaining British power, but the commitment to the Raj was limited even among the British. Many British army officers were wartime conscripts, and had no family connection or ideological commitment to empire. British visitors worried that ordinary British soldiers were discontented and often themselves on the verge of mutiny; they could not be kept to hold India for long. The Labour politician Douglas Houghton gave a lecture tour of British barracks in early 1946, and found British soldiers angry, resentful and desperate to quit, complaining that ‘they can’t rule India, for God’s sake stop India ruling us’. It also made it impossible for the British to impose power against widespread Indian resistance.40

  The conditions in which this shrinking number was expected to hold on to power stayed bad. Rural protest movements spread. For the first time, there was evidence of communist organization in the countryside. Revolt was fuelled by the continuation of high prices, and the failure of living standards for the poorest to improve after the end of the war. ‘The grim spectre of impending famine’ once again caused the Viceroy to beg for Gandhi’s help preserving peace and social order in February 1946. Gandhi was as hostile to class war as the British. To stave off social breakdown, he spoke against hoarding and urged the middle classes to make sacrifices so ‘that the poor may live’. To stop crisis people needed to curb their needs and desires, he said. ‘We must’, Gandhi urged his countrymen after meeting the Viceroy’s private secretary, ‘economize like misers.’41

  Most alarmingly for the British, protest grew once again, spreading now to significant parts of the imperial regime’s armed forces for the first time. To the surprise of many British officers, the military stayed ‘loyal’ throughout the war, but that changed in 1946. In February, a revolt took place on board ships of the Royal Indian Navy moored in Bombay harbour. The mutiny began in protest against poor food and the arrest of a rating for scrawling ‘Quit India’ on the side of one ship. As in 1857, violence escalated as men heard about the punishment of others. Rumours (which were untrue) circulated that sailors had been fired on. Using ships’ radios to communicate, the rebellion spread to seventy-eight ships and twenty shore establishments, involving 20,000 sailors in total. Sailors hoisted the flags of Congress, the Muslim League and the Communist Party together, but only the communists supported the rebellion. It was not the guns of the imperial regime, but the words of nationalist leaders which encouraged the rebels to back down. Gandhi’s great Gujarati ally Vallabhbhai Patel went to Bombay and persuaded the rebels that independence would happen more quickly if they submit. When residents of Bombay rioted in support, they were met by British soldiers from four regiments, aided by armoured cars. Two hundred and thirty-three demonstrators were killed in the violence. A socialist British soldier complained that the brutality was caused by British soldiers’ frustration about not being demobilized. Many of the mutineers were arrested and dismissed from the navy, but not punished further.42

  The prospect of famine again, the likelihood of India-wide revolt and the loss of British officers’ ‘heart’ to rule, made the regime in Delhi desperate to hand over authority to an Indian government at the centre as soon as it could. The newly elected Labour government in London was committed to a quick transfer of power, too. In London, the new Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin worried that the Labour Party would be perceived as weak if it transferred power too hastily. But the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had a long history of supporting Indian self-government. There was a significant body of Labour opinion in favour of ‘the recognition of full Indian national rights’, as one group of parliamentarians put it. The King’s speech in July 1945 promised the ‘early realisation of full self-government’. The question for the British government was not whether to go but how to exit with ‘honour’ and ‘dignity’.

  Elections were held in India in December 1945 and January 1946, and seemed to confirm the division of India between two camps. Congress won an overwhelming majority, with the Muslim League capturing 75 per cent of the Muslim vote, enough to rule two out of India’s four Muslim majority regions, Bengal and Sind. The division occurred between radically different attitudes about how power should be configured in the future. Congress claimed to be the unified voice of a single, progressive India. It ‘included in its fold the members of all religions an
d communities in India’, the then Congress President Maulana Azad wrote in July 1946, and that meant it thought it had the right to rule alone. ‘The link that has brought all these various groups and communities together . . . is the passionate desire for national independence, economic advance, and social equality,’ Azad went on. With a sense of the need for a strong coordinating power to plan India’s ‘progress’ from poverty to prosperity, the majority of Congress politicians believed India needed a strong central government. Its ‘passionate desire’ to centralize national power was inconsistent with sharing authority at the centre. But its links to business leaders, and its deep-rooted organizational structures everywhere apart from Bengal and Punjab, meant its claims needed to be taken seriously.43

  By 1946, the Muslim League had pulled together many different groups in India alienated from this Congress vision of centralized state power. Its coalition was disparate, made up of communities which otherwise would have been rivals. It brought together big rural landlords in Punjab, resentful of the way grain was requisitioned and rationed during the war; impoverished Muslim peasants in Bengal, hostile to the continued attempts at domination by largely Hindu zamindars; sufi saints in Sind, opposed to more orthodox, centralizing Islamic clergy who tended to support Congress. Unlike Congress with its central committee meetings and annual Congress, the League was incapable of mediating antagonisms between its different constituencies. It could not contain conflict between Shia and Sunni in north India, for example. All that united the League was a shared fear about ‘the tyranny of the Hindu majority’ if Congress came to power. But that was enough to allow its support to expand during and after the war. As a village headman from Punjab put it when interviewed in 1946, ‘If there were no League, the Hindus would get the government and take away our land.’44