Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  Gandhi’s strategy of satyagraha rested on the belief that an adversary would respond with pangs of conscience to evidence of the suffering he caused. Bose, in contrast, maintained that Britons were more likely to respond to material weapons than to spiritual ones. Bengalis had been excluded from the army “on the ground that they were not sufficiently warlike or brave,” Bose declared; and Viceroy Curzon had added injury to insult by summoning armed police to disperse peaceable protestors. “In sheer despair, young men took to the bomb and the revolver,” Bose asserted. The offspring of upper-class families had begun to assassinate British officials and, on the streets of Calcutta, youth responded with their fists to racial insults. And slowly an “impression gained ground that for the first time the Bengalee was being respected by the Britisher,” Bose concluded. Violence demonstrated that the people of Bengal were not “a race of cowards.”47

  On July 2, 1940, the day before the announced march, Bose was arrested under the Defence of India Act and taken to a Calcutta prison. After four months of watching political developments from behind bars, he resolved to not spend the rest of the war thus incapacitated and devised an escape plan. On November 29, he started fasting, and in a few days grew dangerously weak. “One individual may die for an idea but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives,” he wrote Bengal’s government. “Today I must die, so that India may live and may win freedom and glory.” Taking the warning that Bose’s death in custody could make him a highly inconvenient martyr, on December 5 local authorities released him to a loose house arrest.48

  Once at home with his family, Bose disappeared from view for two weeks, pretending to be sick while secretly growing a beard to use as a disguise. His attempts to free India by political means having been thwarted, he had formulated a fresh goal: to seek military aid from Britain’s enemies, the Axis powers. Such an opportunity as a world war was not to be squandered, he was certain. Early on January 17, 1941, Bose left his house dressed as a Muslim insurance agent, and a nephew drove him all the way to Bihar province, west of Bengal, where he boarded a train. After changing trains near Delhi, Bose finally disembarked in Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province. There he met up with a Pakhtun associate and, decked in flowing turban and pajamas and hastily trained in tribal etiquette, he trekked with a guide over frozen mountain passes into Afghanistan.

  That nation, cursed by cartography, sat neutral and uneasy between two warring powers, the British Empire and the Soviet Union (which at the time was allied with Nazi Germany). Arriving in Kabul on January 27, Bose approached the Soviet embassy, which demonstrated no interest in him; the German embassy, which cabled to Berlin and awaited instructions for what seemed like forever; and finally the Italian embassy. An official there informed Rome that the newcomer was “intelligent, able, full of passion and without doubt the most realistic” of the Indian leaders. Bose was insisting that “if 50,000 men, Italian, German, or Japanese could reach the frontiers of India, the Indian army would desert, the masses would uprise and the end of English domination could be achieved in a very short time.” According to the Italian cable, India was the secret fount of British military power, and therefore it was essential that Bose be rendered all the help he needed to realize his grand plan. In early April 1941, Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Berlin in the guise of an Italian diplomat.49

  Bose had taken a car and a train into the Soviet Union and flown to the German capital from there. He was fortunate in this choice of route, because in March, after learning of his whereabouts and guessing his intentions, Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) had issued orders to assassinate him. The agents had assumed, however, that he would travel through Iran, Iraq, and Turkey to reach Germany. The War Diary of the SOE noted that Amery “was also interested” and would no doubt lend his support “to Bose being liquidated on Turkish territory” if necessary. Such a venture was diplomatically risky, because Turkey was neutral, but the Foreign Office consented to Bose being killed there. Given that the SOE was created by Churchill and was headed by Desmond Morton, one of his close associates, the order to kill Bose must have emanated from the very top.50

  IN HIS PRISON barracks in Midnapore, a coastal district in the southwestern corner of Bengal, twenty-nine-year-old Sushil Kumar Dhara thrilled to the news of Bose’s escape. “I was convinced that he’d gone toward Japan or Germany,” Dhara wrote in his autobiography. “If only he could get there, surely he would secure India’s freedom.” Like many others immersed in the independence struggle, Dhara regarded the enemies of Britain as his friends.51

  A village-level Congress worker like Dhara planned and executed acts of civil disobedience while otherwise living his life and pursuing a calling in social service. Dhara had been attending college in Calcutta when Gandhi had launched the satyagraha movement. He was on Gandhi’s select list of participants and, in the fall of 1940, had returned to Midnapore to await the word to launch his protest. In the meantime, one of Dhara’s duties was to beg for money from shopkeepers, collecting a coin here and a coin there until, at the end of an exhausting day, he might have a rupee to pay for food for himself and his co-workers. A rupee could buy a maund, or 37.4 kilograms, of coarse rice, and Dhara’s cell survived on around 25 rupees a month. Dhara did the cooking himself, boiling rice and lentils together and flavoring the mixture with a bit of clarified butter or a donated vegetable. Soon after his arrival in Midnapore, his seniors had begun to visit marketplaces and give anti-war speeches. One by one they had been arrested. When it was his turn, Dhara earned himself half a year in jail.52

  LIKE MANY OF his comrades, Sushil Dhara had joined the Congress Party a decade earlier, during the protest movement known as the Salt Rebellion. In the spring of 1930, Gandhi had embarked on a long, winding trek that had taken him to Dandi, Gujarat, on the west coast of India. Reaching the sea on April 6, he had waded into the surf, picked up a handful of water, and set it onto the beach to dry—symbolically defying the law. The Government of India had the exclusive right to manufacture and trade salt; and this monopoly, along with taxes, made the product hundreds of times more expensive than it would otherwise have been. The burden fell hardest on the poor, who lived by performing manual labor under a tropical sun, sweated profusely, and needed around fifteen grams of salt a day to stave off heatstroke.

  In the early eighteenth century, the coastal district of Midnapore had supplied salt to all of eastern India and Nepal, but it had since become dependent on salt imported from England. The teenage Dhara, sitting cross-legged in the dust near an old temple, just before the salt uprising, had listened wide-eyed as a Congress speaker had detailed the economic misadventure of India under colonial rule—and had been among the first to sign up. On April 6, 1930, thousands of protestors walked from the crumbling red-brick palace at Tamluk, the region’s most ancient town, to an inlet of the sea, there to boil water and make salt. From the second day onward, the police began to beat and jail the leaders of the movement, and Dhara, too, was soon under arrest.

  Prison turned out to be instructive. The indulgent Indian jailor permitted Dhara to visit restricted areas in the facility, where members of a revolutionary outfit gave the youth books on armed insurrection and spent hours indoctrinating him. “Gandhian thought had yet to leave much of a mark on me,” Dhara recounted. “So their message of power mesmerized me.” Everyone, including the English superintendent of the jail, seemed to treat these men, described as “terrorists,” with a respect that bordered on reverence—especially after the events of April 18, 1930. On that day, sixty-five rebels who called themselves the Indian Republican Army had seized control of a police armory and other strategic sites in Chittagong town in eastern Bengal. They had eventually retreated to a forested hill that the authorities had surrounded with troops and raked with machine-gun fire. An unknown number of the rebels had died there, while others had escaped into surrounding villages and were being hunted down.53

  Within weeks after the salt movement bega
n, all of Midnapore’s nationalist leaders were behind bars. But Bengal’s officials reported to the viceroy that every villager was making salt in his home: the entire populace had lost its fear of the law. The police took to punishing dissidents by setting fire to huts, cowsheds, and the occasional gola (mini-silo) full of grain. An Indian civil servant protested to his superior, District Magistrate James Peddie, that the local people were behaving in a nonviolent fashion. “This way, you will be provoking them into violence.”54 “That’s what I want,” replied Peddie, who had the power to adjust the level of force used by the police. “As long as they remain nonviolent it is very difficult for us. If they become violent, we can crush it in a day.” Eventually, however, he developed misgivings about the strategy he was meant to implement. One incident illustrated his doubts. When his train stopped at a station, a boy on the platform caught sight of him and called out a freedom slogan. Peddie rushed up and punched him in the face, shouting, “Will you now stop?”

  “Wait, let me catch my breath,” the boy gasped. “Then I’ll do it again.”

  “I never felt so small in my life as I did then,” Peddie confided to a friend. Soon after that encounter, the viceroy summoned all district officers to meet with him in Calcutta—but Peddie refused to go. “Ask his Excellency,” he instructed a colleague, “what more he expects me to do for his British Raj.”55

  In April 1931, James Peddie was shot dead by a revolutionary from a secretive cell in Midnapore town. Two other white district magistrates were also killed in quick succession. As a result, for the next decade only native civil servants, selected for loyalty to Crown and career, were appointed by the Raj to the most senior position in the district.

  Elsewhere in India, the uprising of 1930 surpassed that of 1920 in its pervasiveness and force. Peasants fled into neighboring princely states to avoid paying rent; women picketed liquor shops, from which the government earned a hefty revenue; and the middle class boycotted imported luxuries such as cigarettes, whose sales halved. In the North West Frontier Province, a charismatic pacifist named Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan inspired nonviolent protests, including a refusal to pay taxes. More than 200 of his followers were shot dead—but Hindu soldiers in a regiment from the Himalayan foothills refused to open fire on these unarmed Pakhtun farmers. On January 25, 1931, Viceroy Irwin released Gandhi from prison (where he had been for eight and a half months) and subsequently summoned him for discussions. In return for certain concessions, such as the right of villagers living near the coast to make salt, the liberation of nonviolent political prisoners, and a promise to invite the Congress for talks, Gandhi called off the movement.56

  In London, Winston Churchill charged the viceroy with craven capitulation. “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 organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor,” he told a conservative association in February 1931. As the chief spokesman for the Indian Empire Society, an association devoted to the preservation of the British Raj, Churchill would write and speak extensively on the topic over the next few years. The crux of his argument was that granting any power to a tiny “oligarchy” of Hindu politicians—the leaders of the Congress—would be a dereliction of duty to ordinary Indians. In his view, native politicians were incapable of rising above the confines of the communities to which they had been born; it took the distant Briton, who stood far above the fray, to adjudicate impartially among India’s quarreling castes. For the British Raj to abandon its responsibilities would be “an act of cowardice, desertion and dishonor,” Churchill argued, as well as “a hideous act of self-mutilation, astounding to every nation in the world.”57

  His furious efforts bore fruit. Gandhi, arriving in London in September 1931 to attend the promised conference, found himself facing princes, landlords, merchants, and representatives of various religious and ethnic groups from his homeland—all of whose concerns would have to be met before His Majesty’s Government could be confident that Indian self-government would not degenerate into a Hindu dictatorship. Virtually every representative demanded a separate electorate for his constituency, a privilege already enjoyed by Muslim politicians. (That is, every minority Indian would be forced to vote for someone of the same religious or ethnic persuasion.) Gandhi refused: the entrenchment of such divisions was anathema to the secular Congress.58 “Chief concrete result of the human Mahatma’s visit is that in London the price of goats and goat’s milk has gone up,” quipped Time magazine (after noting a goat whose milk Gandhi drank, and who had been labeled “Mahatma” at an agricultural show). By the time Gandhi returned empty-handed to India and called for a renewal of civil disobedience, Lord Irwin had been replaced by a new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, who took a harder line. Gandhi was rearrested on January 4, 1932, and within four months around 80,000 protestors would be jailed. As if to underline their power, the authorities increased the tax on salt, which during fiscal year 1932 yielded a record revenue of 102 million rupees. The Government of India had finally “begun to act sensibly,” Churchill noted with satisfaction. “I always said how easy it would be to crush Gandhi and the Congress.”59

  Dhara had been released from prison, thanks to Gandhi’s understanding with Irwin; he began to hide out with other Congress agitators in the countryside. They were well protected—by the conch shells possessed by many Hindu women in nearby villages. The women blew the shells during their evening pujo, or prayer, sending a long, melodious call resonating through the dusk. But when one of them spotted policemen passing by, she would blow the shell then, prompting mothers, wives, and daughters for miles around to relay a cacophonous warning. Except in the dead of night, the police had no hope of catching anyone by surprise.60

  In 1932, in a fresh act of resistance to the Raj, Midnapore’s householders started refusing to pay a small tax that maintained the village chowkidar, or watchman, who often doubled as a police informer. In response, parties of police—usually Muslims from northwestern India in largely Hindu Midnapore, divide and rule being the principle by which keepers of the law were assigned to different regions—established camps alongside the villages. In lieu of the tax of a few rupees, they confiscated cattle and jewelry worth thousands. The government also imposed a punitive tax to fund these police outposts. Villagers unfamiliar with English called it the pituni, or “beating,” tax because of how it was extracted.61

  Also in these years, the Great Depression overcame rural India. High grain prices in the 1920s had allowed some cultivators to accumulate savings in the form of gold or land, which had prompted an increase in taxes. Although the prices of wheat and rice began to slide in 1930, slashing farmers’ incomes, cultivators still owed taxes and other dues. Moneylenders (who, through a chain of refinancing arrangements, were ultimately beholden to banks) ran out of cash, refused additional credit, and instead forced peasants to pay up their debts—which they did by confiscating the gold bangles, earrings, and necklaces belonging to the family’s women. (The alternative was to sell land, which for a peasant was the last resort because it deprived the family of its cheapest source of food.)

  The secretary of state for India and the governor of the Bank of England controlled the colony’s monetary policy. They ensured that as much as possible of this “distress gold” flowed to the United Kingdom. In the United States, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stopped the export of the metal and used the country’s gold reserves to support the value of the currency, allowing him to inject money into the economy to revive it. Historian Dietmar Rothermund has written that had the British government in India been more responsive to the needs of the people, it similarly would have collected the distress gold and used it to finance projects to alleviate rural suffering. Instead, banks melted down 3.4 billion rupees (£255 million) worth of gold jewelry into bars and ship
ped it to London, helping to buttress its threatened position as a financial capital of the world. As a result, rural India was drained of its savings, leaving peasants defenseless against future economic shocks.62

  By the end of 1932, the civil disobedience movement was petering out. Also that year, the Government of India announced a so-called Communal Award: along with reserved seats in Parliament, every significant minority group would have a separate electorate. Gandhi, who was in prison, embarked on a fast until the leader of the Depressed Classes agreed to merge his constituency with the general Hindu electorate, in exchange for a larger number of reserved seats. When in 1935 His Majesty’s Government enacted into law the colony’s new constitution, Nehru charged that it “petrified” British rule in India by playing off different constituencies against one another. “The Act strengthened the alliance between the British Government and the princes, landlords, and other reactionary elements in India; it added to the separate electorates, thus increasing the separatist tendencies; it consolidated the predominant position of British trade, industry, banking, and shipping and . . . retained in British hands complete control over Indian finance, military, and foreign affairs,” Nehru would write in a history of India. The new political arrangement gave elected ministers certain responsibilities, such as in agriculture and education, but posed no bar that would keep India from being inducted, with or without its acquiescence, into World War II.63

  AFTER HAVING SERVED six months for his satyagraha against the war effort, Sushil Kumar Dhara emerged from prison in the spring of 1941 to find that the leader of his local Congress cell, a dedicated Gandhian named Kumar Chandra Jana, was still in prison. Jana’s wife was running the cell, and around this motherly figure had gathered a cluster of young women who were eager to join the fight. Most of these recruits had very little schooling, and it became Dhara’s pleasurable task to teach them poetry, the history of rebellions around the world, and the political ideas of Gandhi, Nehru, and Bose.64