India's War

by Srinath Raghavan

  The government was taken aback. After being placed on ice for over a year, the report was rejected on the grounds that it had exceeded its remit. But realizing the need to mollify the Indians, the government held out minor concessions, such as increasing the number of places for Indians at Sandhurst from ten to twenty-five. The nationalists were left cold. Motilal Nehru asserted that the term Indianization was a misnomer: ‘The Army is ours; we have to officer our own Army; there is no question of Indianizing there. What we want is to get rid of the Europeanization of the Army.’66 The constitutional report prepared by the Congress under his leadership in 1928 also called for accelerated Indianization.

  By 1930, seventy-seven KCIOs had been commissioned into the army. So, in April 1931, the viceroy announced the extension of Indianization from eight units to a full combat division of fifteen units. An Indian Military College Committee, chaired by the commander-in-chief, submitted its report later that summer. The committee recommended the establishment of an Indian Military College, with an annual intake of sixty cadets for a three-year programme. On passing out, they would be called Indian Commissioned Officers (ICOs). The Royal Indian Military Academy was opened in Dehradun in October 1932. But it had an annual intake of only forty cadets. Less than half of these would be selected by open competition; the remainder were reserved for VCOs and the princely states’ troops.

  Through the rest of the decade, Indianization proceeded at a leisurely pace. As war clouds gathered, the CLA passed a resolution in September 1938 calling for a committee to recommend ways of increasing Indianization. The government responded by appointing one led by the chief of the general staff, Auchinleck, to examine the issue. After interviewing several KCIOs and ICOs, Auchinleck was inclined towards the Indians’ viewpoint, but before he could set down his recommendations, war broke out in Europe.67

  The commander-in-chief, General Robert Cassels, was prominent among the conservatives, however. In March 1940, a study commissioned by him to assess the requirements of the expanding army recommended that Indian officers should not be sent to units officered solely by the British. This would have an undesirable impact ‘not only on the efficiency of such units but might be likely to prejudice the future requirement of British officers’. Clearly, old assumptions died hard. Nor did the study recommend the Indianization of more units. It merely suggested that the Indians now being given Emergency Commissions could be absorbed in garrison and administrative units.68

  Cassels produced a plan that he hoped would mitigate the challenge posed by the growing number of Indian officers. His solution was to fix a high ratio of British to Indian officers in the army and plan accordingly for recruitment. Any further acceleration of Indianization, he warned the viceroy, would ‘inevitably result in ruining the Indian Army as an instrument of war’.69 The upshot of this was that the average number of officers in units had dropped to desperately low levels by 1941. Only after Cassels’ departure from office and the appointment of Auchinleck as commander-in-chief did the army adopt a rational policy towards Indian officers. From January 1942, there was marked upturn in the number of Indian officers – right through to the end of the war. During the same period, the ratio of British to Indian officers fell sharply.

  Indianization during the War

  Date Indian Officers Ratio of British to Indian Officers

  1 October 1939 396 10.1:1

  1 January 1940 415 9.7:1

  1 January 1941 596 12:1

  1 January 1942 1,667 8.3:1

  1 January 1943 3,676 6.9:1

  1 January 1944 6,566 4.5:1

  1 January 1945 7,546 4.2:1

  1 September 1945 8,340 4.1:1

  Source: Gautam Sharma, Nationalisation of the Indian Army 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1996), p. 184.

  The recruitment of officers was a two-stage process. Initially the volunteers were screened by their local Provincial Selection Board. Those who got past this were then interviewed by the Central Selection Board of the General Headquarters. Initially, the army used rather informal techniques for officer recruitment. K. V. Krishna Rao – future chief of the Indian army – was among the youngsters who made it to the second stage. There he was quizzed on general questions about the war and at greater length about his passion for cricket: ‘how a leg-break was bowled, what a late cut was, what position was known as gully and so on’. Satisfied with his replies, the chairman of the board remarked: ‘Well, Mr. Rao, I hope you will get to play plenty of cricket in the Army.’70 A successful Jewish volunteer, J. F. R. ‘Jake’ Jacob, was asked in his interview in mid-1941: ‘Do you shoot games?’ Jacob replied, ‘No sir, I don’t shoot games, I shoot goals.’ There were peals of laughter round the table and no further questions.71

  The officers so recruited went through a five-month crash course at Dehradun or the new officer training schools at Belgaum and Mhow. By 1943, the rapid Indianization of the officer corps began to raise questions about the quality of the volunteers. This led to the adoption of a more ‘scientific’ system based on applied psychology – one that aimed at selecting men fitted by temperament and character for the duties of an officer. To attract suitable candidates, the army offered such incentives as the reservation of a percentage of appointments in government services for retired officers. Age and educational qualifications were relaxed. Propaganda was stepped up in schools and colleges. Teams of officers travelled around showing films depicting the life of an officer and interviewing potential candidates prior to the formal selection process. Yet, 50 to 65 per cent of the volunteers were weeded out by the Provincial Selection Boards. Of the rest, almost 75 per cent were rejected by the GHQ Central Selection Board.72

  The army, in short, was unable to attract the best talent. Most of those who signed up saw it simply as an avenue of employment. As one Indian officer cheerfully confessed, ‘Hats off to the University for granting me the degree but I think a degree of the Punjab University is not worth much.’73 There were only a few officers like A. M. Bose – nephew of the distinguished scientist J. C. Bose – who joined the army because they ‘wanted to do my bit to fight the Nazis’.74 Why did the best men not volunteer in adequate numbers? While there may have been a variety of reasons at the individual level, collectively high school and college students were strongly drawn to the nationalist movement. As Krishna Rao recalled, ‘Whenever a great leader such as Mahatma Gandhi visited, most of the students used to cut classes and attend the public meetings, as volunteers’.75 Indeed, students were in most places the backbone of the Quit India revolt in 1942 and went to prison in droves. Given the political deadlock during the war, the best and brightest seem to have chosen not to volunteer.

  For all its problems, recruiting men was the easier part of mobilizing India. Rather more difficult was gearing up the Indian economy for the exigencies of war. Very simply, India was a desperately poor country. Between 1900 and 1939, per capita income in India grew by a mere 0.42 per cent. And during the inter-war period, per capita income was actually stagnant.76 The dismal economic performance between the wars stemmed from a combination of a sharp increase in population growth and the stagnation of the largest sector (accounting for almost half) of the Indian economy, agriculture. The latter, in turn, occurred for various reasons: lack of an increase in cultivated areas; an inability to improve productivity per acre; and, above all, the slump in global demand for agricultural products, particularly during the Great Depression. The Indian government’s refusal to devalue the rupee, especially after Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931, made economic recovery extremely slow, halting and painful.77

  At the same time, India was also a significant industrial power outside the Western world, not incomparable in scale with Japan and the Soviet Union. During the previous century, India – very like other colonized tropical countries – lacked well-developed capital and labour markets or the capacity to achieve a technological revolution. The colonial connection, however, did help India surmount these obstacles to industrializa
tion by drawing on British capital, investment and trading networks. The principal beneficiaries of this were those industries, pre-eminently textiles, where India had a relatively strong resource cost advantage. Capital industries like machine tools and chemicals failed to take off since they needed much higher levels of capital and technology than, say, textile or steel mills.78

  The First World War underscored both the utility of India as a manufacturing base and its limitations. Although the Indian government was granted some leeway to pursue an industrial policy, especially on tariffs, London also sought to protect British goods in the Indian market. In consequence, Indian industry grew more by expansion than diversification. Additional factories in cotton and jute textiles, iron and steel, cement and sugar, paper and matches sprang up across India, especially outside the traditional industrial cities of Calcutta and Bombay. During the inter-war years, while the economy as a whole stagnated, manufacturing output grew annually by almost 4.7 per cent.79 Nevertheless, the squeezing of rural India’s purchasing power during this period left industry facing a vicious cycle of high costs, low prices and insufficient effective demand. All told, by 1939 Indian industry had limited capability to contribute to the manifold requirements of modern war.

  Unsurprisingly, India’s arms industry was rather rudimentary. The government had only six ordnance factories, which by 1938 produced barely enough military equipment to meet the needs of a peacetime force for internal security duties. In 1936–37, India imported arms worth Rs. 100.5 million – the bulk of them from Britain. There was no private arms industry. Nor did the configuration of Indian industries allow the government to expand the indigenous production of armaments. Although India produced 1.55 million tons of steel in 1936–37, it still had to import an additional 6 per cent of its own production level to meet the overall demand. India relied even more heavily on imports of aluminium. Worse, there was no production of aluminium in ingots and finished forms. Further, India had no domestic automobile manufacturing capability – almost 82 per cent of its cars were imported from Britain, the United States and Canada – never mind any aircraft industry.80

  The Indian and British governments were aware of these problems prior to the outbreak of war. Even as India was called on to defend its traditional sphere of influence, strategic planners in India sounded a note of caution. A modernization committee led by Auchinleck submitted its report on 10 November 1938. The committee bluntly observed that India had ‘neither private armament firms nor those basic industries, such as chemical and optical industries, which are essential to the production of armaments’. The burden would, therefore, have to fall on the government’s ordnance factories. Yet the government could not, with its ‘strictly limited financial resources’, afford to invest adequately to attain self-sufficiency – not least because the peacetime requirement and output would be rather low. Even if it did so, India would be heavily reliant on imports of raw materials as well as a range of components, especially for automobiles and aircraft. Despite these grim conclusions, the committee recommended expanding the ordnance factories to produce more light machine guns, field artillery and ammunition. Key ingredients such as cordite, trinitrotoluene (TNT) and amatol must also be manufactured in the ordnance factories. In addition, these factories should develop the capacity for the maintenance and replacement of certain types of equipment – heavy artillery guns and ammunition, aeroplane bombs – that would otherwise have to be imported from Britain. This programme of modernization was envisaged over a five-year period.81

  The Chatfield committee, which submitted its report on 30 January 1939, echoed these suggestions. It held that India ought to become ‘in all major respects self-sufficient in munitions in time of war’. This self-sufficiency, however, ‘cannot be complete, and it is not proposed to provide for the manufacture of those types of warlike stores … where the article is of so complicated a character as to make the installation of the necessary plant disproportionately uneconomical’. The Chatfield committee also ruled out the possibility of enlisting private, indigenous enterprise. Even with the Tata Steel Works – the largest producer of steel in India – it felt that there was ‘little chance of satisfactory arrangements being made … for the installation of special plant for meeting possible military requirements in war’. The best course was to augment the capacity of the ordnance factories.82

  The Chatfield report’s description of the state of Indian industry was reasonably accurate. Not so its assumptions about the limits of industrial potential and the role of private enterprise in armaments production. The course of events from 1940 onwards – and especially the entry of Italy and Japan into the war – would gradually compel the Indian government to cast aside these assumptions. Yet the initial conservatism proved immensely frustrating for Indian businessmen.

  After the years of depression, Indian business naturally welcomed the prospect of expansion and the opportunities to profit by the war. Until the outbreak of war, many major Indian industries were faced with excess capacity: over 40 per cent of the total production of sugar and cement lay unsold. The textile industry, for instance, had hit a plateau by the late 1930s. Of the 389 equipped cotton mills, 22 were idle by August 1939. Not a single new mill started production in the western Indian hub of Ahmedabad after 1932.83 Going by the experience of the Great War, Indian industry expected an immediate boom triggered by government purchases of a range of commodities. They proved prescient – up to a point.

  In the last quarter of 1939, for instance, many textile mills were able to clear their accumulated stocks. The Delhi Cloth Mills (DCM), owned by Sir Shri Ram, sold all its stock of 4.83 million lbs by the end of the year. In early 1940, however, the situation was abruptly reversed. With the fall of the Low Countries and France, Indian agricultural exports to Europe suddenly dwindled. This, in turn, severely curtailed the purchasing power of rural India, resulting in a slump in agricultural prices that lasted till the end of 1941.84 Industry was affected not only by the ensuing drop in demand, but also by the fact that some players had accumulated stocks of raw materials that were now cheaper. Big players like DCM found themselves having to compete with new mills that could purchase cotton at lower prices. Indeed, in 1939–40, Shri Ram could make a net profit only 4.9 per cent higher than the previous year.85

  These problems were compounded by developments on the political front. The resignation of the Congress ministries and the ensuing stand-off with the government put the industrialists in an awkward spot. On the one hand, they wanted to make the most of the opportunities opened up by the war. A group of businessmen in Calcutta – including the future magnate Kailash Chandra (K. C.) Mahindra – pondered ways to ensure ‘closer cooperation’ with the government and to convince it of the ‘potentialities of India particularly in relation to Bengal’s engineering capacity’.86 Their concerns were typical of the entire Indian business community. On the other hand, a powerful section of industry vocally supported the nationalist movement, especially the Congress.

  The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) was set up as a pan-Indian body in 1927 by the leading lights of Indian capitalism: Ghanshyam Das (G. D.) Birla of Calcutta, Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas of Bombay and Shri Ram of Delhi. FICCI reflected the aspiration of the dominant Indian business communities to create an autonomous national arena of capital accumulation. This ambition arose from the fact that in the post-war period the imperial connection – which had hitherto provided an integrated international market for capital, commodities and labour – was not advancing their interests any longer. In the following years, these men worked closely with the top leadership of the Congress, adopting a shrewd anti-colonial posture without forsaking their commercial interests.

  Following the onset of war, the industrialists sought to reconcile the imperatives of co-operating with the government and supporting the Congress. Initially, it seemed easy. As soon as war broke out, Birla cabled Churchill that the ‘sympathies of most of us who belong to the Gandh
i school of thought are whole-heartedly with Britain’. The Congress ministries’ resignation and the subsequent deadlock caught him off guard. For the best part of the next two years, Birla cast about for ways to bridge the gap between the positions of the Congress and the viceroy.87

  Thakurdas similarly believed that India’s interests would be best served by backing Britain and its allies. He too sought to close the gulf between the government and the Congress. At a public meeting organized by the governor of Bombay in July 1940, he said that the

  Congress, though not actively cooperating with the government in the manner it would have liked to, has done nothing in any way to obstruct or slacken the pace or nature of help that India can give … The commercial community in India strongly feel that this attitude of Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress should not only not be under-valued but be appreciated at its correct worth.88

  Shri Ram wanted to go further and impress upon the viceroy the need to constitute a national government with the major political parties.89 In a statement prepared in June 1940, FICCI ‘emphatically urge[d] the Government to utilise the present opportunity for establishing such key industries as those for manufacturing aircraft, ships and automobiles under Indian ownership, control and management’. The statement went on to warn the government that any such plan would be ‘frustrated, unless the policy and administration of defence are under a popular Minister’.90