By this time, people of all classes who could leave the city were doing so. ‘Railway stations became gateways to heaven for the city-folk’, wrote Pudhumaipithan. All available modes of transport were pressed into service: coal-fired buses and bullock carts were departing the city as packed as the trains. The working poor fled to their villages or nearby towns. Rickshaw-pullers abandoned Madras for adjacent towns like Kanjeevaram, Dindivanam and Vellore. Even the ubiquitous beggars disappeared. As the writer A. K. Chettiar mordantly observed, ‘Beggars can survive only if there are people in the city.’46
Buzzing commercial areas like the Flower Market, the Round Tana and the China Bazar were entirely deserted. Firms with offices and warehouses near the port shifted into ostensibly safer parts of the inner city. The university library and printing presses were moved out of Madras. As elsewhere, houses emptied in the city and drove down the rents. And they soared so high in the interior districts that the government had to warn house owners against charging exploitative rents.
A distinctive feature of Madras was the ‘mess’: an establishment that offered cheap accommodation and food to migrant workers. Many of these messes emptied out during the panic. Those who stayed on in them suffered from serious shortages of milk and food. An intriguing development during this period was the opening of Chinese restaurants in the city. Many Chinese who were formerly engaged in the sale of silk, lace and other products from China and Burma found themselves without supplies and a vanishing clientele. In an enterprising move, they opened several restaurants serving Chinese food – restaurants that continued to function when others shut down, and so turned a tidy profit. This is all the more interesting because Chinese restaurants were mushrooming in other parts of India too: Bombay, Delhi, Lahore, Jubbulpore, as well as most other major civilian and military stations.47 Another lasting culinary consequence of the war was the rava idli – a variant of the staple south Indian breakfast that substituted semolina for the increasingly scarce rice.48
As official restrictions encroached on everyday life, evacuated Madras acquired its own zing. A. K. Chettiar nicely captured it:
Hundreds of tanks came out in procession. Thousands of small explosions occurred. Bomb trenches were dug. Visiting the beach after 6 pm was prohibited. Wild animals in the Zoo were shot. Chinese restaurants opened. Dancing halls proliferated. Talcum powder became costlier … Use of electricity was restricted.49
By May 1942, as the Japanese threat receded, government departments returned to Madras. Gradually, the people came back too. Schools and colleges opened as usual after the summer vacation. This was observable elsewhere too. Workers slowly returned to their factories, as did traders to their bourses. Families came back to the cities they had fled some months ago. A semblance of normality was in the air. But the political atmosphere was crackling with tension.
Throughout the summer of 1942, Gandhi and the Congress were casting about for ways to regain the political initiative. To a meeting of the Working Committee in late April, Gandhi sent a draft resolution stressing the ‘eternal conflict between Indian and British interests’ and stating that India bore ‘no enmity either towards Japan or towards any other nation’. Gandhi, in fact, had no illusions about the Japanese. ‘It is a folly to suppose that aggressors can ever be benefactors’, he wrote in his newspaper. ‘The Japanese may free India from the British yoke, but only to put in their own instead … I have no enmity against the Japanese, but I cannot contemplate with equanimity their designs on India.’50 Unlike Nehru, who openly advocated preparing for a guerrilla war in the event of a Japanese invasion, Gandhi called for non-violent non-cooperation. Eventually, the Working Committee adopted Nehru’s draft with its language of uncompromising anti-fascism.
After the meeting, while Nehru left for a break in the hills of Kullu, Gandhi stayed on in Bombay for a few weeks. There he saw for himself the stifling wartime atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Rajendra Prasad and Rajagopalachari kept him informed of the flight of population in eastern and southern in India. Although he was initially exercised about the American troops pouring into India, Gandhi came round to the view that they should be welcomed if India was declared independent and the Allies signed a treaty with the independent government to fight Japanese aggression against India and China. This was his message to President Roosevelt too.
Meeting in Wardha from 6 July to 14 July 1942, the Working Committee discussed a resolution demanding the termination of British rule in India. If the demand were not met, a civil disobedience movement would be launched. The following days found Gandhi in an unusually militant mood. He was certain that the ‘Allies are in for defeat this time if they do not do this initial act of justice [granting India freedom]’. ‘We are betraying a woeful cowardice,’ he declared. ‘I do not mind the blood-bath in which Europe is plunged.’51 This did not mean he endorsed violence, though. Nor did it imply any softening of his stance towards Japanese aggression. ‘India as an independent Power’, he insisted, ‘wants to play … a decisive part in favour of the Allies.’52 All the same, ‘some form of conflict was inevitable to bring home the truth to the British mind’.53
The All-India Congress Committee met in Bombay on 7 August to consider the Wardha resolution. After two intense days of discussion, the ‘Quit India’ resolution was adopted by an overwhelming majority. Gandhi announced to the Committee that he would not settle for anything short of complete freedom for India. He offered the Congressmen a mantra: ‘Do or Die’. At the same time, he said that ‘If the Government keep me free, I will spare you the trouble of filling the jails. I will not put on the government the strain of maintaining a large number of prisoners at a time when it is in trouble.’54 Gandhi evidently did not intend to force an immediate showdown.
The Raj, however, was rattled by the slogan of ‘Quit India’. The government’s response to a possible mass movement was under discussion throughout the summer. At a security conference held in June 1942 with civil and military officials, the consensus was to crush the Congress even before any campaign could be launched. The home member, Sir Reginald Maxwell, insisted that time was ripe for a final reckoning with the Congress. Amery, the secretary of state for India, was prepared to grant considerable leeway to the viceroy in advance. After the Wardha meetings of the Congress, he felt that the Indian government should not be placed in the impossible position of the apocryphal railway authorities in Calcutta: ‘Tiger on platform eating station master. Please wire instructions.’ The war cabinet held back for some weeks. Eventually on 9 August, the entire leadership of the Congress was swooped into custody. Amery had originally wanted to send Gandhi to Uganda, to join another sub-continental prisoner – former premier U Saw of Burma. Concerns about Gandhi’s health, however, led to him being held in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona.55
The arrest of Gandhi and the other Congressmen triggered the most serious popular uprising in India since the Rebellion of 1857. The connected arc of revolt stretched from east to west via north India. Although the unrest began in urban centres, it soon spread to the countryside. Local and regional particularities apart, the intensity of the Quit India revolt essentially stemmed from the combination of two factors: the levels of panic experienced earlier in the year and the strength of the local Congress organization. Thus the movement was strongest in Bombay, United Provinces, Bihar, Bengal and Assam. In Madras, however, the provincial Congress committee, led by Rajagopalachari, was opposed to the Quit India resolution. Hence, the protests in this province paled in comparison to the uprising elsewhere.
Although the revolt claimed the imprimatur of Gandhi, it rapidly escalated into a major violent confrontation with the Raj. Government offices and installations were attacked. Networks of communication – telegraph, railway lines, bridges – were systematically disrupted. The scale of the rebellion in parts of eastern India approached that of a fully fledged insurgency. The rebels in these areas deliberately targeted the lines of supply for the Allied troops. As a popular ditty in eastern United Pr
ovinces went: ‘Hol-land khatam, Po-land khatam, / Eng-land ki aayil baari na?’ – ‘Holland’s gone, Poland’s gone, / Isn’t it England’s turn anon?’56 The government estimated that the rebels had fully or partially destroyed 208 police stations, 749 government buildings, 332 railway stations, and 945 post and telegraph offices. They had also derailed 66 trains, sabotaged railway lines in 411 places and severed 12,000 telephone lines.57
Despite its intensity, the Quit India movement was limited in many ways. Not only was it confined to specific – if crucial – regions of India, but it drew on a limited social and political base. With prominent Congress leaders in jail, the leadership of the movement passed, in the first instance, to students. The fact that many of them came from rural families facilitated the spread of the revolt to the countryside. The students as well as the peasants that participated in the uprising typically belonged to upper-caste landholding families or the dominant peasant communities that had swung behind the Congress in the past decade. Groups on the margins of Hindu society, especially the depressed classes and the tribal peoples, appear to have stayed almost entirely aloof. Leaders of these groups, especially Ambedkar, wanted to leverage the war effort to advance their own interests – just as the Raj sought to attract these groups for the expanding war effort. The participation of Muslims was also conspicuously limited. Jinnah had denounced the Quit India resolution as
the culminating point in the policy and programme of Mr. Gandhi and his Hindu Congress of blackmailing the British and coercing them to concede a system of Government and transfer of power to that Government which would establish a Hindu raj immediately under the aegis of the British bayonet.58
The Communist Party of India, too, condemned the uprising as a grave error. Following the German attack on the Soviet Union, the CPI had shifted yet again to an anti-fascist ‘line’ in support of the war. Realizing the importance of taking in any ally, however far-removed politically, the British cabinet had allowed New Delhi to lift the ban on the CPI only weeks before August 1942.59
The Quit India movement turned the political fortunes of the Congress. The party leadership was forced to cool its heels in prison for the remainder of the war, leaving the field open for anti-Congress forces to build and mobilize their own bases of support. None did this better than Jinnah and the Muslim League. The death in December 1942 of the powerful premier of Punjab, Sikandar Hayat Khan, greatly strengthened Jinnah’s hand. Thenceforth, he was able steadily to tighten his grip on the Muslim majority provinces and so bolster his claim to speak for all Muslims of India, as well as his demand for ‘Pakistan’. The Raj naturally welcomed the flourishing of these countervailing forces to the Congress.
More immediately, New Delhi was pleased with the performance of the Indian army during the Quit India revolt. In dealing with the uprising, the Indian army jettisoned many of the tenets of action in ‘aid to the civil power’ that had been adopted over the previous two decades: deterrence, limited force, no use of heavy weapons or other technology, civilian and legal control over the actual use of force.60 In late 1942, at the moment of the Raj’s greatest peril, the army was allowed to do away with these restrictions on using force against the people. Aircraft were used to machine-gun large crowds; mortars and gas were employed against rebels and mobs. The government introduced the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance, which allowed orders for the use of force to kill to be given by an officer of the rank of captain or above. The requirement of authorization to fire from a civilian magistrate was practically done away with.
In his novel The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott would sketch a memorable scene of the army being deployed to disperse a crowd: banners of warning held aloft; magistrate in tow; troops aiming below the knee. Scott was not in India during the Quit India revolt and he seems to have gone by the written doctrine in the army. The reality in late 1942 was very different. As a young British officer wrote:
We were in one of the worst areas of the whole country … The damage done to communications and govt. property was enormous and our job was to get the damage repaired and communications going again by doing extensive road and railway patrols … we were given a free hand, pretty well, to use force where necessary without the usual rigmarole of getting a magistrate’s sanction written or otherwise.61
The army noted with satisfaction that even new Indian units, such as troops of the 1st Battalion of the Mahar Regiment raised from the depressed classes, did not flinch at firing on their countrymen – and indeed were ‘very effective’.62
Military intelligence picked up sporadic attempts by Congress sympathizers to undermine the loyalty of the Indian troops. Soon after the revolt broke out, it seemed to evoke little interest among the Indian soldiers. According to one intelligence report, the reactions of Indian troops in the fighting units fell into three groups. The first, and by far the largest, group appeared to be uninterested. The second, a smaller group, felt that a successful or even partially successful Congress campaign could create problems back home. As one NCO put it, ‘I do not know what harm this wicked destruction is doing to the Sirkar; I do know that it is causing much misery to my family.’ The third, and smallest group, was ‘looking ahead to the period after the war, and wonders how the interests of Indian soldiers were going to be protected’. Even the more politically conscious recruits in technical and supporting services did not indicate much interest in the Congress’s call.63
As the rebellion progressed over the following weeks, the army grew more concerned about its impact on the troops. There was a spike in the number of recruits failing to turn up at regimental centres for training. Soldiers travelling on leave reported that they were accosted by civilians and forced to strip off their uniforms. Troops in an Indian artillery battery conspired to desert en masse – only to be checked in time and court-martialled. By early October 1942, military intelligence felt that ‘the cumulative influence of the present political ferment in India must consciously, or unconsciously, affect the army in general, and the ICO [Indian Commissioned Officer] in particular, to an increasing extent’.64
Nevertheless, the fact remained that the Indian army had held during the crucial weeks of the revolt. Churchill was understandably smug when he told the Commons in September 1942: ‘It is fortunate, indeed, that the Congress Party has no influence whatever with the martial races … So far as matters have gone up to the present, they have revealed the impotence of the Congress Party either to seduce or even sway the Indian Army.’65
He was right. Attempts at suborning the loyalties of the Indian army would come from elsewhere.
12
Indian National Armies
The most serious attempt at turning the sword-arm of the Raj against it was mounted by Subhas Bose. The story of his Indian National Army that fought alongside the Japanese has become the stuff of legend. Yet the army that Bose raised in Malaya and Singapore was neither his first such attempt, nor indeed was it the first Indian National Army (INA).
The idea of using Indian soldiers against Britain was initially floated by Bose in his meeting with Ribbentrop on 1 May 1941. He suggested recruiting Indian prisoners of war who had surrendered to the Axis forces in North Africa, claiming that these soldiers would be promptly ready to fight against England. The presence of an Indian unit on the German side would have an extremely strong propaganda impact on the rest of the Indian army. The British, in turn, would lose confidence in these forces and would not be able to deploy them without reservation.1
In his detailed plan of work submitted to the German Foreign Office later that month, Bose proposed to organize a ‘Free Indian Legion’. Made up of volunteers from prisoners of war, the Indian Legion would eventually join an Axis expeditionary corps to be sent to India. Bose planned to prepare a ‘big military campaign in the independent Tribal Territory between Afghanistan and India’. Here a military and propaganda centre would be established for the penetration of India. Bose envisaged building an airfield and a logistics network with the he
lp of European advisers. A training centre would also be established to prepare Indian officers and men for the future army of liberation.2
Bose’s military plans may have been wishful thinking, but his move to set up an Indian Legion was well timed. In his opening offensive in North Africa, Rommel had netted part of an Indian motorized brigade at Mechili in Libya. The Indian prisoners of war were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. At the end of April 1941, a group of 1,000 Indian soldiers and 37 officers were interrogated by the German SS in their Italian prisoner-of-war camp at Derna in Cyrenaica. The Germans thought that they could detect a strong anti-British attitude among the Indians, which stemmed from the Indians’ belief that they were being unfairly treated by British officers in the distribution of food in the camp. An officer with nationalist leanings would recall that ‘the discriminatory attitude of the British undermined whatever of the Indian loyalty to the crown was left by those days’. An Indian VCO had allegedly gone so far as to write a letter to Mussolini, offering to organize Indian soldiers in captivity to fight with the Axis forces.3
In any event, the SS discerned an opportunity and sought the transfer of these soldiers to Germany in order to use them for anti-British propaganda. The Italians, however, refused to hand them over, hoping to exploit the Indian soldiers for their own propaganda purposes. Meanwhile, Bose’s proposal wafted its way through the German government. The High Command was averse to hastily drafting prisoners of war and deploying them as envisaged by Bose; it insisted on a careful programme of screening and training. Organizing an effective military force, the High Command held, would take time and effort. Bose reluctantly fell in with these views.4
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