India's War

by Srinath Raghavan

  an independent attitude with no marked alignment with any group. We should make it clear that we stand not only for Indian interests but, more especially, for the interests of peace and freedom everywhere and that we are not going to be dragged in the wake of power politics so far as we can help it. It is fitting especially now that there has been a change in the Government of India that India should play a much more independent role in foreign affairs.2

  Here was an adumbration of the idea of ‘non-alignment’ that would come to be closely associated with Nehru’s India. Yet India’s policy of non-alignment mattered in world politics only because of India’s potential value as an ally – one that had been amply demonstrated during the Second World War.

  Even as Nehru sought to position India as a major regional power in Asia, the Indian army was undergoing rapid retrenchment. Soon after the war ended, GHQ India expected the army to shrink from 2.5 million men to 700,000 by the end of 1946. This entailed, in the first instance, a major exercise in repatriating soldiers from various theatres back to India. Between the Japanese surrender and the end of April 1946 some 600,000 men and officers were demobilized at an average rate of 70,000 to 80,000 a month, and around 2,000 units were disbanded. If demobilization was slower than anticipated, it was not only due to the massive logistical challenges of bringing troops home. Rather, it also reflected the continuing military demands on India. In April 1946, the Indian army still had two brigades in Middle East; four divisions in Burma; three divisions in Malaya; four divisions in Indonesia; one division in Borneo and Siam; a brigade in Hong Kong; and two brigades in Japan. Over the next few months, repatriation and demobilization gathered pace. By October 1946, the Indian army had 800,000 men and officers. By April 1947, it stood close to 500,000 strong.3 So, as independence approached, India’s ability to project military power in Asia was increasingly circumscribed.

  The larger, unspoken assumption in Nehru’s strategic vision was, of course, the unity of India. Yet securing this was no longer easy. The interim government proved as unworkable as the rest of the Cabinet Mission’s plan. The Muslim League decided to join the government six weeks later, but continued to boycott the Constituent Assembly. Far from working as a coalition, the two parties were constantly at loggerheads with each other. Instead of acting as a bridge between the two sides, the interim government accentuated the gulf between them.

  Faced with the continued impasse and with the rapidly increasing communal violence and other unrest in the country, Wavell advocated a breakdown plan for a phased British withdrawal from India. As a consequence, an alarmed British government decided to recall him. On 20 February 1947, Prime Minister Attlee announced Lord Mountbatten’s appointment as viceroy. In deference to the latter’s wishes, Attlee also announced that the British would withdraw from India no later than June 1948.

  Developments at the provincial level imparted further momentum for the move towards partition. The Muslim League’s agitation in Punjab forced the resignation of the Unionist-led coalition on 2 March 1947.4 Now the Shiromani Akali Dal made it clear that the Sikhs would press for the partition of the Punjab. The province was soon engulfed in a spiral of violence and retaliation that would assume the form of ethnic cleansing as partition neared.

  By this time, influential sections of the Bengal Congress had begun advocating partition of the province. The ‘Great Calcutta Killings’ and the subsequent violence had marked a critical turning point. More importantly, the upper-caste Hindu Bhadralok saw partition as a means to do away with the dominance of Muslims in provincial politics and to secure their own primacy. Further, the Muslim League had managed to mobilize the support of the province’s largely Muslim peasantry against the landlords and money-lenders. This too threatened to undercut the Bhadralok rentiers, and gave impetus to their calls for partition. Some Bengal Congress leaders, such as Sarat Chandra Bose and Kiran Shankar Roy, reached an agreement with Muslim League leaders H. S. Suhrawardy and Abul Hashim on a united independent Bengal. Although Jinnah approved of it, the idea failed to take-off, owing to opposition from the Provincial Congress Committee and the Congress High Command.5

  When Mountbatten arrived in India in late March 1947, he still hoped to reach an agreement on the basis of the Cabinet Mission plan. After several rounds of meetings with Indian leaders, it became clear that partition was the most realistic option. And it had to be done quickly. The Congress leadership, too, had reached the conclusion that a partition of Punjab and Bengal was inevitable. The mounting violence showed that the Muslim League could not be forced to remain within India against its wishes. The experience of the interim government reinforced this point. Concerns about the growing violence and anarchy led the Congress to revive its demand for an immediate grant of full powers to the interim government while the constitution was being drawn up. Towards this end, the Congress agreed to accept Dominion status as a device for the interim transfer of power.

  After tortuous and prolonged negotiations, Mountbatten presented the Indian leaders with the Partition Plan on 2 June 1947. In effect, the plan called for the splitting of Punjab and Bengal, and for plebiscites in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Muslim-majority Sylhet district of Assam. The Congress agreed to the plan. Jinnah accepted it very reluctantly, for it left him with the truncated Pakistan that he had wanted to avoid. Mountbatten also declared that the British would now quit India on 15 August 1947, nine months ahead of the original schedule. A boundary commission, led by the British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, began its work with barely a month to go before partition. In the event, the boundaries drawn up by the commission would be unveiled only on 17 August, after the new Dominions had come into existence. But in anticipation rival communal groups – Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims – had taken up arms and had begun creating facts on the ground. The bloodbath of Partition was well underway.

  The staggering violence and ethnic cleansing that eventually accompanied Partition was unanticipated by the Congress, the Muslim League or the British. Almost a million people may have perished in those months – and many more millions were displaced. The human cost of Partition continues to tax the explanatory powers of historians and social scientists. It is perhaps not surprising that in recent years there has been a turn towards recovering the subjective experience of the violence and trauma of Partition, especially for women, by recourse to literature and memory.

  Yet the rapid and enormous escalation of communal violence during Partition cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of the Second World War. In the first place, wartime economic mobilization had led to urbanization at an unprecedented scale and pace. There was an enormous increase in the number of towns and cities with a population of over 100,000. Urban areas with a population of between 100,000 and 400,000 rose from eleven in 1941 to seventeen in 1943 and to twenty-three in 1944. Those between 400,000 and 1 million increased from four in 1941 to nine in 1943 and to thirteen in 1944. Those with over a million shot up from seven in 1939 to nine in 1941 and to seventeen in 1944.6 Accelerated urbanization unmoored people not just from their homes but from traditional ties of sociability. The weak social fabric of these huge urban concentrations was further frayed by the post-war economic slump and competitive political mobilization.

  Secondly, the war had led to overt militarization of a large chunk of the population. The manifold expansion of the Indian armed forces provided military training and combat experience to hundreds of thousands of men. On demobilization, they joined in droves the self-defence units and volunteer outfits of all communities that were mushrooming in post-war India. To these outfits, the former soldiers brought their professional skills in the organized application of force and the ability to impart basic training to other recruits. Those with combat experience were not only inured to the idea of killing people but capable of improvising in rapidly changing and violent circumstances. Nor were the skills that they had picked up during the war restricted to using force. The organizational techniques learnt in the
military enabled them to construct safe-havens for their communities and ensure safe passage through hostile territory. Reporting from Lyallpur in the Punjab during Partition, Ian Morrison of The Times noted the ‘orderly and well organized’ movement of 200,000 Sikhs out of the town:

  The Sikhs moved in blocks of 40,000 to 60,000 and cover about 20 miles a day. It is an unforgettable sight to see one of these columns on the move. The organization is mainly entrusted to ex-servicemen and soldiers on leave who have been caught by the disturbances. Men on horseback, armed with spears and swords, provide guards in front, behind, and on the flanks. There is a regular system of bugle calls. At night a halt is called near some village where water is available, watch fires are lit, and pickets are posted.

  Indeed, during Partition, the districts that had higher numbers of men with combat experience saw significantly higher levels of ethnic cleansing.7

  By contrast, the capacity of the state to halt the violence had considerably diminished. Not only were the armed forces wracked with a host of troubles, but they too were being partitioned between the new states of India and Pakistan. The partition of the Indian army would be completed only several months after August 1947. In a further ironic twist, the armies of India and Pakistan were soon confronting each other as a rash of crises broke out over the princely states of Junagadh, Hyderabad and, above all, Kashmir.8 Officers and men, companies and battalions, regiments and formations that had fought together in the Second World War were now ranged on opposite sides. Field Marshal Auchinleck was forced to look on from his titular perch of ‘Supreme Commander India and Pakistan’ as senior British officers directed the armies of both sides: among others, Frank Messervy and Douglas Gracey in Pakistan; Dudley Russell and Francis Tuker in India.

  The legacy of the Second World War coloured the first India–Pakistan war over Kashmir in other ways too. For instance, the crucial airlift of Indian troops to Srinagar on 27 October, which stopped the Pakistani raiders in their tracks, owed a great deal to the techniques and capabilities honed during the battles of Imphal and Kohima. Both armies fought using American as well as British weapons and equipment, and when the United States imposed an informal embargo on supplying arms and spares to India and Pakistan, both countries were forced to use their shares of the sterling balances to import military equipment from Britain.9 Nevertheless, India was the principal beneficiary of the wartime expansion in ordnance factories and strategic infrastructure – most of which had occurred outside the areas that became Pakistan – for Allied operations against Japan. Not surprisingly, Pakistan sought to offset its military weakness by seeking an ostensibly anti-communist military alliance with the United States.

  By the time the First Kashmir War ended in December 1948, India and Pakistan were locked in a rivalry that persists to this day. Interestingly, one of the few acts of co-operation between them was the formation of a combined historical section to write the official history of the Indian army during the Second World War. Yet this was a history that neither country wanted much to recall. The nation-states of India and Pakistan needed new histories for self-legitimization. And so they sought to gloss over the war years of common mobilization and sacrifice. Commemoration of the Second World War was conspicuously absent in post-colonial South Asia: even the war cemetery in Kohima is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. This perhaps explains why, as a fresh cadet in the Officers Training Academy, I was unable to recognize the significance of Meiktila and Jessami, Kohima and Keren, Sangro and Cassino.

  Modern South Asia remains a product of the Second World War. The Partition of India might have been inconceivable without the stances and policies adopted by the Raj, the Congress and the Muslim League during the war. Equally important was the sundering of India’s links with its eastern neighbours. The ‘Great Crescent’ stretching from Bengal to Singapore via Burma, Thailand and Malaya, was shattered by the devastation of Burma in war and by Britain’s unwillingness to invest in its reconstruction in peace.10 As Burma embarked on a prolonged period of introversion and international isolation, India’s geographical and economic, cultural and strategic links with South-East Asia were broken. The cumulative impact of these developments, against the backdrop of the emergent Cold War, put paid to Nehru’s vision of India as a regional hegemon that could don the mantle of the Raj. India’s strategic horizons narrowed to its immediate borders and it proved incapable of exerting any real influence in the Persian Gulf, East Africa or South-East Asia. Instead, India had to fall back on claims to solidarity with, and leadership of, the still-colonized countries – and subsequently the Third World and non-aligned nations.

  Not all the consequences of India’s war were deleterious. Popular mobilization during the war led to a widening of the political horizons of the Indian peoples. Ideas of freedom and democracy, social and individual rights seeped into the discourse – not just of the elite but also of the marginalized. This underpinned the subsequent decision of the Indian Constituent Assembly to adopt a universal adult franchise and provide for economic and social as well as political rights. The war also left a deep economic imprint on independent India. Progressive taxation and public distribution systems were among its lasting legacies. Wartime measures and ideas also enabled the post-war state to play a prominent role in planned economic development – by import-substituting industrialization, by focusing on basic and heavy industries, by a range of controls on the economy, and by deficit financing. If India is today regarded as a major ‘emerging economy’, it is worth remembering that the roots of this transformation stretch all the way back to the Second World War.

  Perhaps the most pressing reason to recall India’s Second World War is geopolitical. Today India stands again at the centre of an Asia whose eastern end is unsettled by the rise of a new great power and whose western end is in the throes of ideologically driven turmoil. To be sure, the situation now is very different from that of the early 1940s. Yet India is seen as a key player in ensuring a balanced regional order in East Asia. And India’s own dependence on oil, as well as the presence of a large diaspora, impels it towards a more active role in stabilizing the Middle East. Yet if India is to revert to its older role as the ‘pivot’ of Asian security, it will first have to aim at the economic and strategic integration of the subcontinent: both to its west with Pakistan and Afghanistan and to its east with Bangladesh and Burma. Only then can the rise of India – prefigured in the Second World War – be fully realized.

  Illustrations

  1. Viceroy at bay: Lord Linlithgow

  2. Gandhi arrives in Delhi with Rajendra Prasad (left foreground) and Vallabhbhai Patel (far right), October 1939

  3. Nehru, Song Meiling and Chiang Kai-shek, September 1939

  4. Generals Auchinleck and Wavell

  5. Marching to war: Indian students in Lahore, c. 1940

  6. Preparing for modern war: Indian infantrymen, c. 1940

  7. Clearing a village in Eritrea, 1941

  8. An Indian armoured division in Iraq, 1941

  9. Securing an oil refinery in Iran, September 1941

  10. 4th Indian Division in Tunisia, April 1943

  11. Raising of the Free Indian Legion in Berlin, 1942

  12. Subhas Bose and Tojo taking the salute in Shonan, 1944

  13. General Stilwell inspecting Chinese troops in India, 1942

  14. Quit India: protestors being teargassed in Bombay, 1942

  15. Manufacturing armoured vehicles in an Indian railway workshop

  16. Machines and Men

  17. Building a US Army Air Force Base in Assam, c. 1943

  18. A war artist’s potrayal of Indian soldiers in the Arakan campaign of 1943

  19. A cartoon by Shankar commenting on the neglected famine in Travancore

  20. Gearing up for Burma, 1944

  21. Japanese rat trapped in India: cartoon from a Josh newsletter, April 1944

  22. Fighting malaria

  23. Indian soldiers in Rome, 1944

  2
4. Into Burma, 1944

  25. Commanders and Men: General Slim

  26. Lord Mounbatten chatting with Indian troops, 1945

  27. Road to Meiktila, 1945

  28. On to Rangoon, 1945

  29. Closing in on the Japanese in Burma, 1945

  30. Towards Partition: Cabinet Mission members Pethick-Lawrence (left) and Cripps (right) with Jinnah, 1946

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AAC Asian and African Collections, British Library, London

  CWMG Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India, 1958–94), 100 vols.

  FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States

  IAR Indian Annual Review

  IWM Imperial War Museum, London

  LHCMA Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London

  NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi

  NCW Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose (eds.), Netaji: Collected Works Volume 11: Azad Hind, Writings and Speeches 1941–43 (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau and New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002)

  NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi

  SWJN S. Gopal (gen. ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972–82), 15 vols.