During the First World War, Mahatma Gandhi had supported the Allied war effort. This move had created a soft corner for him in many British hearts, despite Winston Churchill’s continuous jibes that he was a charlatan and a humbug. Gandhiji was the first Indian leader the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, invited for consultations after the start of the Second World War. The meeting took place on 4 September 1939 in Simla, the summer capital of the British Raj, high up in the Himalayas.
Mr Gandhi explained to me in moving terms the depth of his affection for England and told me that the idea of any enemy defacing Westminster Abbey or Westminster Hall or any monuments of our civilization was one which was intolerable to him and he contemplated the present struggle in his own words with an English heart. I was greatly struck with the depth of his real feeling, his emotion being at times so marked as to make it impossible for him to continue with what he was saying.4
So wired the viceroy to Lord Zetland (Laurence John Dumley Dundas), the secretary of state for India in Neville Chamberlain’s Government. The viceroy added that Gandhiji had also assured him that he was ready to help with the recruitment of Indians into the Army, as he had done during the First World War.
The British Government received its first shock when Gandhiji failed to get these sentiments translated into the Congress Party’s policy; in fact, quite the opposite happened. The Congress leaders met to discuss their attitude to the developing situation at Wardha, Gandhiji’s camp in western India, a few days after the above conversation. Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been touring China and had rushed back for the meeting, led with the following argument: ‘How can a person bound in chains fight? And if Britain is indeed fighting to uphold freedom should it not logically free India?’ He was not a man to knowingly think of, or attempt, blackmail. The provocation for this rhetoric was another. He had visited Europe the previous year and was still seething with anger against the ‘class interest-ridden’ government of Prime Minister Chamberlain of Britain. Nehru blamed this government for conniving at Francisco Franco’s takeover of Spain, for appeasing ‘fascist Hitler’ at Munich and strangulating the Socialist International, the company of whose members in Europe he had mostly kept. And this was Nehru’s way of getting back at Chamberlain, forgetting that once Britain had declared war on Hitler, opposing its war effort on whatever account, in practical terms meant aiding the very fascists he so detested. His anger against His Majesty’s Government (HMG) abated only after the fall of France, when England itself was directly menaced.
Subhash Chandra Bose, a rising star from Bengal and Nehru’s rival in the Congress Party, also supported the policy of opposing Britain. To him ‘Britain’s difficulty was India’s opportunity’. For some years now, he had been opposing the Mahatma’s policy of non-violent non-cooperation as one that was unlikely to yield results and was spoiling to mobilize the masses for a no-holds-barred violent struggle to overthrow British power. A graduate of Cambridge University, like Nehru, Bose was heir to the more revolutionary traditions of Bengal. On his very first meeting with Gandhiji in 1921, he had declared that the Mahatma ‘showed a deplorable lack of clarity in his political aims’. Bose’s popularity amongst the youth was rising. In 1938, to everyone’s surprise, he won the presidentship of the Congress Party, defeating the candidate favoured by Gandhiji. Gandhiji had to work hard to reverse this party decision in the electoral contest the following year. He did so by pushing the equally charismatic, plus a very hard-working and devoted Nehru, to the forefront. In March 1940 Bose formed his own group, the Forward Bloc, and in July 1940 parted company with the Congress Party. Bose, as a result of his subsequent activities perhaps contributed more, in the 1940s, to demoralize the British and break their will to remain in India, than the Congress Party. However, he also contributed to the deepening of the distrust between Britishers and Indians.
Gandhiji was among the few who spoke in favour of unconditional support to Britain in the war at the Congress Party meeting at Wardha. But he failed to press his view in the face of Nehru’s emotional appeal and Bose’s combative stand. The majority of the Congress leaders, though willing to cooperate with Britain against fascism, wanted a definite declaration from the British that, at the end of the war, India would be freed. They could not rid themselves of memories of the brutal suppression of the freedom movement after the First World War, despite the support the nationalists had given Britain when the hostilities were on. They saw the same pattern emerging again, with the viceroy declaring war on India’s behalf without consulting its elected representatives and assuming enabling powers for the duration of the war to interfere in provincial affairs within the competence of the ‘popular’ governments. The compromise decision taken at Wardha, after several days of deliberations, was that Gandhiji should see the viceroy once again and persuade him to make an unequivocal declaration of British intentions to grant freedom to India as soon as the war ended and, in the meantime, to associate the Congress Party with the Central Government. Gandhiji met the viceroy on 26 September, once again taking the train to the distant Himalayas.
Whereas during his first meeting with the viceroy on 4 September 1939 the atmosphere had been warm, when Gandhiji saw Linlithgow on 26 September, he had turned cold. He brusquely told Gandhiji that there was no prospect of His Majesty’s Government agreeing to a declaration of British war aims as demanded by the Congress Party or yielding power at the Centre while Britain was engaged in a life-and-death struggle. ‘It was not a question of fighting for democracy,’ he explained, ‘but of beating Hitler who sought world conquest.’ He added that ‘the Congress was not the only organization to be considered’ because ‘there was also the question of the legitimate real claims of other parties and particularly the Princes and the Muslims’. It was a long meeting, during which Gandhiji made the following pitch, as reported by Linlithgow to Zetland: ‘If we [the British] could make up our minds to buy Congress we should buy the finest propaganda machine in the East.’ It did not move the viceroy. In his report to the secretary of state, he said: ‘Their [Congress’s] objective is to tie the Muslim community and the Princes tight in constitutional bonds imposed in the first instance with our authority and maintained thereafter in their original rigidity by the majority community.’5
Something had obviously happened between 4 and 26 September 1939. And that was Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah had met the viceroy immediately after Gandhiji on 4 September. While Gandhiji had offered tears and sympathy, Jinnah offered the viceroy the means to win the war and a clear compact. He pledged ‘the loyalty of the Muslim community everywhere’ (as if he was the sole representative of the Muslims of India) and then, with reference to the Congress ministries in the provinces, told the viceroy: ‘Turn them out at once. Nothing else will bring them to their senses. Their object, though you may not believe it...is nothing less than to destroy both you [the British] and us Muslims. They will never stand by you.’6 And then spelt out his mind:
Muslim areas should be separated from “Hindu India” and run by Muslims in collaboration with Great Britain.7
Jinnah had spoken so candidly to the viceroy because his lieutenant, Khaliq-uz-Zaman, had met Lord Zetland in London a few months earlier. According to Khaliq-uz-Zaman, when he had conveyed to Zetland the desirability of the creation of autonomous Muslim states in the subcontinent that would remain linked with Britain for defence, the British minister showed enough interest to prolong the talk for an hour and a half! The answer Khaliq-uz-Zaman gave to Zetland, when asked about defence, needs to be quoted because it was bound to make the minister feel that the Muslim League would remain dependent upon, and subservient to, Britain: ‘If you want to know (about defence) for the period that you are not in any way connected with the administration of the country, then I beg your Lordship not to put that question to me, for God only knows what will happen to us then.’8
Gandhiji requested Linlithgow to meet Dr Rajendra Prasad, the Congress president, and Jawaharlal Nehru. The viceroy did so on 3 October 1939. D
r Rajendra Prasad argued: ‘If India was to play her part (in the war) she must feel satisfied that she had something to fight for.’ He also asserted that ‘the Muslim League did not represent the mind of Islam’; i.e., Jinnah did not represent all the Muslims. Nehru pressed for a declaration of war aims so as ‘to persuade the people that something big had happened and to produce a sufficient psychological disturbance to produce real enthusiasm for the war’. But then he dwelt at some length on how changes brought about by the war would modify the concept of the Empire itself. This touched a raw nerve in the viceroy, who retorted: ‘If the war was to transform the British Empire, it might make a difference to the fortunes of the Congress as well if they were now to decide to commit themselves to active opposition to Government…. They would be well advised in their own interest to avoid a break.’9
From then on, the records in the British archives show that with each meeting Linlithgow held with Gandhiji and Jinnah, he gravitated more and more towards the latter. Jinnah’s stand that he would ask his co-religionists to oppose the type of declaration demanded by the Congress Party, on the plea that it would harm Muslim interests, was very convenient for his purpose. It would help stall the Congress Party pressure for the same as well as of those members of the Labour Party in England who desired to accommodate the nationalists.
When Gandhiji met Linlithgow next on 5 October 1939, he unfolded a plan to help Britain and bypass the obstacles created by some of his Congress Party colleagues (that is not generally known to the public). According to Linlithgow’s report to Zetland, Gandhiji began by saying that Nehru maintained that if we obtained freedom, India would have to go in for a first-class army, a large air force, battleships and everything ‘tiptop’, ‘to which he [Gandhi] had told them that if that is where Congress is leading India, I can go no further with them.’ According to Linlithgow, Gandhi then said:
I [Linlithgow] must not feel surprised if in a few days it came out that he [Gandhi] had broken away from his friends. He had desired, since he and I had come so close together, himself to tell me these things in advance. Meanwhile he hoped that I would go quietly ahead on the line I had already taken. If by any chance a greater part of the Congress were to follow him (on the path of non-violence) then of course his own path and perhaps mine [Linlithgow’s] also would be greatly eased...I thanked him and asked no more.10
Judging from the exchange of views between Linlithgow and Jinnah later on the same day, it becomes evident that Gandhiji’s démarche had made no impression on the viceroy. For Gandhiji this was a way to help Britain, however tortuous the approach (and indeed he did everything to keep the Congress Party from obstructing the war effort, until 1942, when the Cripps* offer, with the embryo of Pakistan hidden in it, made him emote like a jilted lover). For Linlithgow, if Gandhiji were a true friend, he would have dug in his heels and forced the Congress Party to cooperate with the British war effort.
‘Jinnah’, the viceroy reported, began by ‘expressing great gratitude for what I had done to assist [him] in keeping his Party together’.11 Jinnah was referring to the pressure Linlithgow had applied on Sikandar Hayat Khan, the chief minister of the Punjab, to fall in line with Jinnah. Linlithgow’s disciplining Sikandar Hayat Khan was no small help. Besides being a staunch friend of the British, he was the premier of a province from which 50 per cent of the British Indian Army was recruited and a major figure in Indian politics. Though a member of the Muslim League, Sikandar Hayat Khan believed that his government, as well as the unity of his prosperous province, was being threatened by Jinnah’s policy of pitting the Muslims against the Hindus and the Sikhs, all of whom supported his coalition government in the Punjab. And lived amicably in it. Linlithgow’s perspective was different. After acknowledging Jinnah’s thanks, he told him:
It was clearly unsatisfactory that while one of the two great parties was well organized and well equipped to pursue its objectives and express its aims, that the other equally of great importance should be masked and prevented from securing its full expression by failure to secure an adequate mouthpiece. It was in the public interest that the Muslim point of view should be fully and competently expressed.12
The viceroy then sought Jinnah’s opinion on the Congress Party’s demands for a declaration of British objectives in India after the war and on the expansion of the council to accommodate political parties. It was now Jinnah’s turn to scratch Linlithgow’s back. Neither was necessary, Jinnah replied and added that he would refuse ‘to reach agreement either with the Congress or the government unless the plan of creating a united India was abandoned, and effective protection was given to the Muslim minorities in the Provinces’.13 Linlithgow, by citing this ‘Muslim objection’, could now deflect the Congress Party’s demands as well as those of the Labour Party critics at home.
Reinforced with this pledge of Jinnah, Linlithgow, on 17 October 1939, proceeded to issue a statement on British policy in India that brought about the Anglo–Congress Party rupture. This statement promised that, after the war, consultations would be held with representatives of various communities, parties and interests in British India and also with the Indian princes, to secure their cooperation in the framing of such modifications in the stalled federal scheme as may be agreed upon. And, in the meantime, to set up ‘a consultative group’ of the representatives of the political parties and princes.14 All this was very far from the Congress Party’s demands and was condemned by it as a reiteration of the same old imperialist policy of prevarication. And on 23 October, in a huff, the Congress ministries in the provinces decided to quit. Linlithgow, under London’s pressure, tried to placate the nationalists by suggesting an expansion of the Viceroy’s Executive Council to include political leaders, but the Congress Party went ahead with its resignations. This walking out by the Congress Party from the provincial governments was interpreted by many in England as its refusal to support Britain in its life-and-death struggle against the Axis powers. It turned out to be a watershed in Indo–British relations.
There had been considerable support in England for the Congress Party’s demand for a British declaration on its post-war policy on India, with the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, wanting the viceroy to respond to it ‘with imaginative insight’.15 According to a private telegram from Zetland to Linlithgow, Stafford Cripps in a letter to Nehru had urged him to stand firm and not to recede by an inch from the position he had taken (on the declaration), which Zetland termed ‘all very naughty and extremely mischievous’.16
On the other hand, the mood of the British establishment in India that surrounded the viceroy was different. When Desmond Young, the editor of the Pioneer newspaper, had got Nehru to agree to terms for the Congress Party’s cooperation in the war that he wanted to show to Linlithgow, Sir John Gilbert Laithwaite, the viceroy’s private secretary, turned down his request for an interview with the viceroy, with the words: ‘Surely you don’t believe a word these fellows say. You are only wasting the Viceroy’s time.’17 And Laithwaite also headed off other Britishers such as Malcolm Darling, a senior British civil servant, who tried to intervene to prevent a rupture. For the British establishment in India, which was appalled that the Congress Party had been given power by London to govern over large parts of India, this was an easy way to get them off their backs.
After the administration of the Congress-run provinces was taken over by the government, Linlithgow began to lean even more towards the Muslim League. He calculated that in view of the Congress Party’s earlier commitment against Nazism and fascism, it would be hesitant to start a campaign of civil disobedience. Further that international opinion would condemn any action by this party that might thwart the war effort. The government was also confident that it had ample resources to crush any civil disobedience movement that the nationalists might launch.
When Gandhiji saw Linlithgow next on 4 November 1939 he regretted the turn things had taken, promised to continue to work towards a settlement and made several suggestions.18 However, a
ll of them floundered as Linlithgow’s insisted that the Muslims and the princes would have to be first brought on board. When the viceroy saw Jinnah the same day the atmosphere was completely different. Referring to Jinnah’s public rejection of a declaration of British objectives in India after the war, Linlithgow thanked him for the ‘very valuable help he had given by standing firm against the Congress claims’ and added that he was ‘duly grateful’.19 In his telegram on his discussions with Zetland, he reported: ‘If Jinnah and the Congress had confronted me with a joint demand on this [the British declaration], the strain upon me and upon HMG would indeed have been very great.’20
Jinnah, after accepting Linlithgow’s thanks, made certain remarks that were bound to sound like music to any Britisher at that time and would be lapped up in London. ‘He [Jinnah] was extremely doubtful as to the capacity of India and Indians to look after themselves’, reported Linlithgow. And added: ‘If the British by any chance be beaten in the war and driven out of India, India would break into a hundred pieces in three months and lie open, in addition, to external invasion.’ After offering this bouquet, Jinnah came to the point he had come to make. Referring to the recent debate in the House of Lords, he said:
Prominent personages, who were quite likely to be in the [British] Cabinet after the war, had frankly urged that in India [the] majority must rule and the minority take their medicine.… When the opposition at home came into power they would force democratic government on India and anaesthetize the Muslims.21
Therefore, what he wanted was an undertaking from HMG that the Muslim community would not be compelled in any future dispensation to accept something it did not want. Linlithgow kept silent on this subject, but promised to forward this view to London for consideration.
The Shadow of the Great Game Page 4
