The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  The philosophy and the strategy behind the Cripps offer were devised by the India Committee, in London, during early 1942. On 21 February, Amery wrote to the viceroy on how to get round the criticism that ‘we are deliberately holding up all progress by giving a blackmailing veto to the minorities’. The way out, he suggested, lay in the ‘provincial option’ that was ‘normally accepted in the Dominions…namely, that if there are sufficient provinces who want to get together and form a dominion, the dissenting provinces should be free to stand out and either come in after a period of option, or be set up at the end of it, as a Dominion of their own’.10 This line was approved by Churchill on 26 February11 and adopted by the War Cabinet, with Attlee in the chair, on 27 February.12

  ‘This approach represented a radical departure from the policy adopted by Britain in India so far’, observed V.P. Menon in his authoritative work The Transfer of Power in India. He also noted: ‘It had never before been contemplated that the accession of the British Provinces to an Indian Federation or Union would be optional.’13 By adopting this line, Britain was accepting the rights of the provinces to ‘walk out’ of the country. Indeed, this option opened the constitutional path for the creation of Pakistan. From this theory, the British never afterwards resiled. In the Cripps offer of 1942, in the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946 and in Attlee’s announcement on British withdrawal on 20 February 1947, the right of the British provinces to walk out was a consistent feature.

  London adopted this approach in February 1942, independently of any advice from the viceroy, which would have been based on the contingencies prevalent in India. It is important to note this fact, because of the general belief that the British devised the theory of the ‘provincial option’ to meet Muslim pressure.

  On 10 March 1942, a fortnight before Sir Stafford Cripps landed in Delhi, Amery informed Linlithgow on the significance of the new plan. This let the cat out of the bag:

  As for the Congress their adverse reaction may be all the greater when they discover that the nest [the offer] contains Pakistan Cookoo’s [sic] egg.14

  In his secret report on his mission, while recording his conversation with Jinnah in Delhi on 25 March 1942, Cripps noted:

  I think he [Jinnah] was rather surprised in the distance that it [the British offer] went to meet the Pakistan case.15

  It is another matter that the public face of British policy remained quite different. Concluding the debate on the Cripps mission in the House of Commons, Amery announced with fervour: ‘Our ideal remains a united India.’

  In the concluding chapter of his book, The Transfer of Power in India, V.P. Menon writes:

  When in 1942 HMG’s offer was announced, the opinion was widely expressed that the British were bent upon the division of the country; that they wanted to create a Middle-Eastern sphere of influence and in pursuance of that policy wished to bring about the creation of a separate Pakistan. This would [be in] accord with their policy of protecting the Straits [of Hormuz] on the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal from Russian influence and with their new but overwhelming interest in oil of Iran, Iraq and Arabia.16

  Whether strategic considerations had entered Churchill’s calculations at this time or they evolved a little later cannot be said for certain. Evidence suggests that by 1945 defence had certainly become the prime factor for Britain’s India policy.

  However, before Churchill could send Cripps off to India to make his offer, President Roosevelt intervened. General Chiang Kai-shek of China had wired to Roosevelt from Chunking on 25 February 1942 that after his recent visit to India (with Madam Chiang) he had come to the conclusion that ‘if the British Government does not fundamentally change its policy toward India, it would be like presenting India to the enemy. If the Japanese should know of the real situation and attack India, they would be virtually unopposed’. Chiang then referred to British mismanagement in the Malay states and pointed out that Britain ‘…should voluntarily give the Indians real power and...not allow different parties in India to cause confusion’.17 On the same day, Roosevelt wired the US ambassador in Britain, John G. Winant, that he was ‘concerned about the situation in India especially as the British defence [against the advancing Japanese] will not have sufficiently enthusiastic support from the people of India themselves’.18 He then instructed the ambassador as follows:

  In the greatest confidence could you or Averil Harriman [the president’s special representative in London] or both let me have a slant on what the Prime Minister thinks about new relationships between Britain and India? I hesitate to send him a direct message because, in a strict sense, it is not our business. It is, however, of great interest to us from the point of view of the conduct of the war.19

  Things had been coming to a boil in Washington. Earlier the same month, President Roosevelt had decided to send an Economic and War Supplies Mission to India headed by Colonel Louis Johnson (formerly assistant secretary in the War Department), in the capacity of his personal representative, to endeavour to boost war production there. The Americans feared that it may not be easy to convince the British Government that India should be made self-sufficient in war production because of fears of losing the Indian markets after the war. The State Department had advised that: ‘We once more take up with the British the necessity of making a statement of policy with respect to India. It would seem that the logical thing to do was to have Churchill announce in London that the British plans contemplated the introduction of India as a full member of the United Nations and that by pre-arrangement, the United States – perhaps through the President – promptly and vigorously welcome the step.’ As a preamble to this recommendation, the State Department noted: ‘The Secretary of State Cordell Hull has taken up with the British Government twice in 1941 the possibility of a prompt recognition of India’s aspirations to freer existence and membership of the British family of nations and the President had indicated his sympathy with this general line.’ And that ‘under existing conditions any such programme [as contemplated in the Louis Johnson Mission] is not likely to get very far unless the political situation is handled with extreme vigor.’20

  Washington had also, at the same time, received a message from the US ambassador in London that there was wide division among the members of the British Cabinet on the Indian question. But perhaps the strongest pressure on Roosevelt to take some action by exerting pressure on Britain with regard to India had come from the rumblings in the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. This committee had, unanimously, with such important senators as Thomas Connally, Arthur H. Vandenberg, Nathan Green and Dewey la Follet pitching in, expressed the view that the ‘Allies should fully utilize the manpower of China and of India as sources of military strength’ and that ‘Indians would not have the desire to fight just in order to prolong England’s mastery over them’.21 The overwhelming sentiment within the committee was that the US had done so much for England through lend-lease that it could now justifiably participate in British Empire counsels and demand autonomy status for India.

  Roosevelt, on 12 March 1942, explained to Sir Girja Shanker Bajpai, the Indian agent general, his policy vis-à-vis India. He pointed out that India needed the inspiration of ‘new thought’. He added that Indian self-government should evolve through a process of trial and error; a date for independence needed to the fixed and the UK and the USA should support China and India in post-war Asia.22

  Roosevelt’s message to Churchill was delivered by Averil Harriman, the dapper millionaire of great charm and discretion who had given up business and polo to serve his country. Harriman carried out numerous difficult tasks for several American presidents in the last century. For such a man to voice the opinion that the assignment now handed to him was the most trying of all the assignments that Roosevelt had ever given him shows he was well aware of Churchill’s rigid views on India. Harriman was later to marry Pamela Churchill, the wife of the prime minister’s son, Randolph, and Lord Beaverbrook (Maxwell Aitken) had remarked: ‘To have FDR’s Personal R
epresentative, the man charged with keeping Britain safe, sleeping with the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law was a wonderful stroke of luck.’23

  When Harriman broached the subject on 26 February 1942, Prime Minister Churchill immediately replied that the political initiative that the British were planning to take in India would be discussed by the cabinet that very day. And then fired the opening salvo of his campaign by volunteering the following information that Harriman passed on to Roosevelt in a telegram the same day:

  Approximately 75 per cent of the Indian troops are Muslims.… The Muslim population exceeds 100 million. The fighting people of India are from the northern provinces largely antagonistic to the Congress movement. The big population of the low-lying centre and south have not the vigor to fight anybody. The Prime Minister will not therefore take any political step which would alienate the Muslims.… There is ample manpower in India willing to fight. The problem is training and equipping.24

  Now, the fact was that only 35 per cent of the Indian troops were Muslims (as Lord Wavell, commander-in-chief in India had cabled to London the same week). But then, as Churchill was to tell Roosevelt in another context later: ‘In war the truth must sometimes have an escort of lies.’25 The prime minister followed up his discussions with Harriman with a telegram to Roosevelt (on 4 March):

  We are earnestly considering whether a declaration of Dominion status after the war carrying with it if desired the right to secede should be made at this critical juncture. We must not on any account break with the Muslims who represent a hundred million people and the main army elements on which we must rely for the immediate fighting.… We have also to consider our duty towards 30 to 40 million untouchables and our treaties with the princely states of India, perhaps 80 million. Naturally we do not want to throw India into chaos on the eve of invasion…26

  To this telegram, he appended a memorandum written by the military secretary at the India Office, which read as follows:

  Indian soldiers are voluntary mercenaries. They take pride in their profession in which a leading element is personal loyalty to the British Officers and general loyalty to the British Raj. Any indication of a fundamental change in the conditions or the authority under which they have accepted service, whether as affecting their material prospects or their creed as soldiers of the British Crown, cannot fail to have at once an unsettling effect.27

  In order ‘to let the Americans see the Muslim side of the picture’, he enclosed a note by Jinnah, which stated: ‘The virtual transfer of power immediately to a Hindu All-India Government [meaning to a majority Congress Party Government] would practically decide at once far-reaching constitutional issues in breach of the pledges given to the Muslims and other minorities in the British Government’s declaration of 8 August 1940 which promised no constitutional change, interim or final, without Muslim agreement and would torpedo the Muslim claim for Pakistan which is their article of faith.’

  Churchill followed up this note with another telegram to Roosevelt on 7 March: ‘We are still persevering to find some conciliatory and inspiring process, but I have to be careful that we do not disturb British politics at a moment when things are increasingly aquiver.’28 And, in addition, he summarized the Punjab governor’s views to the viceroy: ‘Responsible section of Moslems hold [the] unshakeable view that until [a] constitution acceptable to Moslem India is devised, Britain must continue to hold the ropes. They will certainly be worried at [a] constitution [that] would place power in hands of Hindus, whom they already suspect of pro-Japanese tendencies. They will therefore be diverted from working for defence of India as a whole and seek to align themselves elsewhere.’29

  President Roosevelt was, however, not convinced. On 10 March 1942, he wired back to Churchill: ‘Of course all of you good people know far more about [the problem] than I do.’ He then launched into a lengthy discourse about the process of trial and error through which the thirteen American colonies had passed during the US Revolution from 1775 to 1783 before agreeing to federate. He suggested that representative groups in India be recognized as a temporary ‘dominion government’ until a year after the end of the war, when the same body ‘could also be charged to consider a more permanent government after that’. Roosevelt added that such a move would be strictly in line with the changes that had taken place in the world over the past half a century and also with the democratic processes followed by all those who were fighting Nazism. He ended his message as follows: ‘It is, strictly speaking, none of my business, except in so far as it is a part and parcel of the successful fight that you and I are waging.’30

  The US State Department had, in the meantime, advised Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, that Gandhiji’s pacifist influence was on the wane and the Congress Party could therefore be persuaded to join in the war effort: ‘Many party members considered the satyagraha [the individual non-violence] movement unrealistic and ineffective, and opposition to it was growing…. Apparently, he [Gandhiji] realized that he could not prevent the adoption of the resolution but felt that his non-violent principles would not permit him to participate in a policy of co-operation with the war effort. He therefore renounced his active leadership in the party but was able to nominate Nehru as his “legal heir”.’31

  Sir Stafford Cripps landed in Delhi on 22 March 1942 and made his offer eight days later. I distinctly remember hearing Sir Stafford’s broadcast in the evening news of All-India Radio in my school that day (30 March). And I was struck by one word in his broadcast, i.e., the ‘peoples’ (of India). I had never before thought of, or heard, the people of India being described in the plural. And it was on the implication of this very thesis that India contained more than one nation, that Cripps’ offer got stuck.

  George R. Merrell, the officer in charge of the American Commissariat in Delhi, could recognize the nub of the problem and telegraphed the secretary of state on 2 April 1942:

  The Congress will oppose the scheme on the ground that it unnecessarily presupposes vivisection of the country whereas the declaration should only promise Dominion Status and a Constituent Assembly after the war leaving details to be worked out by the Indian leaders themsleves.32

  The same day India’s agent general in Washington, Sir Girja Shanker Bajpai, sent out a subtle warning to the viceroy that he had been summoned by the US president and that ‘Mr Roosevelt seemed to think that the plan regarding immediate federation does not go far enough’.33

  H.V. Hodson, the reforms commissioner and the main adviser to the viceroy on constitutional affairs, has recorded in his memoirs that, before Cripps left for India, Linlithgow, on his advice, had ‘objected strongly’ to the idea of ‘the provincial option’ clause. According to Hodson, this clause, ‘while being no substitute for safeguards for Muslims in Hindu-majority Provinces would be taken as acceptance of Pakistan as regards the Muslim-majority Provinces and would have a particularly disruptive effect in the Punjab, above all amongst the Sikh minority there’. The viceroy was also against disturbing the status quo in the Punjab, from where 50 per cent of the Army was recruited. Hodson has recounted that there was a ‘fierce Ministerial dispute on the issue which had threatened to split the War Cabinet’, but that Churchill and the protagonists of Pakistan had prevailed and ‘the package deal (consisting of the provincial option) was no longer negotiable’.34

  On 6 April 1942, while Cripps was still in India, the first Japanese bombs fell on Indian soil at Visakhapatnam and Kakinada (then in the Madras Province and now in Andhra Pradesh), situated on the east coast of India. Only eight anti-aircraft guns were believed to be available in the whole of India at that time. Moreover, no planes were available to counter the raids. The Japanese were in complete control of the Bay of Bengal and had sunk a good deal of British shipping there. In Burma the British forces were in full retreat, through dense forests and mountains, into northeast India. After the ineffectual resistance put up by the British to the Japanese both in the Malay states and Burma, there was not much confidence in their
ability to defend India.

  Colonel Louis Johnson had by now landed in New Delhi and flung himself into the negotiations with typical American vigour, apparently making an immediate impact on Jawaharlal Nehru. The colonel posed the question: Could there not be a compromise on the interim arrangements so favourable to the Congress that it would make them forget their long-term concern about the ‘provincial option’ and induce them to enter the war on the Allies’ side? And Cripps, in a desperate bid to bring the Congress Party on board, agreed to dangle before them the possibility of an immediate cabinet type of government with a restricted viceregal veto, even though the granting of this concession went beyond his brief.

  A compromise was reached with Nehru on the control over defence; this would remain in the hands of the ‘British Commander-in-Chief for the duration of the war’. But Linlithgow protested directly to Churchill against Nehru’s efforts, which were supported by Cripps and Johnson, to abridge his (Linlithgow’s) veto powers to overrule the Interim Government, which would mean the virtual transfer of power into Indian hands and Britain’s loss of control over Indian affairs. Churchill firmly put his foot down against any such moves (or ‘Crippery’ as the British civil servants in India had started to call Sir Stafford’s efforts). ‘In your natural desire to reach a settlement with Congress you may be drawn into positions far different from any the Cabinet approved before you set forth,’35 wired Churchill to Cripps on 10 April. Actually, since the viceregal veto powers over the Viceroy’s Executive Council were derived from an Act of the British Parliament, they could not be modified without a reference to it. There could, of course, be a gentleman’s agreement not to use these powers, but this depended on the viceroy’s concurrence, which was absolutely and predictably not forthcoming.