Churchill's Secret War (40 page)

But Bose had failed to come; and just as painful to Dhara was Gandhi’s instruction, which he felt he could not disobey. The Tamluk
National Government had, after all, been born of the Congress directive that everyone should serve the cause of freedom according to his or her own conscience—but only so long as the leaders were unable to lead. The rebel government was on its fourth head of state, after the third one had also been arrested. But some of its activities, such as the courts for resolving civil disputes, were running smoothly and had become very popular. The senior members of the government did not want to disband their makeshift civil institutions, especially with independence nowhere in sight. Still, Dhara prevailed in his urging that Gandhi’s wishes be respected. It was agreed that one by one the renegade government’s officers would court arrest. By September 29, 1944, the second anniversary of Midnapore’s march to freedom, they would have disposed of all the pending court cases, balanced their ledgers, and settled other matters. On that day Dhara himself would surface.
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“I assumed that I would certainly hang,” he recalled. By that time, Dhara was directly or indirectly responsible for close to a hundred assassinations—of police informers, grain speculators, and others whom the Tamluk government had judged guilty of heinous crimes. He was not proud of having taken these lives, Dhara would write, nor did he regret them—with a few exceptions. Information that he received after the killings had led him to believe that three or four of those executed might actually have been innocent.
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One of those killed was the wealthy father-in-law of the elder sister of Kanu Mahapatro (the Tamluk government’s courier). “He was a good man—he did no wrong,” she later protested. As far as she knew, the victim’s only faults lay in being part owner of the rice mill where the police had shot three villagers in September 1942 and in having traded in rice from Orissa during the famine. Dhara had subsequently presented the bereaved family with a cow, but no one had asked him whether it was in expiation or just in sympathy.

Biplabi
, the underground newsletter, began to publish lists of the Tamluk government’s officials, along with the dates on which they would surrender. Dhara spent these precious weeks of freedom touring the countryside, resolving unfinished business and trying to comfort villagers
who were fearful of what would befall them once their protectors had gone. Early on September 29, he bid farewell to loved ones, including Kumudini Dakua, who had been released from jail some months earlier. The whole village seemed to be in tears, and Dhara shed some quiet ones himself. Accompanied by three close associates, he took a meandering route into Mohisadal. The police were watching the main roads, and Dhara was determined to deny these adversaries a chance to claim the reward on his head. Appearing suddenly in the bazaar, the men shouted “Freedom to India!” and displayed flags. They ended up sprinting across the bridge and into the police station, chased by policemen—who eventually concocted a tale about the capture of the terrible outlaw and shared the 10,000-rupee reward for Dhara.

Calcutta’s police and intelligence officers were thrilled to find the fish jumping into their net. Within days Dhara had been sentenced to ten years’ hard labor, for political offenses alone. He was also charged with twenty-nine murders, but despite their best efforts the police could not persuade a single witness to testify against him.
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GANDHI’S GESTURE DID not induce the Government of India to release its Congress prisoners—and his attempt to engage Jinnah was equally fruitless. The more Gandhi pondered partition, the more he feared it. Hindus and Muslims could not be nations apart, he pleaded with Jinnah at the Muslim leader’s seaview mansion in Bombay. Surely religion alone could not so drastically separate peoples with almost a millennium of intertwined history.

“We are a nation of a hundred million,” retorted Jinnah. Muslims, he said, had their “own distinctive culture and civilisation, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions.” The definition would seem to exclude the Muslims of Bengal, very few of whom spoke Urdu, the sophisticated language of Mughal courts that was favored by Muslims from northwestern India. Be that as it may, Jinnah insisted that only the Muslims of the disputed areas—and none of the other inhabitants—
should vote in any plebiscite on the partition of their provinces. Moreover, he wanted the matter settled before independence, so that the British could force the Indian National Congress to keep any promises made to the Muslim League. Gandhi, in contrast, wanted independence first. As he saw it, the very presence of the British precluded the unity that the colonizers demanded as necessary before they would leave.
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In the end, Gandhi and Jinnah could agree on nothing at all. “The two great mountains have met and not even a ridiculous mouse has emerged,” Wavell remarked caustically when the conference was over.
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PERHAPS THE SECRETARY of state for India was uncomfortably aware of having inserted the partition clause into the Cripps formula that the War Cabinet had offered to the Indian National Congress in 1942. Although Amery had never wanted to break up India, he had ended up nudging events along that course. Or perhaps he was hoping to make amends for the colony’s suffering during the war. For whatever reason, Amery now put forth a breathtakingly radical suggestion: the viceroy should simply declare independence. He could simultaneously release the Congress internees and invite the political parties to draw up a constitution, even as the country continued to run under the current one. Certainly Churchill would protest; but with the war drawing to a close, Labour Party members of the Cabinet were becoming more assertive and might support the idea.

As Amery saw it, the imperial presence had made Indian politicians irresponsible. “At the back of their minds they are always thinking that by stating their case in its extreme form they may get something more out of the British Government when the latter has to come to a decision,” he wrote. “To that extent there is, I believe, something in Gandhi’s argument that our presence in India impedes a settlement.” Amery seems to have feared that the assurance of British backing would induce Jinnah to demand exorbitant terms, to which the Congress would not agree, leaving partition as the only option. Once they were actually forced to assume responsibility, Amery argued, the politicians might be less inclined to strike poses and stake claims. And without some such
powerful shove forward, “the existing antagonisms only dig themselves in more deeply and the rut gets worse.”
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If the viceroy had agreed, he would have given valuable momentum to Amery’s lone attempt to spare India the slaughter to come. But Wavell dismissed the idea out of hand. “S. of S. [Secretary of State] has a curious capacity for getting hold of the right stick but practically always the wrong end of it,” he opined about Amery and his idea. As Wavell saw it, agreement among the natives had to come first, and independence second. The consensus that precedes freedom is acquiescence obtained at gunpoint—a consensus the viceroy regarded as necessary to ensure a “fair” sharing of power between Hindus and Muslims.
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Although they agreed on a great many things, Amery and Wavell had profoundly divergent views of Indians. Both used the paternalistic lexicon of the times to describe the colony’s subjects. Amery saw them as “neither parent nor child” but as young adults capable of assuming control of their own lives. Wavell, in contrast, held that the natives had reached at most the “tiresome age of adolescence” and needed tutoring in the use of freedom. He could find “hardly any sense at all of nationhood in India or of leadership likely to produce it,” and searched in vain for men of vision—among the princes. He might have had more luck among his prisoners. At the very least, the viceroy believed that he would need to stand over the desks of his charges while they wrote their constitutions; only then would they be ready to graduate.
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There was something else. For reasons of personal history, Wavell was more inclined to sympathize with supposedly martial peoples such as Muslims than with Hindus. During World War I, he had helped conquer Palestine using Indian Muslim troops who had steadfastly guarded holy sites in Jerusalem. He had subsequently become friends with Lawrence of Arabia and sympathetic to Arabs’ fears of being overwhelmed in their own land by Jewish immigrants. When it came to India, he similarly believed that valorous and loyal Muslims deserved special protection from traitorous and wily Hindus of the Congress. The warriors Wavell and Churchill could agree on this much: the malevolence of Gandhi, whose half-naked frame, hair-splitting arguments,
and refusal to put up his fists encapsulated all that was repugnant to them about Hindus.
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Amery wrote in his diary that Wavell was refusing to see that his insistence on consensus before freedom “means Pakistan and the breakup of India.” The viceroy nevertheless remained committed to breaking the political deadlock. After the war ended, prisoners who were members of Congress would have to be released, soldiers demobilized, and laborers thrown out of employment, he wrote to the prime minister in October 1944. The clamor for change would become deafening. “Indians are a docile people, and a comparatively small amount of force ruthlessly used might be sufficient; but it seems to me clear that the British people will not consent to be associated with a policy of repression, nor will world opinion approve it, nor will British soldiers wish to stay here in large numbers after the war to hold the country down.”
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In addition to pushing for progress on the political front, Wavell requested part of the sterling balance to pay for reconstructing India after the war. At an evening meeting of the War Cabinet on November 6, 1944, Amery had what he called the “worst open row with Winston that I have yet had.” The prime minister “denounced Wavell for betraying this country’s interests in order to curry favour with the Indians, and went on at large about the scandal and disgrace” all around. Amery tried to control himself, “but could not help in the end exploding violently and telling him to stop talking damned nonsense.”
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ON FEBRUARY 1, 1945, Winston Churchill was on board the HMS
Orion
, on his way to Yalta in the Crimea for a second meeting during wartime of all three Allied leaders. He wrote to his wife, recommending a book,
Verdict on India
by Beverley Nichols. “It is written with some distinction and a great deal of thought,” he told her. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission.”
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Verdict on India
was a kind of sequel to
Mother India
—a travelogue that, two decades earlier, had detailed the sexual perversions of Hindus, and which Churchill had admired. The poverty Nichols saw in India
had at first inclined him to be charitable, he wrote. “But the flock of dreadful beings that fly towards you, attracted by the clink of coins, is too great; they seem to appear from nowhere, to drop from the sky and the trees, gibbering, spitting, moaning, screaming, and pointing to their sores.” The writer also saw several “QUIT INDIA” signs, proof of the government’s easygoing attitude toward dissent. Of course, “no breath of democracy had ever stirred the Indian dust until we came,” Nichols attested, and all such hard-fought gains would vanish with the imperialists. Should the Congress take over, the lower castes “might as well run to the nearest village well and hurl themselves into it
en masse.
” Untouchability was “as integral a part of the Hindu faith as anti-Semitism of the Nazi,” while the Congress party was “the only 100 percent, full-blooded, uncompromising example of undiluted Fascism in the modern world”—with Gandhi as its führer.
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One Indian earned Nichols’s respect: “The most important man in Asia is sixty-seven, tall, thin, and elegant, with a monocle on a grey silk cord, and a stiff white collar which he wears in the hottest weather. He suggests a gentleman of Spain, a diplomat of the old school.” Mohammad Ali Jinnah was as different from a Hindu politician as a surgeon from a shaman, Nichols wrote, and with a surgeon’s precision he had dissected the status quo. The Muslim had nothing in common with the Hindu, Jinnah said disdainfully: “We eat the cow, the Hindus worship it.” And that was the least of their differences. The skirmishing between Muslims and Hindus had produced a cancerous society, Nichols summarized. “There is only one remedy for a cancer, in its advanced stages, and that is the knife. . . . To the knife it will have to come in the end, and surely one knife, used swiftly and with precision, is better than a million knives, hacking in blind anarchy in the dark?”
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Thinking about India depressed him, the prime minister wrote to his wife. He received unceasing abuse for “holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing.” And yet he had discovered within himself “a renewed resolve to go fighting on as long as possible and to make sure the Flag is not let down while I am at the wheel. I agree with the book and also with its conclusion—Pakistan.”
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WHEN THE THREE Allied leaders met at Yalta, the Germans were fighting on their own soil on both the Eastern and Western European fronts, and President Roosevelt had just won a fourth term. Yet the bonhomie among the men felt hollow. Roosevelt was ill—too ill, perhaps, to deal effectively with a formidable ally such as Stalin. And relations between the president and the prime minister were worse than ever. The British were upset that the Americans were not doing more to stop the Soviets from overrunning Poland, while the Americans were appalled that Churchill had met privately with Stalin to chalk out their respective spheres of influence in the Balkans—in the process, bartering several small and prostrate nations.
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