Gandhi & Churchill (85 page)

Burma was the next to collapse. On February 27 the new head of the British Army or CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) General Alan Brooke, confided to his diary, “I cannot see how we are going to go on holding Rangoon much longer.”
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Through Burma spread a very real fear that at this pace the Japanese might reach eastern Bengal before the monsoon. Tens of thousands of Indians who had been living and working in Burma, some for generations, seemed to have no choice but to pack their belongings and run. The retreat from Burma turned into a rout and a human disaster: as many as eighty thousand died en route of hunger and exposure, most of them poor ordinary Indians who “trailed like herds of animals before a forest fire,” an eyewitness said.
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Once again British colonials fled in a panic, leaving chaos behind them. Randolph Churchill’s proudest boast, that he had added Upper Burma to the empire, became Britain’s greatest shame.

The war that had seemed so far away was now on India’s doorstep. The question was whether India would fight, and on whose side. Many Indians wondered seriously if there would still be a British side left to fight for. Gandhi was asking himself that question as well. On January 22 he told a Congress worker, “Jawaharlal [Nehru] believes the British Empire is finished. We all wish it to be finished, but I do not think it is finished.” He knew from experience what Churchill was made of: “Mr. Churchill has said that [the British] are not ‘sugar candies,’ and that they can meet rough with rough. Therefore it will be long before the Empire is finished.”
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Still, the speed and squalor of the East Asian collapse impressed even Gandhi. When Singapore surrendered, he had felt compelled to issue a statement calling for public calm. “The recent British reverses ought not to create panic in the land,” he wrote as he rode a train to Calcutta on February 17, in an editorial that appeared in
Harijan.
“Failures do not dismay or demoralize [the English]. They take them with calmness…Wars for them are like a game of football. The defeated team heartily congratulates the successful one almost as if it was a joint victory, and drowns the sorrows of defeat in a glass of whisky.”
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Gandhi overestimated British fortitude: the trauma of war triggered in far too many British colonials a moral collapse. Gandhi’s view of the British at war, like Churchill’s, still had a Victorian frame, made up of memories of the Boer War. But both were right in that the British people themselves were prepared to fight and endure. With uncanny instinct, Churchill had managed to channel their feelings of determination into a war policy that defied defeat and disappointment before, and would do so again. Gandhi could admire that resolve, even as he sensed a deeper tragedy: that India could not participate in it. “We are a house divided against itself and there is no living bond between ruler and ruled,” he lamented. “The tragedy is deepened by the knowledge that all parties feel so helpless.”
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Would ordinary Indians help the British cause? That was the critical question for Churchill and his War Cabinet during the headlong flight from Burma. For the even more frightening possibility was that Indians would not only allow their country to be overrun but would rise up against their British masters and join the Japanese. One man was already working to make that happen: Subhas Chandra Bose.

Bose had been imprisoned during Gandhi’s “personal” satyagraha, then was released under house arrest. Furious at being sidelined while world events were unfolding, on January 17, 1941, Bose gave his guards the slip. Like a character in a Kipling or John Buchan novel, he traveled incognito across India and headed for Kabul. There he met first with the Russian legation (at that time Stalin was still Hitler’s ally) and then with the Italians, who gave him a Sicilian passport under the name Orlando Mazzota, along with a Russian visa.

On April 2, 1941, Bose landed in Berlin. His plan was to make India the second front in the Nazi war on Britain. “For the sake of my country, I have risked my neck to come to Germany,” he told his hosts. “I am confident that India will win its freedom in this war.” He wanted German help to do it.
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German intelligence officials listened politely, but their plans to put Bose to work hung fire for months. They did allow him to set up a Hindi propaganda station in Berlin, Azad Hind Radio, which broadcast news of German victories and British disasters into India.
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In time the Germans gave Bose money, uniforms, and military equipment to form his own Free India Corps with ex-Indian Army volunteers.
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The news of the Japanese attack and fall of Singapore seized Bose’s imagination and gave him a new resolve. “The fall of Singapore means the collapse of the British Empire,” he ecstatically proclaimed, “and the dawn of a new era in Indian history.”
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When he learned that the Japanese were actively recruiting Indian troops from POWs and overseas Indians, he became frantic to get to Malaya. He told the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that “a new order in greater East Asia will be accomplished only with the cooperation of 350 million people in India.” To build that order, the Japanese would need Bose.

They, at least, were nothing loathsome—their Indian recruits in Singapore “worshiped Bose like a God.” As they made plans to get Bose back into Asia, their Indian National Army (INA) was growing into a genuine force. Its members were divided into three regiments, each named after an Indian nationalist: Gandhi, Nehru, and Azad.
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The INA held its first parade in Singapore on October 2, 1942.

That date was chosen because it was Gandhi’s birthday.
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In London that spring, as the Japanese were racing to the Indian border, as Gandhi’s name was being invoked by Britain’s enemies, and as Bose was summoning German and Japanese help for an armed insurrection, everyone realized something urgent had to be done. “India is vital to our existence,” General Claude Auchinleck, now commander of British forces in the Western Desert, told Churchill. “We could still hold India without the Middle East, but we cannot hold the Middle East without India.”
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Churchill had little choice but to agree. In February he also had a new cabinet. Halifax was now in Washington as British ambassador; Anthony Eden took his place at the Foreign Office. The leader of the Labour opposition, Clement Attlee, became deputy prime minister, and another Labour stalwart, Sir Stafford Cripps, was officially leader of the House of Commons as well as Lord Privy Seal. Together with their colleague Ernest Bevin, they began to pressure Churchill to give way on India.

Now “is the time for an act of statesmanship,” Attlee told the cabinet on February 2, even before Singapore fell. “A renewed effort must be made to get the leaders of the Indian political parties to unite.” Viceroy Linlithgow was not the man for the job, Attlee felt; nor was the Indian secretary Leo Amery. Amery and Linlithgow were stalemated over what to do, terrified that any move might jeopardize the original 1935 settlement. Even an offer from the Liberal politician T. B. Sapru and twelve other non-Congress leaders in early January 1942, promising to support the war if Britain gave India immediate par status with the other Dominions and formed a national government, met with hesitation from New Delhi and London and finally a negative response.
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Attlee felt it was time to cut the Gordian knot by sending a single representative from the cabinet with full powers to negotiate a final settlement with all parties, including the Muslim League. “There is a precedent for such action,” he wrote in his memorandum. “Lord Durham saved Canada to the British Empire.
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We need a man to do in India what Durham did in Canada.” Attlee had in mind Stafford Cripps, who was deeply sympathetic to the Indian cause and had been Labour’s point man on the India Bill. Cripps was a socialist like Nehru, and like Nehru he believed India’s problems were about not religion or ethnicity but class. He had met and dealt with Jinnah in talks in December 1939. He was even a vegetarian like Gandhi. To his party’s leader, Cripps seemed the perfect man to bring Indians of all shades of opinion together and rally them in the fight against fascism, in exchange for their freedom.

Churchill’s feelings when he read this proposal can be imagined, but Attlee’s memorandum proved decisive.
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After Singapore’s fall Churchill’s hand was weaker than at any time since he had assumed the premiership. He had insisted on a vote of confidence immediately afterward, which he won overwhelmingly, but for the first time since the war began, his inner confidence was shaken. John Colville, now serving in Pretoria with the Royal Air Force, noticed it at once when he heard his former boss announce Singapore’s surrender on the radio. “All the mastery of his oratory was there,” Colville noted in his diary, “but also a new note of appeal lacking the usual confidence of support.” A few days before, Churchill had run into his friend from days past, Violet Bonham Carter. She had never seen him so depressed, worse even than after Gallipoli. He confessed to her his fear that the British soldier of the day was not as good as his predecessors. “We have so many men in Singapore,” he said over and over, “so many men—they should have done better.” It seemed an epitaph for an empire as well as an army.
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Churchill was also feeling inexorable pressure from the Americans and Roosevelt. “India,” wrote the editor of the American magazine
Foreign Affairs,
“had become a touchstone” of the Anglo-American alliance. The issue was no longer American anti-imperialist feelings or even admiration for Gandhi as “a man of peace,” as it had been in April 1941. India was becoming a vital supply base for the U.S. reinforcement of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in China. If the two-thousand-mile long Burma Road became permanently shut, or if India dropped out of the war, Chiang’s struggle against the occupying Japanese would be doomed.

Chiang himself realized this, and in the second week of February the Generalissimo made a sudden visit to India to try to rally public opinion. The meetings, including a four-hour chat with Gandhi, were not promising. A thoroughly depressed Chiang reported back to Churchill and to FDR that “if the Japanese should know of the real situation and attack India, they would be virtually unopposed.”
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On February 25 Roosevelt sat at his desk and composed a long letter to Churchill. “I feel that there is real danger in India now” and “too much suspicion and dissatisfaction in too many places.” Roosevelt continued, “I have been for many years interested in the problem of the relations between Europeans and Americans on the one side [and] varieties of races in eastern and southern Asia and the Indians on the other. There is no question in my mind that the old relationship ceased to exist 10 or 20 years ago, and that no substitute has yet been worked out except the American policy of eventual freedom.” From that standpoint, Roosevelt worried that Indian resistance against the Japanese would falter unless Britain made some firm offer of a new constitutional arrangement.
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In the end Roosevelt decided not to send the letter. But he did go forward with a plan of his own for India—he was neither the first nor the last statesman who felt he knew what Indians needed better than Indians did. It involved forming a “temporary government” along the lines of America’s Articles of Confederation, led by “a small, representative group covering different castes, occupations, religions and geographies” who would act as a temporary Dominion government until they could call an assembly to draft a final constitution. “Perhaps the analogy of some such method to the travails and problems of the United States from 1783 to 1789 might give a new slant in India itself,” Roosevelt concluded, “and it might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to feel more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination.”
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It was a plan breathtaking in its boldness—and in its simplemindedness. It reflected the general American consensus that Churchill and the British were responsible for the discontent in India, because of their “unwillingness to concede the right of self-government to the Indians.”
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That consensus, like Roosevelt’s plan, ignored the realities of the past ten years, as well as two hundred years of the Raj, not to mention thousands of years of Indian history. But it was a sincere attempt to break the logjam. Churchill’s doctor had noticed that disagreements with FDR “took more out of him than any major disaster in the field.”
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But if Churchill was unwilling to accept the American plan, he would have to accept someone’s before India became the next battleground.

On March 6, 1942, General Harold Alexander ordered the evacuation of Rangoon. Churchill wrote to FDR, “The weight of the war is very heavy now, and I must expect it to get steadily worse for some time to come.” On the tenth he received FDR’s Articles of Confederation–style proposal for India. But he and the cabinet had already decided to act.