The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (69 page)

The repercussions of the Amritsar debate, as much as what had happened in the city, had a profound effect on Indian opinion. Gandhi and the Congress had hitherto proceeded in the belief that they could sway the collective moral conscience of Britain, but the debate over Dyer showed that no such thing existed. There was, as Montagu’s speech proved, a body of liberal-minded opinion which held that educated Indians deserved to be treated as rational creatures and were fit to exercise the freedoms cherished in Britain, but there was another section of British public opinion which claimed that Indians were intrinsically incapable of responsibility. Consider a
Spectator
editorial of December 1919, which argued that British rule in India was an ‘absolute necessity’ since the raj protected Hindus and Muslims from themselves. If the British departed, India would fall into the hands of ‘the Brahminical caste’ and slide into anarchy. ‘We Anglo-Saxons like to rule ourselves,’ the piece concluded. ‘Why assume that our desire is not shared by men of darker complexion? The answer is to be found in the Oriental temperament and Oriental History.’
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Both disqualified Indians from self-government then and for many years to come, if not ever.

Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who campaigned for Dyer until the latter’s death in 1927, and then against any concessions towards Indian self-rule, repeatedly alleged that Indians were helplessly addicted to graft. Furthermore, Congress was merely a mouthpiece for a small clique of grasping and ambitious men who wanted only power. ‘The fact is,’ wrote O’Dwyer, ‘as everyone, British or Indian, who understands the east will, if honest, admit, that 99 per cent of the people do not care a brass farthing for the “forms of government” about which Congress lawyers were always arguing. This was one of the tacks adopted by Churchill who, from 1930, led a Conservative rearguard in a parliamentary struggle against measures leading towards responsible government in India. Even when prime minister he could not mask his contempt for Congress. It was, he told the Commons in September 1942, ‘a political organisation built round a party machine and sustained by manufacturing and financial interests’ which was ‘opposed by all Muslims and the millions of Indians who were subjects of the princes’.
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His statement shocked Labour MPs. Aneurin Bevan asked whether the Prime Minister’s ‘silly language’ was endorsed by the Labour members of the coalition. Churchill said it was, and dismissed his questioner as ‘a merchant of discourtesy’. He may well have been right on the second point, but was mistaken about the first. Ever since the beginning of the century, the Labour party had extended friendship, sympathy and encouragement to the Congress party. There were close links between such intellectuals as Nehru and Krishna Menon and their opposite numbers within the Labour party, based to a large extent on shared radical and reformist traditions stretching back into the previous century.

For most people in Britain and India, Congress meant Gandhi. It would be as hard to overestimate his influence over events in India after 1919 as it is to strip away the layers of sentimental adulation that have been applied to him by his various hagiographers. He was an international figure who captured headlines and the imaginations of his countrymen, as well as those of nationalists engaged in struggles against Western imperialism outside India. His charisma was remarkable, although there were times when his humility seemed close to inverted arrogance. He was also capable of the most breathtaking humbug, as in June 1942, when he wrote that, ‘Nazi power has arisen as a nemesis to punish Britain for her sins of exploitation and enslavement of the Asiatic and African races.’
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Gandhi’s most impressive achievement was to stamp his ideals of nonviolence on the Congress party, even though, as he admitted to an Australian journalist in April 1942, the mass of Indians seemed unable to appreciate what satyagraha required.
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This had been obvious ever since the 1919 disturbances. There was a vast, unbridgeable gulf between the pacific ideals of Gandhi and the behaviour of his followers on the streets. When he opened his civil disobedience campaign at Bardoli in November 1921, there were riots in which 53 died and 400 were wounded. He was, as on all such occasions, shocked, and postponed a return visit to the town, which did not prevent further disorders there in February 1922. This pattern was repeated whenever he launched a campaign of passive defiance or non-cooperation.

From 1920, Gandhi’s aim had been swaraj, complete self-government and independence, which were one part of a vast programme for the moral regeneration of the Indian people. During the 1920s, he spent much time and energy in trying to convert the Indian middle-class Congress members to cotton-spinning and with it the discovery of their true roots in the countryside. His insistence on a revolution within the individual soul rather than one within society as a whole did not satisfy many Congress members. Nehru, for one, could not subscribe to his master’s reverence for poverty, which the younger man hoped to eliminate. Nor was it practical to disregard what had occurred within India during the past two hundred years and embrace the Gandhian ideal of small, self-sufficient rural communities. And yet the force of Gandhi’s spirituality was so great that the radical wing of Congress acquiesced to his authority and guidance. While Gandhi’s obstinacy exasperated the British, his leadership of the Indian national movement gave them many advantages. He restrained the firebrands and turned the party away from the paths of Communism and armed revolution. His influence, as much as police surveillance, ensured that in 1942 the Indian Communist party had only 5,000 members.

The struggle for swaraj was slow and convoluted. Congress sought to extract concession, through a sequence of peaceful acts of defiance and non-cooperation, which invariably ended in bloodshed. The British government attempted to keep the initiative through offering compromises, but dodged the issue of when and how full independence might be achieved. From 1929 everything hinged on the phrase ‘dominion status’ which had been hesitantly offered to India. As understood by all involved, dominion status would give India the same political freedom and detachment from Britain as was enjoyed by, say, Canada. But what if India took the path of another dominion whose people’s ties with Britain were, to say the least, extremely tenuous – Ireland? For India to follow such a course was unthinkable for it would have knocked away the chief prop of British power in Asia and the Middle East.

Whatever settlement was reached, Britain could never permit India the right to neutrality implicit in dominion status. To have done so in the international situation of the mid-1930s would have been suicidal. It was, however, possible to extend the participation of Indians in government without engaging head-on the knotty question of dominion status. The 1935 Government of India Act created an Indian federation embracing the British-ruled provinces and the princely states in which careful provision was made for the representation of the non-Hindu minorities. Elections for the provincial governments were held in 1937, and Congress secured a dominant position in each.

Congress’s electoral success was to have been expected. It had about a million members across India, and a country-wide organisation which gave it its muscle and an advantage over all other parties. For this reason, it had always asserted that it was the voice of India. And yet, even in the periods of intensive public protests in 1919 and 1930–34, it had never come close to toppling the raj or even proving beyond doubt that India was ungovernable. There were no more Amritsars, but the authorities somehow managed to keep the upper hand through mass arrests of leading party activists, including Gandhi, and disorders were held in check by the police with army help. When matters appeared on the verge of getting out of control, as they did during the 1930 disturbances in Peshawar, armoured cars and aircraft were deployed. Such astringent measures were exceptional; there were 200,000 police in India in the 1930s, and they were well paid and their morale remained high. With a loyal police force, the backing of an army which numbered 194,000 in 1939, and a considerable degree of determination among its officials, the raj was able to hang on without too much strain on its resources.

And yet, while the raj still appeared formidable, especially from the perspective of the streets of Peshawar or anywhere else in India during the 1930s, its future was no longer certain. All three British political parties had acquiesced to the gradual introduction of self-government since 1919, despite the outcry on the right of the Conservatives. There was a general understanding that, in principle, a limit now existed to the life of the raj, although no one had yet drawn up the timetable for its extinction. Congress accepted, grudgingly, the 1935 Act. but only as a milestone on a road which led to unconditional swaraj in the near future.

It had been assumed during the early stages of the campaign for Indian independence that the state which would emerge would encompass all the territory then under British rule. This seemed reasonable during the early 1920s, when an accord existed between the overwhelmingly Hindu Congress and Muslim organisations. This was a result of an upsurge in anti-British feeling among Muslims everywhere, after it had become known that Britain was intending to force the Turkish sultan to renounce his spiritual title as Khalifah (successor) to the Prophet. From the British standpoint this measure was an insurance against future jihads, but from the Muslim it was an affront to Islam. Indian Muslims therefore joined with Congress during the disturbances of 1919, and for the next five years there were a series of pan-Islamic uprisings on the North-West Frontier.

Muslim militancy subsided after 1924. Henceforward there was a steady growth of Muslim apprehension about the power of Congress, and the position of Islam within an Indian state in which Hindus were paramount. Clashes between Muslims and Hindus increased in scale and ferocity; the refusal of Muslim shopkeepers to join a hartal in Calcutta in February 1930 lead to a riot in which between four and five hundred died. This resurgence of Muslim consciousness directly threatened Congress, since hitherto its political strength had rested upon its claim to be the authentic voice of the entire population, and its programme for complete independence had emphasised the ability of all Indians to live in harmony.

The historic memory of India’s Muslims, who had been the country’s masters during the Mughal period, gave an added edge to existing religious antipathies. When Dr Muhammad Jinnah, President of the Muslim League, proceeded through Karachi in October 1938, he was followed by a three-mile-long procession of supporters, a parade which had marked similarities to the public shows held by the Mughal emperors.
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By this date, the Muslim League had become the focus for Muslim aspirations and the guardian of their political interests. It may have exaggerated its grass-roots support, but by the end of 1943 the League was claiming to speak for all of India’s Muslims. The British, following that well-established imperial rule of doing business with those who appeared to possess power, accepted the League’s credentials. These had been considerably enhanced by the results of the 1937 elections, which revealed that Muslims were fast losing confidence in Congress.
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More and more Muslims were alienated by Congress’s attempts to secure a monopoly of power within the provincial governments and its agrarian reforms, which hurt Muslim landowners. Conscious of its value to the British as a counterweight to Congress, the Muslim League began to nudge its way towards a final settlement of India that would involve partition and the establishment of a Muslim state, Pakistan.

The idea of Pakistan had begun to circulate in Muslim intellectual circles in the mid-1930s. There was much subsequent debate as to how and when a division of India became unavoidable, and even more as to whether it was desirable. What mattered was that in August 1940 the Muslim League publicly committed itself to the formation of Pakistan, and during the next three years it transformed itself into a mass political organisation dedicated to that end. At the heart of its ideology was the old battle cry ‘Islam is in danger’, and there were distinctive jihadic undertones running through its propaganda. Among the League’s repertoire of popular songs in 1941–2 was
‘Moo mein kalma, hath mein talwar, larke lenge ham Pakistan’
(‘With a Quranic verse on the lips and a sword in hand, we shall fight for Pakistan’).
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On 3 September 1939 the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, announced on the wireless that India was at war with Germany. He was perfectly entitled to do so under an amendment to the Government of India Act which had been rushed through parliament the previous April.
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Congress was stunned by the declaration of war, and protested that a Scottish aristocrat had no right of any kind to drag the Indian people into a war on Britain’s behalf. Yet while the Viceroy’s action symbolised India’s continued subservience to Britain’s will, Congress members were also acutely aware that Britain was fighting against political systems which most found repugnant. During the past four years, Congress had taken a left-wing stance on foreign policy, opposing the appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini and British neutrality during the Spanish Civil War.

Divisions over what, if any, part it ought to play in India’s struggle against Naziism and fascism contrasted with Congress’s determination to use the war as a chance to squeeze concessions from Britain. On the extreme left, Chandra Subhas Bose, leader of the Forward Bloc inside Congress, favoured a course similar to that taken by Sinn Fein in 1916; all-out rebellion. He had been elected Congress president in 1938, but was manoeuvred out by Gandhi. At the end of 1941 he fled to Berlin, by way of Kabul, and offered his services to Hitler who, much to Bose’s dismay, turned out to be an admirer of the raj.

The years between 1939 and 1941 were relatively calm. Gandhi neither said nor did anything that might have disrupted the war effort, but continued to press for complete independence. The wrangling between Congress and the government over constitutional quiddities proceeded with little reference to the momentous events which were occurring outside India, or to the mobilisation of its manpower and resources which was gathering pace.