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INDIA’S FREEDOM MOVEMENT is synonymous with the towering figures of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Yet the Indian National Congress (INC), which guided 340 million Indians to their ‘tryst with destiny’ in 1947, was founded by an English ornithologist.
Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912), the son of the fearless Scottish reformer James Hume, was twenty when he arrived in India in 1849. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Bengal civil service. While stationed as a district magistrate at Etawah, near Cawnpore, he was reluctant to impose the death penalty on sepoys who had taken part in the 1857 revolt, earning him a reputation for fairness and moderation. He was also, in his own words, ‘an unsafe, impulsive, insubordinate officer’, qualities that led to his eventual demotion from the civil service. Freed from the strictures of officialdom, he devoted himself to becoming an expert on the game birds of India. In the hill station of Simla, he built Rothney Castle to house his collection of 80,000 bird skins and nests, which he later donated to what would become the Natural History Museum in London.
The catalyst for the formation of the INC was the Ilbert Bill of 1883, which allowed Indian judges to preside over the trials of British subjects. The bill threatened to unleash a ‘white mutiny’ of irate Europeans, mainly indigo planters and merchants, who believed their position as the ‘ruling race’ was being forever undermined. Hume was among those outraged by the European backlash to the bill. In March 1883, with Viceroy Lord Dufferin’s (1862–1902) blessing, Hume addressed an open letter to the graduates of Calcutta University, encouraging them to form an association for national regeneration. Such an association of educated Indians would also act as safety valve ‘for the escape of great and growing forces’ of discontent in India.
The INC’s inaugural meeting took place in Bombay on 28 December 1885, with the seventy-two invited delegates affirming their loyalty to the British Crown. Their key demand ‘was that the basis of the government should be widened and that the people should have their proper and legitimate share in it’. Forty-four years later, the INC would be fighting for total independence from Britain.
For the first decade of its existence, the INC met once a year, over Christmas, so as not to interfere with the work of its members, who were mainly lawyers, journalists and civil servants. Proceedings were conducted in English. Ominously, there were few Muslims in its ranks. This rankled Muslim leaders such as Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, who in 1875 had founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. Khan insisted that representative government might work in societies ‘united by ties of race, religion, manners, customs, culture and historical traditions’ but ‘in their absence would only injure the well-being and tranquility of the land’. His arguments would later be used to justify the partition of India and the creation of the Muslim-majority state of Pakistan.
The INC’s endorsement of British rule (its members explicitly complimented an ‘empire on which the sun never sets’) drew the ire of right-wing Hindus. Prominent among them was Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), whose politicisation resulted from his opposition to the 1891 Age of Consent Act, which raised the age for the consummation of marriage to twelve. In his writings, Tilak quoted the Bhagavad Gitā to justify the killing of oppressors. After two British officers were killed in June 1897, he was charged with incitement to murder and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. On his release, he was revered as a martyr for the nationalist cause.
Acts of such violence were rare, with luminaries such as the social reformer Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) and the poet, philosopher and educationalist Rabindranath Tagore stressing passive resistance and economic self-reliance in preference to confronting the Raj directly. The British maintained their aura of benevolent rule. Once Indians gained sufficient experience to manage their own affairs, it was suggested, Britain could gradually withdraw and Indians could at some future undefined time rule themselves as a self-governing dominion. Little did they realise, this process was about to be sped up.
‘THE GREATEST POWER IN THE WORLD’ – FOR NOW
The trigger for the first sustained mass movement against British rule in almost half a century came as a surprise. In 1903, the viceroy, Lord Curzon (1859–1925), announced that Bengal, India’s most populous province, was to be partitioned.
George Nathaniel, Baron Curzon of Kedleston, an Oxford graduate, seasoned traveller and explorer – and the holder of a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society for discovering the source of the Oxus River – had long coveted the position of viceroy. No stranger to controversy, Curzon took a dim view of Indians’ ability to govern themselves and opposed facilitating their entry into the civil service. When it was suggested that an Indian be elected to the executive council, he retorted, ‘In the whole continent there is not one Indian fit for the post.’ One of his ambitions as viceroy, he wrote to his superiors, was to assist the ‘unrepresentative’ and ‘tottering’ INC to a ‘peaceful demise’. He won few fans from educated Indians when he told an audience at Calcutta University that ‘truth was a Western concept’. India’s princes were dismissed as ‘a set of unruly and ignorant and rather undisciplined schoolboys’.
Curzon was not all bad. He did stand up for ordinary Indians, travelling widely in rural areas and ordering the expulsion of a whole regiment to Aden because of a conspiracy to protect soldiers who raped a Burmese woman. Among his least contentious achievements was setting up the Archaeological Survey of India, which was charged with restoring what he termed ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’.
When Curzon became viceroy, Bengal had a population twice that of Great Britain and encompassed Bihar, Orissa, Assam and present-day Bangladesh. Predominantly Hindu in the west and Muslim in the east, Bengal’s partition was justified in the interest of stimulating growth in the under-developed eastern region of the province. The real reason was more sinister – ‘to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents’ to the Raj, namely the well-educated, high-caste Bengalis of Calcutta.
CURZON, THE IMPERIALIST: ‘For as long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world.’
Even while at Oxford, Curzon exhibited the self-importance and sense of entitlement that inspired the famous Balliol rhyme: My name is George Nathaniel Curzon, / I am a most superior person / My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek, / I dine at Blenheim once a week.
Despite London warning that ‘the severance of old and historic ties and the breaking up of racial unity would backfire’, partition went ahead on 16 October 1905. Angry demonstrations erupted almost immediately in many cities and towns in eastern India, spreading quickly to the rest of the country. Congress leaders urged people to boycott British goods, which were burned on massive bonfires across the country, and purchase swadeshi (‘of one’s own country’) instead. What became known as the Swadeshi Movement saw coarse Indian-grown cotton woven on local handlooms replace sophisticated Manchester textiles. Locally made sugar, salt and other goods took precedence over imported manufactures.
The partition of Bengal led to a schism in Congress between moderates and radicals. The moderates espoused dialogue and believed British promises that power would gradually devolve to Indians until they became self-governing states within the British Empire, such as Australia and Canada. Warnings from moderates such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale that ‘only madmen outside lunatic asylums could think or talk of independence’ cut little ice with radicals who wanted direct action. They took their inspiration from Irish nationalists and saw the boycott of British goods as ‘part of a great turning of the national consciousness away from foreign ideas and institutions’. Self-government was the only way forward, Tilak declared. ‘Swaraj is my birthright and I will have it.’
The rupture between the two sides came to a head at the Surat Session of the INC in 1907. The British took advantage of the split by arresting prominent radicals, including Tilak, who was jailed for six years. Editors of pro-independence newspapers were charged with sedition and their publications suspended. A penal colony set up on the remote Andaman Islands was soon overflowing with prisoners. Cases of persons being sent to jail without being charged or tried inspired even more young Indians to join the nationalist cause.
Curzon departed just after the partition of Bengal came into effect. His replacement was Lord Minto (1845–1914), who, together with John Morley (1838–1923), the new secretary of state for India, began drawing up a program of political reform. The Morley–Minto Reforms, also known as The Indian Councils Act, came into effect in 1909, increasing the size of existing central and provincial legislative councils and enabling more Indians to be represented. For the first time, an Indian was allowed to be admitted to the viceroy’s executive council. Controversially, the Act also provided separate electorates for Muslims, who argued they had been underrepresented in official bodies. The concession, wrested from the British by the recently formed Muslim League, would entrench existing communal differences and for many nationalists served as proof, if any were needed, that the British were engaged in a policy of divide and rule.
The high-tide mark of the Raj came in 1911, with the staging of Delhi Durbar to commemorate King George V’s visit. Unprecedented in scale and extravagance, it marked the first and only visit by a reigning British monarch to India. The king and his wife, Queen Mary, sat on golden thrones under the gilded dome of the royal pavilion before an audience of 100,000. The first order of business was bestowing decorations on India’s leading princes. In a procession of bejewelled splendour, each ruler halted before the king, bowed and took three steps backwards – except the nationalist Gaekwad of Baroda, Sayajirao, who merely cocked his head and abruptly turned his back on the king. The alleged snub (the Gaekwad blamed an attack of nerves, though it is doubtful) did not register as heavily as it might, given what came next. George V made a surprise declaration: the capital of India would be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. No one had expected this news. After a brief, stunned silence, the crowd erupted with cheers.
LIST OF VICEROYS: 1899–1947
Lord Curzon (1899–1905)
Lord Minto (1905–1910)
Lord Hardinge (1910–1916)
Lord Chelmsford (1916–1921)
Lord Reading (1921–1926)
Lord Irwin (1926–1931)
Lord Willingdon (1931–1936)
Lord Linlithgow (1936–1944)
Lord Wavell (1944–1947)
Lord Mountbatten (1947–1948)
Moving the capital to Delhi made sense geographically and symbolically – the city had been the seat of power for much of the Mughal period – but it had yet to recover from the ravages of the 1857 revolt. The decision was also meant to signal British single-mindedness in the face of Bengali intransigence. While the decision was welcomed by most Indian princes, who would now be closer to the seat of power, it received a lukewarm response in England. One of those critical of the move was Curzon, who believed Calcutta was a symbol of everything the British stood for, while Delhi was ‘a mass of deserted ruins and graves’. Here Curzon was missing a vital point. By creating a new capital on the ruins of past empires, Britain would be able to write itself into India’s past. As Viceroy Lord Hardinge proclaimed, ‘Every walled town in India has its “Delhi Gate”, and among the masses of the people it is still revered as the seat of the former Empire.’ To soften the blow to Bengali pride, George V announced that the partition of Bengal had been revoked.
THE GANDHI FACTOR
The outbreak of World War I, which came only three years after George V’s visit, punctured the myth of British invincibility. But it also saw an outpouring of loyalty from both Congress and the Muslim League, as well as the princes. Ultimately, more than one million Indian combatants and support staff served in theatres as diverse as Gallipoli, Flanders and Mesopotamia. For nationalists such as Tilak, the unstinting support for the war effort was proof that Indians could run their own affairs. After returning from exile in Burma in 1914, he teamed up with the rights activist Annie Besant (1847–1933). Her Irish parentage, trade-union background, Fabian principles and indefatigable energy made her the perfect champion of Indian home rule. In 1916, she and Tilak founded the Home Rule League, which advocated self-government within the British Empire for all of India. Two years later, Besant was elected chair of the INC, which officially adopted the goal of home rule as part of its platform.
Mixed signals on the political front only strengthened the hand of those wanting Britain off their backs. In August 1917, Edwin Montagu (1879–1924), India’s secretary of state, told the House of Commons that substantial steps were needed to realise responsible self-government in India ‘as an integral part of the British Empire’. Montagu embarked on a five-month tour of the country with the new viceroy, Lord Chelmsford (1868–1933). At the end of 1919, they submitted a report to the British government for legislative changes that would become known as the Montford reforms. Enshrined in the Government of India Act 1919, these changes broadened the democratic base of India’s administration. Legislative councils, elected by Indians in each of the provinces, would be responsible for areas such as education, public health and public works, while law enforcement, taxation and defence would be looked after by imperial bureaucrats responsible to the viceroy. The reforms were immediately dismissed by hardline nationalists as being too limited. Only 5.5 million landholders, or one-tenth of the adult male population, could vote in provincial elections.
But the reforms were largely stillborn, negated by the Rowlatt Report. Published in April 1918, it recommended that the near-totalitarian wartime powers of the Defence of India Act 1915 to control public unrest and terrorist activities be made permanent. For the millions of Indians who had been willing to sacrifice their lives for the empire, the passing of the Rowlatt Bill in March 1919 was an insult, and signalled Britain’s readiness to use repression to silence its enemies.
Closely monitoring the reaction to the Rowlatt Bill was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948). Forty-nine at the time, he had spent the majority of his formative years agitating for the rights of Indians in South Africa. Gandhi would become the most influential figure in the Indian independence movement, yet he was only ever briefly president of the Congress Party and spent far more time in jail or in one of his ashrams than in directly steering India to freedom. Nor did he make a concerted attempt to present his political doctrine in print. His changing and often contradictory ideas are contained in the ninety volumes of his Collected Works. Those looking for consistency in his views on everything from Western medicine, which he described as ‘black magic’, to caste and untouchability (the former was necessary even though it was responsible for the latter) need look no further than a passage he wrote in his newspaper Harijan on 30 September 1939: ‘At the time of writing I never think of what I may have said before. My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result is that I have grown from truth to truth.’
Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbandar, a small principality in Gujarat, where his father served as a diwan, or prime minister. He was thirteen when he married his wife, Kasturba, who was one year older than him, and at the age of nineteen he went to England to study law at the Inner Temple in London. After a short and unremarkable tenure at the Bar, he was invited to South Africa by a fellow Gujarati Muslim merchant seeking a legal adviser. His first encounter with South African racism came in 1894, while travelling by train to Pretoria. A white male passenger alerted railway officials that an Indian was seated in a first-class compartment in defiance of rules that restricted coloured people to third class. After pointing out that he had a valid ticket and refusing to vacate his seat, Gandhi was forcibly ejected from the train and left on a platform in the middle of a cold winter’s night.
Over the next twenty years he fought for the rights of 150,000 Indian migrants in Cape and Natal provinces, described in the statute books as ‘semi-barbarous Asiatics or persons belonging to the uncivilised races of Asia’. In 1908, he composed his first political pamphlet, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), while travelling by ship from London to South Africa. Influenced by the pacifism and anti-materialism in the writings of Leo Tolstoy, and by John Ruskin’s respect for labour and the rights of the poor, Hind Swaraj was a critique of modernity. In this seminal text, Gandhi articulated the use of nonviolence as a political weapon, extolled the interdependent life of a utopian village community and argued for the equivalence of all religions and classes – though not for the abolition of untouchability. His advocacy for communal harmony attracted the support of many Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. His championing of nonviolent resistance based on moral strength earned him a legion of admirers in the West, among them the Nobel-winning French essayist and novelist Romain Rolland, who compared Gandhi to Jesus. The only thing lacking, Rolland wrote, was ‘the cross’. His role in bringing Britain to its knees became an inspiration for millions of individuals and movements around the world, from the civil rights movement in America to the Prague Spring.
Having failed in his legal appeals to the South African government to grant Indians equality under the Constitution, Gandhi switched to direct protest, which he called satyagraha, or ‘holding firmly on to truth’. Satyagraha drew on the nonviolent Jaina and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat and elevated suffering and denial into a quasi-religious discipline, like yoga or meditation. For Gandhi, satyagraha was the quality of the soul that enabled individuals to endure suffering for what they believed was morally right. More than a weapon for resisting oppression, it was a vehicle for converting his opponents to his beliefs.
GANDHI ON SATYAGRAHA: ‘Satyagraha does not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but it means the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant. Working under this law of our being, it is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire, to save his honour, his religion, his soul, and lay the foundation for that empire’s fall or its regeneration.’
Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, and two years later started his political career. In India, the pool of potential recruits to his cause rose to 300 million, few of whom ultimately would be untouched by his work. At first, he concentrated on campaigns against the exploitation of indigo workers in the district of Champaran and of mill workers in Ahmedabad, succeeding in improving conditions for both groups. The agitation against the Rowlatt Bill was to be his first real test on Indian soil, ‘the greatest battle of my life’. And it would backfire spectacularly.
Gandhi’s call for a peaceful hartal (strike of workers and businesses) and for a day of fasting and prayer resulted in violence in Delhi, Bombay and many other cities. The population was incensed, and there was little appetite for airing their dissent respectfully. Angry mobs attacked British civilians; police fired on demonstrators. When Gandhi discovered the unrest was spreading to small towns, he admitted he had made a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’ in calling on people to undertake civil disobedience before they were ready to do so.
Gandhi was one of the most photographed and discussed individuals of his time, yet so varied are the interpretations of his life and influence that he remains an enigma. Indian schoolchildren are taught that the first person to refer to Gandhi as the Mahatma or ‘great soul’ was Tagore in 1915.
Gandhi’s ability to influence events across a country as vast as India was limited. Ignoring his calls for an end to demonstrations, thousands of protesters in Amritsar ran amok, murdering five British men and beating up a female missionary, who they left for dead. (She survived thanks to a Hindu family who dragged her to their house and handed her over to the British.) The commander of troops at Amritsar was Brigadier General Reginald Dyer (1864–1927), a man known for his short temper and for overreacting when under pressure. On 13 April 1919, an estimated 20,000 people congregated in Jallianwala Bagh, an area of open ground enclosed by high walls. Most were there for the Sikh harvest festival of Baisakhi and were unaware that Dyer had issued an order that morning prohibiting gatherings, religious or otherwise. At 4.30 pm, Dyer personally led a force of Gurkha, Sikh, Pathan and Baluchi riflemen to Jallianwala Bagh and, without warning, ordered them to open fire. With troops blocking the narrow entrance to the Bagh and its walls too high to scale, there was no escape for those inside. Official figures put the death toll at 379. An enquiry by Congress put the figure at over 1000.
Condemnation of Dyer’s actions came swiftly. Winston Churchill (1874–1965) called the mass shooting ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British empire … an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’. Rabindranath Tagore, who had been knighted for his services to literature, protested the massacre by returning his award. Gandhi declared that ‘cooperation in any shape or form with this satanic government is sinful’.
Called before a committee of inquiry in Lahore several months later, Dyer justified the shooting, claiming it was calculated to sap ‘the morale of the rebels’. Dyer was dismissed, but on his return to England became a cause célèbre for die-hard Tories and Unionists who believed that conquest, not partnership, was needed to maintain Britain’s empire. His deification only served to increase Indian antagonism towards British rule.
Gandhi reacted to the Amritsar massacre by staging a fast. For the Mahatma, fasting was a weapon that could be employed by the weakest and the poorest against the mightiest of opponents. He also saw it as a means of atonement for his own sins, errors and shortcomings. As Wendy Doniger writes, Gandhi’s fasting ‘was intended first to control himself, then to control his own people, getting them to unite in protest but to pull back from violence; and then to control the British, getting them to let him out of jail on several occasions and, eventually, to quit India’.
Tilak’s death in 1920 left Gandhi the undisputed leader of the INC. Under his guidance, an organisation once derided as an upper-middle-class debating society transformed into a national body with roots in small towns and villages, and an efficient hierarchical structure. A total of 14,000 delegates attended the INC’s 1920 meeting in Nagpur, in central India. His emphasis on mass civil disobedience caught on, serving to politicise large sections of Indian society, especially in rural areas, which accounted for 90 per cent of the population. Thousands of upper-caste lawyers and professionals were ordered to the villages to recruit new members. For most, it was their first encounter with India’s impoverished masses. Gandhi also made inroads into the working class, which was small (less than 1 per cent of the population in the 1920s) but significant because it was concentrated in the larger cities.
The growing split between Hindus and Muslims alarmed Gandhi. He believed that the INC’s support for the Khilafat Movement, which had sprung up during the First World War to oppose Muslim troops being used against the Constantinople-based Caliph, offered an opportunity of uniting the two communities ‘as would not arrive in a hundred years’. When the Treaty of Sèvres effectively erased Turkey from the map, and with it the Caliph’s control over the holy places of Islam, the movement gathered strength. So eager were its leaders to attract Hindu support, they told Gandhi they were prepared to ban cow slaughter – an offer he brushed aside.
In December 1921, the INC authorised Gandhi to start a campaign of civil disobedience. Promising swaraj (self-rule) within a year, he urged his supporters to deliberately break British laws. Civil servants were told to leave their posts; no taxes were to be paid and courts were to be boycotted. By making India ungovernable, the British would be forced to leave.
But India was not ready for the Mahatma’s vision. In February 1922, a crowd of Congress and Khilafat volunteers was fired on by police in the village of Chauri Chaura, in the United Provinces. The crowd retaliated by setting fire to a police station. Twenty policemen were either hacked to pieces as they tried to flee or burned to death to the cries of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’ (‘Victory to Mahatma Gandhi’). Horrified, he called off the campaign, telling his followers to educate the masses, extend grassroots organisations and take up the spinning wheel. His entreaty for the latter was simultaneously a practical way of achieving swadeshi by spinning cotton, a potent symbol of unity against the oppressor and a spiritual exercise. The British responded by giving him a six-year prison sentence, though he was released on health grounds after serving less than two.
THE POLITICS OF POLARISATION
Gandhi responded to the failure of the civil disobedience movement by withdrawing to his ashram near Ahmedabad, where he could be found seated at his spinning wheel, holding daily prayer meetings and staging numerous fasts to protest acts of injustice. His retirement from active politics commenced in 1927 with Congress’s rejection of the Simon Commission. Set up by Stanley Baldwin’s conservative government, the commission was tasked with reviewing the workings of the Montford reforms and to prepare a constitution for a self-governing India. Angered by the absence of a single Indian on the commission, Congress voted to boycott it ‘at every stage and in every form’ and resolved for the first time to make complete independence from the British its goal. A year later, representatives from all major independence groups drafted their own constitutional reform scheme.
Approved by Congress in December 1928, the Nehru Report, produced under the presidency of Motilal Nehru (1861–1931), stated that the ‘next immediate step’ for India must be dominion status, as enjoyed by Canada, Australia and other independent former colonies of Britain. India would be a federation, having at the centre a sovereign two-chamber parliament to which the ministry would be responsible. The report rejected the idea of separate electorates for minorities, instead providing for their protection through a system of reservations.
The report was opposed by Congress radicals, who saw the acceptance of dominion status as a step back from the goal of complete independence adopted the year before. Abandoning the principle of separate electorates also angered the Muslim League, headed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948). Like Gandhi, Jinnah had studied law at the Inner Temple, and in 1896 became the youngest Indian to be called to the Bar. In 1906, two years after returning to India to practise as the sole Muslim barrister in Bombay, he joined the overwhelmingly Hindu INC. In 1913 he became the leader of the Muslim League. His impact on pre-independence India was based on his brilliance as a politician, even though the verdict is still out on whether his demand for a seperate state of Pakistan was a strategy to win more concessions for Muslims or an end in itself.
Although Jinnah campaigned for a state founded solely on the basis of religion, his Islam was moderate and progressive. It was said he could not recite any passages from the Koran and rarely prayed at mosques.
The Muslim League’s rejection of the Nehru Report hastened the inevitable breakdown of a working relationship between it and Congress. For many Muslims, the powers proposed for a future central government reinforced their belief that the British Raj would be replaced by the Congress Raj, limiting their ability to share power and protect their interests in a future democratic and independent India.
The December 1929 conference of the Congress Party in Lahore was a watershed moment for the freedom movement. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, the tricolour flag of an independent India was raised on the banks of the Ravi River amid shouts of ‘Inquilab zindabad’ (‘Long live the revolution!’). Gandhi declared 26 January 1930 to be Independence Day, and presented the viceroy Lord Irwin (1881–1959) with an eleven-point program that, if accepted, would be tantamount to granting independence. To pressure the British, he devised his most spectacular satyagraha so far – the salt march.
Ever since the days of the Mughals, the production and sale of salt had been state monopoly. The tax was minimal, less than three annas a year, but because salt was a necessity for rich and poor alike, it was regressive, impacting the poorest drastically. Followed by journalists and newsreel cameramen from around the world, Gandhi left his ashram at Sabarmati on 12 March 1930 for the 380-kilometre walk to Dandi, on Gujarat’s western coast, telling those accompanying him not to return until India was free. His daily prayer meetings drew massive crowds. By the time he reached Dandi, tens of thousands had joined his march. On 5 April he bathed in the sea and picked up a handful of salt from the beach, a trivial but highly symbolic act. The government treated the whole episode with indifference, concentrating instead on the mass arrest of Congress leaders. Gandhi was jailed but, in the weeks and months that followed, hundreds of thousands followed his example, a response that Gandhi had never expected.
The police use of steel-tipped lathis against marchers when they reached Dandi was memorably captured in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi.
By the closing months of 1930, both sides recognised that an impasse had been reached. Fearing that Congress might turn to more violent methods, Irwin invited Gandhi for talks in Delhi. In Irwin, Gandhi at last had a viceroy who was sympathetic to the demands of moderate nationalists. He considered the Mahatma a leader with ‘a very good mind; logical, forceful, courageous, with an odd streak of subtlety’. The respect was mutual: Gandhi would later say, ‘I succumbed not to Lord Irwin but to the honesty in him.’ Photographs of the leader of the freedom movement striding up the steps of the vice-regal palace wearing his trademark dhoti and carrying a walking stick prompted Churchill to deride Gandhi in the House of Commons as a Middle Temple lawyer turned half-naked ‘fakir of the type well known in the East’. Nevertheless, the talks were a success, producing the Gandhi–Irwin Pact. Civil disobedience would be suspended in return for the release of most of the 60,000 jailed for participating in the salt marches. Gandhi also agreed to attend a second Round Table Conference in London (the first had been boycotted by Congress) to work out a constitution for India.
Gandhi sailed to England, arriving in London on 12 September 1931. Three days later, still wearing a dhoti and shawl, he addressed more than 100 delegates at the conference. His presence in London descended into a media circus. Weeks of talks were bogged down over the reservation of seats for religious and other minorities. His demand for immediate and full responsible government was ignored. Disillusioned, he left London in December 1931.
By the time he returned to India, Irwin had been replaced by the arch conservative Lord Willingdon (1866–1941), who made clear his intention to preserve British power in India whatever the cost. Congress reacted by announcing a second national disobedience campaign. The government responded with even greater repression than before, outlawing Congress and arresting more than 100,000 people. As deadly clashes escalated, Gandhi was once again forced to suspend the agitation.
The ensuing stalemate was broken by the Government of India Act 1935, the longest piece of legislation ever passed by the British parliament. The Act, which became law in August, allowed for provinces with elected politicians to be given autonomy from the central government, increased franchise to about a sixth of the Indian population and allowed women the right to vote for the first time. The complex franchise provisions were spread out over fifty-one pages with people being excluded from electoral rolls for reasons such as being a Sikh in a Muslim constituency. An assembly in Delhi comprising 250 seats, half occupied by members from the princely states, would form a power-sharing executive with the central government. Although it was a step forward, the Act was seen as just another bid to buy time.
One of those disappointed in the Act was Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964). Born in 1889, Nehru was a graduate of Harrow and Cambridge and, like Gandhi, had studied law at the Inner Temple. His father, Motilal, was a barrister at the Allahabad High Court and was elected president of Congress in 1919. In 1923, Nehru was elected Congress general secretary and quickly became its chief ideologue. His writings, composed mainly during his long stints in jail, countered the British narrative that India was a fragmented entity divided by caste, religion and language, needing the benevolent guiding hand of colonialism to unite it. Nehru dismissed the Act as a ‘Charter of Slavery’ designed to preserve British rule, referring to the safeguard-ridden document as ‘a machine with strong brakes but no engine’.
Jawaharlal Nehru (left) and Rabindranath Tagore (right) shared a vision of a secularist Indian. Nehru in turn was influenced by the Bengali Nobel Laureate’s writings and his theory of universality.
NEHRU ON INDIAN UNITY: ‘Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilisation. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardisation of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practised and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.’
Despite Nehru’s misgivings, Congress members participated in the March 1937 Indian provincial elections. When the votes were counted, the party had won absolute majorities in five provinces and was the largest single party in four others. After demanding assurances that the government would not use its special powers, it formed ministries in all provinces except for Punjab, Sindh and Bengal. In contrast, the Muslim League scraped together barely one-quarter of the 482 seats reserved for Muslims. Jinnah’s overtures to form coalitions in several provinces received the cold shoulder from Congress, which found itself riding a wave of popular support and now had control over most aspects of government, aside from security and defence.
The League’s rebuff from Congress marked the end of any real chance that Hindus and Muslims would march towards independence hand-in-hand. The growing alienation and insecurity Muslims felt was fanned by Hindu chauvinist parties, the most prominent of which was the All-India Hindu Mahasabha. According to the Mahasabha’s president, V.D. Savarkar (1883–1956), Hindus were united by ‘the tie we bear to our common fatherland, and the common blood that coursed through our veins and also by the tie of a common homage we owe to our great civilisation or Hindu culture’. Only followers of religions that originated in India could be Hindu – a criterion that included Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains but excluded Muslims. (The division is still at the core of Hindu nationalist or Hindutva ideology today.) In 1938, Nehru tried unsuccessfully to assuage Muslim fears by insisting that Hindu fundamentalists would be banned from Congress. It was too little too late. By the time the League met in Lahore in 1940, the idea of a separate nation for Muslims was not only a goal, but it had also taken on a name: Pakistan, or ‘the land of the pure’.
QUIT INDIA AND THE COUNTDOWN TO INDEPENDENCE
When Britain, and therefore India, declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Congress was not consulted. Instead, it was presented with a raft of new laws limiting the autonomy of provincial governments and restricting civil liberties. Despite his commitment to nonviolence, Gandhi declared his support for Britain at a meeting with Viceroy Lord Linlithgow (1887–1952). The Congress Working Committee followed suit, passing a resolution reaffirming its ‘entire disapproval of the ideology and practice of Fascism and Nazism and their glorification of war and violence and the suppression of the human spirit’. But it also stressed that ‘the issue of war and peace for India must be decided by the Indian people’. The British government was asked ‘to declare in unequivocal terms what their war aims are in regard to democracy and imperialism and the new order that is envisaged, in particular, how these aims are going to apply to India and to be given effect to in the present’. For Britain to fight in the name of freedom while refusing to let Indians rule themselves was seen as hypocritical. When Linlithgow sidestepped the issue, Congress’s nine provincial ministries resigned in protest. For the Muslim League, the resignations were cause for celebration: Congress rule, they believed, was finally over. In March 1940, the League adopted what was called the Pakistan resolution, demanding ‘independent states’ in the northwestern and eastern parts of India. A plan on how to achieve that goal was conspicuous by its absence.
With the entry of Japan into the war in September 1940, the sudden fall of Singapore in February 1942 and the rapid Japanese advance through Burma, an invasion of India seemed just a matter of time. In Bengal, more than 40,000 boats were scuttled to prevent them from falling into Japanese hands. In Madras, government officials were dispersed into the interior, and tigers at the zoo were shot in case they were released from their cages and began roaming the streets.
Ready to back the advancing Japanese was the Indian National Army (INA). Made up of thousands of Indian prisoners of war who had been interned by the Japanese forces, the INA was led by Subhas Candra Bose (1897–1945), who had briefly held the position of Congress president before being ousted by Nehru and Gandhi for his radical views. After being arrested in late 1940 for organising anti-British protests, Bose staged a spectacular escape, travelling to Germany via Afghanistan and Moscow. The Indian population of Axis-held Europe hailed him as ‘Netaji’. In 1943, he landed in a submarine in Japanese-occupied Singapore before sailing to the Andaman Islands, the only Indian territory in Japanese hands. The Andamans became Azad Hind or Free India, with Bose as head of state. In the end, the INA never posed a threat to India. Of the 6000 soldiers who saw action, more died from disease than in battle, and many suffered abuse and neglect by their supposed allies, the Japanese. Bose would die in a plane crash on his way to Tokyo just weeks before Japan’s surrender.
In March 1942, Stafford Cripps (1889–1952), a socialist member of Churchill’s war cabinet, flew to India with the most far-reaching proposal for Indian independence yet. In return for supporting the war effort, the government promised ‘the earliest possible realisation of self-Government’. A ‘new Indian Union’ would be created – a ‘Dominion, associated with the United Kingdom and the other Dominions by a common allegiance to the Crown, but equal to them in every respect, in no way subordinate’ to them. Congress was invited to join the Viceroy’s Council and act as the Cabinet of the Indian government. Once the war was over, India would gain complete freedom within or outside the British Empire – the choice would be up to its new leaders.
While some Congress leaders, including Nehru, were prepared to accept the proposals, hardliners and representatives of other parties doubted the truth of Britain’s declared intention to share executive power, especially in critical areas such as defence. A provision allowing provinces and states to eventually secede was seen as an attempt to appease the Muslim League and the princely states. In the end, Cripps left India without making an agreement. Gandhi described the Cripps offer as a ‘post-dated cheque on a failing bank’.
Bankruptcy of another kind was also on Gandhi’s mind. Non-cooperation had not succeeded in dislodging the British from India, his fasts had had little effect, and negotiations with viceroys and at the Round Table Conference in London had produced few results. Convinced that Britain could not resist an Axis advance, Gandhi decided it was time for the Raj to ‘leave India to her fate’. On 8 August 1942, the All-India Congress Committee endorsed his riskiest and audacious move yet, the ‘Quit India Resolution’ authorising ‘the starting of a mass struggle on nonviolent lines on the widest possible scale’. As Gandhi declared the following day: ‘I am not going to be satisfied with anything short of complete freedom. We shall do or die. We shall either free India or die in the attempt.’
It would be his last declaration until the war was over. No sooner had he made his statement than he was arrested, together with nearly all of the Congress leadership. With no one to direct them, volunteers took things into their own hands. Largely peaceful protests were staged in many cities and towns, but these soon turned violent after police responded with lathi (metal-tipped wooden staves) charges, firings and more arrests. Factories making war provisions were sabotaged and telegraph lines cut. Europeans were dragged out of derailed trains and killed. In some areas ‘national governments’ were established. Writing to Churchill, Linlithgow described the unrest as the ‘most serious rebellion since that of 1857’.
Gandhi’s Quit India Movement has been described as his ‘final throw of the dice’. Jinnah would call it ‘the Mahatma’s Himalayan blunder’. Most historians agree. The jailing of Congress leaders allowed the Muslim League to gain strength and press for partition. In the midst of a world war, the British had few worries about public opinion at home if they went hard after Congress – and they did. With Japan now occupying the bulk of Southeast Asia, India was needed more than ever as a source of money, materials and manpower. Giving into Congress demands, British officials argued, risked igniting communal strife – something the country could ill afford. There was also pride at stake. Britain had never given up territory except through war, and India was the jewel in its imperial crown. As long the arch-imperialist Churchill was prime minister, Indian independence was a low priority, if not a lost cause.
Alongside the threat of war on India’s doorstep came another nightmare: famine in Bengal. Several years of poor rice harvests, a lack of boats for distributing food supplies, the cutting off of rice supplies from Burma due to the war and hoarding by Indian traders all combined to produce one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. Churchill’s intransience about diverting ships from Europe’s defence to deliver food to the starving contributed to the disaster. Famine or no famine, it didn’t matter, Churchill crowed, because ‘the Indians will breed like rabbits’. Anywhere between 1.5 and three million people would die before the incoming viceroy Lord Wavell (1883–1950) overruled Churchill and ordered the Indian Army to start distributing food supplies.
A TRYST WITH DESTINY
The end of the war in Europe on 7 May 1945 saw the curtain finally start to fall on Britain’s Indian empire. On 26 July, Churchill’s Tory-led government was defeated by Labour, which had long been a supporter of Indian independence. The new prime minister, Clement Attlee, ordered the release of Congress leaders from jail. Early the following year, Britain sent a Cabinet Mission to India. The issues on the table were no longer whether Britain would pull out of India or under what circumstances, but how soon a handover could be achieved and, most importantly, to whom.
As far as Nehru was concerned, the Muslim League was a creation of the British, part of its divide-and-rule strategy. He believed that once the British left, Muslims would flock to Congress. But his dream of a united India did not reflect the reality. Elections for provincial assemblies held in December 1945 and January 1946 only deepened communal divisions, with Congress dominating in Hindu-majority areas and the League triumphant in areas with a high concentration of Muslims. As the undisputed leader of India’s Muslims, Jinnah now had the mandate to press for their own state.
After two months of deliberations, the Cabinet Mission came up with a complicated three-tier governing structure. The Muslim League accepted the plan, even though it contained no provision for an independent homeland. After some reservations, Congress also agreed to an arrangement where it would share cabinet posts with the League. It was Gandhi who sabotaged this last hope that India could remain united by refusing to endorse any deal that gave the League and Congress equal constitutional representation, calling it such parity ‘worse than Pakistan’. Relations between the two sides deteriorated drastically. After meeting Nehru in Bombay, Jinnah declared he would have nothing more to do with his adversary and announced a Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946 ‘to oppose Congress tyranny’ and support the creation of Pakistan. Black flags hung over the houses of Muslims. His declaration sparked what became known as the Great Calcutta Killings, which left thousands dead in a week-long orgy of communal bloodletting.
Fearing that India was rapidly descending into civil war, Wavell announced a Breakdown Plan that would see Britain withdraw province by province, south to north, by 31 March 1948. The plan was rejected in London as a surrender of power rather than an orderly transfer. Wavell was recalled and the date for Britain’s departure was amended to June 1948. In the same announcement, Attlee confirmed that the last viceroy of India would be Louis Mountbatten (1900–1979). The former supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia and a cousin of King George V, Mountbatten would have free rein to obtain a settlement without having to refer to his superiors in London. For once, both Congress and the League applauded the move.
Within days of his arrival in India on 22 March 1947, Mountbatten started a charm offensive, using his inauguration speech to stress that his was ‘not a normal’ viceroyalty, and that he sought ‘the greatest goodwill of the greatest possible number’ of Indians. His engaging frankness quickly won over Gandhi and Nehru and other senior Congress leaders. Nehru formed a particularly close relationship with Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina (1901–1960), which ‘raised many eyebrows’, according to Shahid Hamid, military secretary to the commander of Indian forces, Claude Auchinleck. Mountbatten, however, failed to win over Jinnah, whom he privately referred to as an ‘evil genius’, a ‘lunatic’ and a ‘psychopathic case’.
It soon became clear to the new viceroy that partition was inevitable. Congress finally signed up to principle on 28 April, with Nehru believing that Pakistan would not survive more than a few years and would eventually return to the Indian fold. It was a view shared by Mountbatten, who likened Pakistan to a Nissen hut – a temporary structure easy to dismantle. Under pressure from the viceroy, Jinnah had to drop his dream of a contiguous state, settling instead for what he called for a ‘mutilated and moth-eaten’ Pakistan consisting of the Muslim-majority districts of West Punjab and East Bengal separated by more than 2000 kilometres of Indian territory. Among those who questioned its viability was R.G. Casey (1890–1976), the governor-general of Bengal, who predicted that the more populous and linguistically and ethnically distinct East Pakistan would eventually break away. His prophecy proved correct. From the ashes of a bloody civil war, the state of Bangladesh would be created in 1971.
On 4 June 1947, the day after the plan for partition was agreed by both parties, Mountbatten told a press conference that the transfer of power ‘could be about the 15 August’, shortening the previous timetable by almost a year. The date, which he later admitted had been plucked out of thin air, left the government with just seventy-three days to make the necessary constitutional military and economic arrangements for independence. By now, Congress had accepted that partition was inevitable. But two major hurdles remained. The first was to convince the hundreds of princes whose states made up a third of the subcontinent to relinquish their power and join either India or Pakistan. The second was to draw up the boundaries of the soon-to-be-independent states. The man given this almost impossible task was London lawyer Cyril Radcliffe (1899–1977), who had never been to India before, something Jinnah and Nehru both welcomed – his lack of experience was preferable to bias. The majority of princes accepted their fate but the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities on either side of the soon-to-be demarcated boundaries were bracing for the worst.
Just before midnight on 15 August 1947, a time chosen by astrologers as being auspicious, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the legislative assembly in New Delhi, declaring: ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge … At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will wake to life and freedom.’ Two days earlier the Mountbattens had flown to Karachi, where ceremonies marking Pakistan’s independence were to take place on 14 August. After speeches at the assembly hall, the viceroy sat next to Jinnah, now the first governor-general of Pakistan, in an open-topped borrowed Rolls Royce for a procession through the city. Mountbatten had been told of a plot to assassinate Jinnah and believed his presence would prevent any such attempt by Hindus or Sikhs.
There was no such protection for those caught up in the ethnic bloodletting that was already spinning out of control in newly partitioned districts. Historians are divided on whether hastening the transfer of power avoided a civil war or helped precipitate violence. Killings had begun as early as July, when gangs of Sikhs and Hindus attacked Muslims who had begun migrating westwards, fearful that they would be trapped in a nation hostile to their faith. The violence intensified when the final draft of Radcliffe’s boundary map was leaked to the League and Congress a week before its official 16 August release date.
Partition, when it came, triggered the largest and, by some estimates, bloodiest forced migration in history. Up to 15 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs crossed the newly demarcated borders to their promised homes. The brutality that accompanied the settling of scores was medieval, with axes, scythes, swords, spears and clubs used. Thousands of women were raped, abducted or mutilated. Recent research puts the death toll at between 500,000 and 600,000, divided more or less equally between Muslims and non-Muslims. With the British Army already beginning its withdrawal and Mountbatten ordering intervention only when English nationals were in danger, there was little that local police and military personnel could do. A 50,000-strong boundary force was largely ineffectual, as it was made up of Hindu and Muslim troops not inclined to intervene against their own communities. Despite the massacres, Nehru remarked, ‘I would rather have every village in India go up in flames than keep a single British soldier in India a moment longer than is necessary.’
Absent from the ceremonies marking independence in Delhi was Mahatma Gandhi. He was 1500 kilometres away in Calcutta, fasting, spinning and praying. When government officials asked him for a statement in honour of 15 August, he responded that ‘he had run dry. There is no message at all. If it is bad let it be so.’ Gandhi’s disillusionment related to the partition of the subcontinent, which he had fought so hard to oppose. His presence in Calcutta secured a temporary reprieve to the savagery that had beset the city for more than a year, with Hindus and Muslims marching together to celebrate independence. But what was regarded as the ‘Calcutta Miracle’ lasted for only nine days. When Hindu and Muslim mobs renewed their attacks, Gandhi resorted, yet again, to fasting. This time, gang leaders came to his bedside and promised to mend their ways, some weeping as they confessed their guilt.
After peace was restored, the Mahatma made his way to Delhi, where rioting was continuing unabated. He set about touring Muslim refugee camps, reassuring their occupants that they had a future in India, and plunged himself into relief work to help traumatised Hindus and Sikhs. In January 1948 Gandhi, who was seventy-eight and suffering the effects of kidney failure, declared he would fast for as long as it took to end the violence. The effect was immediate, with both Hindu and Muslim organisations pledging to work for peace. Groups were formed to repair damaged temples and mosques. The only party to repudiate the peace pledge was the far-right Hindu Mahasabha.
On 30 January 1948, twelve days after Gandhi ended his fast, a Hindu Mahasabha worker arrived at his daily prayer meeting at Birla House in Delhi. As the Mahatma was being helped to the prayer ground by two of his young female assistants, Nathuram Godse pushed his way through the crowd. When he was directly in front of Gandhi, he pulled out a Beretta pistol and fired three shots, killing him almost instantly. The Mahatma’s last words were ‘He Ram’ (‘Oh Rama’). Just a few months before, Gandhi had written: ‘Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names of Rama and Rahim, which mean to me the same god. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully.’ He had got his wish.
Although he is still revered around the globe for his belief in nonviolent change, Gandhi’s legacy continues to divide Indian historians. Sunil Khilnani writes:
In a society with no history of large-scale collective action, where politics was for most a domain of distant and spectacular power, Gandhi made people believe they could make a difference. He built a movement, shaped a nationalist imagination, and expanded the world’s repertoire of dissent, protest and peaceful disagreement.
Professor of Indian history R.C. Majumdar lowers Gandhi’s pedestal, insisting he was ‘lacking in both political wisdom and political strategy’. Far from being infallible, he ‘committed serious blunders, one after another, in pursuit of some utopian ideals and methods which had no basis in reality’. The truth, as always, falls somewhere in between.
For all the hagiography surrounding Gandhi, it can be argued that India would have achieved independence without him. As British scholar Judith Brown surmises:
Far deeper economic and political forces than the leadership of one man were at work loosening the links between Britain and India – forces that had their origins in India, in Britain, and in the wider world economy and the balance of power. Yet his skills and his particular genius marked the nationalist movement and gave it a character unlike that of any other anti-imperial nationalism of the century.
It was now up to Nehru and other political leaders to turn Gandhi’s struggle for a free India into reality.