During the two years between the atom bomb and Indian independence, Indian concerns drove British policy in Southeast Asia. The availability or otherwise of the Indian Army to suppress dissidence determined events not just in Burma and Malaya, but even in Indo-China and Indonesia. Public perceptions of the East were shaped above all by events in India, much to the dismay of nationalist leaders in Burma and Malaya who wanted to get their concerns to the top of the agenda. Even after 1947 India cast a long shadow over the region, though the new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, scrupulously tried to avoid the perception that ‘greater India’ would now replace the British Empire east of Bengal. British policy towards India over these years was formed by a set of assumptions and sensibilities that went far back into the past of the Labour Party and the Indian National Congress. Attlee, Cripps and Nehru had a long and tumultuous history of mutual admiration and mutual distrust. Attlee had served on the Simon Commission of 1927–9, an all-white committee of constitutional enquiry which Indian nationalists believed had hijacked their country’s future and perpetuated British power by a policy of divide and rule. Nehru and Cripps, old socialist thinkers, had parted company with bad grace in 1942 after the failure of the Cripps mission to find a solution to the constitutional tangle.52 Nehru and many other Congressmen had spent most of the rest of the war years in British Indian jails.
This long history was no less apparent in the case of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Labour Party elder statesman and the newly appointed secretary of state for India and Burma in the Labour government. Pethick-Lawrence and his wife had been involved in Indian issues since the 1920s. Burma, by contrast, hardly entered their consciousness. In September 1945, as her husband took up his job, Lady Pethick-Lawrence wrote to Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, about her early days as a suffragette. ‘As long ago as 1909/10 Indian students were in the habit of attending our suffrage meetings in great numbers and I had many personal conversations with them.’53 They had associated the movement for women’s votes with the liberation of India and she now knew ‘how faithfully that promise has been kept’. Even when Pethick-Lawrence had been a member of the 1929 Labour government, his wife had remained a member of the pro-Congress India League.54
The Labour Party of the 1940s was still essentially the political arm of a movement of moral, and specifically Christian, reform. Likewise the Congress was suffused with Gandhi’s neo-Tolstoyan and semi-Christian ideology, while even the socialism espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru was influenced by the rhetoric of Hindu and Christian moral uplift movements in India. But these religious influences were not necessarily recognized by the British, let alone applauded. In late 1943 Pethick-Lawrence had discussed the role of holy men in politics with the novelist Aldous Huxley, proposing that Gandhi’s ‘spiritual conception of Indian independence’ made him ‘intolerant of compromise’. He had, Pethick-Lawrence thought, displayed intolerance towards the untouchables in India in the 1930s and had worsened India’s problem of over-population by his stubborn opposition to birth control. Worst of all, he was unable to offer an ‘olive branch to the Muslims’. Indeed, ‘I think Gandhi himself has envisaged the breaking out of a civil war.’55 Pethick-Lawrence was inclined to agree with a friend who felt that ‘the neglect of human suffering is typical of Eastern mysticism’.
Despite the apparent overlap of their ideals and political language, then, there was still a fundamental lack of trust on the part of the Labour government’s leaders towards the Congress and still more towards the Muslim League. The same was true on the other side. The Congress leaders had been let down by successive British governments, Labour politicians included, once too often. Right up to independence and beyond they expected to be sold down the river again. Somehow the chains would remain in place. Nehru wrote to Cripps in friendly terms in December 1945. He said he felt ‘a dull pain’ when he thought about Cripps’s actions in 1942, when the two leaders had failed to strike a compromise between the British government and the Congress. He must understand, Nehru went on, how vastly India had been changed by war: ‘People have grown desperate and it is no easy matter to hold them in check… There must be no prevarication’ by the Labour government in its Indian policy.56 At Christmas, as a new Labour mission set out for India, Gandhi wrote to Pethick-Lawrence summoning up ‘the Prince of Peace’. He drew the secretary of state’s attention to an event nearly fifty years earlier when King Edward VII had supposedly played a ‘benign role’ during the peace negotiations between the British and the Boers at the close of the South African war.57 He hoped Pethick-Lawrence would exert a similar statesmanlike influence. But India must move immediately to independence. Through the dew of Gandhi’s Indo-Christian piety, the message was clear: there were at least two potentially armed and bitterly opposed forces. For Boer and Briton read Indian and Briton.
Yet the speeches of nationalist leaders were only the surface wind. The real lessons were to be learned from the Indian Army itself, which had already metamorphosed into a genuinely national force. One fact that became increasingly clear in the autumn of 1945 as demobilization began was that the Indian Army would never be the same again. Even before VJ Day, commanding officers had noted that the troops were saying in their letters that the world must change. One army electrician writing in Urdu expressed his sense of shame when ‘an Italian peasant’ – presumably a POW or a volunteer – asked him why education was not compulsory in India. ‘I resolved in my mind that I will do my best to start a primary school in my village after the War.’58 Indian commissioned officers were even more vigorous in their political determination. They told their British colleagues in no uncertain terms that the INA’s aim of liberating India was entirely right.59 The only thing that was wrong was their method. The British must leave India immediately, now that it was under no threat of attack from Japan.
By October 1945 the issue of the INA had risen to the top of the national political agenda and it became a key point of controversy between the newly released Congress leadership and Wavell’s government.60 Many people in India believed that Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA were wrong to join the Japanese, but even so they felt that the INA officers and men were true patriots. Whereas the British reserved particular contempt for the INA men they called the ‘blacks’, men who had tortured and flogged Indian Army soldiers who had refused to join them, most Indians made no distinctions between members of the INA. They agitated for the release of all of them. One comparison developed by members of Bose’s old party, the Forward Bloc, was between the INA and the Free French under General de Gaulle. The INA, too, had rebelled against a government of occupation and had been sentenced to death in their absence. Not surprisingly, this view was not popular with the British and the Americans, but went down wonderfully among ordinary Indians. A national defence fund was instituted and some of the best lawyers in the country, including Jawaharlal Nehru, came forward to act as defending counsel for INA men put on trial. In England, the Cambridge University Indian student association, the Majlis, set up an INA Defence Fund. V. D. Savarkar, Hindu ideologue and historian of the Indian freedom struggle of 1857, sent a telegram to Attlee.61 It demanded a general amnesty for all INA prisoners. It was signed, not with Savarkar’s name, but with a date, ‘1857’, the year of the Great Mutiny.
At first the British resisted the campaign to free the INA men. Wavell was quite clear that the INA ‘blacks’, estimated at about 7,000 men, would have to face trial. Their ‘rebellion against the king-emperor’ and violation of their oath put these men in quite a different category from, say, those Tamil estate workers in Malaya who had joined the Japanese. Nor was there a comparison with the BNA, for the Burmese had ‘redeemed’ themselves by ultimately rebelling against the Japanese. Even the cautious General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief India Command, was insistent that INA men who had personally beaten and tortured their former comrades must be held to account. Otherwise the army would be guilty of disloyalty to its own men. The British made a lot out of those enlisted men who were hostile to the INA. Not everyone was cowed by the public adulation of Bose. One R. A. Hassan of Lahore wrote to the Statesman in October denouncing him as ‘selfish, vain, ruthless’. He had eaten four-course meals every day while slowly killing the POWs who would not join him.62 A British officer, W. L. Alston, was moved to compose a little ballad on how he thought a penitent INA man might feel:
It makes me shudder when I think
That once I lent a hand,
To help that squat barbarian,
To take my native land.63
Alston sent his doggerel to Auchinleck, but did not receive a reply, perhaps because his verses went on to indict the Labour ‘cranks’ for betraying the Empire.
The INA was a prickly issue for the Congress too. Despite their public denunciations of the British for even considering trials, the Congress leaders were privately in two minds, concerned that a new national army should be loyal and not divided by factions that had originated in the war. Nehru had always referred to the INA as ‘misguided men’, but had then gone on to say that ‘whatever errors and mistakes they had committed’, they had been real patriots. The issue of the oath meant little to civilian Indians, but the atrocities against other Indian troops were more difficult to dismiss. The British picked up some of the Congress’s disquiet through a returned POW, Captain Hari Badhwar. Badhwar, who was well acquainted with the accounts of atrocities, met Asaf Ali of the Congress Working Committee and found that he had been deputed by Congress to test opinion in different parts of the country.64 Badhwar reported that Ali had found a widespread feeling amongst ordinary Indians that the British must not try even the INA ‘blacks’. Congress was well aware of the INA atrocities and deplored them. It was also worried about the future of the army. But Congress dare not take a line against the INA ‘as they would lose much ground in the country’. There was an implicit suggestion in Badhwar’s report that if the government of India were to abandon the plan, Congress might be prepared to put them on trial when it came to power.
The British themselves were already backing down a little. Everyone was aware that a campaign of ‘mass glorification’ of the INA was going on, particularly in Bengal. The idea that the ordinary ‘white’ rankers, the INA men who had escaped British censure with no more than a dishonourable discharge, would simply be quietly absorbed into the villages was exploded. Instead, provincial Congress committees arranged receptions as the men passed through railway stations on their way home. They were garlanded, eulogized and treated like conquering heroes. One thing that particularly worried the authorities was the way in which the issue might become communal. Though Muslim soldiers had joined the INA, some soldiers from the Muslim peoples of the northwest regarded Bose and his followers as traitorous Hindus. With communal tensions beginning to build up again as the war ended, the British did not want the INA issue to feed into Hindu–Muslim disagreements.65 The authorities reached a consensus at a conference of provincial officers held in November 1945. They agreed that, since there was so much sympathy for the INA among army rank and file and ordinary people, the only safe policy was to confine prosecution to those INA officers specifically accused of brutality against fellow soldiers. It took a while for full import of this decision to sink in, but the fact that so many officials were prepared to overlook the charge of rebellion against the king-emperor was a tacit admission that the imperial game was up.