The War Years — Who Did What

11939: India Goes to War Without Being Asked

The declaration

On 3 September 1939 the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, announced that India was at war with Germany. He did not consult the Central Legislative Assembly. He did not consult the eight provincial governments that Indians had elected and were running. He did not consult the Congress or the Muslim League.

Three hundred and eighty million people were taken into the largest war in human history by the signature of one appointed official.

Whatever you think of what the Congress did next, understand the position it was in. Congress ministers were governing provinces under a constitution that had just been shown to be worthless the moment it mattered.

The Congress resigns

The Congress position was not simple refusal. It said: state your war aims, tell us whether they include freedom for India, and treat India as a free country whose government decides its own participation. Linlithgow would not.

So in October and November 1939 the Congress ministries resigned in all eight provinces. The provinces went back under the direct rule of British Governors.

Look at what that meant in practice, because it is the hinge of the whole period.

• The British could now govern most of India by decree, without any elected Indian body to obstruct them.
• The Congress had taken itself out of power voluntarily, at the exact moment when power was about to become valuable.
• And the field was left open to whoever chose to cooperate.

Jinnah understood immediately. He called on Muslims to observe 22 December 1939 as a Day of Deliverancefrom Congress rule.

The August Offer and the individual satyagraha

In August 1940, with France fallen and Britain alone, Linlithgow made the August Offer: dominion status as an objective at some future date, more Indians on the Viceroy's Executive Council, a war advisory council. Congress rejected it as far too little.

Buried in that offer, however, was a sentence of enormous consequence. The British stated that they could not transfer power to any system of government whose authority wasdenied by large and powerful elements in India's national life. That was a veto, and everybody could see whose hand it was placed in. From 1940 onward the Muslim League did not merely have a demand. It had a guarantee that nothing could be settled over its objection.

Gandhi's response to the war was a limited campaign called individual satyagraha, beginning in October 1940. Chosen individuals would publicly make an anti war speech and be arrested. Vinoba Bhave was the first, Nehru the second. It was deliberately small, symbolic and controlled. About twenty five thousand people were eventually arrested. It kept the Congress alive without provoking a confrontation Gandhi did not think it could win.

By March 1942 the war had arrived at India's border, and Britain suddenly needed Indian cooperation very badly indeed.

2The Cripps Mission: Was Rejecting It a Blunder?

Why Britain sent him

Singapore fell on 15 February 1942, and with it about eighty five thousand Allied troops. Rangoon fell in March. The Japanese were in Burma and moving towards the Indian frontier. Roosevelt was pressing Churchill publicly about the moral position of fighting a war for freedom while holding India by force, and Chiang Kai shek had visited India in February and said the same thing.

So Churchill, who loathed the idea, sent Sir Stafford Cripps to Delhi in March 1942 with an offer.

• Dominion status after the war, with the right to leave the Commonwealth. This was a real advance in principle.
• A constituent assembly after the war, elected by the provincial legislatures, to write India's constitution.
• The right of any province not to accedeto the new Indian union, and instead to keep its existing constitutional position or negotiate a separate one with Britain.
• For the duration of the war, nothing changed.Defence remained entirely in British hands and the Viceroy kept his powers.

What was actually offered Why Congress rejected it

Two reasons, and they are different in kind.

The immediate reason.There was no transfer of any real power now. Congress wanted a national government with genuine authority, including a share in defence, for the duration of the war. Cripps could not offer it, because Churchill and Linlithgow had made sure he could not. Cripps appears to have gone beyond his brief in his conversations and then had to retreat, which poisoned the whole thing.

The deeper reason.The non accession clause. By offering provinces the right to stay out of the Indian union, the British had for the first time conceded theprincipleof partition in an official document. Congress saw that clearly and rejected it for that reason as much as any other. The Muslim League also rejected the offer, because it did not give Pakistan outright, but the League understood what it had gained.

Was rejecting it a blunder?

The case that it was.Dominion status with the right of secession was more than Congress had ever been offered. Accepting it would have put Congress inside the government during the war, in the room when decisions were made, and in a strong position at the end of it. Instead Congress rejected it, launched Quit India, and spent the next three years in prison while its rival grew. On this reading, 1942 is the year Congress handed India to Jinnah.

The case that it was not.The offer gave nothing during the war, which was the only period that mattered, and Churchill had made certain of that. Congress would have been asked to take responsibility for an unpopular war effort, including conscription and rationing and the requisitioning that helped starve Bengal, while holding no real power. And the non accession clause meant that accepting Cripps was accepting the principle of Pakistan in 1942 rather than 1947, before the Congress had any bargaining position at all.

The last great mass movement of the freedom struggle. It was crushed in weeks and it changed everything anyway.

3Quit India: How Big It Was and What It Cost

Do or die

On 8 August 1942 the All India Congress Committee met at Gowalia Tank in Bombay and passed the Quit India resolution. Gandhi's speech that night contained the phrase that defined it: he gave the country a mantra,do or die, telling Indians that they should either free India or die in the attempt, and that they must not live to see the perpetuation of their slavery.

He intended, by his own account, to open negotiations after the resolution. He never got the chance.

Nine August

Before dawn on 9 August 1942, in an operation planned well in advance, the British arrested the entire Congress leadership across India. Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and the whole Working Committee were in custody before the country woke up. The Congress was declared unlawful. Its offices were seized and its funds frozen. Press censorship was total.

The government had decapitated the movement in a single night. What followed was therefore something nobody had designed: a leaderless national uprising.

What people actually did

It varied enormously by region, and it was far more violent than any previous Gandhian campaign.

• Communications were attacked.Railway lines were torn up, telegraph and telephone wires cut, stations and post offices burned. In Bihar and eastern United Provinces, rail links were severed for weeks.
• Parallel governments were declared.The Prati Sarkarat Satara in Maharashtra under Nana Patil ran courts and collected revenue for years, into 1945. The Jatiya Sarkarat Tamluk in Midnapore, Bengal, ran relief and administration and even had a women's wing. Ballia in the United Provinces and Talcher in Orissa also declared their own governments for a time.
• Underground work.Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the flag at Gowalia Tank and went underground for years. Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan ran a socialist underground network. Usha Mehta, a twenty two year old, ran the Congress Radio, a secret transmitter that broadcast news past the censors until she was caught in November 1942 and jailed.

What it cost

The repression was on a scale not seen since 1857, and the figures are disputed in the usual pattern.

Fifty seven battalions of troops were used. The movement was broken in most places within six to eight weeks, although pockets held out for years.

In Part 4 we left the Muslim League with 4. 4 percent of the Muslim vote and no provincial governments. Here is how that changed, and it is not a mystery.

4The Muslim League: The Three Years That Made It

Jinnah's strategy

Jinnah did not launch a movement. He did the opposite, deliberately. His approach through the war was:

• Do not obstruct the war effort.The League did not oppose recruitment or supply. This made it, from the British point of view, the responsible party.
• Do not go to jail.While the entire Congress leadership was imprisoned from August 1942 to June 1945, Jinnah was free, speaking, travelling and organising.
• Take office wherever possible.Office meant patronage, and patronage meant organisation.
• Hold the veto.The August Offer of 1940 had given the League the assurance that power would not be transferred over its objection. Jinnah's task was simply to remain the recognised voice of Muslim India, and let the arithmetic do the rest.

What that produced

Between 1942 and 1944 the League moved into government in province after province, mostly by coalition and defection rather than by election.

By 1945 the League had what it had entirely lacked in 1937: government office, a mass membership, a fund raising machine, a network of local committees, and above all the ability to say that it, and not the Congress, was the party that had been working while the other side sat in jail.

This chapter contains facts that many people find surprising, and they are not in dispute among historians. They come from assembly records and from the Mahasabha's own published presidential addresses.

5The Hindu Mahasabha and the Coalition Governments

The record

Savarkar was president of the Hindu Mahasabha from 1937 to 1943. During his presidency:

• Bengal.In December 1941 the Mahasabha entered A. K. Fazlul Huq's Progressive Coalition ministry.Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a leading Mahasabha figure, became Finance Minister.Fazlul Huq was the man who had moved the Lahore Resolution in March 1940.
• Sindh.The Mahasabha was part of the provincial government. On 3 March 1943 the Sindh Legislative Assembly passed a resolution moved by G. M. Syed recommending to the Viceroy that the Muslims of India constituted a separate nation. Mahasabha ministers voted against the resolution and remained in the government afterwards.
• North West Frontier Province.The Mahasabha was in coalition arrangements involving the Muslim League.

What Savarkar said about it

He did not deny it. He defended it, in public, in his presidential address at the Kanpur session of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1942, arguing that practical politics required reasonable compromises, that the Sindh Hindu Sabha had rightly taken responsibility by joining hands with the League in running a coalition government, and that the Bengal coalition had functioned successfully.

The Mahasabha's declared policy towards the British during the war wasresponsive cooperation: not opposition, but conditional support in exchange for concessions.

• Coalitions are how legislatures work.In a hung assembly, parties that despise each other form governments. That is normal politics, not betrayal, and the Mahasabha ministers voted against the separate nation resolution when it came.
• The Mahasabha's argument was that Hindu interests needed defending from inside government, not from a prison cell, and that abandoning office to the League entirely would have made things worse for Hindus in Muslim majority provinces.
• And Syama Prasad Mookerjee resigned.This matters and is often left out by the Mahasabha's critics. In November 1942 he resigned from the Bengal ministry, writing to the Governor in protest at the repression of the Quit India movement and at the government's conduct in Midnapore. His resignation letter is a real document and it is a creditable one.

The strongest defence, which must be stated

This is the specific charge I was asked to test, and it deserves to be tested precisely rather than shouted about. Precision here means separating two different accusations that are constantly mixed together.

6Was the RSS Working for the British?

First, separate the two accusations

Accusation A: the RSS did not participate in the freedom struggle at its decisive moment.

Accusation B: the RSS worked for the British, meaning it assisted them, informed for them or acted on their behalf.

These require completely different evidence. Let us take them in turn.

Accusation A: the evidence

• Golwalkar's own instruction.In 1942 Golwalkar directed that the organisation would not take part in the Quit India movement. His stated reasoning was explicit: their pledge spoke of the freedom of the country through the defence of religion and culture, and contained no mention of the departure of the British from here.
• Golwalkar's later admission.He acknowledged that the Sangh had resolved not to do anything directly during the 1942 movement.
• It was not banned.The Congress was declared unlawful in August 1942 and its funds were seized. The RSS was not banned during the war and continued to operate, hold camps and expand.
• Official approval on the record.Provincial government assessments of the period recorded that the Sangh had kept itself within the law and had refrained from taking part in the disturbances of August 1942.
• No leadership arrests.No senior RSS figure was imprisoned as part of the 1942 movement, in a period when the entire Congress leadership was.

Accusation A isestablished. It is established from the organisation's own leader's words, which is the strongest kind of evidence there is.

Accusation B: the evidence

Now the more serious charge, and here the picture changes.

• British intelligence did not find the RSS working for them.Intelligence assessments of the period record that no evidence connected the Sangh as an organisation to the 1942 uprising. They do not record it assisting the government, informing on nationalists or acting under direction. If a body had been working for the British, the British files would be the place it appeared, and it does not appear there.
• The police also recorded anti British speechesmade at RSS training camps in the same period, which is not the profile of a collaborating organisation.
• Individual members did participate.There are documented instances of individual swayamsevaks joining the 1942 movement in their personal capacity, and of local units sheltering underground workers.
• The founder's own record.Hedgewar had been a Congress volunteer, was jailed for a year in 1921 during Non Cooperation, and was jailed again in 1930 during the Civil Disobedience Movement, having first handed over the running of the organisation so that the Sangh itself was not implicated. That is the pattern of a man keeping his organisation out of politics while going himself, which is exactly the doctrine at issue.
• The stated doctrine was consistent.The RSS position was that it was a character building and cultural body rather than a political one, and that it therefore abstained from all political agitation. It applied that rule across the board, not selectively in Britain's favour.

Two separate charges, thirty years apart, about the same man. I am going to deal with them in the order they happened, and I am going to start with what he actually did before either of them.

7Savarkar: The Recruitment Drive and the Petitions

What is not in dispute

Being fair means beginning here. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a genuine revolutionary long before he was a political theorist. He founded Abhinav Bharat as a secret society. He wrote The Indian War of Independence 1857 in 1909, a book banned before it was published, which reframed 1857 as a national war and inspired a generation. He was involved in supplying pistols to India from London. In 1910 he made a famous escape attempt at Marseilles, swimming ashore through a porthole, which became an international legal case.

He was sentenced to two life terms, fifty years, and sent to the Cellular Jail at Port Blair, where he spent roughly a decade under conditions that broke men: the oil mill, solitary confinement, floggings, and no news of the outside world. Nobody should discuss what he wrote from there without holding that in mind.

The mercy petitions

Savarkar submitted a series of petitions to the British authorities from the Andamans. Historians count at least six, in 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and 1920. The texts are in the National Archives of India and have been published in full.

The 1913 petition, presented in person to Sir Reginald Craddock, the Home Member of the Viceroy's Council, during his visit to the Andamans, contains the passage that is quoted most often. I am printing it as written.

He was released in 1924 on conditions: he would live in Ratnagiri district and would not participate in politics for five years. He observed those conditions. The restrictions were fully lifted only in 1937.

The defence, at its strongest

• It was a tactic.His defenders argue that a revolutionary buried alive in the Andamans is of no use to anybody, that petitioning was the only legal instrument available, and that he wrote whatever was necessary to get out and resume the fight. Getting out of prison by deceiving the enemy is not dishonourable.
• Petitioning was normal.Mercy petitions were filed by very many political prisoners of the period, and the practice was not in itself regarded as shameful.
• He had already served roughly a decadeof an effectively impossible sentence in conditions designed to destroy people.

The problems with that defence

• The language goes well beyond a request for release.Offering to serve the Government in any capacity they like, and describing a conscientious conversion, is not the minimum required to obtain clemency.
• He kept the conditions.If the petitions were a ruse to get out and fight, the natural sequel is to get out and fight. He did not. He stayed within his restrictions for thirteen years, and when he re entered politics in 1937 it was as the leader of a party pursuing responsive cooperation with the British rather than confrontation.
• A claim about Gandhi's advice does not hold.It is sometimes said that Savarkar petitioned on Gandhi's advice. Gandhi did write in 1920 supporting the release of the Savarkar brothers, and he did advise the family on making representations, but this is not the same as having prompted the petitions, several of which predate it. Fact checking of this specific claim has found it to be a distortion of the sequence.

The recruitment drive

From 1941 to 1943, as Mahasabha president, Savarkar ran a campaign urging Hindus to enlist in the British Indian armed forces. His slogan of the period was to Hinduise all politics and militarise Hindudom. His stated reasoning was that Hindus had been systematically excluded from the military under British recruitment policy, as Part 1 described, and that a war which required manpower was the one opportunity in a century to get a generation of Hindus trained, armed and experienced.

The case that this was collaboration

He was recruiting soldiers for the British Empire during a war, at the exact moment when the Congress leadership was in prison for demanding that the British leave. Congress condemned recruitment. Every soldier recruited was a soldier available to suppress the 1942 movement.

The case for the defence, and it is stronger than most people expect

The best witness for the defence is not a Mahasabha supporter. It is Subhas Chandra Bose, who was at that moment leading an army against the British. In the Azad Hind Radio broadcast of 25 June 1944 which I quoted in Part 5, Bose said that while almost all Congress leaders were decrying Indian soldiers as mercenaries, it was heartening that Savarkar was fearlessly urging Indian youth to enlist, because those enlisted youths themselves provided trained men and soldiers for his Indian National Army.

And Bose was factually correct. The INA was built almost entirely from Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army captured at Singapore. The recruitment pipeline that Savarkar was feeding did in fact end up supplying Bose's army. That is not a retrospective rationalisation. It is what Bose himself said at the time.

While all of this was being argued about, between one and three million people starved to death in one province of India. It is the largest single atrocity in this entire book and it gets the least attention.

8Bengal, 1943

What happened

A chain of events, each of which made the next one worse:

• Burma fell in 1942.Burma had supplied around fifteen percent of Bengal's rice. That supply stopped.
• The denial policy.Fearing a Japanese landing, the government removed or destroyed things the invader might use in coastal Bengal. This included confiscating or sinking tens of thousands of country boats, which were how rice, fish and people moved in the delta, and removing rice stocks from coastal districts. It wrecked the local economy of exactly the region that would starve.
• Provincial trade barriers.Other Indian provinces, run by Indians, blocked rice exports to Bengal to protect their own supplies. This is not a British decision and it should not be blamed on the British.
• Priority for the war.Food and transport were directed to the army, to war industries and to Calcutta's workers. The rural poor were last in the queue.
• Prices and hoarding.Rice prices rose several fold. The landless labourer, the fisherman and the artisan could no longer buy food that physically existed in the market. This is the mechanism Amartya Sen later analysed: people died not because there was no food but because they had lost the ability to command it.
• Denial that it was a famine.The government did not formally declare a famine, which would have triggered legal obligations under the Famine Codes.

The numbers

Estimates range from about 800, 000 to 3. 8 million. The figures most commonly used by historians fall between 2. 1 and 3 milliondead. The wide range exists because rural registration collapsed and because deaths from starvation, from the diseases that follow starvation, and from the 1942 cyclone are hard to separate.

Churchill

The charge.Churchill's war cabinet repeatedly refused or reduced requests to divert shipping to carry grain to India, while grain was being stockpiled elsewhere. Offers of aid from Canada and the United States were not taken up in the way they could have been. And the record of Churchill's own remarks about Indians in this period, preserved in the diary of Leo Amery, his own Secretary of State for India, is genuinely shocking, including Amery's note that on this subject he could see no difference between Churchill's outlook and Hitler's.

The defence. 1943 was the height of the shipping crisis. U boats were sinking Allied vessels at a rate that threatened Britain's own survival, and every hull diverted to the Indian Ocean was a hull not carrying an invasion. The Indian provincial governments, which were Indian, failed to control hoarding and blocked interprovincial trade. Some relief was eventually sent, and Wavell on becoming Viceroy in October 1943 used the army to distribute food and brought the famine under control within months, which suggests it could have been done earlier.

Where We Have Reached

Six years of war ended with an India completely rearranged.

• The Congresshad spent nearly three years in prison, had run the largest uprising since 1857 and had seen it crushed, and emerged in June 1945 with enormous moral standing and almost no organisation left in the Muslim majority provinces.
• The Muslim Leaguehad gone from four percent of the Muslim vote to four provincial governments, a mass membership and a written British assurance that nothing could be settled over its head.
• The Hindu Mahasabhahad held office in coalition with the League in three provinces and had defended the policy publicly.
• The RSShad stayed out by instruction, remained unbanned and grown quietly.
• Bose's armyhad been destroyed in Burma, and was about to become far more dangerous to the British dead than it had been alive.
• And Britainhad won the war and lost the argument, with a bankrupt treasury, an Indian Army it could no longer be sure of, and a famine on its conscience.

In Part 7 we take the biggest claim in this whole subject and test it properly with numbers: that India became free because Britain was broke and exhausted, and that Gandhi's contribution was minimal. We will look at what Britain actually owed India, what British officials wrote to each other in private, whether that famous Attlee quotation is real, and how the credit should honestly be divided.

• Text of the Cripps offer, March 1942, and the Congress and Muslim League resolutions rejecting it.
• Quit India resolution of the All India Congress Committee, 8 August 1942, and Gandhi's speech of the same evening.
• Official Government of India figures on arrests and casualties during the 1942 disturbances, and the subsequent official account of the disturbances.
• Bengal Legislative Assembly and Sindh Legislative Assembly proceedings, including the resolution of 3 March 1943 moved by G. M. Syed.
• V. D. Savarkar, presidential address, Hindu Mahasabha, Kanpur session, 1942, in the published proceedings of the Mahasabha.
• Syama Prasad Mookerjee, letter of resignation to the Governor of Bengal, November 1942.
• M. S. Golwalkar, statements of 1942 on the Sangh's non participation, in Shri Guruji Samagra Darshanand in the published collections of his speeches.
• Provincial Home Department assessments of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 1942 and 1943, and Intelligence Bureau reporting of the period.
• V. D. Savarkar, petitions of 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and 1920, National Archives of India, published in facsimile and transcription.
• Subhas Chandra Bose, Azad Hind Radio broadcast, 25 June 1944.
• Leo Amery's diaries as Secretary of State for India, for the war cabinet discussions on Indian food supply.
• Report of the Famine Inquiry Commission on Bengal, 1945, and Amartya Sen,Poverty and Famines, 1981, for the entitlement analysis.