During that decade, although the British viceroy remained supreme, significant amounts of executive power had been handed over to elected constitutional assemblies of Indians. Yet in 1939 the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had committed India to the war effort against Germany without consulting the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the major secular pro-independence movement in India. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, along with the movement’s other prominent leaders, were furious. Like
