An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Ironically, when war came, the viceroy would have found ready support from the Congress, whose leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, had declared that in any conflict between democracy and fascism, ‘our sympathies must inevitably be on the side of democracy… I should like India to play its full part and throw all her resources into the struggle for a new order’. Nehru’s abhorrence of fascism was so great that he would gladly have led a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and not imposed upon them by the British. But when Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend the sovereignty of a weak country resisting the brute force of foreign conquest—precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.