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Still, the Congress could not formally oppose separate electorates for fear of antagonizing minority groups while the British were busy stoking minority fears of Hindu domination if and whenever self-government came to India.
Gandhi demanded that the representatives of the Depressed Classes should be elected by the general electorate under a wide, and if possible universal, common franchise, and undertook a fast unto death in 1932 that riveted the nation and compelled the British and the Dalit leadership to give in.
Disdaining the populism and the mass appeal of Gandhi, Jinnah had retreated to his law practice in England, only to return, after a long political sulk, as the leader determined to take the Muslim League towards separatism.
The 1937 elections saw the Indian National Congress being elected to rule eight provinces; the party won an astonishing 617 of the 739 ‘general’ seats it contested, and even 25 of the 59 seats reserved exclusively for Muslims.
Though the elections involved some 15.5 million voters and marked a significant step forward in the creation of representative governance, most key powers were still retained by the viceroy, and no elections were held to the central government, which continued to be run by him. This
So much of the talk of self-government was hollow, and its hollowness was confirmed when it was the viceroy, and not the elected representatives of the Indian people, who declared war on Germany on behalf of India in 1939.
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.
Nehru blamed British appeasement for the fall of Spain to the fascists, the betrayal of Ethiopia to the Italians, and the selling out of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis: he wanted India to have no part of the responsibility for British policy, which he saw as designed to protect the narrow class-interests of a few imperialists.
The Congress leaders made it clear to the viceroy that all they needed was a declaration that India would be given the chance to determine its own future after the war.
The decision was taken on a point of principle, but politically it proved a monumental blunder. It deprived the Congress of their only leverage with the British government, cast aside the fruits of their electoral success, and presented Jinnah with a golden opportunity.
Many Muslims began to see themselves as a political and economic minority, and the League spoke to their insecurities. Jinnah
This demand would be enshrined in the League’s Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940 calling for the creation of Pakistan.
The viceroy, anxious to prevent Congress–League unity on the war issue, consented. The League’s policy, he observed, was now the most important obstacle to any talk of Indian independence, and therefore needed to be encouraged.
Nehru rejected this utterly. Civil disobedience seemed the only answer.
Congress President Maulana Azad insisted that the defence of India should be the responsibility of Indian representatives, not the unelected Government of India led by the British viceroy, and it was on this issue that Nehru refused to compromise.
Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma’s meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931, he had notoriously declared: ‘It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King.’
‘He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,’ wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill.
On 7 August 1942 in Bombay, the All-India Congress Committee, at Gandhi’s urging, adopted a resolution moved by Nehru, and seconded by Patel, calling upon Britain to—in a journalistic paraphrase that became more famous than the actual words of the resolution—‘Quit India’. (Gandhi’s own preferred phrase was ‘Do or Die’.)
Wartime hardened British attitudes to the prisoners as well. Gandhi ‘should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting’, Churchill told the Cabinet.
What became Nehru’s longest spell in prison, a total of 1,040 days, or over thirty-four months, from 9 August 1942 to 15 June 1945, saw the British moving to strengthen the position of Jinnah and the Muslim League, pressuring Jinnah’s critics within the party to remain in the League and under his leadership.
Others who could have made a difference (like Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan in Punjab and Allah Bux in Sindh) died before they were able to influence the outcome.
In this effort the British were complicit: as Lord Linlithgow, Britain’s viceroy during the fraught years of World War II, admitted of Jinnah, ‘He represents a minority, and a minority that can only effectively hold its own with our assistance.’
The futility of the Quit India movement, which accomplished little but the Congress’s own exclusion from national affairs, compounded the original blunder of the Congress in resigning its ministries.
On 15 June 1945, Nehru and his Congress colleagues emerged from prison, blinking in the sunlight. The war was over, and they had been freed. But they would be taking their first steps in, and towards, freedom in a world that had changed beyond recognition.
They had presided over one of the worst famines in human history, the Bengal Famine of 1943, while diverting food (on Churchill’s personal orders) from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies.
Even Lord Wavell, who had been rewarded for military failure (in both the deserts of North Africa and the jungles of Burma) by succeeding Linlithgow as viceroy, considered the British government’s attitude to India ‘negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated’.
In this atmosphere of frustration and despair, the British called elections in India at the end of 1945, for seats in the central and provincial assemblies.
Its blunder in surrendering the reins of power in 1939 and then losing its leadership and cadres to prison from 1942 meant that it went into the campaign tired, dispirited and ill-organized.
But except for the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress won nineteen Muslim seats to the League’s seventeen, the League swept the reserved seats for Muslims across the board, even in provinces like Bombay and Madras which had seemed immune to the communal contagion.
Whatever the explanation—and Nehru could have offered a few—there was no longer any escaping the reality that Jinnah and the Muslim League could now legitimately claim a popular mandate to speak for the majority of India’s Muslims.
A state of their own was what they were determined to have, and by the spring of 1946 Nehru’s idealism appeared naïve, even dangerously so.
A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.
The demand for freedom was all but drowned out by the clamour for partition.
Whatever the errors and misjudgements of the INA men (and Nehru believed freedom could never have come through an alliance with foreigners, let alone foreign fascists), they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule.
London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of the burdens of its Indian empire.
Even the idea of Pakistan seemed to take many forms in the minds of its own advocates, with several seeing it as a Muslim state within a united India, and others advocating assorted forms of decentralized confederation rather than outright secession.
Nehru, meanwhile, sought nothing less than an act of abdication from the British: India’s political arrangements should, he declared, be left to Indians to determine in their own constituent assembly, free of British mediation.
Talbot felt that Nehru had simply not realized that Britain was exhausted, near bankrupt, unwilling and unable to despatch the 60,000 British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India.
‘How differently would Nehru and his colleagues have negotiated,’ Talbot wondered, ‘had they understood Britain’s weakness rather than continuing to be obsessed with its presumed strength?’ The question haunts our hindsight.
Nonetheless, when the Cabinet Mission proposed a three-tier plan for India’s governance, with a weak centre (limited to defence, external affairs and communications), autonomous provinces (with the right of secession after five years) and groups of provinces (at least one of which would be predominantly Muslim), the League accepted the proposal, even though it meant giving up the idea of a sovereign Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the problem of the Cabinet Mission’s proposed government remained to be addressed. Both Congress and the League had accepted the plan in principle; the details were yet to be agreed upon.
Nehru was widely blamed for his thoughtlessness in provoking the end of the brief hope of Congress–League cooperation in a united Indian government, even on the League’s terms.
‘Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’—not by Nehru’s wilfulness.
Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta.
But the British remained supportive of the League and of its government in Bengal, which had allowed the horrors of Direct Action Day to occur.
More importantly, the fiasco suggested that Nehru, as a Hindu, could never be acceptable to the province’s Muslims as a national leader.
The viceroy thereupon went behind the Congress’s back and negotiated directly with Jinnah, accepting his nominations of Muslims as well as of a Scheduled Caste member.
The League’s members met by themselves separately prior to each Cabinet meeting and functioned in Cabinet as an opposition group rather than as part of a governing coalition.
Amid the shambles of their policy, the British government announced that they would withdraw from India, come what may, no later than June 1948, and that to execute the transfer of power, Wavell would be replaced.
early March, as communal rioting continued across northern India, even this hope had faded. Both Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Nehru agreed that, despite Gandhi’s refusal to contemplate such a prospect, the Congress had no alternative but to agree to partitioning Punjab and Bengal; the option of a loose Indian union including a quasi-sovereign Pakistan would neither be acceptable to the League nor result in a viable government for the rest of India.
