A new chapter in India’s political and constitutional history began in the opening days of 1936. Gandhi had withdrawn from the active leadership of the Congress and was pushing ahead with his Village Industries Association. The annual Congress session held at Lucknow in the middle of April under the presidentship of Jawaharlal Nehru finally gave up the policy of boycott of legislatures, and decided to fight elections to capture power in the provinces.
Nehru was personally opposed to working provincial autonomy and in his presidential address characterised the Reforms Act of 1935 as a “charter of slavery.” I watched his discomfiture when the session rejected by 487 votes to 255 a Socialist motion favouring wrecking the Constitution and refusal of ministerial responsibility. Wondering whether Nehru would treat this as a vote of no-confidence, I approached him for his views. He said he had had his way on the larger issue. The session had agreed to his proposal demanding a constituent assembly to draw up a constitution. It had further endorsed his plea for mass contact among the Muslims.
An interesting sidelight of the session was the manner in which Nehru quickly took the lesson of the rebuff. In his presidential address, Nehru had pleaded for the infusion of younger elements into the top echelons of the party. Everyone therefore waited to see what Nehru would do in exercising his prerogative of nominating his “Cabinet,” the Working Committee—whether he would make peace with the old guard or carry the fight forward. Surprisingly, Nehru sought the help of Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad in selecting his team. They asked him to choose his general secretary first. When Nehru replied, “Of course Kripalani,” they understood he was not prepared to break with the old guard and the crisis blew over.
Jinnah almost simultaneously staged a session of the League in Bombay. It opposed the federal part of the Act but favoured contesting the elections to the provincial legislatures.
A welcome note was introduced into the political scene with the
Non-Cooperation Ends 1
arrival of Lord Linlithgow in succession to Willingdon. Taking advantage of the rapport I had established with the new Viceroy when he came out to India as Chairman of the Royal Commission on Agiiculture, and also the brief talk I had with him after meeting Baldwin in London in 1931, I approached him with a request for a gift of an acre of land near the Council House for a Press Club of India, which he readily conceded. I also took the occasion to discuss the prospect of federation as envisaged in the Act of 1935. He was enthusiastic about provincial autonomy and said they had a long way to go in getting the federal part into operation. He expressed doubt whether the Princes would co-operate.
I got the impression that he was anxious to push on with rural welfare schemes because of the uncertainty of the federal scheme. Apparently, Gandhi and he operated on a common wavelength in this sphere, while Jinnah, sophisticated urbanite, made little appeal to the Viceroy. Linlithgow also told me he would try to make friends with the Congress, for it was the only political body which stood for nationalism and promoted self-respect. He was happy at the stand against Socialism taken by Patel, Rajendra Prasad and C.R. He expected Gandhi’s co-operation for a programme to improve rural conditions.
Meanwhile, the country was getting ready for the electoral battle, having digested the significance of the reforms. Patel and Prasad inaugurated the election campaign in Bombay on 7th July, 1936, and the A.I.C.C. met on 22nd August to adopt its election manifesto. Significantly, the Congress gave up its neutral attitude to the Communal Award with an eye to neutralising the Hindu Mahasabha’s appeal to the Hindu electorate. The Congress election manifesto stated that the party would seek to wreck the Reforms Act, while the League promised to work provincial autonomy for all it was worth and, although favouring a “new social edifice,” opposed “any movement that aims at expropriation of private property.”
The selection of the President for the next annual session again assumed political significance in view of the differences between Nehru and Patel on the issue of socialism. Patel and Nehru had been proposed by Provincial Congress Committees; the former had a majority backing. Gandhi, however, decided that Nehru be given another term and persuaded Patel to withdraw in his favour. Gandhi’s object was to avoid a split in the party against the background of the vote in the previous session at Lucknow in which Nehru’s group had been trounced. Patel bowed to Gandhi’s wishes, but made it clear that he did not accept Nehru’s ideas on socialism nor agreed with him that the reforms be wrecked. He had an open
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mind on acceptance of ministerships in the provinces under the new Reforms Act.
The session, the first in a rural setting, was held at Faizpur in the middle of January 1937. The camp, constructed of bamboo, was named Tilak Nagar, and the session attracted more than a hundred thousand people. It marked a compromise. Nehru conceded in his presidential address that the Congress stood for a democratic state and not socialism while the issue of office acceptance was put off until the results of the poll were known. The session reaffirmed the decision to fight the elections, but called for a hartal on 1st April “to mark the country’s protest against the imposition of the new Constitution” on that day. Actually, this was the first shot in the Congress election campaign, and another was a resolution asking the people to boycott the ceremonies connected with the coronation of King George VI following the abdication of King Edward VIII.
Jinnah too was in a belligerent anti-British mood. He told me he was looking forward to co-operation with the Congress in fighting the elections under the Reforms Act. With the death of Fazli the field was clear, he said, for imparting new life to the League. He undertook an extensive tour of the provincial capitals—a novel experience for an “arm-chair” politician.
The election results took even Congressmen by surprise, for, despite the franchise being limited to a bare twenty-seven per cent of the adult population, they won clear majorities in six of the eleven provinces, namely Bombay, Bihar, the Central Provinces, Madras, Orissa and the United Provinces, and emerged as the single largest party in Assam. Their most outstanding success was in Madras, where the Non-Brahmin Party, which had ruled uninterruptedly since 1921, was routed, securing only twenty-one seats in the Lower House of provincial legislature against 159 for the Congress.
Gandhi kept totally aloof from the election campaign, whereas Jawaharlal threw himself heart and soul into it. It was in this campaign that he arrived politically. He drew crowds everywhere and became the idol of the masses, not in the sense Gandhi was but as his glamorous and noble disciple. When I congratulated Nehru on his triumphant tour, he said: “Make no mistake. I was greeted everywhere with ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’. It is Bapu’s spell that gave us their vote.”
The League did well only in the U.P. and Bombay and made little impact on the Muslim-majority provinces. Fazli’s plan had succeeded even though he was no more, for the League candidates did not poll more than four and a half per cent of the total Muslim vote.
Now that the Congress had triumphed in most of the provinces, the acceptance of office became a live issue. A session of the A.I.C.C. held at the end of March 1937 i n Delhi found Nehru and Subhas Bose opposing ministerial responsibility but Gandhi’s compromise formula favouring acceptance on certain conditions was carried.
During a brief talk, I found Gandhi doubtful whether the Congress had elected men who would be true to its pledge. He feared that most of them would succumb to the temptations of office and material gain. When I asked him whether he would seek an interview with the Viceroy, he replied that he would be free to re-enter the political field only after 17th July, 1937, when his remitted sentence of imprisonment would end.
Gandhi met Linlithgow in Simla early in August and their talk related to animal husbandry, village industries and rural improvement in general but not politics. Nevertheless, the meeting established a rapport which made Gandhi feel drawn towards Linlithgow even more than he had been to Irwin.
Chapter 24
GRIGG-BREAK WITH REUTER AND API
In 1937, I severed my link with Reuter and Associated Press of India, for which I had worked for eighteen years. The story of my break with the two agencies throws light on the political strains and stresses of the time. The Briton’s wholesome respect for the Fourth Estate was being overlaid by the urge to make the journalist a sort of public relations man for the Raj.
Sir James Grigg, the new Finance Member, unlike his two predecessors in that office, was not from the City. He had been with the Treasury in London, a Civil Servant at the head of the Inland Revenue set-up. Of his talents there can be little doubt; and after his retirement from India he was to become Britain’s Minister for War under Winston Churchill. He was something of an enfant terrible in the eyes of both the Establishment and spectators of the parliamentary scene, a curious amalgam of bluffness and intellectual refinement. There was nothing that pleased him more than to cross swords with “Supplemurthi,” as he had nicknamed S. Satyamurthi, who fired supplementary questions at the Treasury
I.F.G.N. M
benches with the rattle of a machine-gun. Grigg respected genuine talent, though. His instructions to the Chief Whip were precise, that he himself should be promptly sent for whenever Pandit Pant, Deputy Leader of the Opposition, was on his legs to speak on economic and financial issues.
Grigg was suspicious of the Press and had few friends in the Fourth Estate. He even had a brush with the representative of The Statesman , Malcolm Muggeridge, who later gained world fame as author and commentator. Malcolm was unconventional and his informality, which brought a whiff of fresh air to the closed corporation atmosphere of the ruling elite in Simla, was frowned upon by the traditional Blimps. A Civil Servant, Grigg tried to play politics, for which he was neither trained nor temperamentally suited. That his close friends found him warmhearted was another matter. What Grigg dreaded most was the risk of budget leakages. He therefore set out to devise a new “foolproof” system for handling the budget. He divided the budget statement into two distinct parts, the first a general review of the economic and financial operations of the year, and the second embodying specific fiscal proposals. The latter was revealed to the Executive Council a couple of hours before its presentation and was released to the Press at the precise moment he unfolded it on the floor of the Legislative Assembly. That wrote finis to the era when A.P.I. was permitted to handle the proposals in advance.
Grigg, eager to counteract Gandhi’s move to spread his revolutionary gospel in the countryside through his Village Industries Association, allotted Rs. twenty million for a two-year Governmentsponsored programme of rural uplift. An annual report on the use of the fund by provincial Governments was to be placed on the table of the Central Legislature.
Contrary to established practice in regard to official documents, the Finance Minister did not send an advance copy of the first annual report to A.P.I. for putting out its own summary. Instead, the Information Bureau prepared a summary and had it endorsed by Grigg. No sooner had the Finance Minister placed the report on the table of the House than the Bureau Chief slipped into the seat next to mine in the Press Gallery and handed over his own summary with a polite request that it be used exactly as it stood.
With a smile, I picked up an address slip, scribbled a dozen-word introduction, signed the message and passed it on to my assistant for despatch to the telegraph office. The official gave me a friendly grin, as much as to say: “I shall tell the boss that you obliged.” Next morning, however, the fat was in the fire. The “intro” proclaimed
Grigg - Break with Reuter and API 179
that the summary of the White Paper had been supplied officially.
Grigg exploded: “We have been- (the oath was vivid, but
unprintable).” Since the A.P.I. disowned responsibility for the summary, it lost a great part of its value.
Grigg was thereafter on the warpath. Fortunately for us, we were well insulated against local dangers. We had access to the Viceroy and maintained excellent relations with the Home Member and the Leader of the Assembly. Grigg therefore mounted an attack on us in London while back home on mid-term leave. He complained against our using the agency network to put out nationalist propaganda and allegedly threatened to withdraw the Government subscription unless the “twins” (Iyengar and myself) were packed off from our Simla-Delhi preserve. Not long afterwards, Reuter’s General Manager in Bombay put forward a scheme under which both of us were to be moved out of Delhi—one to be posted in Bombay and the other in London to reinforce Reuter’s India desk. Meanwhile, the Company’s Chief Accountant was sent from Bombay to Delhi to fill the newly created post of Deputy General Manager, presumably to ensure British supervision even while we functioned at the headquarters.
We had strong roots in Delhi and Simla and could not think of pulling out of the centre of political warfare. Roy’s advice to me strengthened our resolve. He had said: “This is not a job. It is a forum of self-expression. Quit if it ceases to be one.” Iyengar and I conveyed our decision to Usha Nath Sen and, as a life-long associate of Roy, he said he would quit with us, and that the three of us could then pool our resources and share the rewards. That evening Sen rang up the General Manager to acquaint him with the developments. Presumably fearful of the political consequences of the exit of three senior Indian members of his staff, the General Manager prevailed upon Sen to stay on, giving him charge of the Delhi outfit and a directorship on the local board set up in India. Next morning Sen told us he had slept over our proposition and was reluctant to be an encumbrance to us. But we were not to be deflected from our resolve.
From New Year’s Day of 1937, when the General Manager handed to us the terms of our “re-engagement” in a sealed cover, to 20th January, when we finally took the plunge, was a period of intense personal drama. Both of us were then earning higher emoluments than any Indian editor and many perquisites, including a free first class railway pass. I had six children, the eldest only 15. Our refusal to compromise won appreciation in nationalist circles. “Never put money above honour,” Jinnah exhorted us. Sir Chiman
lal Setalvad’s support was qualified by a characteristic warning: “Don’t fall into Congress hands either.” Satyamurthi’s “congratulations on your stand” was also a morale booster. An agreement annulling the previous contract was signed. We were on our own from i st April, 1937.
That finished my plan for the second overseas trip, which this time included Japan and the U.S. and was to take me to London for the King’s coronation. I had gathered from the leader of the Japanese delegation which concluded the first Indo-Japan Cotton Agreement in 1934 that the motive force in Japan was economic development to match that in the West. I was keen on studying this process. I had also been thrilled to learn from the Assistant Finance Editor of the Mainichi of Osaka, who accompanied the delegation that when he was a child his grandmother used to tell him about the wonderful country called Tenjiku (paradise), an old Japanese name for India. I wanted to see whether that spiritual bond still existed between India and Japan. Further, I wanted to assess the depth of American interest in our freedom struggle.
First April, 1937, a red letter day in India’s political calendar because it marked the inception of provincial autonomy, also marked a turning-point in my career. Iyengar and I quickly organised a news-cum-feature service on the model of the special material we had been supplying to various newspapers. My own plan was to develop this ultimately into the kind of all-India organisation I was to embark upon some twenty-three years later.
Arthur Moore, Editor of The Statesman , who was anxious to popularise his paper among Indians, particularly in the North, by publishing material written from the Congress viewpoint, invited me to join his staff as the first Indian special representative. My effort to get the offer diverted to my colleague was unsuccessful. Iyengar pressed me to accept it. I succeeded, however, in deferring the decision for six months, during which The Statesman agreed to publish our material as emanating from a special correspondent. This Delhi-Simla interlude enabled me not only to strengthen Iyengar’s hands in running the service we had launched independently but also to help build up Roy's Weekly, a periodical we set up in collaboration with Sen as a memorial to K. C. Roy. It was a period of adventure.
I tore myself away at the end of six months from the exhilaration of the Delhi-Simla round to take up The Statesman assignment in Lucknow. What awaited me in the new milieu was a rich experience, a grandstand view of provincial autonomy at work—indeed a preview of Swaraj.
Chapter 25
JINNAH-BREAK WITH THE CONGRESS
If Punjab gave birth to communalism which vitiated the working of the Montford Reforms, the U.P. sparked off a controversy which culminated in the country’s partition.
Rafi Ahmed Kidwai was the operator of the party machine in the U.P. He had been Motilal Nehru’s private secretary and one of the Swarajist Whips in the Central Assembly under him. After the elder Nehru’s death, he became the son’s principal aide. Known to his friends as Rafi, he organised the Congress campaign for elections to the U.P. legislature in 1937. It was not easy to divine how Muslim electors would vote and they formed an influential section in a majority of urban constituencies. The Muslim League, too, was not sure if its appeal could outdo the feudal influence of the powerful landed aristocracy, which had a party of its own and which consisted of both Hindus and Muslims.
Rafi as a matter of electoral tactics persuaded Chaudhuri Khaliq-uz-Zaman and Nawab Mohammed Ismail and other Muslim Congressmen to contest the elections on the ticket of the Muslim League. The Congress, unsure of sweeping the polls, was willing to go into partnership with Congress-minded Leaguers. But the overwhelming Congress electoral victory in U.P. and six other provinces altered the picture radically as the Congress Party suddenly found that it could form Ministries without the aid of the Leaguers. Jawaharlal Nehru was the Congress President for the year and political interest centred on the lead the U.P. would give in the matter. Gandhi, Patel, Azad and Pant were agreeable to enlisting the League’s co-operation in a coalition as envisaged originally.
Rafi made Nehru parley with Khaliq-uz-Zaman and his followers and suggest that they rejoin the Congress or at least endorse the Congress election platform. Jinnah was counting on establishing the League’s identity by a Congress-League coalition in U.P. and Bombay. He quickly sensed that the Rafi-Nehru move would leave him high and dry and launched a bitter attack on Nehru. Interviewed on 26th July, 1937 he said: “What can I say to the busybody
President of the Congress? He (Nehru) seems to carry the responsibility of the whole world on his shoulders and must poke his nose into everything except minding his own business.” Nehru reacted equally sharply and opposed a coalition with the League.
The terms proposed by Rafi were acceptable to Khaliq-uz-Zaman but not to Jinnah who considered them an affront to his prestige. The opportunity for a Congress-League entente was thrown to the winds. Rafi made matters worse by encouraging defections from the ranks of the League. (This was an evil precedent, as the defectionridden politics of the late sixties was to show.) The Congress Ministry was formed and the League assumed the role of a militant opposition in combination with the party of the landlords.
I was still in Simla preparing for the move to Lucknow for my new assignment. Jinnah told me: “This is war to the knife.” The break thus caused by Nehru’s impetuosity and Jinnah’s arrogance was never repaired. I watched the drama of the widening breach first in Simla-Delhi and then in Lucknow.
In the autumn of 1937, Jinnah proclaimed that his enemy was the Congress, and his words implied that his enemy’s enemy was his friend. He fired the first shot of his campaign at the Lucknow session of the League in October, declaring that the Congress was a Hindu body championing the cause of “Hindustan for Hindus” and that it called for the liquidation of the League as the price of collective responsibility. This broadside concluded with a reminder that the blank cheque Gandhi had earlier offered to write on Jinnah’s terms for a Hindu-Muslim settlement had remained unsigned.
The controversy was embittered by the Jinnah-Nehru correspondence in April 1938. Nehru spoke of Congress willingness, in the light of the critical international situation, to work with any organisation or individual in furtherance of its policy of attaining independence. But, to Jinnah’s mortification, he characterised the League as “an important communal organisation,” not as “the one and only organisation of Indian Muslims.”
Jinnah’s reply marked the final break with the Congress. Nehru’s mind, “obsessed with the international situation,” he said, was entirely divorced “from the realities which face us in India.” He resented Nehru’s “arrogance and militancy of spirit.” He urged the Congress not to act as if it were the “sovereign power” but to deal with the League on a footing of complete equality.
Now on the warpath, in his presidential address to the League session in December 1938, Jinnah challenged Nehru’s theory that there were only two forces at play, the British and the Congress. He said there were four: the British Raj, the Princes, the Hindus
and the Muslims. He inveighed against the Wardha scheme of education and the Nai Talim Sangh (New Education Organisation) set up to implement it as “worked out behind the back of the Muslims,” as “Hindi-Hindustani” intended “to stifle and suppress Urdu.” He called the Congress fascist and its executive a “fascist Grand Council.” When I found Britons in glee over such denunciation of their principal enemy, I met Jinnah and remonstrated with him that this attack would hurt Gandhi and stiffen the attitude of the Congress. He agitatedly replied: “Durga, this is the only language Gandhi understands.”
As for the charge about the Wardha scheme, I told him that it was unfair and recalled what Madam Cram Cook, an American who had lived in Gandhi’s ashram had told me when she came with James Mills of A.P.A. to our office in New Delhi. She had spoken to me in Hindustani which, she said, she had learned at the ashram. According to her, “Gandhi above all wants to make use of what India’s own life has evolved for the language. He feels Hindustani has come to fill a need and indeed told me over and over again: Learn Hindustani as the Muslims speak it if you want to be understood from end to end of India’. Gandhiji considers Hindustani a uniting element, and in the bargain a tonic to the Muslims, a way of utilising all they have done in art, in eclecticism, in culture for the unity of India in the greater sense. The wonderful scientific vocabulary being developed in Hindi is the gift of Sanskrit, and every Indian language can have the same. Gandhiji told me he longed to have the right Muslim emerge to be the President of free India.” This plea left Jinnah cold. I further mentioned that Dr. Zakir Husain was the Chairman of the Committee which had prepared the Wardha scheme. But he emphatically asserted he knew one thing: Gandhi stood for Hindu revivalism.
Chapter 26
PROVINCIAL AUTONOMY AT WORK
Of the various Ministries formed by the Congress, three in particular attracted much attention. The one in the U.P. represented the cream of party talent. Madras had as its Chief Minister C. Rajagopalachari, the only member of the Congress High Command to take up this
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role. The Ministry in Bombay was the symbol of collective leadership. The Central Parliamentary Board under Sardar Patel’s leadership was to keep a watch on the functioning of the Ministries. This “superintendence, direction and control” of an extra-constitutional character detracted from the democratic freedom of the provinces, but it was meant to assure adherence to Congress ideology and implementation of its programme.
I was happy at the opportunity of having a glimpse of Swaraj. I had cordial personal relations with the Governor of U.P., Sir Harry Haig, and with Chief Minister Pant, with whom I had established rapport in Delhi. I was able to rent a new house facing the official residence of the Chief Minister in Lucknow. The close proximity and our daily meeting over a cup of tea in the morning made me an insider. Indeed, not long after I had begun to function in Lucknow, The Pioneer and the Leader , one mirroring the landlords’ point of view and the other that of the Liberals, characterised The Statesman as the “Congress organ.” My professional experience helped, and Pant capped it by setting up a Press Consultative Committee and inviting me to be its Chairman. Composed of editors of leading dailies of the province, the Committee was the first of its kind in India.
Pant told me one day of how his Ministry came to be formed. Purushottamdas Tandon was senior to Pant but was dedicated to the cause of Indian sanskriti (culture) which appeared to Nehru and Rail a reactionary outlook. Tandon was senior to Nehru too, and in fact was among the few who called him by his first name. Rafi manoeuvred to get Tandon to accept the Speakership of the U.P. Assembly and thus cleared the way for Pant, who had been the leader of the Swaraj Party in the defunct provincial legislature, to take over as Chief Minister. Rafi, for his part, told me how he had helped to insulate the Pant Ministry against “the irritable criticism and interference of the unpredictable Nehru.” Pant and he waited on Nehru at his residence in Allahabad and sought his blessings for the inclusion of Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Pandit in the Ministry. Nehru, who doted on his younger sister, readily agreed. This plan did succeed to a very large extent, but still Nehru could not help an occasional outburst.
I was present at a public meeting at which he noticed Pant’s peon in his gold-embroidered red uniform. Nehru shouted against this exhibition of authority and asked why the liveried Jamadar (head peon) was there. He thus ridiculed Pant and drew cheers from the vast crowd. The incident caused quite a stir at the gathering, where it was interpreted as a calculated rebuff to the Chief Minister, who
was known to be Patel’s lieutenant in U.P. just as Rafi was Nehru’s. Pant himself suffered a psychological shock. Anyway, Nehru made it obvious to the people who was boss. Commenting on the incident, Mrs. Pandit told me: “Bhai (brother) went off the deep end. I never travel without Ahmed (her liveried peon). The common people know me to be a Minister because Ahmed is with me. They salaam ‘Ahmed’s livery.’ ” (Nehru himself realised this well enough when he became the Prime Minister and had a retinue of peons and security staff—several times the size any Viceroy had had—when he moved among the people.)
Not long after assuming office, Pant clashed with the Governor when he received a peremptory directive from the High Command to secure release of the remaining political prisoners and, failing that, to tender the resignation of his Cabinet. This directive was issued a few days before the annual Congress session at Haripura to avoid criticism from the Leftists who had opposed acceptance of office. Pant felt helpless and told me that the Chief Minister of Bihar was in a similar predicament. He drew up his letter of resignation, but for fear it might give undue offence to the Governor he asked me to vet it. His anxiety was not to make an issue of the incident but to avoid a crisis. Suitably phrased, the communication was approved by the Council of Ministers and sent to the Governor.
Pant was keen on breaking the deadlock. But as he and his colleagues were leaving Lucknow to attend the Congress session he urged me to stay behind to persuade the Governor against accepting the resignation in haste and to find a way out of the crisis on the lines we had discussed earlier. Gandhi came to the rescue by adopting what sounded to me like Pant’s formula. He suggested that the crisis could be ended if the Chief Ministers gave an assurance, after talking with the Governors, that the misunderstandings about interference with their sphere had been removed. Haig was equally anxious for a settlement. I was at the railway station to greet Pant on his return to Lucknow. Little time was lost thereafter in ratifying the agreement that gave the Ministry a fresh lease of life.
I cannot say that the preview of Swaraj gave me a thrill. The Pant team was undoubtedly talented. But each Minister ran his Ministry as his or her special preserve. Pant loved to wrestle with files, his appetite for notes and memoranda was insatiable. He prided himself on the fact that his own notes were longer, better written and meatier than those of the civilians. Pant was apparently seeking to establish his authority by proving himself a super Civil Servant. Ridiculing Pant’s methods, Rafi said to me in those early days: “I
have to give decisions, not to write notes to convince myself. I read notes put up by the Secretariat, weigh issues in my mind and write orders.”
The Government front bench was more than a match for the Opposition in parliamentary skill. Pant was of course the outstanding parliamentarian. Dr. Kailash Nath Katju, who rose to be the Defence Minister and later Home Minister in the Nehru Government at the Centre, was an efficient administrator and skilful debater. Hafiz Mohammed Ibrahim, who resigned from the Muslim League to join the Pant Cabinet and successfully contested a by-election on the Congress ticket, represented the enlightened social conscience of his community. Mrs. Pandit made her mark as a Minister who had a mind of her own, was articulate and had a gift for the rough and tumble of parliamentary life. Lai Bahadur Shastri was then Parliamentary Secretary to Pant and Ajit Prasad Jain to Raff. Shastri was hardly noticed since he concentrated on handling unobtrusively numerous petitioners and party men who sought the Chief Minister’s intervention—a role that endeared him later to Nehru.
The Governor, Sir Harry Haig, and British Civil Servants observed the obligations imposed by the Constitution. Haig with whom I had established cordial relations in Simla-Delhi complimented the Ministers on their zeal and fair play but felt that Pant, in tackling the problems of law and order, had displayed a lack of perspective (“his action almost touched off a police mutiny at one place”) and rather meddled in the appointment, transfer and promotion of Civil Servants. The Indian officers of the service laboured sincerely to help the Congress Ministers implement their programme despite the British civilians’ scepticism about their practicability. There thus grew slowly and invisibly a wall between the Indian and British Civil Servants, the latter in private talk accusing the former of going over to the “rebels.”
One rewarding aspect of my duties as The Statesman's representative in Lucknow was the opportunity to tour various parts of the province. I discovered that the Muslims enjoyed a special position and represented a vital force. There was communal tension in the western districts of the province, it is true, but there was some kind of fusion of the Hindu and Muslim cultures in the towns, where the spoken language was Hindustani intermixed with Persian. The peasantry had been indifferent to politics before the advent of Gandhi. The Muslim masses had hardly been touched by Islamic fervour until the Khilafat movement awakened them. It was in the
Provincial Autonomy at Work 187
interests of both Hindu and Muslim landlords to see that communal harmony was preserved in the countryside. Communalism was an urban excrescence.
The district administration in the U.P. was highly centralised. The landlords kept peace in the countryside. The British encouraged Muslims of talent and sixty per cent of the junior executive posts under the Raj were held by Muslims although they constituted only fourteen per cent of the population. Young Hindus, who were denied opportunities for employment in Government service, were drawn towards the Congress movement. So also were the millions of tenants to whom the Congress held out the promise of hereditary tenancy and abolition of feudal landlordism. Indeed, it was this platform which contributed largely to the Congress success at the polls.
The Pant Ministry’s outlook was genuinely secular. However, in fulfilling its pledge to the tenantry it unwittingly drove a further wedge between the Congress and the Muslims. Raffs Tenancy Reforms Bill encountered stiff resistance from the League landlords, the only propertied class among the Muslims. In a bitterly fought passage through the Assembly, the Bill was described as destructive of the culture of the minority community, sustained by the patronage of the Muslim landed aristocracy. Nawabaza Liaquat Ali Khan (who became the first Prime Minister of Pakistan), was the chief exponent of this charge as a spokesman of the Opposition. The Nawabaza was of course playing politics. Nevertheless the fact is that the Congress regime did make the urban Muslim feel that he had lost the pre-eminence he had enjoyed under the Nawabs and their British successors.
In a piece I wrote for The Statesman headed “U.P. in Travail” and published on 5th May, 1939, I summed up the situation at the end of two years of Congress rule thus: The Congress Party, on assuming office, proceeded to translate its pledges into legislative and administrative acts. At once rose the cry: “This is revolution.” The intellectual classes found themselves put on the shelf. The stakeholders asked themselves whether they had supported and financed the Congress for the purpose of promoting their own ruin. The masses inquired if the Congress really intended to play a revolutionary role. The public servants wondered whether the administration would be run on idealistic lines and at the same time avert chaos. Legislators rubbed their eyes at the disregard shown to the “nonofficial” opinion voiced by them. The spokesman of the minorities complained that they had asked for liberty, not communal raj. The Ministers were overworked. Unemployed Congress legislators were getting on the nerves of the Ministers and a desperate Opposition
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sacrifices for party exigencies the larger issues of a constitutional and financial nature which should be above party politics.
On his retirement towards the end of 1939, Governor Haig wrote to me: “I have always enjoyed and profited from our talks, for I know no one who can analyse a political situation so acutely. I have been particularly glad that you have been in Lucknow during these difficult times. Before you came, the exaggerated stories current in Delhi were an embarrassment. (The reference is to the Grigg episode.) You have been able to present U.P. conditions fairly, yet with a benevolent attitude towards the Congress, which was of real value, and you have helped a great deal to a clearer understanding of our conditions.”
I visited Bombay and Madras to make a study of the Congress regime in these provinces. The Bombay Ministry improved the administration and won laurels for the efficient way K. M. Munshi, the Home Minister, handled a Hindu-Muslim riot within three months of assumption of office. C. Rajagopalachari, who headed the Congress Ministry in Madras, was so dominant a figure that his Ministry came to be known as a one-man show. Madras was fortunate in possessing a cadre of experienced civilians, both British and Indians who served the Ministers with conspicuous loyalty and co-operation.
The three Ministries, indeed, set separate patterns of political management. In the U.P. the Cabinet responsibility was a fagade. Each Ministry worked as a separate empire, subject to the overriding vigilance of the Chief Minister. The Bombay set-up was an example of collective responsibility and cohesive team work. While Ministers were encouraged to express their view frankly at a Cabinet meeting, they backed the final decision both in their public statements and private talk. Madras set the pattern for a compact Ministry under a father figure whose word was law.
Book III 1 9 3 9~4 7
INDEPENDENCE DAWNS
Chapter i
WORLD WAR II
(a) JINNAH GETS THE VETO
The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 marks a watershed in the political history of India. This global catastrophy, more than any human design or the interplay of domestic political forces, hastened the liquidation of the British Raj in India and, side by side, the partition of the country.
To comprehend the drama that unfolded itself, it is relevant to recall certain broad facts that influenced the course of events. Minto put a brake on the nationalist movement by launching on a policy of divide and rule through the grant of separate electorates to the Muslims. Consequently, the political controversy from 1910 till ! 935 centred on separate electorates versus joint electorates. Jinnah was then the protagonist of joint electorates with reservation of seats and the Aga Khan and Fazli Husain of separate electorates. The separatists won the day when Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald gave the Communal Award, which conceded to the Muslims a share in power through legislators chosen by the Muslim electorate. The award was later embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935. But the Act did not affect the basic political situation, namely that the main forces contending for power were still the Raj and the Congress.
Ihe elections of 1937 for the reformed legislatures brought the Congress sweeping victories in the Hindu-majority provinces. The League suffered a major reverse in the Muslim-majority provinces, but many of its candidates in U.P. and Bombay, who were mainly former Congressmen, won. Jinnah now expected the Congress to reward his nationalism by forming a coalition with the League in these two provinces and thereby give his party a national identity. When the Congress insisted that the Leaguers should first endorse the Congress platform, Jinnah’s prestige suffered a major blow and he started attacking the Congress virulently as a Hindu-fascist body.
Jinnah now proceeded to gather evidence of the “atrocities” committed on the Muslims under Congress rule in the U.P. He set
up a committee under a Muslim landlord, the Raja of Pirpur, to prove the matter. The committee produced a report which came in handy to Jinnah and all those who wanted to blast the Congress as an “oppressive Hindu tyrant.” The report raised many questions, including one about the Governor’s role. I asked Sir Harry Haig, a highly conscientious civilian, whether he had failed to exercise his overriding powers as Governor to protect the minorities as alleged. He categorically denied the charges levelled against the Congress in the report. That, however, made little difference to Jinnah when I mentioned this to him. A skilful lawyer, he went ahead to use the Pirpur report to strike a new note. The safeguards provided in the Act of 1935, he contended, had proved inadequate in protecting the interests of the Muslims.
The situation on the Congress front at the time was not altogether satisfactory. Two succeeding sessions at Haripura and Tripura in 1938 and 1939 respectively had brought into the open the struggle between Subhas Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru for leadership and created a major crisis. Having presided over the Haripura session, Bose offered himself for re-election on the precedent established by Nehru’s presidentship of two successive terms. Gandhi opposed Bose’s candidature and put up Pattabhi Sitaramayya, a veteran Congressman, as his candidate. Bose triumphed and Gandhi proclaimed the victory of the young leader from Bengal as his own defeat. The High Command, however, promptly neutralised Bose by getting the session to pass a resolution directing the new President to form his “Cabinet” in consultation with Gandhi. Bose took the resolution as a vote of no-confidence and resigned. Prasad stepped into the breach.
The outbreak of the war tended for a while to revive the struggle between Nehru and Bose. Nehru was then on his way back from Chungking after a visit to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Interviewed by Press correspondents in Rangoon, he declared: “This is not the time to bargain. We are against the rising imperialism of Germany, Italy and Japan and for the decaying imperialisms of Europe.” Bose quickly seized the opportunity provided by Nehru’s Press statement to embarrass his rival and score over him. When Nehru arrived in Calcutta, he was confronted with a demonstration organised by Bose displaying placards demanding firm action against Britain and proclaiming: “British adversity is India’s opportunity.” Gandhi again came to Nehru’s rescue and nipped the controversy in the bud by demanding a definition of Britain’s war aims and ruling that the Congress would finalise its stand in regard to the hostilities only thereafter. Nehru promptly accepted Gandhi’s
line and into the bargain not only played safe but enabled the Congress to speak with one voice.
In the meantime, the Viceroy, anxious to mobilise the support of all sections of the Indian people for the war effort, invited Gandhi, Jinnah and the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes for talks and sought their co-operation. While the League asked for further discussions and clarifications, the Congress Working Committee took strong exception to the failure of the British Government to include India’s freedom among its war aims and called upon the Ministries to resign in protest. This the Congress Ministries did in October, and Jinnah imaginatively used this psychological moment for a call to the Muslims to observe “Deliverance Day.” He cleverly fixed this demonstration for Friday (2nd December, 1939), when the Muslims normally close their businesses and hold congregational prayers in their mosques. He could now assert that 10,000 meetings had been held all over the country to celebrate the deliverance from “Hindu tyranny.” Incidentally, for Britons too the exit of the Congress Ministries was a deliverance from the handicap of subjection to popular Ministers. They could now go full steam ahead in organising the war effort.
Linlithgow’s action in inviting not only Gandhi (as was the case in the past) but also Jinnah and the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes had the effect of greatly inflating Jinnah’s stature politically. The League leader had been equated with Gandhi for the first time and, what is more, the Viceroy’s decision eloquently confirmed the basic contention made by Jinnah in his correspondence with Nehru that the power struggle in India was between four parties, namely the British, the Hindus, the Muslims and the Princes, and not between the British and the Congress only as Nehru asserted. The fact of the matter was that the invitation to Jinnah was not extended without reason. Over the preceding two years he had emerged as the tallest among the Muslim politicians and as an uncompromising critic of the Congress. In doing so, he created a favourable impression both on the Princes and on the British bureaucracy.
But Jinnah was still a nationalist at heart. He tried to cash in on his new status and made another effort in January, 1940, to persuade the Congress to accept him as the sole spokesman of the Muslims. “That is all that I seek,” he told me. But he was again rebuffed. He took further offence when the Congress elected Azad as its President for their annual session in March at Ramgarh to demonstrate to the world that Jinnah was not the sole spokesman of the Muslims. “They have now added insult to injury by selecting that
I.F.C.N. N
showboy,” he bitterly remarked. I pleaded with him that the moment the Congress recognised the League as the sole Muslim spokesman the British would organise another Aga Khan show as a challenge. But he was in no mood to argue. “No, Durga,” he replied, “if only Gandhi would join hands with me, the British game of divide and rule would be frustrated.”
Linlithgow made another effort to persuade the Congress to co-operate in the war effort and invited Gandhi in February for talks. He assured him that a new constitution would be drawn up after the war in consultation with the Indian leaders. But the deadlock continued, and the Viceroy thereupon decided to seek the League’s co-operation both to counter the Congress and fight the war. Jinnah was invited for a talk on 13th March, and he used the occasion to assure the Viceroy that the Muslims would not retard the war effort if an undertaking was given to them that no political settlement would be reached with the Congress without the previous consent of the Muslims. The Viceroy, according to Jinnah, reacted favourably and said he would communicate his views to London.
Gandhi was quick to sense the significance of the Viceroy’s move and realised that the British were now boosting Jinnah to create a roadblock to ride out the period of the war. He therefore decided to counter the British move and, at the pressing request of Nehru and Azad, agreed to attend the party’s annual session at Ramgarh in March 1940. Addressing the Subjects Committee and the delegates after a gap of six years, he put forward the proposal for a Constituent Assembly as a solution to the Hindu-Muslim problem. Under his proposal, as Gandhi explained to me earlier, the eighty million Muslims of India would be conceded the right of self-determination provided their representatives were elected to the Constituent Assembly on adult franchise. They could then decide whether they wanted independence for India as a joint family, with the right to claim a division if they wanted. Gandhi, as I wrote in my despatch of 20th March in The Statesman, “still hopes by this move to get into the pocket of Mr. Jinnah.”
At the same time, the Congress passed a resolution at the session reaffirming that “nothing short of complete independence” was acceptable and calling for the setting up of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of adult suffrage to determine the future. It stated that the Congress would make every effort to secure communal harmony by agreement or by arbitration. The resolution declared that the withdrawal of Ministries was only a preliminary step and would be followed by civil disobedience. Gandhi was authorised to launch the movement at an opportune time.
Jinnah, now after a bigger prize, was unmoved and four days later, at the League session at Lahore, he made his next shrewd move in the wartime game of political chess in India. He got the session to declare in a resolution that no constitutional plan would be acceptable to the Muslims unless designed on the following basic principle, “that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the north-western and eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute ‘independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” The session further authorised the League Executive “to frame a scheme of constitution in accordance with these basic principles, providing for the assumption finally by the respective regions of all powers such as defence, external affairs, communications, customs and such other matters as may be necessary.” Significantly, the resolution made no reference to the issue of war, and by implication left the Muslims free to support the war effort.
The resolution did not employ the word Pakistan, although in his presidential speech Jinnah specifically asserted that the Hindus and the Muslims represented different and distinct social orders and could not therefore evolve a common nationality. A Hindu correspondent asked him whether the resolution “meant a demand for Pakistan?” Jinnah still avoided using the word Pakistan and replied that it was open to him to think so and that he was prepared to accept his interpretation. (The resolution was eventually publicised as demanding Pakistan.) When I met Jinnah after the session and pointed out that Sikander Hayat Khan had categorically told me that the resolution was essentially a bargaining counter, Jinnah replied: “A bargain, my friend, is struck between two parties. Let the Congress first accept the League as the other party.”
Now that the two parties had made their pronouncements, it was clear that the Congress was on the warpath and that the League would co-operate at a price in fighting the war, made grim by the blitzkrieg Hitler suddenly launched to end months of phoney confrontation. The Viceroy accordingly invited Jinnah to another talk on 27th June, and this proved most rewarding to the League leader. In a statement on 8th August, 1940, Linlithgow placed in the hands of Jinnah a veto on constitutional progress by declaring that the British Government could not contemplate the transfer of power “to any system of government whose authority is directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life. Nor could they be parties to the coercion of such elements into sub
mission to such a government.” Jinnah was on top, and when I saw him he disclosed in confidence that the League owed this concession to Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State. (The India Office had once again played the Crescent Card.) Jinnah was remarkably relaxed and, leaning back in his chair, added: “All I have to do now is to wait for the next Congress move and to counter it. I have no doubt that Nehru will play into my hands.”
(b) SAPRU ON NATIONALISM
As the situation was getting desperate, some of us felt a determined effort should be made to avert the crisis. I discussed certain ideas with Pant and Rafi, who reflected the views of the High Command, and finding them react favourably, wrote in The Statesman in June 1940 two articles headed: “India at Bay; Way to Avoid Disaster.” In these articles I suggested the formula of a national government comprising nominees of the provincial administrations. If an announcement of this kind was made, I felt the Congress would return to ministerial responsibility. I drew the attention of Sapru to my articles in the hope that if he supported the plan it would gain weight.
Sapru was then holidaying in Kashmir and sent me a very interesting reply:
“There is a good deal in your articles with which I am in agreement. With the concluding portion in which you say that ‘a self-governing India would need to spend 300 crores of rupees, not forty-five crores, annually (one crore means ten million), to keep herself in a state of preparedness to meet a possible attack by a major power’, I am in complete agreement. I regret that I do not share the optimism of some of your distinguished Congress leaders, who have been saying recently in their speeches that there is no apprehension of a foreign invasion, and that if one takes place they will be able to face it. The foreign invasion may never—and I hope will never—take place, but I should not like to be put off my guard and it is extremely dangerous and unwise to lull people into a false sense of security. It is mainly because of this that I think that in matters of defence it is an advantage to
O
remain a member of the Commonwealth. In fact, no country can afford to be completely independent of another in the altered state of the world.
“I should have thought that the immediate question before us
was to get self-government and not the domination of any particular school of thought. You say Gandhi’s socialist state will evolve round the village economy. To improve the economic condition of our villages is undoubtedly a vital necessity and I regret that it has been neglected so far, but I doubt whether you are justified in using the phrase ‘Gandhi’s socialist state.’ His ‘socialism’ is more akin to humanitarianism than to a political creed, and it is so elastic that the orthodox socialist and the combative Marxist may well claim standing room under his canopy.
“You then say that the leftist conception is of a Marxist brand. For one thing, if the leftists adopt the Marxist brand, they cannot be nationalists; for another you cannot avoid class struggle. All this will be fatal to the establishment, or at any rate continuance of self-government. Class struggle must also be strengthened by the forces of communalism.
“Nationalism in the case of India is, and must be, very different from the territorial nationalism of Europe, which is the result of the Treaty of Vienna made more than 100 years ago and which has been accentuated in Europe by trade rivalries. Nationalism in India must aim, for a long time to come, at reducing the internal points of conflict to a minimum, multiplying the points of contact and fostering a sense of community of interests. This will require very conscious and continued effort.
“Personally speaking, I see very little evidence of such nationalism in India. Each party is using democratic phrases and slogans really for the establishment of its own supremacy. When you express the hope that the Viceroy may cut the Gordian knot by ignoring the claims of both the Congress and the League to represent the will of the Indian people and of the Muslims respectively and calling upon the autonomous provincial units to nominate their representatives to form a provincial federal Government, I share that hope with you, though I realise that such a step on the part of the Viceroy will, at the start, meet with the strongest possible opposition both from the Congress and the League.
“The recent pronouncement of the Mahatma that it is no use calling an all-parties conference, as other parties do not share the point of view of the Congress, has filled me with despair. Bluntly put, it is the very essence of totalitarianism, and it does not matter that his totalitarianism is different from other brands of totalitarianism in that it is based on non-violence. The result is the same. There is no toleration for difference of opinion.
198 Independence Dawns
“I am most unwilling to express my opinion on these questions at present and if I have written to you this personal letter (not for publication), it is only out of my regard for you.”
(c) DELHI — LUCKNOW INTERLUDE
At the turn of the year, I came to Delhi for the Budget session of 1941 to act for a British colleague and probed political developments in the capital since the outbreak of the war. During the period, I met the Viceroy and his high officials, the members of the Congress High Command and Jinnah to get the last picture of the developments that had brought about a political deadlock. What I saw and heard held out little hope of a breakthrough. In fact, the scene was being complicated by an additional factor—the Princes. Nehru had gone ahead and helped promote the States People Conference (despite Gandhi’s lukewarmness) and the rulers were now reacting. “They are now more inclined towards the League,” Jinnah gleefully claimed.
Surprisingly, I found the bureaucrats quite unperturbed by the new Congress campaign. In fact, they seemed quite complacent and full of confidence. Symbolic of the general feeling was the Secretary of the War Supplies Department’s remark to me: “As a bureaucrat, I do not see why we need a national Government. We are getting all the supplies we need for our war effort.” The credit for this situation mainly went to Sir Jeremy Raisman, the Finance Member and the only member of the I.C.S. to be given charge of this portfolio since 1922. I consider Sir Jeremy one of the architects of the Allied victory. It was primarily this design that provided the manpower and goods worth hundreds of millions of pounds which brought the British their victory at El Alamein in North Africa.
Sir Jeremy confided to me he knew that unlike in World War I, when India voted £100 million as her gift towards the war expenses, the Central Legislative Assembly this time would not make any contribution. He, therefore, devised an ingenious plan under which he was not only able to get all that he wanted for the war effort but created such a powerful profit motive that even Gandhi-capped businessmen came forward to provide supplies. He achieved this by adopting the simple device under which Britain would not pay India for the goods and services in gold but in sterling and, what is more, the rupee reserve would be held in paper currency and not in metal. India, no doubt, built up a huge sterling balance but the country suffered considerable inflation. Insofar as Whitehall was
concerned, it was convinced that a national government was not necessary to mobilise India for the war effort. The Americans, however, thought otherwise, the more so when Japan began to knock at India’s gates.
Back in Lucknow in the summer of 1941, I found Governor’s rule functioning effectively and the British bureaucracy confident that this time it would see the demise of the Congress. The civil disobedience movement did not excite much public interest and was at a low ebb by the end of the year. Life moved at a dull pace even as the Government stepped up its repressive measures. I had the arduous task of repeatedly coming to the rescue of the National Herald (founded by Jawaharlal Nehru) against repressive action. As President of the U.P. Press Consultative Committee, I maintained that the comments objected to did not amount to a breach of the Defence of India Rules, nor of the code adopted by the All-India Newspaper Editors’ Conference. After I left Lucknow the paper closed down for over a year and most of its meagre editorial staff was absorbed by the Hindustan Times. This gesture somewhat mollified Nehru, who was bitter against Devadas Gandhi for refusing to help the Herald out when it fell short of newsprint and for treating it as a rival. When I mentioned this incident to Mahatma Gandhi in Delhi after I joined the Hindustan Times, he remarked: “Devadas is a finished diplomat.”
An event at the end of April gains significance in the light of later developments. I had watched Indira Gandhi attend the yearly sessions of the Congress and recalled seeing her for the first time as a little girl at an A.I.C.C. meeting seated on the lap of her grandfather. She looked so frail and sickly that I felt sorry for Jawaharlal that his only child did not have a more robust constitution.
She first attracted public attention in her own right when she addressed the Lucknow Students’ Federation on 29th April, 1941, in Ganga Prasad Memorial Hall. What she said haltingly was not important, for she merely wanted Indian students to follow the example of those of Spain and China, an echo of her father’s ideas. But whoever drafted the Federation’s address to her was politically inspired. It stated: “Having lived in the very storm centre, you must have noted the duel between the old and the new and seen that revolution is a more grim affair than many of us in this country realise. If you can utilise the experience in decisions that you will be called upon to make in this country, you will be a worthy political heir to your illustrious father.” (She took a long time to arrive politically, but the speech writer planted a seed which flowered twenty-five years later.)
Chapter 2
THE CRIPPS MISSION
Although the Viceroy and the bureaucracy were satisfied that India was putting in the maximum war effort, Whitehall, concerned about American criticism, authorised Linlithgow to enlarge his Executive Council in a bid to win popular support. Tight Indians and four Britons were appointed to the new Council, the “natives” outnumbering the whites for the first time. But the gesture was lost when Churchill dashed all the hopes roused by the Atlantic Charter with his statement in the Commons that the Charter did not apply to India. Nationalist India reacted angrily and Gandhi firmly refused to approve an earlier proposal by a section of the Congress leaders, who had come out of jail at the end of their term, that they should resume ministerial responsibility. Gandhi told me he opposed the move any way because of his fear that Congressmen would get enmeshed in the power and corruption rackets which had sprung up round war supplies, especially when no political gain would accrue in the existing conditions.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 6th December, 1941, brought the U.S. into the war and quickened the pace of political developments. New Delhi suddenly became a focal point for the war effort in Asia and The Statesman decided to shift me to the capital. Even though the Congress leaders were in jail and the political scene dull, I felt a wrench, for I had developed abiding friendship with leading politicians and Civil Servants in Lucknow. Among the public figures were Pant, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Kailash Nath Katju, Mrs. Pandit, Lai Bahadur Shastri, Mahavir Tyagi, Ajit Prasad Jain and Iveshodev Malaviya, all of whom (except Mrs. Pandit, who took up a diplomatic career) later played an important role as Ministers in the Nehru Cabinet. What equally paid me deferred dividends was the rapport I established with civilians then on the middle rungs of the ladder. They too filled top roles in the Union Government after independence. Wajahat Hussain became Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Vishnu Sahay Cabinet Secretary, Bhola Nath Jha Secretary, Ministry of Home
Affairs, C. S. Venkatachar Secretary to the President, Shankar Prasad Secretary for Kashmir Affairs, Bhagwan Sahay Ambassador in Nepal and later Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, S. Ranganathan Comptroller and Auditor General of India and V. Vishwanathan Governor of Kerala.
By the beginning of 1942, I was posted to Delhi permanently as The Statesman's, first Indian representative at the Centre with the status of a Senior Assistant Editor. In addition, I also functioned as the Special Representative of the Times of India (whose own correspondent had been drafted for war duty) and wrote editorials for both papers on topics of interest concerning the Government of India, besides providing news and features. My return to the capital was professionally timely and a few days later Chiang Kai-shek and his wife visited India in February to urge the Indian leaders to support the war effort against Japan. They met Gandhi in Calcutta and at the end of the visit Chiang issued a statement supporting the Indian demand for independence. (I well remember the furore caused when Chiang’s statement came through. It was not released for broadcast until the Viceroy had been sounded and had agreed to allow its publication.) Madame Chiang, whom I met in Delhi, assured me that the Americans were fully behind the Indian demand and that their visit would strengthen the hands of President Roosevelt in putting pressure on Churchill to change his attitude on India. She added that Lord Halifax was exerting pressure from Washington and that Churchill would have to yield.
Not long after the Japanese entered Singapore and Rangoon had fallen, the British Government decided to send the Cripps Mission to India, thereby rousing great expectations. Roosevelt wanted to make sure that the mission was handled properly and therefore sent his personal envoy, Col. Louis Johnson, to Delhi in April 1942. The Cripps proposals envisaged setting up a constitution-making body at the end of the war and the creation of a new Indian Union as a dominion. Provision was to be made for the participation of the Indian States and the constitution so framed was to be accepted by Britain subject to a treaty for the protection of racial and religions minorities and subject also to the right of any province to stay out of the Union. Britain, meanwhile, was to retain control and direction of the defence of India as part of their world war effort “but the task of organising the full military, moral and material resources of India” was to be “the responsibility of the Government of India with the co-operation of the peoples of India.”
Cripps believed that his personal relations with Nehru would help him win the approval of the Congress Working Committee for his
plan. He was reinforced in this faith by the powerful support given to his proposals by Rajagopalachari. But Gandhi told me that the Cripps proposals had all the bad points of the federation plan of the 1935 Reforms Act and had further introduced the evil principle of partition of India to be decided by people chosen on a very limited franchise. He had told Cripps that his proposals at best offered “an undated cheque on a crashing bank” and was leaving all power in the hands of the Viceroy and the India Office to govern India while the war lasted. One day, soon after the Congress Working Committee had dispersed after meeting at Birla House, I broke in on confabulations between Gandhi, Patel and Azad. I asked them whether they had drafted their resolution on the proposals. Patel replied: “We are waiting for our Englishman to finalise it.” Gandhi laughed, and Azad added: “Han, bhai” (this is so, brother).
Gandhi left Delhi in disgust before the resolution was passed. He held the view that if the Japanese invasion was to be met the British must immediately transfer power so that an Indian government could take command of the instruments of administration, attune them to its purpose and direct the masses how to conduct themselves. I gathered that Gandhi expected the Japanese to land in India and he did not wish the British to leave a vacuum which the invader would fill with a puppet regime.
Besides Gandhi’s opposition, the reason for Cripps’s failure was Churchill’s refusal to back the assurance he had given Azad that the Viceroy’s Executive Council would function as a Cabinet and that the defence portfolio would be entrusted to an Indian. Wavell, then Commander-in-Chief, according to some insiders, was agreeable to this arrangement.
Johnson was functioning behind the scenes and an accidental scoop on a secret meeting between him and Nehru enabled me to get the low-down on his role. I was in touch with Johnson and keeping a track of his movements. Turning up at his residence one day, I sensed excitement among the chauffeurs clustered about the house. I soon learnt that Nehru was closeted with Johnson. To watch Nehru depart from a vantage point and to run a story about the mysterious parleys was just routine. I had not bargained, however, for the sensation it would cause.
Linlithgow took offence at Johnson’s diplomatic faux pas. Johnson himself, when I called on him after these developments, was impenitent. The handshake he greeted me with almost crushed my fingers —he was powerfully built—but it was one of the warmest I remember. “You are a guy after my own heart,” he exclaimed, adding that his doors were open to me at all times. As rewarding were
The Cripps Mission 203
certain confidences he shared with me about the pressure he had put on Sir Stafford and also on London through his cables to Roosevelt on how the deadlock over the defence portfolio could be easily resolved, if only Churchill would relent.
The situation on the war fronts was now becoming increasingly desperate. Japanese warships appeared in the Bay of Bengal. The Government, fearing an invasion was impending, destroyed installations in Madras harbour and took other measures in pursuance of its “scorched earth” policy. The British Parliament had already passed an Act providing that in the event of a complete breakdown of communications with Britain the Viceroy would exercise the powers of the Secretary of State. The Congress High Command was advised by the Madras Congress Committee to authorise it to function in the name of the party in case of a breakdown in communication.
Rajagopalachari and Kamaraj toured Madras and Mira Behn went to Orissa to urge the people to keep calm and refuse to cooperate with the invader. The Madras leaders were of the opinion that the British power should be replaced by the Congress organisation so that when the Japanese landed they would find a national government functioning. The Congress members of the Madras legislature, led by C.R., passed a resolution recommending that the League’s claim for separation be accepted and negotiations with it for a national government started. The Andhra Pradesh Committee passed a resolution opposing the stand taken by the Madras legislators. Within a week, the A.I.C.C. met at Allahabad and discountenanced the Madras resolution by a large majority. Instead, it passed one of its own, emphasising the unity of India and calling for non-cooperation with and non-violent resistance to the invader. Rajagopalachari, thus disowned, soon resigned from the Congress. By this time, however, the danger of a Japanese invasion receded and the perspective considerably altered.
Chapter 3
DO OR DIE
The failure of the Cripps Mission, curious as it might seem, did not gladden the hearts of the Tory diehards. Relief that no interim national government was possible in India was temporary, and was quickly swamped by the conviction that this “jewel of the British Empire” was lost. Striking evidence of the feeling then prevalent in the ruling circle in Britain is afforded by a note in the diary of King George VI recorded after one of his Tuesday luncheons with Churchill in July 1942:
“He amazed me by saying that his colleagues and both, or all three, parties in Parliament were quite prepared to give up India to the Indians after the war. He felt they had already been talked into giving up India. Cripps, the Press and U.S. public opinion have all contributed to make their minds up that our rule in India is wrong, and has always been wrong for India. I disagree and have always said India has got to be governed, and this will have to be our policy.” (From King George VI—His Life and Reign , by John W. Wheeler-Bennett.)
True, both Churchill and the authorities in India held firmly to the belief that the war effort would be gravely impeded were popular governments to be established in the country. But they had to reckon with increasing pressure from Roosevelt. William Phillips, who had succeeded Johnson as the President’s personal representative in Delhi, was a suave diplomat, but his reports to Washington on the Indian situation were forthright. During our frequent tete-a-tetes, Phillips confided to me that few Americans believed that adequate mass support could be mobilised in India for the Allied cause in the absence of a popular government. American opinion was particularly exercised over the grim prospect of a Japanese invasion of India and the possible need to organise a resistance movement.
The deadlock in India, however, persisted. The India Office and the Viceroy were now agreed on building up Jinnah as their Crescent Card to neutralise the Congress challenge. This was mani
fest from Sikander Hayat Khan’s disclosure to me that the Viceroy, on instructions from the Secretary of State, had enjoined upon him and Fazlul Haque not to undermine Jinnah’s position as “leader of the Muslim community.” This happened towards the end of 1939, when Jinnah had taken up an uncompromising attitude and the Muslim Premiers of Punjab and Bengal were under pressure from some of their followers “to disown Jinnah or cut him down to size.”
The political situation was clearly developing into a triangular contest. The Congress still laboured under the sincere belief that it could cope with Jinnah’s intransigence if it succeeded in striking a deal with the British. The Cripps proposals had conceded the principle of partition and Gandhi therefore left Delhi in a fit of disgust. The Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution expressing regret that the proposals “gravely imperil the development of a free and united national government and the establishment of a democratic state.”
“Nevertheless,” the resolution went on to say, “the Committee cannot think in terms of compelling the people of any territorial unit to remain in the Indian Union against their declared and established will.” This resolution, drafted by Nehru, ironically, introduced the novel principle of yielding to the provinces the right not to accede to the federation if they so chose.
Jinnah exultingly told me that he had won his battle, for he considered this a surrender to the concept of partition. (The validity of his contention was borne out by a statement issued from 10 Downing Street on 6th December, 1946, at the end of talks with Nehru, Jinnah, Liaquat Ali and Baldev Singh. The statement concluded as follows: “Should a Constitution be framed by a constituent assembly in which a large section of the Indian population had not been represented, His Majesty’s Government could not contemplate—as the Congress have stated they would not contemplate—forcing such a Constitution upon any unwilling parts of the country.”)
Kripalani, confronted with this interpretation, denied that the principle of partition had been conceded. The sentence relating to secession, it was explained, was a concession to men like Asaf Ali who had suggested that the committee should endorse the principle of self-determination. Had that been done, according to Kripalani, any village could have asked for independence.
The League executive almost simultaneously passed a resolution expressing “gratification that the possibility of Pakistan is recognised by implication by providing for the establishment of two or more
unions in India” and rejecting the Cripps proposals for the reason that they were not open to modification.
Reluctant to alienate American sympathy, however, the Congress adopted another resolution on 14th July, 1942, stating that it would “change the present ill-will against Britain into goodwill and make India a willing partner in a joint enterprise of securing freedom for the nations and people of the world” and that this was only possible “if India feels the glow of freedom.” It added: “The Congress is, therefore, agreeable to the stationing of the armed forces of the Allies in India, should they so desire, in order to ward off and resist Japanese or other aggression and to protect and help China.”
Britain having spurned this significant gesture, the Congress chiefs persuaded Gandhi to resume active leadership of the party and give a call to the people in the manner he alone could. It was thus that the Congress embarked on the Quit India campaign on 8th August, 1942. Meeting in Bombay on that day, the A.I.C.C. adopted a resolution authorising Gandhi to lead a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale “so that the country might utilise all the non-violent strength it had gathered during the last twenty-two years of peaceful struggle” in the fight for liberation. Gandhi, addressing the gathering, called it open rebellion—the “do or die” struggle to compel the British to depart.
Linlithgow’s Government had anticipated the move and had made its plan to deal with it a couple of months in advance. In a resolute bid to nip the rebellion in the bud, it arrested Gandhi and all the other leaders on the morning of 9th August and incarcerated them in Ahmednagar Fort in Bombay Presidency. The Congress organisation was outlawed throughout British India.
Bereft of effective leadership, the agitation was carried on by underground workers and quickly turned into a chaotic battle with authority. The eruption into the ranks of the non-violent freedom fighters of extremists and terrorists on one hand and anti-social elements on the other led to alarming disturbances all over the country. Communications were disrupted, much public property was destroyed indiscriminately and the war effort was impeded considerably. The situation in Bihar and the eastern regions of the U.P. was particularly grim. Communications with Bengal and Assam were paralysed and the supply of war material to the forces defending India on the Burma border was placed in great jeopardy.
The Quit India movement then degenerated into an ill-organised mass upheaval, lit up as much by acts of surprising individual ingenuity and heroism as by crude outbursts of incendiarism and looting. Anti-social elements and the Communists indulged in
violence and destruction. Among the many who went underground was Yashwantrao Chavan, who later became Chief Minister of his State, Maharashtra entered the Union Cabinet in 1962 as Defence Minister and thereafter became Home Minister. Another was Aruna Asaf Ali, who once took shelter with a tenant in my house. (After independence, she became the first woman Mayor of Delhi and won the Lenin Peace Prize.)
But the back of the struggle had been broken by the end of September. The Raj, employing all the instruments of suppression at its command, had imposed on the country, a sullen, frustrated quiet.
The political stalemate induced by the arrest and imprisonment of the Congress leaders and the ruthless quelling of the revolt was marked, however, by feverish activity at the India Office in London, where a cell had been set up to work on a new formula for the future governance of the country. Sir Reginald Coupland, a professor of Oxford University who had spent the winter of 1941-42 in India and was attached to the Cripps Mission as an unofficial adviser, had come out with a report which contained a memorandum prepared by an “expert” showing that Pakistan was financially viable.
The Coupland plan was an ingenious amalgam of various other schemes then in the air. It sought to resolve the problem by dividing the country into four broad geographical regions: the Indus basin, the Gangetic basin, the delta of the Brahmaputra, and the Deccan. Two of these regions would have a Muslim majority, and the Hindus would predominate in the other two, and this would result in a balance of power at the Centre. For the princely States, he suggested either a single separate dominion or several dominions where viable units were feasible. It is interesting to note that Coupland wanted a statutory guarantee for the continuance of the work of the Christian missions in the hill tracts of Assam. (This lends weight to the suspicion that the present-day movement for independence among a section of the Nagas and Mizos on the Assam borders is inspired by missionaries.)
The pressure of the war and of political happenings in the country, however, thrust the Coupland plan into the background. But Jinnah seemed to go from strength to strength. Back from a League session in April 1943, glowing with pride, he told me that now indeed his claim that the League was the sole representative of the Muslims in India had been vindicated, for three Muslim-majority provinces were being governed by League Ministries. I asked Jinnah why he had not responded to Gandhi’s request for a definition of his de
mands. His reply was illuminating. “You see, Congressmen are dying to get back to power. My men are in power. It is for Congressmen therefore to state what they are prepared to concede. The ball is in their court. I am in the happy position of being able to extract the best terms, as they want power and the British do not want to part with it.” Jinnah’s parting shot was almost prophetic: “You can depend on Rajagopalachari to use his sharp wits to define Pakistan for me.”
Wavell took over as Viceroy in October 1943. This change, Phillips confided to me, had been hastened by Roosevelt’s advice to London that Linlithgow should be replaced by someone who could handle the Indian constitutional deadlock with greater imagination. A week before his departure, Linlithgow provided me in an interview with an insight into his thinking. With apparent sincerity he expressed the belief that India could not hope to become free for another fifty years. This country, he declared blandly, was new to parliamentary institutions and would require a large leavening of British officials and Europeans to ensure their successful functioning. With the advent of air-conditioning, it was now possible for Britons to settle down in India permanently in areas like Dehra Dun, and when there were some six million of them to buttress a democratic administration India might expect to make substantial progress towards self-government.
Soon after Wavell’s assumption of office, the League decided to establish a Committee of Action to combat a unitary constitution. This was intended to intimidate the Viceroy who, it was said, had arrived with a new mandate from Whitehall. Ignoring the threat, Wavell proclaimed in his address to a joint session of the Central Legislature on 17th February, 1944, that India was a “natural unit.”
Wavell made an auspicious start. Early in February 1944, he toured vast areas of Bengal ravaged by one of the most devastating famines of the century during the closing months of his predecessor’s regime. He also ordered the release of Gandhi on medical grounds and received from him a letter offering withdrawal of civil disobedience and full co-operation in the war effort should a declaration of Indian independence be forthcoming. The steady Japanese advance was underlining the need for an immediate ending of the political deadlock.
Nothing came of this bold overture. Yet, though only a few were conscious of it, freedom was “round the corner.”
Chapter 4
OVER TO THE HINDUSTAN TIMES
My six-year association with the British-owned Statesman had been as pleasant as it had been rewarding. But always in the secret recesses of my heart I had nursed the ambition to edit a nationalist newspaper. This was fulfilled when I accepted the post of Joint Editor of the Hindustan Times of Delhi on 1st April, 1944. It was not without a pang of regret that I bade farewell to The Statesman , which had provided me with six years of exhilarating journalistic activity. But I had not been wholly happy after Moore had relinquished the editorship of that paper. He belonged to that genre of great editors the like of whom are hard to find today. There were occasions when he acted inexplicably and perversely, but by and large he displayed a remarkable sympathy for Indian aspirations.
Ian Stephens, who succeeded Moore, was cast in a different mould. He was courteous and considerate in conversation, but his face often betrayed his inner annoyance and fretfulness. Economy in the use of words was Stephen’s besetting passion. Not infrequently, he rubbed his colleagues up the wrong way by rewriting what others had produced in conformity with his own particular style and way of thinking. His approach to Indian politics was very different from Moore’s. When I joined the Hindustan Times , Prem Bhatia took over from me on behalf of The Statesman and Frank Moraes as the special representative of the Times of India in New Delhi. It was pleasing to know that both papers would be represented by Indians, an implicit acknowledgment by the British owners of these publications that Indian talent was now competent enough to handle assignments hitherto the exclusive privilege of Britons.
The financial control of the Hindustan Times had passed into the hands of G. D. Birla, one of the most enterprising Indian industrialists; Devadas Gandhi, the youngest son of the Mahatma and son-in-law of C. Rajagopalachari, was its Managing Editor. Politically, its heyday was the period when Pothan Joseph regaled the ruling hierarchy and the intelligentsia with his wit and subtle daily commentary, Over a Cup of Tea. The editorials made little impact, but Shankar, one of India’s top political cartoonists, pro
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duced “seditious” cartoons. He not only got away with them because of the Briton’s healthy respect for cartoonists’ fancies but many of the targets of attack, especially James Grigg, bought the originals. Linlithgow indeed helped him to visit England on a study tour to improve his technique. The paper’s editorial staff consisted of seven persons whose total emoluments did not even add up to the salary of the Editor of the Statesman. The daily had tided over its lean period and was by now firmly established, but the Managing Director’s mandate to me was to make the Hindustan Times hold its own against the British-owned Times of India and The Statesman.
Thus began a sixteen-year association with a newspaper that was to reach a position of pre-eminence not only in Delhi but all over North India. The pleasurable part of this experience was the close understanding and the spirit of comradeship with Devadas Gandhi. As Managing Editor, he brought to the handling of the affairs of the paper a penny-pinching astuteness and a flair for administration. I enjoyed a large degree of freedom in editorial matters and he rarely turned down my proposals regarding new offices, employment of staff and promotions and transfers. Until death snatched him away in 1957, Devadas worked zealously to strengthen the institution.
I began to pursue political developments with redoubled enthusiasm in my new assignment. Jinnah was hostile to the Hindustan Times and would not admit its representatives to his Press briefings. The ban, happily, became inoperative after I joined the paper because of the cordiality of our relations. Jinnah was now riding the high horse, and not without reason. Events seemed to be shaping exactly as he wanted. Early in April 1944, Rajagopalachari embarked on negotiations with him on the basis of a formula for which he said he had secured the general support of Gandhi, who was confined in the Aga Khan’s palace, an isolated and old-fashioned mansion which lay in disuse at Poona, after his arrest in Bombay in August 1942. The formula was a subtle attempt to reduce the League’s Lahore resolution to concrete and intelligible terms.
Jinnah had not been wrong in expecting C.R. to perform this useful job for him. But he would not foreclose on the deal despite the assurance that it had received Gandhi’s blessings. He argued that C.R. lacked the credentials to speak on behalf of the Congress. Gandhi was released unconditionally on 6th May, 1944. In a Press interview, Gandhi said in July that what he asked at that time was different from what he wanted in 1942. He would now be satisfied with nothing less than a national government in full control of the civil administration. Such a government would be composed of
persons chosen by the elected members of the Central Assembly. This would mean a declaration of independence, qualified by the fact that a war was on. He said: “The national government will let the military have the facilities they require. But the control will be that of the national government. Ordinance rule would give place to normal administration by the national government.”
Asked whether the Viceroy would continue in this set-up, Gandhi replied: “Yes, but he will be like the King, guided by responsible ministers. Popular government will be restored in all the provinces so that both the provincial and Central Governments will be responsible to the people of India. So far as military operations are concerned, the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief will have complete control. . . . The Allied forces would be allowed to carry on their operations on Indian soil. I realise that they cannot defeat Japan without that.”
A couple of days after this interview was published, I wrote in the Hindustan Times a piece entitled: “Conspiracy Between British Diehards and Jinnah.” This was based on a talk with a top Briton who said to me: “Mr. Jinnah will never come to an agreement during the war. While he is intransigent, he is on top; the moment he settles with the Congress, the latter will be on top. Once he agrees to a transitional arrangement, the League will get merged in the nationalist movement and will never be able to dictate terms to the Congress. Mr. Jinnah’s intransigence suits us, and if he maintains his attitude and keeps his hands off the Punjab, which is our special preserve, he will deserve some support at the end of the war.”
Despairing of getting justice from Britain and its representatives in New Delhi, the Indian leaders now pinned their hopes on Roosevelt exerting pressure on Churchill to meet their demands. In the middle of 1944, a confidential report on India submitted by William Phillips to Roosevelt created a big stir in New Delhi, London and Washington. Parts of the report were published in the American Press by Drew Pearson though authentic versions of it were not available in India. Phillips pointed out that the Indian people were at war only in a legal sense, as they had no say in their own government and cynically regarded the fighting as a clash between fascism and imperialism, between which there was nothing to choose. It also said that the Chinese, who regarded the AngloAmerican bloc with distrust, might feel differently if India was liberated.
Roosevelt had brought about two meetings between Churchill and his special envoy before the report was published, but they had proved unfruitful. Phillips left India a disappointed man and was
appointed political adviser to General Eisenhower, supreme head of the Allied forces in Europe. When Phillips’s findings found their way into print, the British Government was vastly annoyed and made that known to Washington. Thereupon, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives moved that Sir Ronald Campbell and Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, who had been sent to Washington to “mould” public opinion to accept the British point of view on Indian independence, be in turn declared unacceptable to the U.S. Administration and asked to quit the country.
While Gandhi’s attention was concentrated on countering the anti-Indian propaganda in the U.S., Devadas and I decided to run a column in the Hindustan Times exposing this vicious campaign. The U.S. President’s Special Representative in New Delhi told us he would see that the contents of this column were brought to the notice of Washington and other centres interested in the question of India’s freedom. The column was titled “I accuse” and Devadas suggested that I write it under the pen-name Insaf, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s definition of Ram Raj as Insaf Raj. These articles identified and exposed the outfit that was providing a cloak for the official propaganda machine, accused the Government of India of misrepresenting this country in the Soviet Union, China and the Middle East and of spending Indian money abroad to popularise British rule.
We next ran a series of four articles in February on the “British Propaganda Racket in the U.S.” which were attributed to a special correspondent. The material for this series came from friendly American sources.
One of the most telling ripostes to the British propaganda was delivered at a time when Churchill was in Washington for one of his frequent consultations with Roosevelt. Some Indians and their American sympathisers booked a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post. Churchill was breakfasting with his host at the White House when the Post was brought in. Roosevelt was unaware that the paper contained the ad, which had been prepared by Syud Hussain, Chairman of the Committee for Indian Freedom, and was a biting indictment of British rule in India. He passed the paper to Churchill, who opened it and saw the ad, captioned “What About India?” Churchill threw the paper down angrily. On learning the cause of his ire, Roosevelt calmly observed that the ad had obviously been paid for, and buying newspaper space for-propaganda purposes was not unusual in the U.S.
While Indian politicians were pinning hopes on intervention by the U.S. President, C.R. convinced Gandhi that he should take up
the threads of the negotiations with Jinnah where C.R. had left them. The Gandhi-Jinnah talks in Bombay in September lasted well over a fortnight, but the two parted as distant as ever. Jinnah poured scorn on Gandhi’s formula, which envisaged an all-India central authority. “What I am being offered is a truncated and moth-eaten Pakistan,” he exclaimed indignantly.
When I met Gandhi in Bombay, he emphatically denied he had countenanced the vivisection of India. Jinnah, on the contrary, was jubilant when I saw him in Delhi soon after the luckless parleys. “You see, Gandhi has defined Pakistan for me,” he said. “Gandhi asked me whether it would be a state whose policy on defence and external affairs could be in conflict with India’s. I had only to answer ‘yes’.”
As the effort to bring about a communal rapprochement dragged on wearily, Jinnah’s intransigence seemed to acquire a sharper edge. In November, a non-party conference organised by Sapru set up a standing committee to examine the communal and minorities questions. Jinnah disdainfully refused to recognise it; he would not unbend even to meet Sapru.
Chapter 5
PAKISTAN ON A PLATTER
Bhulabhai Desai approached the Viceroy on 20th January, 1945, in an effort to break the political deadlock. He suggested complete Indianisation of the Executive Council, giving the Congress and the League groups in the Central Assembly forty per cent each of the seats in the Council and the remaining twenty per cent to the minorities. Desai put forward this proposal with the assurance that Liaquat Ali and he had agreed to it and that it had Gandhi’s approval. This was a bold move to end the Congress-League wrangle, and Wavell welcomed it as an opportunity to play his desired role as a conciliator. He had been looking for such an opening since his conference with the provincial Governors in August 1944, when it was felt that a positive move was Essential to redeem the British Government s promises to India. But Jinnah upset the apple cart by stating in February that he had no knowledge of the pact between Desai and Liaquat Ali.
Meanwhile, the political landscape underwent a change with the Congress assuming power in the North-West Frontier Province, the formation of a Congress-League coalition in Assam and the imposition of Governor’s rule in Bengal as no stable ministry could be formed in that communally strife-ridden province. In the Central Assembly the Congress inflicted a series of defeats on the Government, partly with the help of the League, whose main spokesman was Liaquat Ali.
In an imaginative and statesmanlike move to lift the clouds darkening the political horizon, Wavell proceeded to London on 23rd March for consultations with Whitehall. He returned on 4th June and made his fateful announcement ten days later on reconstituting his Executive Council.
Unfortunately, two developments almost checkmated the DesaiLiaquat initiative. Nehru, Patel and the other Congress leaders, fretting impatiently in Ahmednagar fort, where they were detained, as they watched the turn of events in distant New Delhi, got the impression that Desai was keen on levering himself into the Executive Council and seeing that its first act after its reconstitution was to announce the release of political prisoners. They also felt that the pact tacitly endorsed the two-nation theory ofjinnah, which was anathema to them.
Unaccustomed to the subtleties of the political game, Wavell was misled into converting the formula of equal representation for the Congress and the League into an equation between the caste Hindus and the Muslims. His statement of 14th June said “It is proposed that the Executive Council should be reconstituted and that the Viceroy should in future make his selection for nomination to the Crown for appointment to his Executive from amongst leaders of Indian political life at the Centre and in the provinces, in a proportion which would give a balanced representation of the main communities, including an equal proportion of Muslims and caste Hindus.”
The very next day, to create the right climate for the impending talks on the new formula, he ordered the release of the Congress leaders in detention. But no sooner had Wavell made his announcement on the Executive Council than Gandhi disowned it, saying he had never thought in terms of equating the caste Hindus and the Muslims when he blessed the Desai-Liaquat pact.
The Wavell proposals represented, however, a considerable advance on the road to self-rule, and the Working Committee decided to join the conference the Viceroy had summoned. Patel was, however, so incensed at what he regarded as Desai’s manoeuvres
that he insisted on writing him off as a political liability, and that meant the eclipse of the Leader of the Congress Party in the Central Assembly.
Another incident also weighed against Desai. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur had reported to Gandhi that she had seen Desai drunk at a party. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, wrote to Bhulabhai at Gandhi’s instance inquiring whether he drank. Bhulabhai did not reply. Gandhi mentioned the Rajkumari’s charge in the Working Committee, which was considering the panel of Congress names for the Executive Council. He next turned to Azad and asked him pointedly whether he drank. The flustered Maulana falteringly confessed that he used to. When did he give it up ? Before he could answer, Nehru intervened and said: “I took sherry last evening. Why pursue this matter?” Gandhi kept silent, but Desai’s goose was cooked.
The Simla Conference opened on 25th June, a day after Wavell met and talked with Gandhi, Jinnah and Azad separately. In these talks, the caste complexion of Hindu representation in the Executive Council was removed and it was agreed that the composite Central Cabinet would comprise fourteen Indian Councillors, five each to be selected by the Congress and the League and four viceregal nominees. Among the last group would be a Sikh, two Harijans and Sir Khizr Hayat Khan, leader of the Unionist Party of the Punjab.
The Congress proposed at the conference that its panel consist of two Hindus, a Muslim, a Christian and a Parsee. As the League had already been accorded parity with the Congress, this should have pleased Jinnah. Further, the fact that seven of the fourteen Councillors would be Muslims should have won him over completely. The League Council favoured acceptance of the Wavell plan, and the Congress Working Committee got down to the task of preparing a panel of names for the Viceroy’s approval.
But on 11th July, to the amazement and disappointment of all who had set great store by these proposals to end the political deadlock, Wavell announced that his private confabulations with Jinnah had failed. Three days later, the world was told that the conference had foundered on the rock ofjinnah’s insistence that all the Muslim Councillors be nominated exclusively by the League. This was a condition the Congress would under no circumstances accept, for it would have reduced it to the status of a body representing only the Hindus and the smaller minorities while subscribing to Jinnah’s claim that the League was the sole spokesman of the Muslims.
Why, in the hour of the League’s triumph, having won parity
with the Congress, should Jinnah have dragged it back from the threshold of power? On the face of it, his recalcitrance seemed pointless. But his real aim was known to a few insiders. He was expected to announce his final decision on the Viceroy’s proposals to the Press at his hotel lounge. A few moments earlier, he had, however, received a message from the “cell” of British Civil Servants in Simla, which was in tune with the diehards in London that if Jinnah stepped out of the talks he would be rewarded with Pakistan.
As Jinnah emerged from his meeting with the Press and entered the lift to go upstairs to his suite, I joined him. I asked him why he had spurned the Wavell plan when he had won his point of parity for the League with the Congress. His reply stunned me for a moment: “Am I a fool to accept this when I am offered Pakistan on a platter?” After painstaking inquiries, I learned from high official and political sources that a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council had sent a secret message to Jinnah through the League contacts he had formed.
While I could not quote Jinnah’s off-the-record remark, I made it the background for my story on his Press conference. I said Waved had asked the Congress leaders whether they would back his plan even if the League decided not to co-operate. The Congress had given that assurance. When Waved announced the failure of the parleys, I posed the questions: Is the rumour that Whitehall does not want the Viceroy to antagonise Jinnah after ad correct? Did the Viceroy receive instructions from above or did he yield to the pressure of certain Civil Servants ?
Gandhi did not participate directly in the Simla conference but stayed in the background as “adviser” to those who did. I met him several times, and he told me that the most unfortunate aspect of C.R.’s parleys with Jinnah and Desai’s with Liaquat Ali to bring about a Congress-League entente was that they had either misunderstood or misrepresented his approach to the issue. When Desai had approached him with the formula providing for equal CongressLeague representation in the proposed interim government, he had readily agreed, but this provision had been distorted in Wavell’s proposals.
Again, he had blessed C.R.’s offer to Jinnah not because he accepted the two-nation theory nor because he recognised the League as the sole representative of the Muslims. On the contrary, it was precisely because he rejected both these proposals that he supported elections to a constituent assembly on the basis of adult franchise and separate electorates for the Muslims. He said: “I hold the view that we must accept the verdict of the Muslims so elected on whether
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they want independence for India as a whole or wish to live separately.” Polls held on a narrow franchise would not meet the tests he had laid down.
It was unfortunate, he added, that most of his colleagues had come out of jail tired and dispirited and without the heart to carry on the struggle. They wanted a settlement with Britain and what is more, hungered for power. “I fear,” he added, “they may throw to the winds the basic principles for which the Congress has stood. The Hindus are indivisible. India is indivisible. There can be no Swaraj without Hindu-Muslim unity. Jinnah objects to the expression Ram Raj, by which I mean not Hindu Raj but divine Raj, Insaf Raj, where justice will prevail between man and man. If God gives me strength, I will fight for these principles with my life.”
Chapter 6
WAR CORRESPONDENT
With the victorious Allied forces driving up the Italian peninsula, Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, planned a tour by a delegation of about a dozen editors to the war fronts in the Middle East and in Europe. Our itinerary took us through Iraq, Iran, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa and thence over to Italy. As most of the Indian soldiers were from the northern regions, the brunt of questioning and addressing them on behalf of the delegation fell on my shoulders.
Our first hair-raising brush with the reality of war came just beyond Florence. We spent a night under tents close to the battlefront. The German guns opened up that particular night. It was a nerve-shattering experience. But what lifted up one’s spirits was the answering barrage that the Allied batteries put up—sixty shells to every one of the enemy’s screaming overhead. Here was heartening proof of the massive offensive strength the Anglo-Americans had piled up on the Italian front. It was not an uneventful night, however, for a German shell tore into a Nissen hut a few hundred yards away from our tent, killing twenty-nine people.
For me, that was not the end of the adventure. On the way back to Rome, the man driving my jeep halted at a roadside pub and apparently imbibed more alcohol than was good for him. On the
218 Independence Dawns
road, rendered slippery by rain, he soon lost control of the wheel and sent the jeep skidding into a tree. The vehicle was badly smashed. We were lucky, though, for I escaped unscathed save for the loss of my glasses, and the driver had only a minor leg injury.
At Basrah, on the way home, the Indian members of the delegation decided that an agreed report be published, the preparation of a draft being entrusted to me. So for several hours between Basrah and Karachi I tapped away at my typewriter and produced a bulky document running to some 10,000 words. On landing at Karachi, however, the Editor of Dawn backed out of the arrangement. Thus I could use the material exclusively in the columns of my paper but it had to run the gauntlet of censorship. Brigadier Desmond Young told me the censor was not agreeable to its release. It was political censorship, he said, there was not a word that could be objected to on grounds of security. I thereupon sought an interview with Auchinleck, and the Commander-in-Chief, to his credit, stuck to his pledge that political censorship would not be exercised and ordered the unconditional release of my impressions.
The articles created a sensation. I had painted a vivid picture of how Indian soldiers were being discriminated against on grounds of race and colour. What made matters worse was that was done notwithstanding their outstanding gallantry on the battlefield. In the course of our 14,000-mile tour of the fronts, we had met several top-ranking American and British commanders, all of whom said without exception that the Indian soldier was first-rate in every sphere of war activity.
Among the complaints I recorded in talks with Indian other ranks and officers with Viceroy’s commissions was that they received no newspapers or magazines except the official Fauji Akhbar (Army News) from home although their British counterparts did so. They knew scarcely anything about happenings in India and their general opinion was: “We want home news, not war news, we want amusement, not lectures.”
Other troops saw films daily, while they had this opportunity only once a week, and the Indian films they saw were very old. The cigarettes they got from army canteens were inferior to those supplied to British other ranks, and they were denied family allowances. The wheat flour they got as rations was old and infested with weevils, and the chapatis made from it were unpalatable.
They could understand being governed by Indian standards of living and pay when they were in India, but when on service overseas they felt they should get the same treatment as their British comrades in arms. We visited an American camp, and found
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War Correspondent
living conditions that verged on the luxurious. A British camp was located in a picturesque setting, with a hill in the background. There were more billiard tables in this camp than I am sure there were in both Delhis at that time. The nearby Indian camp, on the other hand, had the appearance of a sarai (resting-place for travellers). The kitchen was dark and smoky, and the facilities in what was called the recreation room were pitifully meagre.
Asked about these disparities, an army welfare officer said that the Indian soldiers’ demand for the same treatment as other Allied fighters was “unfair.” He added unfeelingly: “They get here more amenities than in barracks in India. How many of them see films in India? How many read newspapers, magazines or books? How many smoke cigarettes?”
My revelations aroused considerable public feeling. T. T. Krishnamachari, who later became Finance Minister in the Nehru Cabinet, and B. Das, a veteran legislator from Orissa, tabled motions of adjournment of the Central Assembly to censure the Government on the Indian soldier’s disabilities on the war fronts. After a highspirited two-hour debate, the Opposition scored a notable victory and the censure motion was cai'ried.
In the lobby of the Council of State, Auchinleck assured me that he was determined to set right the grievances of the Indian soldiers and officers to which I had drawn attention. He had already taken remedial measures for some of them; as for the rest, he had ordered a thorough inquiry. He was outspoken, however, about what was indispensable to the evolution of a truly national army. To promote unity and solidarity, all the troops must learn to conform to the standard army rations. They had taken one big step forward by fashioning Hindustani written in Roman script into the army’s lingua franca: it now remained for them to adopt a common diet.
He pointed to one transformation the war had brought about; the Indian soldier had, regardless of religious sentiment, taken to the beret. I contended that th ejawan at the front had adopted the beret to escape being discriminated against by the local population, who looked down on men sporting a turban. “Well,” exclaimed Auchinleck, laughing, “whatever the provocation, the result has been good.”
One of the most stimulating experiences I had as a war correspondent accredited to the American and British Army commands in Europe was a visit to the war-devastated areas made soon after the end of the war. It was a ghastly sight. Since the Allied commanders and public relations officials were in Wiesbaden, I made it my headquarters. I first tried to get an idea of the way the Ameri
can mind was working because everyone realised that, having escaped destruction and geared her economy to massive production, the U.S. alone would have the strength to determine how Europe was to be rehabilitated.
When I asked what future was visualised for Germany, the American spokesman declared that the question was premature because they had first to denazify the German people, and that would take at least a decade. I was shown a number of books and pamphlets prepared to ensure denazification through schools and churches. I next sounded the spokesman of the British headquarters. I was told that it would be a generation before Germany could think of standing on her own feet. That was long enough for the Allied powers to make sure she would never threaten the peace of Europe or of the world again.
The spokesman of the French command was quite positive. The French, he said, would see to it that Germany did not become a power again. The Russian headquarters were very reticent on this question, and when I persisted all I could get out of the spokesman was that the question of Germany’s military revival did not arise.
I was not satisfied with these answers for the reason that people with such skill, talent and strength of purpose as the Germans could not be disposed of so summarily. I persuaded the U.S. command to place at my disposal a jeep and an interpreter so that I could find the answer to my question from the Germans themselves. I used to go out daily eighty to ioo miles, visiting villages and small towns to see how the Germans lived after defeat. Once I drove over 200 miles and paid a visit to Nuremberg, where I saw a hall being prepared for the trial of the top Nazi war criminals, including Goering. A fortnight of wanderings revealed to me that, whereas the national and provincial political structure had broken down, life at the grassroots had been unaffected by the war. In fact, villages and small towns had been reinforced by the inflow of skilled workers and intellectuals in search of sustenance in return for the service they could perform.
In the bombed-out Mercedes-Benz plant for manufacturing motor vehicles I found workers labouring twelve hours a day in return for a slice of bread and two cups of tea. They were trying to see what could be salvaged from the wreckage and whether the plant could be restored as a repair or manufacturing unit. Even more significant was the fact that, although political authority had collapsed, the church organisation and basic social institutions were functioning normally. This made me feel that, given the necessary
aid for rehabilitation from the U.S. Germany could rebuild herself rapidly. In the series of articles I wrote on war-devastated Europe I conveyed my impression that it would not take more than ten years for the country to recover. In retrospect, this proved correct.
Chapter 7
IN LONDON AGAIN
I was in London not long after Jinnah torpedoed the Wavell proposals. It was the day after the first atom bomb had flattened Hiroshima. A few days later came Japan’s unconditional surrender and the end of World War II. It is difficult to describe the mighty whirlpool of emotions into which I found myself sucked as Londoners celebrated VJ-Day with fantastic abandon. My own preoccupation, however, was with the inexorable forces driving India willy-nilly towards freedom. On 26th July, less than three weeks before the Japanese capitulation, Labour had surprisingly worsted the Churchill Government at the polls and assumed office. Churchill had once declared that he had not become the first Minister of the Crown “to preside over the liquidation of the Empire.” Happily for India, neither Attlee, the new Prime Minister, nor his Secretary of State for India, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, was committed to this diehard view.
I was staying with Dr. Katial and had a talk with William Whiteley, Chief Whip of the Labour Party in the Commons, at a quiet dinner in my host’s apartment. Whiteley agreed to convey to Attlee our plea that Labour could win India’s friendship permanently by transferring power immediately and making India a dominion. He suggested that, meanwhile, I should strengthen the Government’s hands by putting forward these views in the Daily Herald , the Labour Party organ. Accordingly, I contributed an article to the Herald of 18th September and among other things urged that in India, as in Britain, the urgent tasks of reconstruction could be tackled “only by the leaders of the masses.”
Wavell, summoned to London for discussions towards the end of August, had returned to Delhi and announced on 19th September plans for fresh elections to and for a constitution-making body. Hailing the announcement, the Herald commented editorially two
days later: “The key sentence in Lord Wavell’s announcement—and it was underlined by Mr. Attlee when, last night, he broadcast from London—is that ‘India has to play her full part in working out the new world order’. India can never play her full part until she is self-governing. ... A prominent journalistic supporter of the Congress Party—Mr. Durga Das, Joint Editor of the Hindustan Times —wrote in this paper a few days ago that the day when Labour was elected to power in Britain was regarded as a V-Day by Indians. . . . The Labour Government shows itself eager to break the deadlock which has for so long paralysed Anglo-Indian relations. It proposes, as soon as the forthcoming elections in India have taken place, that the Viceroy should seek discussions with representatives of the new provincial legislatures and of the Indian States, aimed at establishing a constituent assembly to frame a new constitution. The Indian representatives will be invited to decide whether they wish to achieve self-government according to the procedure of the ‘Cripps offer’ of 1942 or by some alternative procedure.”
Whiteley next arranged for me to meet Attlee for a quiet, informal talk. Attlee greeted me warmly with the remark: “It is good you are here, you know the pulse of your politicians.” For a minute I realised it was a different Attlee from the one I knew. Dressed in a blue suit, he exuded confidence and soon proceeded to give me the background to the Wavell announcement. On his visit to London, Wavell, he said, had told him that there were two alternatives confronting Britain—one, to hold India down by force, for which purpose he would require thousands of additional British troops, and the other to pass on the responsibility for government to the representatives of the people. Attlee added that he, for his part, was clear in his mind that Britain must quit; he firmly believed too that the transfer of power must not be made conditional on India’s remaining a Dominion of the British Commonwealth. In this matter, he would leave the decision entirely to the Indians themselves—as envisaged in setting up a Constituent Assembly.
Attlee did not conceal his deep agitation over the Muslim demand for Pakistan and agreed with my plea that a minority should not be allowed to hold up the progress of the majority to self-rule. At the same time, he frankly contended it was as impossible for the British to help the majority put down a revolt on the part of the minority as for it to hold India down by the force of arms. He added that his intention was to promote in India a structure that would give her federal unity. Should he be baulked in this attempt, he would rather transfer power to the provinces and let the Indians sort out their difficulties among themselves.
In London Again 223
He then returned to the theme he had twice earlier propounded to me—that the American presidential system would be more suitable to Indian conditions than British parliamentary democracy. The Constituent Assembly to be set up to formulate a blueprint for the future governance of India, should he felt give serious thought to granting a fixed tenure to the executive, particularly at the Centre. (In the sixties, when Attlee, now an Earl, visited India to deliver the Azad Memorial Lectures, I harked back to this argument. Did he still cling to his preference for the American system for India? The doyen of the Labour Party met the question squarely. The Indians, he admitted, had shown a remarkable democratic temper in conducting elections and forming majority administrations. He was not sure, though, that the strains and stresses likely to follow Nehru’s departure would not call for modifications in the light of Indian needs. The country’s politics in the post-Nehru years have indeed borne witness to Attlee’s profound insight.)
Churchill, his severe electoral reverse notwithstanding, was as pugnacious as ever. Conducted into his presence in the central lobby at Westminster by Whiteley, I found him staring curiously at my army uniform. Somewhat overawed, I explained I was a war correspondent and had visited the Middle Eastern and Italian fronts and seen the famous Tenth Indian Division in action. That set Churchill going. He spoke of how he had started his journalistic career as a war correspondent for The Pioneer in India and then remarked: “Indian soldiers are fine fighters, but your politicians are men of straw—not Gandhi and a few others. You are going to be a burden on us. You have to be your own shield, though as I see it you are a continent—not one nation, but many nations. You have poverty and an increasing population.” To end the brief interview, he added with a characteristic flourish: “We will play fair by you, if you play fair by us.”
I rounded off my visit with a second meeting with Whiteley in Katial’s apartment. The Chief Whip made the point that his party and many Tories felt that the Indian Army should remain united in the interest of the security of South-East Asia and the Near East and join other Commonwealth nations in ensuring the security of the Indian Ocean. He considered the Congress the freedom party and the League disruptionist and expressed the hope that in the impending elections the League candidates in Punjab, Sind and North West frontier province would be defeated. That would help preserve the unity of India.
Chapter 8
CABINET MISSION
WavelPs announcement of 19th September, 1945, reinforced by Attlee’s broadcast from London the same day, showed that Whitehall’s concern now was to determine through negotiation how, and to whom, power was to be handed over.
In India, the feeling that the curtain was now up on the penultimate scene of the political drama released a flurry of activity and counter-activity. The main actors in the domestic power struggle were the Congress and the League. Both sensed the proximity of freedom. It was not Jinnah’s superior tactics alone, however, that yielded him victory. There was a group of British civilians in Delhi to bolster the League at every step in this tortuous game of political chess.
In November 1945, the Commander-in-Chief took the fateful decision of committing to trial three officers of Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army—a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh—before a military court at Red Lort, Delhi. In its unwisdom, this equalled Irwin’s proposal for an all-white Simon Commission on reforms. The trial unleashed nationalist forces, Indian sympathies naturally being overwhelmingly on the side of these martyrs to the cause of freedom.
A dramatic turn was given to the proceedings when Nehru appeared before the court wearing the barrister’s gown he had discarded twenty-five years earlier. It was a gesture, for the defence of the accused was largely conducted by Bhulabhai Desai. Jinnah too attempted to figure in the affair. He sent word to Shah Nawaz Khan, the Muslim on trial, that he would defend him if he dissociated himself from the other accused. Shah Nawaz Khan flatly declined, remarking: “We have stood shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for freedom. Many comrades have died on the field of battle inspired by our leadership. We stand or fall together.” An attempt to drive a communal wedge into the solidarity created by the I.N.A. movement thus failed.
The authorities realised that they had made a blunder and that
the men in the dock had become national heroes. Less than two months later, there came the strike in the Indian wing of the Royal Indian Air Force and the menacing mutiny in the ranks of the Royal Indian Navy—both portents of the rapidly mounting popular upheaval.
The prestige of the Congress shot up as a result of the I.N.A. trial. This was reflected in the ensuing elections, in which the Congress captured practically all the general seats, while the League took most of the Muslim ones. Jinnah could claim with some justice that the League by and large represented Muslim interests and that his demand for Pakistan had popular sanction among the Muslim masses. On the other hand, with the ouster of the Conservative Party from office in Britain, the prospect of getting Pakistan “on a platter” faded. Labour, he knew, would not countenance the demand in its prevailing state of mind, and he was now uncertain whether he would be able to get even a “moth-eaten” Pakistan. But he still had allies in the British and Muslim members of the Civil Service, and he told me he counted on Nehru to give him the opening he needed to attain his goal.
I accompanied Wavell and his wife to the Andamans in the last week of December 1945 together with a group of newsmen. Wavell explained to us that the British fleet had assembled in the Andamans for action in the First Burma War. If they had not been occupied by the Japanese in World War II, they would have been used as a major naval base for operations in South and South-East Asia. The object of his visit was to see to what use the islands could be turned in the future.
In the relaxed atmosphere of the Andamans, I found Wavell inclined to be communicative. He said the separation of Burma from India was a mistake. Burma’s defence from external foes was an integral part of the defence of India and the Andamans. He said the countries on India’s periphery should have a common system of defence. If India was partitioned, Pakistan would have no elbowroom to defend herself. He had tried to solve the deadlock between the Congress and the League, but politics was not his line. The Congress pulled in one direction and the League in the opposite, and the Civil Servants were too partisan to help find an acceptable solution within the framework of an undivided India. He expected Labour to make a fresh effort at a solution in the coming summer and hoped it would be fruitful.
The Cabinet Mission despatched by Attlee landed in Delhi towards the end of March 1946. Its plan envisaged a Union of India, embracing both British India and the States dealing with
I.F.C.N. p
foreign affairs, defence and communications and having the power to raise the finances required for these subjects. Any question raising a major communal issue in the legislature was to require for its decision a majority of the representatives of each of the two major communities as well as a majority of all the members voting. All the subjects other than the Union subjects and all residuary powers were to vest in the provinces and the states. Provinces were to be free to form groups. The Constitution, to be drawn up by a constituent assembly, was to provide each province, with the right to call for a reconsideration of the constitution at ten-yearly intervals. Briefly, the scheme was rooted in the unity and indivisibility of the country.
To Jinnah, therefore, its labours were anathema. As early as ioth April, he summoned in Delhi a convention of some 400 members of the provincial legislatures elected on the League ticket. The rallying cry at this convention was the demand for an independent Pakistan. The Muslims, Shahid Suhrawardy declared, were straining at the leash, and Noon said even the exploits of Halaku, the Mongol conqueror, would be put in the shade by a bloodbath should their right to a separate state be denied. (Both Suhrawardy and Noon had an inglorious political end as Prime Ministers of Pakistan.)
As I listened to the passionate and blood-curdling oratory at the session, I realised that the recent election, in which the League had scored a signal victory, had been a tactical mistake. The demon of communalism having been let loose, it was little wonder then that the first scheme formulated by the mission should have been repudiated as unacceptable on two grounds; one, that it did not go far enough to satisfy national aspirations; the other, that the concessions to the Muslim clamour went beyond the limits of justice and equity and were inimical to the concept of Indian integrity.
Undaunted by this rebuff, Wavell convened a second conference at Simla. It was a triangular affair. On one side were Azad, the Congress President, Nehru, Patel and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, representing the premier nationalist organisation; on the second were Jinnah, Mohammed Ismail Khan, Liaquat Ali Khan and Abdur Rab Nishtar, the spokesmen of the League; and on the third were the members of the British delegation, striving valiantly to effect a compromise. But the seven-day talks early in May proved abortive.
Gandhi was present in Delhi as well as in Simla while the parleys with the Cabinet Mission proceeded. When I met him, he said there was too much deceit all round and added that Patel and Rajen Babu (Rajendra Prasad) had ceased to be his “yes men.” There
was too much violence in the hearts of the people. The League Ministers were preaching violence as the final sanction for Pakistan.
On 16th June, hoping against hope, the Cabinet Mission came out with specific proposals for the formation of an interim government at the centre and setting up a constituent assembly to devise a constitution for a self-governing India. That was the signal for another round of tortuous bargaining. The Congress asked for the right to appoint a Muslim of its choice to the interim Cabinet to establish its claim to represent all communities in the country. The Viceroy, however, assured Jinnah that he did not countenance the demand.
Predictably, the Congress Working Committee thereupon turned down the scheme for an interim government, while at the same time signifying its willingness to participate in the deliberations of the constitution-making body. Jinnah’s response was not any the less surprising. He was wholly agreeable to the League’s joining an interim cabinet; but he chose to be studiously non-committal in the plan for a constituent assembly.
The Congress-League tussle came to a head when Nehru took over the Congress presidentship from Azad on 6th July. In one of his first pronouncements on assuming office, he declared: “We are not bound by a single thing except that we have decided for the moment to go into the Constituent Assembly.”
Nehru had for long been Jinnah’s bite noire. At this particular moment, he was understandably more distasteful to the League champion than ever before. It was Nehru, as Congress President, that the Viceroy would call upon to form an interim government, a prospect that Jinnah was bound to regard with annoyance and deep suspicion. He lost no time, therefore, in condemning Nehru’s statement of 6th July as “a complete repudiation of the basic form upon which the long-term scheme rests.”
From this posture of hostility it was but a short step to the startling volte face of some three weeks later when he prevailed upon the Council of the Muslim League in Bombay to withdraw acceptance of the Cabinet Mission plan in its entirety and to call for the observance of 16th August as Direct Action Day.
In 1945, the Tories had prevented Wavell from honouring his commitment and forming a Cabinet of Congressmen because they did not wish to offend the League, which had served as their Crescent Card. Now, however, Wavell could not redeem his pledge to entrust the formation of an interim government to whichever party accepted the Cabinet Mission proposals. Jinnah got the Council to accept the proposals after learning from his British friends in the Government
228 Independence Dawns
that the letter Wavell had written him, and which had not yet been delivered to him, withdrew the offer. Wavell had withdrawn it because this time Labour was unwilling to alienate the majority party, the Congress, and hand over power to the League.
In the League Council, Jinnah hit out violently both at the mission and the Congress. The former he accused of bad faith, and in his vituperation of the Congress he was even more unbridled. The League, he thundered, had “no alternative but to adhere once more to the national goal of Pakistan.” The session witnessed an emotional outburst as the leading lights of the League, known for their traditional loyalty to the Raj, came to the platform and announced the renunciation of their British titles.
The country thus went to the polls to choose its representatives in the Constituent Assembly on a franchise limited to twenty-six per cent of the adult population in an atmosphere charged with intense communal antagonism. The results emphasised the cleavage between the Congress and the League, for the former won all but nine of the general seats, and the latter all but five of the Muslim seats.
Among the administrative changes which took place at this time was the transfer of H. V. R. Iengar to Delhi from Bombay as Secretary to the newly created Department of Planning. The Department soon set up cells to draft plans for river valley projects, steel mills, cement factories, and machine tool plants, scientific laboratories and the other sinews of industry. The attempt was to put the Government ahead of the economic planning of the Congress and of the Tata-Birla Plan, published with fanfare early in