‘You will have to choose between the two, the Muslim League and the Congress, both your creations. Every day you pass here coquetting now with the Congress, now with the League and again with the Congress, wearing yourself away, will not do.’
Gandhi to Cripps, June 1946
The Labour Government’s way of dealing with India showed some parallels with its way of dealing with Palestine. Over India too it established a parliamentary-style delegation of inquiry to advise on the incompatible claims of different factions, each claiming to be more representative than it was; and here too this rather low-powered body was largely ignored, out-trumped at a higher level of decision-making in the politics of a fluid situation.
There were important differences. One was that, whereas over Palestine Labour ministers quickly decided that their party’s simplistic pledges to the Zionists could hardly be honoured, over India Labour’s longstanding affinities with the aspirations of the Indian National Congress continued to shape Government policy. The latent threat of political opposition at home admittedly raised the stakes. But the commitment of key ministers, especially Attlee and Cripps, to the goal of rapid independence nonetheless prevailed – despite untoward developments in India. Indeed the upshot was that Indian independence, albeit accompanied by partition, came sooner rather than later.
Britain’s sheer power to impose its imperial will had not survived the war. The Attlee Government recognized this. It therefore counted on the goodwill of natural allies, who professed to share its aims, in reaching workable solutions to difficult problems. In Palestine it looked to the United States for assistance while in India it hoped that Labour’s sympathy for Congress – all too obvious in Conservative eyes – would correspondingly help to achieve results. Yet, over Palestine, ministers repeatedly found that the American President could not be relied upon to put the goal of facilitating an agreed settlement ahead of his immediate political worries at home. This came as a shock, a disappointment, a breach of good faith; but whether it can be called sabotage raises the question of whether the intention was to wreck or intentionally destroy an otherwise viable project. The same criteria need to be applied in judging events in India, where the role of Gandhi remained inescapably pivotal in determining the attitude of the Indian National Congress.
In India the American dimension did not bulk so large as in Palestine. The reason was surely that in the United States the Indian dimension did not bulk so large as did Zionism. In the index to the New York Times for 1946, references to Palestine take up thirty-nine columns (not to mention another nine on Zionism, and two on Jews and Jewish organizations). In total this is about one per cent of the indexed stories in the paper – almost exactly the same proportion as in The Times in London for references to Palestine and Jews (‘Zionism, see Jews'). But whereas The Times carried nearly 60 per cent more coverage of India than of Palestine, in the New York Times almost the exact opposite was the case: nearly 60 per cent fewer stories on India than on Palestine.
Not that public opinion in the United States was wholly uninterested in the Indian cry for self-determination. But, once the Cripps Offer had been rejected by the Indian National Congress in 1942 and the Simla proposals had been rejected by the Muslim League in 1945, the problem had appeared rather more complex than simply one of British imperial possessiveness. The United States, once seen as a saviour by Congress, was now regarded by many Indians as complicit in British imperialism. On 18 February, for example, the New York Times duly printed Gandhi’s and Nehru’s expressions of popular hostility towards Great Britain but on the next two days carried reports of an Indian mob in Bombay tearing down the Stars and Stripes from the US Information Service. Moreover, the fact that Attlee’s Government had displaced Churchill’s thereby removed a notable obstacle to Anglo-American understanding – a specially dysfunctional relationship on this particular issue. Furthermore, when Cripps himself again emerged in 1946 as the most prominent member of a ministerial delegation to India, this was also reassuring in the eyes of informed Americans.
It was obvious by 1946 that Cripps, the country-house radical, had somehow emerged from the war as a reformist politician of the centre-left: a champion of multilateral trade and the American loan in external policy, and at home the personification of high-minded austerity. Moreover, his experience during the Cripps Mission had reinforced his view that a Marxist analysis could not unlock the involuted problems of imperialism and communal conflict in India. The point is important because Cripps, along with Attlee, was the major influence on British policy in bringing the Indian Empire to an end. Certainly they wanted to see India stay in the Commonwealth if possible; certainly they wanted economic links to be maintained; certainly they wanted to reconcile India’s new role with traditional British strategic concerns. But all this was now premised on Indian self-determination, in the hope that politics could resolve conflicts that would otherwise result in bloodshed.
The belief that doing the right thing might turn out to be expedient may, of course, be dismissed as naive. This was hardly how Churchill would have acted if he had been in power after the war, as his decisions in government amply suggest and his actions in opposition explicitly confirm. But the fact that leading Conservatives, like Rab Butler and Harold Macmillan, subsequently adroitly distanced themselves from their contemporary criticisms of British policy perhaps tells its own story – hindsight implicitly commending foresight. It did not take sixty years to vindicate the big decisions over India. Where there is still justifiable room for some historical revision, however, is over the role of Cripps himself, which was arguably more important than even that of Attlee.
Despite his heavy involvement in the Loan negotiations as President of the Board of Trade, it was Cripps who kept pressing for a more conciliatory stance on India in the autumn of 1945. He succeeded in getting agreement to sending a parliamentary group of two peers and eight backbench MPs to investigate (though little came of this in the end). He failed to persuade Attlee to summon Jinnah and Nehru to talks in London, but in consolation the idea was hatched of sending out a representative of the British cabinet. By mid-January this had become a plan for a delegation of three cabinet ministers, including Cripps himself, to visit India, with a wide brief to achieve a mutually agreed settlement.
Lord Pethick-Lawrence, as Secretary of State for India, was naturally a member of this cabinet delegation. So was Albert Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty under both Churchill and Attlee: a patriotic working-class figure who struck Lord Wavell as ‘the very best type of British Labour, the best we breed’.1 The Viceroy was less keen on the presence of Cripps, his fellow Wykehamist, whose influence throughout he rightly perceived as dominant.
There were many problems to overcome. One was a direct hangover from the war. Prominent Indian Army officers, captured by the enemy, were prosecuted for defecting to the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army. This created tension, if only because Congress leaders, though longstanding rivals of the INA, could not afford to let their own nationalist credentials be compromised. Equally, Wavell could not forget how the war effort had been undermined and he reacted straightforwardly as a soldier, in supporting disciplinary measures, rather than as one of his despised politicians. Readers of the later novels in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet will recall how this issue festered in the background throughout the post-war months. It surely manifested the need for a political approach that this honest but obtuse Viceroy was incapable of providing.
The political problems of India were diverse; but two interlocked issues were salient in shaping the context for the negotiations of 1946. Jinnah had indicated the nub of the difficulty in December 1945: ‘The deadlock in this country is not so much between India and the British. It is between Hindu Congress and the Muslim League.’2 This was an analysis totally rejected by the Congress leaders. They bridled at being called Hindu when they had made heroic efforts to establish a secular nationalist party. They resented being put on a par with the Muslim League and its absurd scheme for Pakistan. They remained committed to the view that these supposed difficulties were themselves only the effects of British rule and would accordingly disappear with it – if only the British were really intent on yielding power rather than mouthing their endlessly deceptive words about it.
When Cripps resumed a private correspondence with Nehru, what it revealed was the rigidity of the Congress mind-set. Nehru may have been right to blame a century of British rule for preventing ‘the internal forces from establishing an equilibrium among themselves’; he might have had a point when he called the introduction of separate electorates (for minorities like the Muslims) ‘the seed of the poisonous tree that has grown now to poison all our national life and prevent progress’. But in projecting this interpretation of history straight onto the political divisions in India in 1946 he was surely showing himself out of date and out of touch.
The fact that Nehru, like most Congress leaders, had been in prison from the repression of the Quit India agitation of 1942 until June 1945 was rather more than a regrettable personal incident. It was a symptom of Congress’s debilitating wartime paralysis, exacerbating the already damaging effects of its political withdrawal from government since 1939. The fault lay mainly on the British side but some of the wounds on Congress were self-inflicted. The point was that the Muslim League, previously little more than a shell, had meanwhile established a dynamic that had transformed the political situation. Yet Nehru still took for granted the political backwardness of the Muslims; he idly explained the success of League organization as ‘strikingly similar to the Nazi technique’; he disparaged the cry for Pakistan as ‘a sentimental slogan which they have got used to’. He thus assured Cripps that talk of direct action could be dismissed – ‘I do not think there is much in Jinnah’s threat’ – and that the imposition of a unitary constitution based on majority voting was still the obvious way forward. ‘There may be some petty riots in some cities,’ Nehru conceded.3
Hence the Congress insistence that there was no real deadlock between itself and this upstart, reactionary Muslim League. The only deadlock that mattered was between India, represented by Congress itself, and the British. The results of the provincial elections, still coming in while the cabinet delegation began its business, merely confirmed the new balance. In winning around 90 per cent of the vote in the reserved Muslim seats, the League had now established a legitimacy as commanding as that of Congress elsewhere. This lent political cogency as well as personal animosity to the League’s contention that Congress was posturing in keeping a Muslim, Maulana Azad, as its president when he was a mere poster-boy. Though this was slighting to Azad’s own achievements, it was true enough in identifying the real power in Congress as now lying outside its formal structure. On the threshold of Indian self-government, the chief contenders for the Congress leadership were two Hindus: not only the charismatic intellectual Nehru but also the tough, pragmatic party manager, Vallabhbhai Patel.
Congress’s unresolved internal stresses centred on an undeclared war for the Gandhian succession. If Nehru can rightly be called charismatic, what word is left to describe the extraordinary and abiding appeal of the Mahatma himself? If he no longer held any formal position within Congress, it was because he did not want to and did not need to. The danger all along was that the pragmatic political deals hammered out within the formal structures of negotiation would in the end be at the mercy of appeals to values, judgements and slogans that were deemed not negotiable at all.
Above all, Gandhi was bound by his own almost mystical conception of India. He had talked in 1942 about a ‘vivisection of India’ – not as a description of the (abhorrent) proposal for Pakistan but of the (equally objectionable) constitutional devices that were being discussed as a means of avoiding partition. For all the impressive strength of its position, which Gandhi had been largely responsible for building, Congress still lacked an effective political realism; and for this deficiency Gandhi was also largely responsible. It refused to face facts; it hid behind tired excuses and ancient alibis. This helps explain its deep-seated reluctance to believe mounting evidence – like the provincial election results – of the changes brought about by the war.
Whereas Jinnah had no difficulty in accepting that the British really were intent on leaving India, Nehru still needed persuading. He voiced understandable qualms about failure to use the term ‘independence’, which helped spur Cripps to secure approval for a brief far wider than he had been given by Churchill’s cabinet in 1942. This was made apparent in Attlee’s parliamentary statement about the cabinet delegation in March. ‘The temperature of 1946 is not the temperature of 1920 or of 1930 or even of 1942,’ the Prime Minister declared, with reference to the options between which India was now asked to choose. ‘The British Commonwealth and Empire is not bound together by chains of external compulsion,’ he argued, and so, if India ‘elects for independence, in our view she has a right to do so’.4 For Attlee, it might be concluded, the Commonwealth was a substitute for Empire, whereas for Churchill it was a euphemism for Empire. And in working so hard to keep India within the Commonwealth, Attlee and Cripps readily conceded independence, thus squaring with their own longstanding commitment to the principle of self-determination.
The parliamentary Conservative party, in Churchill’s absence, proved notably supportive of sending the delegation, if only for want of a better alternative. It was, as Sir John Anderson said from the Opposition front bench, ‘an interesting debate, entirely free from party or sectional controversy’.5 But this marked a highly conditional kind of approval, subject to the delegation’s ability to secure agreement among the Indian parties – and dependent on Churchill himself keeping out of the way, whether in Florida or in Fulton. On arrival in Delhi, Cripps was able to tell a press conference on 1 April 1946: ‘We want to give independence to India as quickly and as smoothly as we can.’6 The chips were down, the final attempt at deal-making about to begin.
Pethick-Lawrence, Cripps and Alexander sat alongside the Viceroy, day by day, through a series of over 400 interviews that lasted from 26 March until 17 April. Though an official record was kept throughout, Cripps sat busily writing his own notes, which became the basis of his diary, and his colleague Alexander did likewise. It was Cripps rather than Pethick-Lawrence who was spokesman at most of the press conferences, on a variety of bland pretexts which certainly did not fool Alexander, who felt some sensitivity about his status as the ‘silent man’.7
Cripps, of course, had been here before. He privately blamed failure in 1942 on the previous Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and this time wanted to keep his distance from Wavell, showing reluctance to stay even for a couple of nights at the Viceregal Lodge on arrival. But Wavell proved accommodating and Cripps wrote on 25 March of ‘a preliminary chat with the Viceroy last night which seemed successful since there was no great divergence of opinion’.
Cripps staked a good deal on employing an informal approach. His methods in 1946, much criticized at the time and subsequently, stemmed from his determination to avoid making the same mistake (even if this ultimately led him to make the opposite mistake). Above all, since he attributed the failure of the Cripps Mission to Gandhi, this time Cripps went to great lengths to win him round, both directly and indirectly, rather than work through Azad. But it is not true that he only consorted with Congress; instead he likewise tried to establish an effective network with the Muslim League and the Sikhs.
This was the task assigned to two young personal assistants, Major Woodrow Wyatt and Major John McLaughlin Short. Wyatt was an ebullient Labour MP, whose political career was to describe a long arc from the Tribune left to the Thatcherite right, and whose recent experience as a member of the parliamentary delegation to India made him a well-connected aide for Cripps. Wyatt’s main job was to keep open the line to the Muslim League. Short, currently working for the Ministry of Information, was an expert on the Punjab. He had met Cripps in 1942 and bombarded him with memoranda throughout the winter of 1945–6, educating him on the Pakistan issue. As eccentric in his methods as he was idiosyncratic in expression, Short was difficult to pin down, but his main job was to talk to the Sikhs. The ‘two majors’ set to work with a relish, providing much entertainment in more senses than one. Their wine bill alone for a month was of the order of £5000 at today’s prices. Yet Cripps, personally uncensorious about alcohol, thought that he was getting good value and defended this lapse from austerity against Treasury scrutiny.
For Cripps the real work was behind the scenes, especially in mending his fences with Congress. ‘We had some intensely interesting talks and I ended up with a long talk with Jawaharlal in the garden,’ he wrote after a reception given for the Working Committee. ‘I think the whole atmosphere was most promising and there did not seem to be any suspicions about us as there were last time.’ On the surface, relations with the Viceroy remained harmonious, and even friendly, but Cripps was somewhat naive in supposing that ‘we have, I think, quite got over the slight suspicions that were in his mind when we came out.’8 Wavell in fact harboured a jaundiced view of the ‘hole-and-corner’ methods adopted by ‘Cripps and his minions (Wyatt and Short)’.9
There were other supporting characters like Sudhir Ghosh, whose role as ‘Gandhi’s emissary’ offered him eagerly exploited opportunities to inflate his own position. The youthful Ghosh, Cambridge-educated and purposefully ingratiating, was now an employee of the Tata industrial conglomerate, which seemed happy to finance his apprenticeship as a spin doctor. Already known to Wyatt, whose talents were not dissimilar, Ghosh used him to send a warning to Cripps: ‘When Sir Stafford came to India in 1942, the old man described his offer as a “a post-dated cheque” and that was the end of it. So beware of the old man.’10This turned out to be good advice.
Cripps had concluded from his early conversations ‘that the one effective way of settling the matter was to get Jinnah and Gandhi to agree’. This was easier said than done, but he made sure that his first courtesy call – ‘and so a great compliment’ – was thus upon the Quaid-i-Azam (the honorific title bestowed on their leader by his devoted Muslim followers). Cripps found Jinnah reasonable. ‘To use the common language, he had got rid of his inferiority complex.’ He assured Cripps that he was ready to meet Gandhi. ‘I suggested that if they got stuck,’ Cripps recorded, ‘I might perhaps help as a friend of both – unofficially.’11 Jinnah was, of course, far readier to meet Gandhi, whom he regarded as the dictator of Congress, than to consort with its Muslim president. Cripps clearly now hoped that his inevitably well-publicized first visit to Gandhi would be perceived as a further step in mutual conciliation rather than as any kind of snub to the Muslim League.
‘GANDHI CHOOSES TO LIVE WITH “UNTOUCHABLES”’ was the Daily Herald headline in Britain on 1 April. Gandhi had arrived in Delhi on an officially commissioned special train (towards the cost of which Ghosh was duly sent to press a third-class fare upon the Viceroy’s secretary) and on arrival took up residence in the Harijan sweepers’ quarter, where a camp had been set up. The simplicity of the Mahatma’s hut was juxtaposed with the installation of electricity, loudspeakers and telephones. Here, within a week of his own arrival in Delhi, Cripps had his initial informal meeting with Gandhi, first joining over 3000 people for prayers before retreating, shoeless, to the hut for forty minutes of private talk. Cripps then whisked Gandhi off in the official car to meet Pethick-Lawrence. ‘We both asked him to act as our adviser with all frankness and this he promised to do and to help as best he could,’ Cripps recorded in his diary on 1 April. ‘Old Gandhi seemed physically very fit,’ he concluded. ‘I am really fond of the old man though he is no child at negotiation! He’s got an unassailable position in the country and knows it…’
It is obvious that Cripps hoped for more than spiritual uplift from the Mahatma. It was Gandhi’s proven ability to thwart a settlement that made his position pivotal and thus made efforts to propitiate him worthwhile. The alternative strategy was to keep the old man at arm’s length – as the Viceroy clearly wished – and to rely on Azad’s diffuse professions of goodwill or Nehru’s subtle rhetoric or Patel’s brute exercise of authority in carrying Congress. But Cripps felt that he had tried all this in 1942, only to be disappointed. Believing that the Muslim League was bluffing about the irreducibility of its demand for an independent Pakistan, Cripps thought that Congress could be induced to acquiesce in an acceptable compromise if only Gandhi did not feel his amour propre slighted in the process. No trouble was to be spared in courting the old man. Wavell confessed himself ‘frankly horrified at the deference shown to Gandhi’ during his first official meeting with the delegation on 3 April, when a delay in supplying him with a glass of water meant that ‘Cripps hustled off himself to see about it.’12
The round of interviews continued, day by day. By the middle of April, press reports began to speak increasingly of a deadlock. Backed by the final election returns, Jinnah was becoming increasingly intransigent in his public demands for Pakistan. It was an explosive atmosphere. ‘We can't leave this country without a settlement of some kind,’ Cripps wrote in his diary on 7 April. ‘If we did there would be bloodshed and chaos within a few weeks.’
The time had come to lay down a timetable and to make hard choices, especially about Pakistan. Cripps drew up a statement, to be put to the parties, posing two alternatives: either Scheme A for union or Scheme B for partition. Scheme A suggested the most flexible form of union, while Scheme B stipulated the possible extent of an independent Pakistan in rigorous terms. If Jinnah’s ‘two-nation theory’ justified Muslim separation, Cripps argued, it would be ‘wholly inconsistent with this theory if non-Muslim majority areas should be added to Pakistan’.13 The idea was obviously to make union as appealing as possible, and partition as unappealing. To this extent the proposal was simply an extension of Labour’s traditional pro-Congress approach; and British interests in the region, both economic and strategic, predisposed against ‘balkanization’ and thus against Pakistan.
Cripps, however, was clearly intent on telling both sides equally that neither could have everything it wanted. Jinnah might champion the Muslim minority in India as a whole, but a Scheme B Pakistan could only offer salvation to Muslims in those parts of northern India where Muslims were already relatively secure in their majority status. Faced with an agonizing choice, could Jinnah be tempted into some form of federation under Scheme A? Cripps’s information was that Vallabhbhai Patel, the strong man of Congress, stood for the hard line on a unitary solution in which the Hindu majority would naturally prevail. Could he be persuaded by Gandhi to offer the olive branch of Scheme A, so as to avert partition?
Before the Indians could be confronted with a delicately poised choice, the British Government had to face its own moment of truth. Cripps’s negotiating strategy demanded that Scheme B be specified in a form unattractive to the Muslim League. So Pakistan’s consequent economic and strategic weakness would likewise make Scheme B an unattractive option from the point of view of British defence interests in the region. The cabinet and the chiefs of staff in London therefore had to be won over. Attlee cabled back that even Scheme B was ‘better than no agreement at all as this would lead to widespread chaos’.14
‘Crucial Week in India: attempt to bring parties closer,’ The Times reported on 15 April. On the same day, Cripps received a private letter from Azad, who knew that the delegation’s plan was to put a proposal to both parties and then leave them to chew it over while the cabinet ministers left Delhi for a break in Kashmir over Easter. Azad suggested that he should himself first receive an informal briefing, so as to anticipate likely objections from Jinnah and help secure the backing of the Congress Working Committee.
Any hopes that the League would enter into informal negotiations with Congress were promptly dashed by Jinnah. Twenty minutes of ‘photographing and cinematographing a fake meeting’ on 16 April did not help his official interview with the delegation to get off to a good start. ‘I am afraid it yielded no useful results,’ admitted the usually indomitable Cripps. The tone of the meeting had been set, much to the Viceroy’s chagrin, by the Secretary of State’s insistence on the ‘velvet glove’, which in his hands was liable to become a woolly glove of unravelling platitudes. But the ministers seem to have been agreed in relying on personal appeals to Jinnah rather than a sterner confrontation with him. ‘This is the really critical time and I feel personally that I must leave no stone unturned to get a favourable result for the future of 400 million people hangs in the balance in the next few days,’ Cripps wrote in his diary on 16 April. ‘May God give us wisdom to do what is right. I have never felt a heavier responsibility on my shoulders than just at this moment.’ He spared himself no effort. On the next day he spent a long evening with Jinnah, not getting home until nearly one o’clock, only to rise at 5.45 a.m. for a meeting at Gandhi’s camp in the sweepers’ colony.
Jinnah seemed locked into a posture of total inflexibility. ‘He isn't quite big enough to take the plunge, though he realises the immense dangers if there is no agreement,’ thought Cripps. ‘I told him that his attitude tended to throw us into the arms of Congress and appealed to him to make some advance to a compromise – but I could not get anything out of him.’ At this point, neither Scheme A nor Scheme B was regarded by Jinnah as any basis for negotiation with Congress. If only by comparison, Gandhi appeared more forthcoming. ‘As always he was charming and wanted to be helpful,’ Cripps noted; and he seized on the suggestion that if anyone were to meet Jinnah, it should be Nehru.15
Throughout the visit of the cabinet delegation, a contest was taking place for the presidency of Congress, thus virtually settling who would shortly become prime minister of India. In declaring to Cripps that ‘the real man to consult was Jawaharlal’ – rather than Patel, still less Azad – Gandhi gave a highly significant indication of his own preference, which turned out, as usual, to clinch the matter. What apparently weighed with Gandhi was, above all, Nehru’s qualifications as a sophisticated negotiator – someone ‘who was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and became a barrister’ – who could stand on level terms with any British opposite number.16 In effect, Nehru was chosen because he was a match for Cripps.
Cripps heard what he wanted to hear from both Jinnah and Gandhi in one further respect: that, although each party was fearful of being seen by its own supporters to proffer the necessary concessions, a compromise solution that was imposed by the British might actually be accepted on both sides. At the delegation’s meeting with Wavell on 18 April, Cripps opportunely tabled his own proposal. Though there is no evidence that this document was shown in advance to either Jinnah or Gandhi, Cripps’s diary that day does hint that, when he went on from the Viceregal Lodge to meet Nehru for lunch, he was more open: ‘We discussed the merits of various compromises and it didn't look as if the Working Committee were going to give very much either!’
Yet Cripps’s own attempt to square the circle, it quickly emerged, was not acceptable to Congress. Admittedly, his draft award rejected partition as impracticable, on the ground that if Pakistan were to be extensive enough to be viable, its claim to non-Muslim areas would be unjustifiable. Cripps proposed instead to accommodate the Muslim demand for some kind of self-government by means of a three-tier structure, in which provinces could opt for ‘grouping’ into Hindustan or Pakistan at an intermediate level below that of a Union of All India, which would be responsible for certain common functions, including defence.
Here was the origin of the proposal on which everything turned in 1946 – in effect, the last moment to avert partition and bloodshed in India. The exact scheme kept changing, the consequent arrangements for the transition kept changing, the venues in which discussion took place kept changing; but the essence of the choice henceforth dominated every phase of these complex and protracted negotiations. For some such exercise in federalism was the only chance of weaning the Muslim League from the Pakistan option. Yet Congress remained reluctant to grant grouping the sort of legitimacy necessary to entice the League into such constitutional arrangements.
Since the League would only participate if it were persuaded to trust Congress, their mutual perceptions became the real issue at every stage. As Cripps told Nehru at one point: ‘If there was confidence and goodwill, it would work anyway; if there wasn't, it wouldn't – and he more or less agreed.’17 Everything in the end turned on trust or its absence; but not, as in 1942, mistrust of Cripps himself, or of the Viceroy, or of the British Government, so much as mistrust between Congress and the League.
In Britain, India did not provide the main headlines as people celebrated their first post-war Easter, which fell that year on Sunday, 21 April. Worries nearer home – housing, rationing, shortages of all kinds – had more attention. Yet the Labour Government was still riding high. Opinion polls and by-elections alike confirmed that it was holding its support. Success bred success in winning unlikely converts. Harold Nicolson, who badly wanted a peerage, had told the Lord Chancellor earlier that week that he would be prepared to take the Labour whip in the Lords – ‘I said I was heart and soul with the government in its foreign policy and that I also agreed with its domestic policy.’18 John Maynard Keynes, with a peerage already and rather more forebodings about future policy, was spending Easter at his house below the Sussex Downs, where he died peacefully on Easter Sunday morning. India’s sterling balances would trouble him no more.
In the London Sunday papers, reports from India were sobering, with rising communal tension and a total impasse in the talks. ‘Indian leadership has failed dismally to bridge the ever-widening gulf between Muslims and Hindus,’ commented the Observer, a Conservative newspaper in those days. ‘The great Congress hoax of India’s “oneness” has been exposed, as Mr Jinnah always maintained it would be, as a pure myth.’ ‘IT MAY BE A LONG JOB’, conceded the Daily Herald a few days later, loyally seeking to make the best of it.19 The cabinet delegation, now taking a short holiday in the mountains of Kashmir, took stock of a worrying position amid innocent recreations: trout-fishing for Cripps, snooker for Alexander and Pethick-Lawrence (who unexpectedly displayed more aptitude at the billiards table than at the negotiating table).
On their return to Delhi, the heat was on, in every sense, as temperatures steadily soared to around 40°C. Jinnah was wary of the latest compromise plan that Cripps put to him. ‘However I went on and on (like casting a fly over a fish that won't take),’ Cripps wrote, though clearly finding him as difficult to play as any Kashmir trout. This proved not to be crucial since, as Cripps admitted the following day, ‘Jawaharlal turned it down flat! So that was that.’ No sooner was one scheme rejected by one party than Cripps tried an alternative on the other side; dining privately with Jinnah that night, Cripps detected the first signs of concession towards the idea of a federal centre. ‘The plot thickens!’ he wrote as he pondered his tactics, deciding what to say and to whom.20
At last there came a corresponding sign from Congress of a willingness to engage in face-to-face talks. Much oppressed by the Delhi heat, Azad pined for escape to another Simla conference; he determined to ignore his evidently divided Working Committee in seeking out Cripps on 26 April. Azad said to him – none of this was on paper – that he was confident that Congress would, after all, enter negotiations on the basis of a three-tier approach; Jinnah could be told as much. Cripps reported back to his colleagues and, despite the Viceroy’s growing wish ‘to stop all this to-ing and fro-ing by Cripps’, secured their approval.21 Cripps respected Azad’s confidences when he met Gandhi and also played on Jinnah’s fear of being held responsible for a breakdown (again) to bring him into line.
The upshot of Cripps’s efforts was thus an agreement, if only an agreement to leave Delhi for the first face-to-face negotiations between the parties since the breakdown of the 1945 Simla conference. ‘This important move, at a time when negotiations were threatened with deadlock,’ reported the Sunday Times on 28 April, ‘is a major triumph for Sir Stafford Cripps.’ The delegation’s invitations to a second Simla conference specified its agenda: to consider a constitution for a union government, as Congress wished, balanced with the creation of two groups of Hindu and Muslim provinces, respectively – the essential concession to win Jinnah’s acceptance. Azad had just been induced by Gandhi to stand aside as president of Congress and to nominate as his successor not Patel, the self-appointed hammer of the Muslims, but Nehru. This move made Jinnah’s participation in the tripartite talks easier for Cripps to secure.
As in the previous summer, Simla was again an attractive refuge from baking Delhi in May 1946. This was the first meeting between the parties since the end of the war. There were twelve official participants in the tripartite talks: four each from Congress and the Muslim League, three ministers plus the Viceroy. Gandhi orbited the conference, eccentrically. He was not an official delegate but he had been officially invited and accommodated. Seclusion was part of the plan. Journalists, denied any hard news, competed in their evocative word-pictures and speculated, with increasing tetchiness, on the hopes of a settlement.
The signs were mixed. Jinnah made a point of arriving late; his clothes got lost in transit; he refused to shake hands with Azad. Congress’s other Muslim representative, the gigantic Ghaffar Khan, ‘the frontier Gandhi’, spoke no English; his role was to bulk uncomprehendingly large as a symbol of Congress’s hold on the North West Frontier Province, within the territory claimed for Pakistan. Nehru thus did most of the talking for Congress, if only as interpreter. The brooding Patel, so recently slighted in his political ambitions, was hardly an encouraging influence as Congress’s fourth representative.
The talks provided moments of optimism. When, on 6 May, Jinnah offered to come into a union if Congress would accept grouping – the essence of any conceivable bargain – Cripps’s spirits rose. Nehru’s response was encouraging. ‘The atmosphere, except for Vallabhbhai Patel’s scowls, was good and helpful,’ Cripps noted on 7 May. ‘Patel is just anxious to break the thing up and doesn't want anything but a Congress dictatorship with himself as dictator!’ Cripps, ever more convinced that the way to outflank the Congress hardliners was to enlist Gandhi’s influence, accordingly arranged for him to meet the Viceroy and the delegation that evening. The stratagem backfired. Gandhi was in his uncompromising mood – ‘we must choose between the two parties and then hand the matter over to one or the other of them to do entirely in their own way’ – a course which he followed to the logical conclusion of calling the three-tier plan worse than Pakistan. In sparring with Cripps, however, Gandhi did throw out a challenge for him to come up with a workable scheme; and this, despite everything, Cripps set about doing. ‘The only chance now of getting anything agreed is the old man.’
Cripps was adroit in drafting a nicely balanced compromise. In effect the Muslim League was asked to work within the framework of an All-India Union Government, while Congress was asked to accept Hindu–Muslim parity within it and the legitimacy of provinces entering groups, which might set up their own legislatures and executives. Having cleared his draft with his colleagues, while the Viceroy saw Jinnah, Cripps met Gandhi and ‘we went through it word by word and line by line’. Cripps thought that he had ‘convinced him that it was fair’ and wrote that the meeting was ‘wholly successful I think and as he left he said he went with a light heart’. Cripps accepted not only Gandhi’s minor drafting amendments but his advice on postponing formal meetings for twenty-four hours. The two men of God were in apparent communion. ‘I prayed hard for guidance before it and I am sure that I got all that I asked for,’ Cripps recorded on 8 May. ‘I felt more in harmony with him than ever before.’
Nor did Cripps conceal his jubilation from his colleagues. Wavell had qualms about whether the proposed deal was fair to the Muslims, and still disliked this whole style of negotiation. Unaware of the Viceroy’s private opinion – ‘I do not quite trust Cripps and wholly mistrust Gandhi’ – Cripps may have been guilty of some complacency: ‘I must say that we really have been an excellent team!’22
Disillusionment soon came, in the form of a letter from Gandhi with the fairly predictable caveats that he wished to enter, having talked with the four official Congress delegates. They could not be bound by the proposed constitutional arrangements for grouping and, above all, could not accept parity with the Muslims. Gandhi reiterated: ‘This is really worse than Pakistan.’23
Nothing dismayed, Cripps decided to work on Azad and Nehru instead. This was negotiation by attrition, closing the gap by inches – much as in 1942, as all of them must have been well aware. Cripps’s tactics consisted of patient informal conciliation to outflank the formal gestures of confrontation. ‘Each time they break away and write letters saying they can't do this or that, we draw them back again!’24 Wyatt brought back encouraging news that Gandhi was, after all, prepared to let Congress accept Cripps’s proposal, provided two points were met. First, that Congress should remain free to argue against grouping upon entering a constituent assembly. Secondly, that though parity for Hindu–Muslim representation was unacceptable as a principle, if the issue were left specifically to Nehru and Jinnah, then something practically amounting to parity might emerge.
Here was the pivot of the whole Simla conference. On 9 May, Nehru proposed talks between the two parties, along with an umpire to adjudicate on differences. If Jinnah’s slighting riposte, that he was ready to meet any Hindu member of Congress, was intended to provoke uproar and breakdown, it failed. Azad magnanimously did not rise to the insult; the restraint on the Congress side was notable; after a silence, Nehru simply suggested an adjournment while he talked with Jinnah. The two withdrew for forty minutes while most of the rest spilled out into the gardens. The upshot was an adjournment for two days, to allow Jinnah and Nehru to get down to business.
The cabinet delegation had been in India for seven weeks now. Alexander was surely justified in writing in his diary on 9 May of ‘a sudden dramatic turn’ which gave rise to ‘feelings of greater optimism than we had experienced at any time since we had been in India’. Cripps and Gandhi relaxed together by plying each other with compliments. ‘We mustn't become a mutual admiration society!’ the Mahatma declared at one point. ‘He is a great dear and I am really fond of him – though sometimes he is difficult to understand because of the way his mind works,’ Cripps enthused in his diary on 9 May. ‘He appears to be quite irrational but that is because he acts sometimes inspirationally.’
The proposed Jinnah–Nehru summit talks certainly gave the press its most positive news. ‘MORE HOPE FOR INDIA TALKS’ proclaimed the Conservative Daily Mail on 10 May. The crucial point was that the leading Indian politicians themselves – facilitated by British mediation but at last free of British tutelage – were getting to grips with the problems of resolving their own fate. Had some form of compromise between Congress and the Muslim League ultimately flowed from these exchanges, the vision of Indian unity through non-violence might not have perished through a deficiency in the political skills necessary to implement it.
The second Simla conference, like the first, ultimately broke down. On the surface, the reason was much the same: Jinnah’s insistence on himself nominating any Muslim representatives. Thus he could again be blamed. But underlying this largely symbolic issue was a more fundamental issue about power. Here the onus lay with Nehru to satisfy Jinnah that Congress really did accept the premise of grouping of provinces, since only such an undertaking – and evidence of its good faith – could possibly persuade the Muslim League to set aside its demand for Pakistan.
The position of Maulana Azad, the outgoing Congress president, was only the personal aspect of this conflict. The new point, feeding on old resentments about how Muslims had been excluded from provincial power after 1937, was that Jinnah sought to make it a principle that Congress should not choose any Muslim representatives. Faced with this demand at Simla, Nehru’s posture changed from one of negotiation and flexibility to one of equally principled defiance. ‘We simply cannot agree to this, even temporarily, for it means a negation of what we have stood for all these long years,’ Nehru explained to Cripps. ‘It would be a dishonourable act on our part which is bound to be deeply resented.’25
Here was a sinister portent of a dispute that returned to dog subsequent negotiations. Congress and the League were engaged in a broader and finally intractable struggle for representative legitimacy. Nehru’s position was that both sides had agreed to accept arbitration, necessarily accepting thereby the final decision of an umpire. Jinnah’s position, by contrast, was that Congress first had to accept grouping: otherwise the Muslim League’s essential demand for recognition would itself be subject to arbitration. He reiterated that ‘if the Congress would agree to Groups of Provinces as desired by the Muslim League he would seriously consider a Union.’26 The result was again impasse.
In Britain, the breakdown at Simla marked the re-emergence of India as a party political issue. In May 1946, the reinvigorated hero of Fulton was back on fighting form; and the news from Simla licensed him to break the party truce, now that the Indians themselves were in such obvious disarray.
Churchill had sometimes spoken despondently of the Raj. ‘India must go,’ he had told one visitor while on holiday on Lake Como the previous September: ‘We were now in their debt – was 1200 million the figure? – which we owed to them for the privilege of having saved them from conquest by the Japanese.’27 He had been on the other side of the Atlantic, with the emollient Rab Butler leading for the Opposition, when the House of Commons had endorsed the decision to send out the cabinet delegation. What really moved him was the link he perceived between the Government’s decision to evacuate British troops from Egypt, its policy in Palestine, and the options it was now contemplating in India.
Churchill had already drafted a letter to Attlee. In it he minimized the degree of bipartisan acquiescence and warned that its continuance depended on ‘an Agreement between the great forces composing Indian life’. A couple of days after the news from Simla came through, the letter was sent: ‘I must resume my full freedom to point out the dangers and evils of the abandonment by Great Britain of her mission in India.’ Churchill did not deny the latent right to independence implicit in Dominion status. But he claimed that this merely acknowledged a remote contingency. ‘If, at the present time, you reach immediately a solution of independence, I should not be able to support this,’ he told Attlee. ‘I may add that the dangers of civil war breaking out in India on our departure are at least as great as those which are held by the Anglo-American Commission on Palestine to make a continuance of British or Anglo-American Mandate necessary.’28 Was this danger to keep Britain in India too?
The bipartisan front in Britain on Indian policy, uneasily but successfully maintained since 1939, was thus threatened by the return of the unregenerate imperialist. The cabinet was clearly worried. In London they focused on references to Indian independence in the draft of the long-awaited, much-revised statement to be issued by the cabinet delegation. In drafting it, Cripps had seized on Attlee’s ‘historic words’ in the House of Commons, and throughout made frequent and unvarnished use of the term independence, appreciating that its introduction had dispelled longstanding suspicions, which its subsequent qualification would simply rekindle with renewed force.
Yet Attlee suddenly had cold feet, having just learnt of Churchill’s views. Attlee told the delegation that he was reluctant to ‘give ammunition to critics of the Government here’ but, far from imposing his own view at this juncture, he ultimately gave way to the united expertise of the cabinet delegation and Viceroy, backed by their refusal otherwise to take responsibility for the statement.29 The fact that Wavell joined the ministers in taking this stand shows the seriousness of the issue and in fact produced a degree of unity between them otherwise lacking.
Insofar as Cripps did not attribute the outcome of the Simla conference to God, he attributed it to Jinnah. In the conference’s final stages, Cripps had struck Wavell as deplorably partisan in seeking to pin the blame upon the Muslim League. Both he and Alexander thought that the chances for acceptance of the delegation’s own solution, on which work had steadily been proceeding, had been prejudiced.
Cripps undoubtedly wanted Gandhi to remain involved in the negotiations. ‘I think that more than ever he holds the key to the situation,’ Cripps wrote, reflecting his private view of the bottom line in these negotiations. No Gandhi meant no Congress, no Congress meant no settlement, no settlement meant no transfer of power – which was unthinkable at this point. ‘My own view is that we must at all costs come to an accommodation with Congress,’ Cripps wrote on 14 May. ‘We can get through I believe without the League if we have Congress with us but not without Congress even if we have the League.’ Cripps saw here the threat of a split in the delegation. Wavell and Alexander, after golfing together in Simla, had taken to dining together in the air-conditioned luxury of the Viceregal Lodge, and were plainly hostile to further ‘appeasement’ of Congress. Indeed Wavell was now talking of resignation if there were concessions: Cripps if there were not.
The cabinet delegation’s statement was presented to the press on Thursday, 16 May, ‘our D-Day’, as Cripps called it. Simultaneously published as a White Paper in London, it was essentially Cripps’s attempt to build on the measure of agreement revealed at Simla and to erect this into a system of government. At its heart was the historic compromise necessary to secure political acceptance: an All-India Union sufficiently strong to appease Congress, balanced against a system of provincial grouping with sufficient legitimacy to win the acquiescence of the Muslim League. In drafting and redrafting it, Cripps had walked on eggshells around Gandhi’s susceptibilities so that he might have no excuse for branding this scheme as ‘worse than Pakistan’. The name Pakistan was not used and a dichotomous ‘vivisection’ of India was avoided by proposing three groups – in essence, today’s Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh, and today’s Republic of India. These were not to be constituted on an explicitly communal basis but through the consent of the provinces. ‘A United India,’ the Manchester Guardian's headline called it on 17 May, adding: ‘Pakistan Claim Rejected’. The chances of a settlement and the possibility of forming an interim government suddenly appeared closer.
In a remark almost as widely quoted as that about ‘a post-dated cheque’ in 1942, Gandhi abandoned banking metaphors in favour of horticulture: the proposals contained ‘a seed to convert this land of sorrow into one without sorrow and suffering’. What attracted less attention at the time was his assertion that, since the constituent assembly was necessarily a sovereign body, it was open to it to vary any of the provisions in the statement, notably on grouping.30
What now consumed Gandhi’s attention was the small print of the statement, which could, with the requisite ingenuity, be construed as providing an escape clause from the acceptance of grouping. Yet what Congress surely had to understand was the political reality of striking a bargain with the Muslim League. And what that meant was – rather than outwitting the discredited and obsolescent British Raj – offering their fellow Indian citizens a quid pro quo that they could decently accept. It was this kind of problem that Cripps and Gandhi, however often they met, failed to resolve. It simply slipped between the other levels at which their exchanges took place.
On 20 May the delegation sat with the Viceroy, considering a letter from Gandhi about grouping. The meeting was already becoming acrimonious; but the real drama came with the delivery of a second letter from Gandhi, this one replete with uncorroborated allegations of what had been privately said to him by Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence. Unlike 1942, when similar discrepancies had emerged about his assurances to Congress, Cripps was not without a witness. No one now doubted Pethick-Lawrence’s veracity nor mistook his indignation at being misrepresented – indeed it was his idea to restrict any future contact to recorded interviews with all three ministers. ‘I have never seen three men taken more aback by this revelation of G. in his true colours,’ noted the Viceroy, who took special care to observe Cripps’s outraged reaction – ‘shaken to the core’ and ‘quite ahuri’.31
Cripps felt undermined because he had staked so much on Gandhi’s influence. When Cripps found himself confined to bed the following day, though the symptoms were those of his recurrent colitis, it was also true (as Alexander put it) that ‘undoubtedly he had also received a very severe shock from the line taken by Mr Gandhi in his letters.’32 Cripps had driven himself hard, living off his reserves of nervous energy as he chased the elusive prospect of agreement, persuading himself each day that one more arduous session with Gandhi would do the trick. With so much invested in this process, and used to getting his own way, Cripps was vulnerable to the sort of rebuff he received on 20 May, when his overstretched body rebelled.
Cripps attended no official meetings from 21 May until 3 June. He was missed by everyone. Even the Viceroy noted the loss of ‘our chief drafter’ and Alexander, despite their disagreements, called it ‘a great loss to the delegation to be without his fertile suggestions as regards courses of action’.33
While Cripps was ill, he was sent a personal letter by Gandhi, enclosing an advance copy of his public response to the cabinet delegation’s Statement. It larded a compliment to ‘the best document the British Government could have produced in the circumstances’ with the characteristic reflection that ‘what is best from the British standpoint’ might, from the Indian, ‘possibly be harmful’.34 Cripps, after a week away from official business, sent an appropriately providential reply. ‘I have naturally wondered why it was just at this critical time that I should have been withdrawn,’ he wrote; ‘but no doubt there must be some purpose in it.’ Cripps expatiated on how much he had relied upon Gandhi over the previous couple of months and tried to shake his insistence that independence would be a farce unless Britain simply quit India, leaving no troops to maintain peace and order, and with no provision that a constitution should first be made. ‘I feel that the moment has come for the supreme act of Faith or Trust on all sides,’ he wrote, adding: ‘I also believe that you, my dear friend, can do more in this direction than any other man in the world.35 Unmoved by mere words, Gandhi showed himself set in another direction altogether.
In Cripps’s absence, Wavell had initially made good progress towards the formation of an interim government, which Congress wanted settled before they would give a decision on the constitutional proposals. Meetings between the Viceroy and Nehru inspired a degree of mutual confidence, not least in Wavell’s readiness to observe a convention of non-interference; and in fact Congress was already satisfied on this point.
The real trouble arose on other issues. The Muslim League was edging, with frustrating slowness, towards acceptance of the statement; Congress swaying, with frustrating indecisiveness, between acceptance and rejection. Back on the job, Cripps wrote on 4 June that ‘it is very tense and exciting for these next few days to see how things develop – when one remembers that the future of this great continent of 400 millions depends upon it for its future.’ His colleague Alexander, just off for another game of billiards at the club, was more forthright, jovially observing: ‘Truth is they are all B—rs.’36
Jinnah now held the key. He had been playing a hard tactical game all along, never disclosing his bottom line even to his own awed followers. Was it irreducibly an immediate demand for an independent Islamic state based on severance of the Muslim-majority provinces? If so, no real negotiation was possible. As the authoritative edition of the Quaid-i-Azam’s papers now makes clear, Jinnah left no diary divulging his inner thoughts. But Cripps, who did, based his own strategy on a reading of the highly intelligent Jinnah that surely has much historical cogency.
Cripps now sensed that ‘Pakistan’, a fine slogan and an elastic concept, might itself be a negotiating ploy allowing Jinnah to settle for something less – but something that he himself valued more. For it could be used as a tool to entrench the Muslims’ position throughout India, notably in provinces where they would always be a minority and thus potentially vulnerable. For example, Jinnah himself lived in a fine house in Bombay, which would be outside Pakistan. To a Bombay Muslim, grouping was a real safeguard whereas the sort of Pakistan on offer was a distant symbolic notion. Conversely, a Muslim in those parts of the Punjab where Muslims were already in a clear majority had less need of Pakistan in this respect. And Muslims in the parts of Bengal that we now know as Bangladesh, while a majority, are self-evidently no longer united with their co-religionists as citizens of modern Pakistan.
Jinnah thus had to educate the League into accepting the delegation’s Statement of 16 May, which rejected Pakistan in favour of Indian unity. ‘I advised you to reject the last Simla Conference formula,’ he told his followers on 6 June. ‘But I cannot advise you to reject the British Cabinet Mission’s proposals.’37 He secured the League’s acceptance by a large majority, which, Cripps thought, ought to make it easier to persuade Congress too. ‘I think Jinnah has been very good and helpful in the way he has put it across to the League – though from his speeches one might imagine that the Cabinet Mission were halfwits and not his best friends!’ Cripps wrote that day, pleading indulgence of Jinnah’s tactics: ‘That was I think to get the majority with him!’ The League’s demand for parity in an interim government now became crucial.
Gandhi had joined the Congress Working Committee in withdrawing from Delhi into the northern hills and only returned on Sunday, 9 June, for further deliberations. The next day the cabinet delegation received an informal message ‘that Mr Gandhi was feeling neglected and somewhat hurt that he was not being contacted’. When Pethick-Lawrence and Cripps said that there was no way out except by seeing Gandhi, Alexander invoked their experience of 18–20 May and warned that unless the whole delegation were formally involved, he would have to consider leaving for home.38
The agreed plan was twofold. First for Wavell to see Jinnah and Nehru together, building on his success so far, with a view to reaching agreement on the personnel of an interim government that would in practice embody parity, while not conceding it as a principle. Secondly, for Pethick-Lawrence alone to see Gandhi. If both initiatives failed, Cripps would demand ‘to have a shot at it myself’, whatever his colleagues thought: ‘The Viceroy and First Lord particularly seem terrified lest I should give something away and don't understand the need for frank and free personal talks – as against formal interviews – for getting this sort of business through.’39 Gandhi was reported in the Manchester Guardian on 12 June as saying: ‘If the negotiations break down it is God’s will.’
The upshot was that Nehru and Jinnah negotiated separately with the Viceroy. The crisis centred on the formation of an interim government. Wavell’s transparency about his intentions had helped him to secure agreement for participation under the existing conventions; but his lack of finesse in playing his hand was now a handicap in the keen bargaining, and bluffing too, that took place over personnel.
For the first time in six weeks, Cripps dined out. Over a cordial dinner with Nehru – ‘Jawaharlal was his dear and charming self and in very good form’ – Cripps received new information. Nehru gave him to understand that agreement on an interim government was unlikely; ‘but he clearly contemplated we should go ahead with the constituent assembly and perhaps ask the Muslim League to form a Government.’ Nehru thought that no communal trouble was imminent. ‘I definitely asked him what his advice was,’ Cripps recorded on 13 June, ‘and it was to go ahead with our scheme even if there were a refusal by Congress.’ Here was a new twist: possibly a more hopeful one. The indication that Congress could still contemplate accepting the constitutional scheme, even if it rejected the government posts currently on offer, came as news to Cripps.
By this point, even Cripps was aware that the real threat to the search for political compromise came from Gandhi himself. ‘You will have to choose between the two, the Muslim League and the Congress, both your creations,’ Gandhi now told Cripps. ‘Every day you pass here coquetting now with the Congress, now with the League and again with the Congress, wearing yourself away, will not do.’ In advising Cripps to catch his boat home to England, Gandhi’s stance was that of the prophet: ‘Stick to your dates even though the heavens may fall.’ This time it was Cripps who was unmoved, calling this ‘a most ridiculous letter from the Old Man’.40
A compromise on the make-up of a provisional government remained the aim. On 16 June, a second statement was duly issued, exactly a month after the first. Drafted by Cripps, it announced that invitations to serve in a coalition government had gone out to fourteen named individuals. These comprised six Congress Hindus, five Muslim League members and three from the minorities. ‘HAND-OVER TO FOURTEEN INDIANS ON JUNE 26’ ran the banner headline in next day’s Daily Herald. For a couple of days, press reports were full of optimism, only to be confounded yet again by events.
The next move by Gandhi came as a last-minute upset: a proposal to substitute a Muslim for a Hindu as one of the Congress representatives in order to affirm the latter’s non-communal character. This was an admirable principle; its effect otherwise. ‘Of course he must know – as we pointed out – that this would be like a red rag to Jinnah and would make a settlement out of the question,’ Cripps wrote on 17 June.
The debates over the next couple of days began to realize his worst dreams, as the potency of Gandhi’s influence was felt and those who had favoured compromise, like Nehru, appeared to buckle. ‘It really is rather maddening that after these three months the whole scheme long and short term looks like being broken down by a completely new stunt idea introduced by Gandhi, and apparently the Working Committee haven't the guts to disagree with him!’ wrote Cripps on 18 June. For him the issue was not one of principle but one of tactics; for Gandhi perhaps both.
Everything was now up in the air. The crucial figure was Vallabhbhai Patel, hitherto invariably depicted by Cripps as a brooding, scowling Hindu nationalist, resentful of Nehru’s access to the British elite. Yet, as both men came to sense, Patel’s hard-nosed realism made him an ally. Was this, Cripps reflected on 19 June, to be the moment of truth when the politicians asserted themselves against the moralists? ‘I feel that now Congress are embarking on a constructive share of the Government and are no longer to be oppositional,’ Cripps commented; ‘this divorce was almost inevitable though its repercussions, if it persists, may be difficult and dangerous.’
Congress’s rejection of the government posts was sealed when Patel decided that it was impossible for the Working Committee to repudiate Gandhi on such an issue. Partly because of Nehru’s current absence in Kashmir, Patel had become the pivotal figure and now sought to ensure that Congress’s decision would not exclude it from participating in any other government that the Viceroy formed. The point was that the only parties eligible to participate would be those that had accepted the 16 May constitutional statement – which Congress had not yet done. The contention over the interim government had meanwhile spilled over into the press, mainly through Jinnah’s agency, thus exacerbating tension. At this point Cripps envisaged complete breakdown and an early return home for consultation: ‘It is no good blaming anyone for it – it arises from the long and deep communal division and perhaps it was too much to expect that we should be able to overcome it.’41
As Congress, having rejected places in the interim government, moved towards formal acceptance of the constitutional statement of 16 May, Gandhi again broke loose. He seized on the stipulations over grouping to raise the temperature; and also evinced indignation at learning that Azad had assured the Viceroy that Congress would not prejudice his formation of an interim government through insistence on nominating a Muslim. It was eventually settled that all three ministers should see Gandhi with Patel.
The interview took place early in the morning of 24 June. Alexander, ‘roused from my wet and sticky bed at 6 o’clock’, prepared for the worst and duly found that ‘Gandhi who was enjoying his weekly 24 hours of silence, had removed all but his loin cloth and then sat right up in a divan chair, with his legs crossed, nodding and waggling his head as the case might be!’42 Cripps did much of the talking, while Gandhi laboriously scrawled his comments on small pieces of paper, to be read out by his attendant, Sudhir Ghosh. The proceedings left Cripps apprehensive. ‘I really believe that at 77 he is not able always to take things in,’ he wrote that day, ‘and consequently he sticks to what is in his mind and so muddles it – with alas disastrous results to everybody.’ It was Patel who struck everyone as the man of business. After seeing him, Cripps knew what he wanted from Congress – or at least what he could get.
At 8 o’clock that evening, ten minutes after the end of Gandhi’s period of silence, he came with Patel to the Viceroy’s Lodge for a formal interview. The atmosphere was false for many reasons. It is not surprising that Wavell thought Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence disingenuous in the assurances they now gave Gandhi about grouping. They certainly dissimulated a goodwill towards him that they no longer genuinely shared. The strategy, as Cripps described it, was to ‘let the Old Man talk all the time’, to bear with his ‘long references to his S. African experiences’, and generally to humour him. ‘Patel seemed to be with us practically throughout the interview,’ Cripps noted pointedly on 25 June, ‘and we thought it had gone off pretty well and at any rate nothing had come up of any real importance to prevent them accepting the long-term scheme.’
Despite all blandishments, Gandhi was intent on advising rejection of both official statements: that on the constitution as much as that on the provisional government. ‘I must not act against my instinct,’ Gandhi told Cripps, acknowledging that he ‘had nothing tangible to prove that there were danger signals’.43 His influence was nonetheless potent. ‘It really is the most devastating way of conducting negotiations,’ Cripps commented in his diary on 25 June. ‘Twice we have had complete agreement with the Working Committee, once about 5 days ago on the whole thing and yesterday on the long term proposals alone.’ Hearing that the latter had indeed been accepted, he wrote warily: ‘I only hope that they have not filled it up with qualifications and reservations so that it really amounts to a rejection!!’ This was a shrewd if discouraging hunch.
Gandhi had thus been overruled – in form at least – and Congress’s ostensible acceptance secured. Cripps was nonetheless right to wonder whether the scheme would not be rendered nugatory by Congress’s insistence on holding to its own interpretation of the provisions on grouping. Both he and Pethick-Lawrence had refrained from pressing the point in the final interview with Gandhi, so they subsequently explained to the Viceroy, because ‘it might have kept the Congress from agreeing to the long-term plan’. In asking his colleagues to ‘bear in mind that a lot of this trouble about the sections and grouping was due to Mr Gandhi personally’, Cripps hinted that the Working Committee might well come around – ‘but they could not throw Mr Gandhi over completely’.44 The fudged proposals could be justified as a means of buying time.
The door was thus left open for Congress to be invited, after all, into some future interim government, which was undoubtedly what Cripps wanted. The Viceroy, however, felt that he had been outmanoeuvred and put into a false position vis-à-vis the Muslim League. Now aggrieved, Jinnah went back to his Working Committee and obtained a vote to accept the posts on offer in the coalition – posts that were no longer on offer in a coalition-that-never-was. Such manoeuvres duly increased the Viceroy’s embarrassment over unresolved problems, left for him to face after the delegation finally left for home at the end of June.
The constitutional arrangements were never to be implemented, basically because Congress failed to evince its willingness to accept the provisions on grouping. Yet this was not really a matter of untidy drafting nor legalistic interpretation, with the British Government in the position of negligent or treacherous arbitrators. The Muslim League, despite its commitment to Pakistan, had been induced by the delegation into a constitutional scheme providing for a united India – on certain conditions, the most important of which was a recognition of grouping. Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence trusted Congress, one way or another, to make good that inducement; the League was soon to conclude that the behaviour of the Congress leaders left it with no basis for such trust, and thus with no reason to compromise its own aim of Pakistan.
‘SUCCESS OF A MISSION’ – so loyal readers of the Daily Herald were blandly assured on 27 June. ‘The successful conclusion of the Indian talks is more than just a diplomatic triumph for Labour Party policy,’ wrote its correspondent. ‘It is the first great victory of the peace and a sign that there are still men of good will on earth.’ This was as misleading about the failure to clinch a settlement as was the accompanying comment on Cripps’s role: ‘Perhaps it is because they are both vegetarians, but he seemed best able to understand the mysteries of the Mahatma’s mind.’ On this reasoning, both would have been on the same wavelength as Hitler.
Cripps was by now used to being called ‘the English Gandhi’ – seldom intended as a compliment. Abstention from meat and alcohol, indifference to personal comfort, a susceptibility to uplifting moral rhetoric, a relish for the stratagems of a clever lawyer, a belief that religion offered the true path in life – such affinities undeniably existed. They helped to foster mutual regard, especially on Cripps’s side for a man against whom he never uttered any public reproach.
Gandhi’s image is rightly inseparable from the whole story of the struggle for Indian emancipation. Cripps was to call him ‘the Prophet who gave his work and life to accomplish this very end’.45 True, his all-or-nothing utterances had often served a prophetic function, asserting an ethic of ultimate ends as he simply insisted on doing what seemed right, regardless of the consequences. Naked, he had challenged the panoply of British imperialism, with courage and with guile, and left the British to face the consequences. But an ethic of responsibility, accepting second-best solutions for fear of worse, was perhaps what Indian politicians needed in 1946. In this respect, Nehru showed some of the necessary discernment, Patel some of the necessary ruthlessness – but both were still inhibited by deference to the Mahatma.
What Gandhi could not countenance was not so much any particular compromise as compromise itself. This is surely why he deliberately, and with a good conscience, moved to sabotage the negotiations of late May and June 1946 – from the very moment that Jinnah was bringing the Muslim League to the table. ‘Whatever we get, will be our deserts, not a gift from across the seas,’ Gandhi declared. His message had a strong tincture of fatalism. Pethick-Lawrence confided at the time that ‘he was coming to believe Gandhi did not care whether 2 or 3 million people died & would rather that they should than that he should compromise.’46 Pethick-Lawrence, like Cripps, came to this view sadly and ruefully. But it was Gandhi’s incapacity to abide any imperfect solution that now struck them as fatal in this final attempt to reach a negotiated settlement.
During the second half of 1946, both in Britain and in the United States, attention shifted towards Palestine rather than India.47 Yet these were fraught months in India – far from dull, alas. An awkward situation turned into one that shook the nerve even of the imperturbable and soldierly Viceroy. He had an unenviable task and it is difficult to blame him for venting his frustration at the way that the cabinet delegation had avoided a showdown with Congress before themselves departing. Feeling close to Alexander, Wavell reproached Pethick-Lawrence and, above all, Cripps. ‘The fatal weakness of the Mission in their abject attitude to Congress, and the duplicity of Cripps,’ Wavell privately concluded, ‘left behind a legacy which it was beyond my power to counter-act.’48 This was true in its own terms but it avoided the issue of how far political finesse – a face-saving formula here, an adroit form of words there – may be necessary in brokering a peace process that could not tie up all the historically generated loose ends at once. In the House of Commons in mid-July, Cripps tried to hint delicately at the parallel need for Congress to accept grouping in good faith and for the League not to abuse such provisions. He pleased nobody.
Nehru, elected president of Congress in July, was not helped by his own noble assumption that a free India would not be divided on communal lines. For this perhaps induced some complacency about the possibility that the Muslim League would simply back off from the historic compromise to which Jinnah had led them – and which Gandhi’s opposition had jeopardized. In this delicate situation, Nehru’s speeches in July showed him focused on his new tasks as party leader, faced with followers whom Gandhi himself had refused to lead towards conciliation. Thus Nehru ducked the challenge of assuaging the League’s apprehensions that it had offered concessions in vain. His contemptuous references to grouping at a press conference on 10 July likewise pleased nobody.
In particular these left the Quaid-i-Azam explosively displeased. When he spoke to his restive supporters on 29 July at the council of the Muslim League, the fuse of partition was finally lit. ‘The League, throughout the negotiations was moved by a sense of fair play,’ Jinnah claimed, ‘and sacrificed the full sovereign state of Pakistan at the altar of the Congress for securing the independence of India.’ Yet their sacrifice, in seeking to avoid ‘bloodshed and civil war’, had been ‘treated with defiance and contempt’, so he now argued. ‘There was no sign of the slightest gesture of compromise from them.’49 Hence the crucial steps that he announced: to withdraw agreement on the constitutional scheme, to press for Pakistan instead, and to adopt a strategy of direct action, beginning on 16 August.
The result, as had long been feared, was an outbreak of communal violence, beginning in Calcutta, in divided Bengal, with deaths measured in thousands. In the ensuing weeks, the realities of power in India were determined by the politics of the street, rather than by the eventual formation of an uneasy interim government under Nehru in September, still less by the constitutional road-map left by the cabinet delegation.
The Viceroy accordingly felt it time to prepare a ‘breakdown plan’ for phased withdrawal by the British towards the north. In Delhi, this now seemed a prudent worst-case scenario. In London, it struck ministers as paving the way to disaster. ‘Civil war would come upon us at once,’ Cripps was to argue at a Downing Street meeting in late September.50 His view prevailed in determining the Government’s response: to maintain the momentum towards a transfer of power, in spite of the slide into violence.
It is too easy to see this outcome as predetermined – as though there is nothing to explain because there were no alternatives (though admittedly there were few good ones). The Labour Government had played its best card in giving the cabinet delegation its wide brief to facilitate agreement on a path to independence that would have avoided the obvious hazards of partition. After Gandhi’s critical intervention, even the second-best solutions of compromise had been fatally disabled. So the British Government was faced with the pragmatic, unglamorous options of the next-best-in-the-circumstances. And if we look beyond India itself, it is by no means obvious that deterioration in the Indian situation made out the case for granting independence.
It should be remembered that the Conservative Opposition, previously quiescent over India, was now becoming raucous about developments in the Middle East. In particular, there were denunciations of the Government for capitulation to Egyptian nationalism when it decided to evacuate troops from Egypt (and send them to Palestine instead). In a speech at the end of May by the Conservative frontbencher Oliver Lyttelton, a significant extrapolation had been made from Egypt to India: ‘If we scuttle and skedaddle there we shall have reasons to hang our heads in shame if that country is plunged into all the horrors of internal strife and civil war.’51 On this line of reasoning – one highly familiar in imperialist rhetoric – the threat to the peace was always the clinching reason for staying, not for leaving; and internal divisions among nationalist successor groups tended to reinforce this time-honoured logic, which remained Churchill’s lodestar.
In Palestine, indeed, the Government’s stance was more in keeping with this traditional line of thinking. How delighted the British would be to leave if only the Arabs and the Jews could agree between themselves! The obvious catch was that this was such a difficult condition to fulfil. What it meant in practice was that agreement would have to be reached between the Palestinians’ international patrons, all of whom tended to treat actual Palestinian Arabs and Zionist settlers as mere clients, childishly unable to determine their own future. The Arabs’ lack of political sophistication thus made their cause the plaything of exactly the caste of pashas and princes whom Bevin professed to despise. Conversely, though the Jewish Agency was undoubtedly more effective in articulating the aspirations of the pioneers who constituted the ‘Yishuv’, the fact that Zionism had an international outreach also made the United States into its surrogate champion (and paymaster).
One paradox of Zionism was that it was nothing if not an international movement, yet one dedicated to the support of what was nothing if not a national claim. Another paradox was that Zionism in the 1940s was patently a result of anti-semitism, as the prime response to the Nazi atrocities, yet it was also patently a cause of anti-semitism – not only among Palestinian Arabs who felt immediately threatened but also in the country that actually had the responsibility for the Palestine mandate.
We naturally tend to describe all this as happening under the shadow of the Holocaust. But this usage is not how contemporaries talked. The Nazis’ Wannsee conference which decisively established the extermination policy was held in January 1942; and if The Times is searched electronically from then until 1950, only thirty-nine uses of the word ‘holocaust’ are revealed. In 1943 there is ‘the holocaust at Stalingrad’ and the holocaust when a village in the Ukraine is set on fire; in 1944, during the Normandy campaign, German troops duly ‘fall under the holocaust from our waiting guns’; and in 1945 first Cologne and then Berlin experience ‘the holocaust’ of Allied bombing. At the end of August 1946 ‘the Calcutta holocaust’ exercised much attention; and in the next couple of years the dozen or so uses of the word are mainly directed to the possibility of atomic warfare.
On 2 July 1946 The Times reported a statement from the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, employing a new semantic twist. For Rabbi Herzog deplored the retreat from the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine by calling for ‘the immediate migration to the Holy land of 100,000 of the survivors of the Nazi holocaust’. His creative imagery did not catch on at the time but the force of his plea was evident. The impasse between the British and American governments had brought a sense of frustration in Palestine. Zionist terrorism was stepped up in June and five British officers were kidnapped, which in turn prompted the British High Commissioner to ask his Government to break off negotiations about the ‘hundred thousand’.
Bevin was determined not to do this. Though angry at Truman’s pre-emptive statement on the 100,000 in May, he still wanted to draw the Americans into taking part in the search for a solution and insisted that talks ‘should not (repeat NOT) be even partially suspended’.52 Yet the incoming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Montgomery, was restive after his recent visit to Palestine, where his official diarist had recorded his impatience with ‘a state of affairs in which British rule existed only in name, the true rulers being the Jews whose unspoken slogan was “You dare not touch us”.’53 The CIGS insisted on action as only a Field Marshal, still freshly garlanded from victories in the field, was able to do. What could a mere Labour cabinet say – steady on, Monty, you can't talk to us like that? Instead they sanctioned a move on the night of 29–30 June to occupy the headquarters of the Jewish Agency, arresting about 2000 people, including members of the Agency’s executive, notably Moshe Shertok, though not Ben Gurion, who was abroad.
It was not a clever move. True, evidence was seized proving the Agency’s complicity in the activities of Haganah, the ‘home army’, and showing links between Haganah and terrorist groups; but most of those arrested were trade unionists, political agitators and idealistic cranks – the sort of people who joined the Labour Party in Britain. The real terrorists were in the Stern Gang, which had murdered Moyne, and in Irgun, led by Menachem Beigin (a spelling later modified to Begin). Above all, the political effect, in alienating the moderates, both among the Yishuv and among their Zionist patrons, undoubtedly outweighed any supposed military advantage. Monty no more had the magic key in Palestine than Wavell did in India; but at least Wavell knew it.
‘What imbecility as well as what evil this Government is capable of!’ Baffy Dugdale wrote as soon as she heard the news in London. The move was indeed a body blow to Chaim Weizmann. Already under pressure because of his trust in British-style constitutionalism – and in the British themselves – he saw himself further eclipsed by more radical American Zionists. ‘Irreparable harm has been done,’ Dugdale sadly concluded.54 Richard Meinertzhagen, internally torn because of his inbred allegiance to the British Army, still reacted emotionally by blaming the Government: ‘And still we continue Hitler’s policy of extermination against these unfortunate people. Have we no shame or pity?’55 This sort of rhetoric, moreover, was now used in the House of Commons by Richard Crossman, smarting from the way his own stratagems had been thwarted: ‘As the Nazis found, as we have found in the past, as history has always proved, as we found in Ireland and with the Boers in South Africa and as we shall find in this case, where we are fighting against the people’s natural rights, those people will be determined to die for those rights.’56
American Zionists had already shown themselves less squeamish about terrorism – as long as it was in a good cause. In the tit-for-tat escalation of violence that ensued, the British could now be blamed for whatever retribution fell upon them. Visiting Palestine, Weizmann found himself a lonely voice arguing for a peaceful solution. ‘He thinks only his presence has so far restrained “rivers of blood”,’ Dugdale noted after her guru’s return to England on 19 July.57
Any such restraint ended three days later, at 12.37 p.m. on Monday, 22 July, when the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was blown up. The seven-storey building was the British headquarters. The casualties included Arabs and Jews as well as British. Initial reports unofficially put the dead at 39 with another 53 missing; after a couple of days it was said that 47 were dead, 55 injured and 72 missing. ‘Death Roll of 123 Feared in Jerusalem,’ reported The Times on 25 July (ultimately it was to be put at 91). In an editorial, ‘The Shadow of Terrorism’, it commented on the outrage, now acknowledged as the work of Irgun under the leadership of Beigin, once a corporal in the British Army (later, as Prime Minister of Israel, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978). ‘When every allowance has been made for the emotions aroused among the Jews in Palestine by the sufferings of their co-religionists in Europe,’ said The Times, ‘it is impossible to acquit the Agency of failure to recognize and avert the peril which terrorism presents to the interests not only of the national home but of Jews in every country.’
There is little doubt that such sentiments were widely shared in Britain, or that they were shared less widely among Americans. To the British Government, the discovery of plans to extend Zionist terrorism to the United Kingdom, with Bevin as one obvious target for assassination, was a chilling reality, with MI 5 more concerned about the Zionists than about the Soviets. Yet even in the New York Times, famed for the objectivity of its reporting, the King David Hotel had been pushed off the front page by 24 July and thereafter competed for coverage on the inside pages with other Palestine stories. When it came to terrorism, the Atlantic remained wide, New York not vulnerable.
Moreover, within a week of the explosion, the moral high ground was adroitly seized by the Zionists. They were able to capitalize on a non-fraternization order issued by the British military commander, Sir Evelyn Barker. He had included a phrase saying that this step aimed at ‘punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any – by striking at their pockets and showing our contempt for them’.58 Since Haganah intelligence got hold of a copy of this letter, with its anti-semitic taint, and publicized it very effectively, the Palestinian Jews were quickly able to reclaim their victim status. This was obviously important in deflecting American opinion, though the lack of prominence given to the bombing itself meant that this item too was buried away in the small print of the inside pages; and its effect can easily be exaggerated. Still, after Herbert Morrison had apologized in the House of Commons for the terms of the General’s order, the Washington Post showed itself convinced that ‘the Goering model’ (sic) prevailed in British policy and that this was the real point: ‘A history of broken promises accounts for the rise of extremism.’59 The British were thus left counting the cost of this blunder while still counting the bodies exhumed from the ruins of the King David Hotel.
Morrison was involved because of the eponymous ‘Morrison–Grady Plan’. This became the designation of new Palestine proposals, produced in London during July as a result of the resumed Anglo-American talks; and it fell to Morrison to present them to the House of Commons in the absence of Attlee (who was in turn in Paris, substituting for the Foreign Secretary while Bevin recuperated from a heart attack). Morrison, whose only relevant sin was pro-semitism, had been picking up the pieces in co-operation with Henry Grady, representing the State Department. Grady was genuinely co-operative – his sin in the eyes of the American Zionists who were soon to scrutinize his handiwork. The Morrison–Grady plan was based on provincial autonomy within a binational Palestine: balancing the claims of a Jewish as against an Arab province, acting as scrupulously and delicately as the cabinet delegation had done in India a few weeks earlier; and the plan was to meet with the same fate at the hands of intransigent but well-placed opponents.
The Morrison–Grady plan was ready on 24 July, two days after the explosion at the King David Hotel. It went to the British cabinet the next day and was approved. It went to the American cabinet on 30 July, four days after General Barker’s remarks on non-fraternization. None of this was ideal. But President Truman knew that he did not live in an ideal world and he was becoming exasperated with the relentless pressure from the Jewish lobby. ‘Jesus Christ couldn't please them when he was here on earth,’ he told his cabinet, ‘so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?’60 As political realities in New York as much as in Palestine intruded further into the discussion on 30 July, the State Department was left isolated in its support for the plan.
Morrison was in fact parading a dead duck when he brought the plan the next day before the Commons. But it provoked some reflections of wider significance from the Leader of the Opposition. Churchill’s pro-Zionist reputation, though as spurious as Bevin’s anti-semitic reputation, has sometimes disguised the fact that they actually agreed on first principles. ‘Almost any solution in which the United States will join us could be made to work,’ Churchill declared.61 Certainly the converse was true: that any solution in which the United States would not join was thereby doomed.
Remarkably, Churchill went on to explore such a possibility. He said that if the United States would not play its part, the mandate should be returned to the United Nations and Britain relinquish ‘a thankless, painful, costly, laborious, inconvenient task’. He claimed to speak as a friend of Zionism, but a candid friend, rather as he had after Moyne’s assassination. ‘If in the Jewish movement or in the Jewish Agency there are elements of murder and outrage which they cannot control,’ he warned, ‘and if these strike not only at their best but at their only effective friends, they and the Zionist cause must inevitably suffer from the grave and lasting reproach of the atrocious crimes which have been committted. It is perfectly clear that Jewish warfare directed against the British in Palestine will, if protracted, automatically release us from all obligations to persevere as well as destroy the inclination to make further efforts in British hearts.’62
The reaction to the debate of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, in rural Wiltshire, though unimportant in itself, catches the note of disillusion that now permeated old-fashioned imperialist Zionism. ‘Abandon Palestine to anarchy and bloodshed!’ he wrote incredulously. ‘Same as Egypt and India. It is a glaring admission of failure, unprecedented in the history of our Empire.’63
Amid all the rhetoric, the wretched DPs sat in their camps. Their plight, which had made the 100,000 issue so politically emotive, had hardly been relieved by either British or American policy on immigration. The British were legally admitting only about 350 Jewish DPs a month to Palestine. The Americans admitted 5718 Jews to the United States between May 1945 and September 1946 – on average, this was also about 350 a month.64 At this rate, the job would take 143 years. The small chances of legal immigration for Jewish DPs had to be weighed against the risks of attempting illegal immigration, which simultaneously offered a back door into Palestine and closed the front door even further – because the British deducted the illegals who settled from the monthly quota of 1500. Yet all that changed was that the camps continued to receive further refugees from eastern Europe. Everyone could see that an effective solution depended on breaking the deadlock and securing Anglo-American agreement.
This was the logic of the Zionist shift of position on partition. Nahum Goldmann of the Jewish Agency was instrumental in softening the Zionist line here. Accepting partition into separate Jewish and Arab states meant surrendering the biblical claim to the whole of Palestine in face of the fact that the Arabs were in a clear majority. It also meant accepting the fact that the brouhaha of the 100,000 demand had done so little to help the actual situation. Goldmann’s access to David Niles in the White House went a long way to converting the President to the merits of partition as a pragmatic goal, to which the Morrison–Grady plan might be seen as a stepping stone. Since Bevin, who had cordial discussions with Goldmann, was plainly ready to continue the search for compromise, hopes now centred on the conference including Jewish and Arab representatives that the British Government proposed to hold in London.
Though this conference formally opened on 9 September, it proved frustratingly difficult to begin real talks. Not only were the Arab states reluctant to attend, because they feared any kind of Jewish state, but many of the appropriate representatives of the Yishuv had been locked up by the British since the end of June. Patience was clearly going to be necessary in achieving any results; after all, the cabinet delegation in India had spent a couple of months waiting for a breakthrough. On 1 October, Bevin spoke to a group headed by Weizmann, who evidently conveyed to Baffy Dugdale that ‘Bevin is obviously full of goodwill, but as far as ever from understanding the elements of the Jewish case.’65
Bevin told this Jewish Agency deputation of how deeply the King David Hotel incident had embittered British public opinion. ‘Great Britain had accepted more people as refugees in proportion to its size than any other country,’ he pointed out, suggesting that Jewish terrorism was poor recompense. ‘Ever since he had taken office he had been trying to create an atmosphere conducive to final settlement,’ he enjoined. ‘But his task was made very difficult by the acts of the Jews.’66
His task was about to be made very much more difficult by the acts of the Americans. On 4 October, under pressure from Rabbi Silver, Truman issued a statement, allegedly made urgent by the fact that this was the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The statement can be read, not as an outright endorsement of partition, but as a plea for compromise between this and the Morrison–Grady plan, which is what the State Department still wanted. This would have diluted the autonomy of the Jewish as of the Arab entities. But, as Goldmann was told by the Jewish Agency’s representative in Washington, ‘not a single newspaper has pointed up this part of the statement and all the headlines carried by the papers read “Truman’s Support of a Jewish State”.’67 In the age of the spin doctor, the reason will hardly seem mysterious, with Niles ready to brief with a Zionist interpretation – scorning Grady’s efforts – that his master was certainly not going to disavow only a month before the congressional elections. As Forrestal bitterly commented later: ‘It amounted to a denunciation of the work of his own appointee.’68
For Attlee, the scenario was familiar. He had just asked Truman for delay in issuing a statement at such a delicate moment; but he should have remembered what had happened in September 1945 over the 100,000 and in May 1946 over the Anglo-American report. Thrice denied, Attlee was in no mood to leave the President unrebuked: ‘I have received with great regret your letter refusing even a few hours grace to the Prime Minister of the country which has the actual responsibility for the government of Palestine in order that he might acquaint you with the actual situation and the probable results of your action.’69 As usual, Palestine did not show the special relationship at its best.
Whether the failure of the London conference can be attributed solely to the Yom Kippur statement can be disputed. Whether Truman’s words had been misconstrued can be debated. Whether he intended to disable the conference is doubtful; but disabled it was, now that the Americans appeared simply as partisans of one side rather than honest brokers.
Anti-semitism was undoubtedly a factor in British policy. Not, however, because it had inspired it all along, in accordance with the devil-theory about Ernest Bevin, but because its growth in Britain was now such an obvious result of the deteriorating situation in Palestine. Most people, admittedly, did not care very deeply about Palestine, as surveys by Mass-Observation confirmed. By November 1946, however, those who expressed views blamed the Jews rather than the British Government, let alone the Arabs.
The King David Hotel cast a sombre shadow and anti-semitism lurked within it. But this hardly accounts for the explicitly pro-Arab tone often adopted. ‘I don't agree with British policy in Palestine,’ said one middle-aged skilled worker. ‘I think the Arabs should be left in possession of the country.’ Another man, a few years younger, likewise said: ‘I look at it from the Arabic point of view really – it’s their country – feel sorry for the Jews – but I think the Arabs ought to have more say.’ What most respondents voiced, however, was a more straightforward revulsion against a violent situation, for which Zionist terrorism was held mainly to blame, but for which Britain ought no longer to bear responsibility. ‘Leave them there to scrap it out,’ as a lower-middle-class man of sixty put it. ‘It’s one of those dead end problems with no possible way out.’70