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By Root 4591 0

Nehru was influenced by the rhetoric of Hindu and Christian moral uplift movements in India. But these religious influences were not necessarily recognized by the British, let alone applauded. In late 1943 Pethick-Lawrence had discussed the role of holy men in politics with the novelist Aldous Huxley, proposing that Gandhi’s ‘spiritual conception of Indian independence’ made him ‘intolerant of compromise’. He had, Pethick-Lawrence thought, displayed intolerance towards the untouchables in India in the 1930s and had worsened India’s problem of over-population by his stubborn opposition to birth control. Worst of all, he was unable to offer an ‘olive branch to the Muslims’. Indeed, ‘I think Gandhi himself has envisaged the breaking out of a civil war.’55 Pethick-Lawrence was inclined to agree with a friend who felt that ‘the neglect of human suffering is typical of Eastern mysticism’.

Despite the apparent overlap of their ideals and political language, then, there was still a fundamental lack of trust on the part of the Labour government’s leaders towards the Congress and still more towards the Muslim League. The same was true on the other side. The Congress leaders had been let down by successive British governments, Labour politicians included, once too often. Right up to independence and beyond they expected to be sold down the river again. Somehow the chains would remain in place. Nehru wrote to Cripps in friendly terms in December 1945. He said he felt ‘a dull pain’ when he thought about Cripps’s actions in 1942, when the two leaders had failed to strike a compromise between the British government and the Congress. He must understand, Nehru went on, how vastly India had been changed by war: ‘People have grown desperate and it is no easy matter to hold them in check… There must be no prevarication’ by the Labour government in its Indian policy.56 At Christmas, as a new Labour mission set out for India, Gandhi wrote to Pethick-Lawrence summoning up ‘the Prince of Peace’. He drew the secretary of state’s attention to an event nearly fifty years earlier when King Edward VII had supposedly played a ‘benign role’ during the peace negotiations between the British and the Boers at the close of the South African war.57 He hoped Pethick-Lawrence would exert a similar statesmanlike influence. But India must move immediately to independence. Through the dew of Gandhi’s Indo-Christian piety, the message was clear: there were at least two potentially armed and bitterly opposed forces. For Boer and Briton read Indian and Briton.

Yet the speeches of nationalist leaders were only the surface wind. The real lessons were to be learned from the Indian Army itself, which had already metamorphosed into a genuinely national force. One fact that became increasingly clear in the autumn of 1945 as demobilization began was that the Indian Army would never be the same again. Even before VJ Day, commanding officers had noted that the troops were saying in their letters that the world must change. One army electrician writing in Urdu expressed his sense of shame when ‘an Italian peasant’ – presumably a POW or a volunteer – asked him why education was not compulsory in India. ‘I resolved in my mind that I will do my best to start a primary school in my village after the War.’58 Indian commissioned officers were even more vigorous in their political determination. They told their British colleagues in no uncertain terms that the INA’s aim of liberating India was entirely right.59 The only thing that was wrong was their method. The British must leave India immediately, now that it was under no threat of attack from Japan.

By October 1945 the issue of the INA had risen to the top of the national political agenda and it became a key point of controversy between the newly released Congress leadership and Wavell’s government.60 Many people in India believed that Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA were wrong to join the Japanese, but even so they felt that the INA officers and men were true patriots. Whereas the British reserved particular contempt for the