Inferno - Max Hastings [265]
Several hundred Indians, boasting such exotic names as “Tiger” Jaswal Singh, Piloo Reporter, “Jumbo” Majundan and Miroo Engineer, flew for the Indian Air Force; Engineer, one of four flying brothers, once took a girlfriend into the air in his Hurricane. But though Indian fliers wore the same uniforms and adopted the same slang as their RAF brethren, they sometimes suffered the casual racism of British officers, who called them “blackies.” A fighter pilot, Mahender Singh Pujji, was dismayed when his ship stopped in South Africa en route to Britain: “I was shocked to see the treatment of Indians and Africans there. I and my colleagues were very angry.” In England and later the Western Desert, he never adapted to British food, and subsisted largely on eggs, biscuits and chocolate. Indian personnel knew that they remained second-class airmen in their commanders’ eyes, denied the best aircraft and glamorous assignments; but they made a significant contribution to the 1944–45 Burma campaign, flying thousands of reconnaissance and ground-attack sorties in support of the Fourteenth Army.
Other Indians, however, adopted a more nuanced and cautious attitude to the conflict. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a Congress leader and premier of the Madras presidency, said in June 1940 that it might seem small-minded to raise domestic issues when Britain was in the midst of a life-and-death struggle against a merciless enemy. “Yet every nation has its own life to look after … We do not serve civilisation by forgetting our rights. We cannot help the Allies by agreeing to be a subject people. On the contrary, such surrender would help the Germans.”
Nehru, in a letter from the prison cell he frequently occupied, pointed out to the viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, that his supporters had often held back from injuring the Raj: “In the summer of 1940, when France fell and England was facing dire peril, Congress … deliberately avoided [direct action], in spite of a strong demand for it … because it did not want to take advantage of a critical international situation or to encourage Nazi aggression in any way.” He wrote likewise on the day after Pearl Harbor: “If I were asked with whom my sympathies lay in this war, I would unhesitatingly say with Russia, China, America and England.” But for the Congress president, there remained an essential qualification. Churchill refused to grant independence to India; in consequence, Nehru asserted, “there is no question of my giving help to Britain. How can I fight for a thing, freedom, which is denied to me? British policy in India appears to be to terrify the people, so that in anxiety we may seek British protection.”
Following Japan’s entry into the war, Mahatma Gandhi demanded that the British should leave forthwith, to make India a less desirable invasion objective. In 1942, the nationalists’ “Quit India” movement gained widespread support and stirred rising popular unrest. Congress moved from a policy of noncooperation towards one of outright rejection of British rule. On 21 January Lord Linlithgow reported to London: “There is a large and dangerous potential fifth column in Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Orissa, and … indeed, potentiality of pro-enemy sympathy and activity in eastern India is enormous.” To the nationalists’ surprise, even in this darkest hour of Britain’s eastern fortunes, the imperial power declined to negotiate. Most of Congress’s leaders were imprisoned, some for long periods; Gandhi himself was released only in 1944, on grounds