1942: An Indian Tragedy

WHAT-IFS MAKE FOR BAD HISTORY. They aren’t history but fiction. Yet, that’s precisely their temptation. And in fiction, we can always have our pick. What if Charles Lindbergh had defeated Roosevelt in 1940? Philip Roth answered that one imaginatively and rather well. But we can never know. What if, it had been anybody’s war ministry but Churchill’s?

About the same time so many things could have gone wrong in the conduct and course of the war and yet Britain had held out— and thus saved much more than “Christian civilisation”—India saw a door open which, if walked through, might have made us celebrate 75 years of Independence in a different year and perhaps, just perhaps, as an undivided country. In the year we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Quit India Movement, we aren’t quite recalling the Cripps Mission of March-April 1942 with equal nostalgia. The mission was a failure, condemned by Gandhi’s immortal “post-dated cheque” judgment (the subsequent phrase “drawn on a failing bank” was an invention of the press), which might bring to mind Marshal Pétain’s rejection of Churchill’s offer of a union with Britain to better French chances against the Germans by assuming “England will have her neck wrung like a chicken” in less than a month and the union would be “fusion with a corpse”. With little irony, Whitehall liked to call Indian pacifists—or anti-war Congressmen—Pétainists.

Here’s a fact: If it had to be nobody but Churchill to save the world, it had to be anybody but him for India to win its independence. And here’s a what-if: What if Stafford Cripps had succeeded in India and gone back to sooner rather than later become prime minister? That, from the records, was a distinct possibility. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, thought so. Viceroy Linlithgow feared so. Churchill himself wasn’t unaware of how, if the mis­sion succeeded, it would be Cripps and not Clement Attlee who could unseat him. Just how popular the choice of Cripps (actually, he had chosen himself) for the mission was among British law­makers is neatly put in context by Peter Clarke (The Cripps Version, 2002), referencing Harold Nicholson’s diaries and an Agatha Har­rison letter: “Then Churchill announced to a crowded House of Commons [on March 11, 1942]: ‘My Right Honour­able Friend the Lord Privy Seal has volunteered to undertake this task.’ Ap­parently, there was a mo­ment of anti-climax—eyes habitually turned towards Attlee [Cripps’ predecessor as Lord Privy Seal till the other day]—but the mood of the House turned to delight as the word went round, ‘he means Cripps’. The significance of Cripps’ absence—he was already in the air—suddenly dawned. It was at this point that Agatha Harrison, sitting in the gallery, ‘realised that the age of miracles has not passed’—or so she reported to Gandhi in a letter assuring him that Cripps was “the man of the hour” here; desperately needed and trusted by all alike’.”

By February 1942, the ‘atmosphere’ in the UK vis-à-vis India had undergone a sea-change. Not only had the unbending righ­twing of the Conservative Party been outnumbered in Churchill’s national government but the general mood too was craving a deal with the Indians, meaning Congress, which would bring will­ing Indian support to the war effort. The certainty was Indians would largely govern themselves, either as a dominion and/or with eventual independence. The presence of Attlee and then of Cripps, after his return from Moscow, in the War Cabinet had compounded the pressure from Roosevelt on Churchill to do something. On January 2, 1942, Tej Bahadur Sapru sent a copy of a telegram to the viceroy’s private secretary that he had already sent to Churchill who was in Washington. Sapru had asked Churchill: “Is it not possible for you declare this juncture that India no longer be treated as dependency to be ruled from Whitehall, and hence­forth her constitutional position and powers identical with those other units British Commonwealth? [sic: telegraphese]” Sapru, speaking also on behalf of moderates like Radhakrishnan and VS Srinivasa Sastri, was careful not to press on the nitty-gritty of self-government yet, admitting those could “wait more propitious times, until after victory achieved in this titanic struggle against forces threatening civilisation”. DA Low, in Britain and Indian Na­tionalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity, 1929-1942 (1997), summed up the consequences: “Whilst Churchill’s immediate reaction was to fulminate against Sapru’s appeal root and branch, he quite failed to dispose of it as he wished. For Sapru’s long experience of how such things should be handled had led him to send copies of his telegram to the press in India, and to make sure that it received extensive press coverage in Britain too. As soon as it was published in London it was promptly treated there with very considerable seriousness, and in a short while became the central peg upon which the momentous discus­sions which now ensued in Britain over ‘what should be done about India’ were hung.”

Amery and Linlithgow had already decided that nothing was to be done because noth­ing could be done given the circumstances of war and what Amery called “Winston’s own vehement attitude”. But Amery soon felt the tide turning. Clarke, referencing Nicholas Mansergh’s Transfer of Power volumes, observes: “…as Amery subsequently recog­nized: ‘the pressure outside, upon Winston from Roosevelt, and upon Attlee & Co. from their own party, plus the admission of Cripps to the War Cabinet, suddenly opened the sluice gates, and the thing moved with a rush.’ The Government’s readiness to respond to pressure was as much a cause as a result of Cripps’ appointment, and, ten days before it took place, the official line on India was already shifting.”

Churchill changed his mind, for the time being. On Febru­ary 9, following lunch with Cripps at Chequers a fortnight ago, Churchill presented his own proposal to the War Cabinet. Cripps had anticipated this and had told his assistant Graham Spry that the prime minister would “make a new gesture on India”. Churchill’s proposal to expand the Viceroy’s Defence Council with representative members “both as a means of bringing In­dian opinion behind the war effort and as a conduit to post-war constitutional change” didn’t take Amery by surprise but he was “charged with springing [the proposal] upon the Viceroy, whom he expected to ‘throw a fit’.” (Clarke, with reference to the The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929-1945)

ON THE BRITISH SIDE, THE FATE OF THE CRIPPS Mission hung largely on three personalities centred round Churchill: Amery, Linlithgow and Cripps him­self, with Amery the most curious of them all. Adding his own twist to AJP Taylor’s twist to a popular remark that Leo Amery would have been prime minister had he not been “two inches too short and his speeches two pages too long”, William Roger Louis says in his Ends of British Imperialism (2006): “[H]eight was less of a problem than abstract intellect. Amery had an academic turn of mind.” Amery didn’t want to take charge of India and thought he had been “sidetracked”. Louis says: “Winston wished to keep Leo out of the mainstream of the conduct of the war. Yet it was a curious appointment: India was one of the principal issues on which they violently quarrelled.” They quarrelled also on economic ideas and the political ends of Empire and Commonwealth: “Amery believed Churchill held doctrinaire ‘Free Trade’ views and had no under­standing whatever of the principle of colonial self-government.”

Amery had his own ideas of self-government and had adapted the notion of “national protection” to what he called Empire Pref­erence: “By self-government, Amery meant that all units or peo­ples within the Empire gradually should come to manage their own affairs. By ‘Empire Preference’, he meant the development of the Empire and Commonwealth through common economic policies…It rested on the assumption that the British Empire could remain a great world power only if British statesmen possessed the will and courage to adapt to changing circumstances.” Amery was the most intriguing of the personalities who had an influence in the making, and unmaking, of this chapter of history. He had, in fact, volunteered to head for India but “became persuaded in conversation with Churchill that it would be best to let ‘this dan­gerous young rival’ take on the impossible job ‘of squaring the circle of India’”—which also drives home the point about how scared they were of Cripps’ success.

It’s impossible to be as generous about Linlith­gow, but building on HV Hodson’s opinion in The Great Divide (1979) that “Linlithgow’s heaviness of style belied a decisiveness and vigour of mind”, Louis counters Nehru’s ‘definitive’ judgment on the man: “heavy of body and slow of mind, solid as a rock and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness”. And says: “Linlithgow is a much-misjudged Viceroy, in part because he is seldom assessed according to his own goals and Tory code of conduct…Like Killearn [Miles Lampson, British Ambassador to Egypt and the Sudan], Lin­lithgow sought to preserve British supremacy, but he believed that the British in India could re­main dominant only by adjusting to changing circumstances and keeping the game constantly in play.”

At least, this much can be granted: at the back of Linlithgow’s mind was the same thing that had bothered Reginald Coupland (the historian who had also assisted the Cripps Mission). On May 6, 1946, Hindustan Times reported Coupland stating that “[T]he Indian problem…with all its obvious differences, is similar at root to that of Palestine. Muslim minority like the Jewish is fired with consciousness of “nationhood” which will not submit to a majority rule by another “nation”.” Louis writes: “Coupland was increasingly apprehensive about the consequences of full-scale civil war in Palestine… If Palestine was to be partitioned, it would best be done quickly and decisively in 1937, with political as well as economic provisions…to ensure stability. Here perhaps was the lesson for India. ‘Partition’, Coupland had written in his exhaustive study, The Indian Problem [published in 1944 and thus long after the Cripps Mission], during the war, ‘means that the Moslem State or States would be relatively weak and poor,’ the same point he had emphasized about Arab Palestine… Could not rationality yet prevail over the fanaticism of partition? As late as the spring of 1946, Coupland and…many officials within the Brit­ish government refused to give up hope that outright partition in both Palestine and India might be averted.”

Notwithstanding the glaring flaws in the India-Palestine anal­ogy (something the Hindustan Times edited by Devadas Gandhi had exasperatedly pointed out), both the fear of Hindus and Mus­lims working together against the British as during the Khilafat movement and an outbreak of cataclysmic violence had already clouded the viceroy’s horizon long before Cripps had returned to London from Moscow.

When Cripps finally landed in Delhi on March 23, 1942 via Egypt and Karachi, he was more apprehensive about Linlithgow, and certainly Jinnah, than the Congress leadership although sell­ing the proposal to Congress was always going to be the be-all and end-all of his trip. Churchill had used the mission to persuade Linlithgow—whom Cripps and Attlee would have preferred to do without—not to resign, with Amery putting the spin that the proposals were “fairly con­servative”. “Admittedly, the choice of Cripps might upset the Muslims ‘who will think we are selling out to Congress’, but on closer in­spection it would be discovered ‘that the nest contains the Pakistan cuckoos’ egg’. [Amery] maintained that there was an essential conti­nuity of policy between the present policy and that implied in the August offer of 1940, flatter­ing the Viceroy into complicity with the very different sort of offer now proposed.” (Clarke)

Cripps, as a friend of Congress and a still better personal friend of Nehru, wouldn’t have inspired any enthusiasm in the Muslim League but the proviso that no unwilling part of India could be forced to join the post-war ar­rangements indeed contained the “Pakistan cuckoos’ egg” and, as things turned out, the League would emerge from the wreck of the Cripps Mission stronger, not least from pledg­ing support to the war effort. The shadow of partition, on the other hand, was ostensibly also the reason for the Hindu Mahasabha’s hostility. The crux of the proposal to make the Viceroy’s Executive Council representative, with elected mem­bers instead of his appointees, hinged on the question of defence. Britain would retain full control of defence and the resistance from Congress on that count had been anticipated while Linlith­gow and Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief, would never have agreed to allow even a de jure defence portfolio passed to the Indians. In subsequent developments, and with not a little improvisation from Cripps, a modification would be proposed to give Indians a part of defence de facto with London running the rest. None of it came to anything.

THE FIRST CONGRESS LEADER TO MEET CRIPPS at the latter’s temporary residence and office at 3 Queen Victoria Road on March 25 was Maulana Azad. As Cripps read out the still unpublished draft Declaration of the propos­als, “Azad let all the projected constitutional arrangements go by until reaching the final paragraph, containing the vaguely specified proposals for interim wartime arrangements.” After the breakdown of negotiations, Azad would allege in a letter to Cripps: “You told me then that there would be a National Govern­ment which would function as a Cabinet and that the position of the Viceroy would be analogous to that of The King in England vis-à-vis his Cabinet.” It’s not known if Cripps actually promised anything like that but, Clarke argues, “It is not surprising that this testimony [Azad’s memoirs which elaborate on the matter] has been seized upon by those who have accused Cripps of ‘not run­ning straight’ with Congress, and by extension, of deceiving the Viceroy. In this way, the al­legation that Cripps exceeded his mandate was to provide a convenient alibi for the two parties which subsequently repudiated the lines of a pro­posed settlement that they came to find embarrassing: for the Viceroy and Churchill on the British side as much as for the Congress leadership on the Indian side.” Notwithstanding Clarke’s obvious sympathy for Cripps, that much is less opinion than fact. Moreover, “What is indisputable is that, in his talks with Congress, Cripps held out the prospect of a fully Indianized Executive Council, which was itself not the way that Amery and Churchill had envisaged imple­menting the draft Declaration, though it was consistent with it.”

Cripps’ meeting with Jinnah went well, with the latter suffi­ciently impressed by the draft Declaration’s position on Pakistan, as did the unofficial one with Rajagopalachari who had not only famously dissented from Gandhi’s anti-war line but was also too important not to be consulted. In fact, the decision to at last pub­lish the Declaration was taken after these two meetings, with two modifications: one, a tightening of the wording on non-accession at Jinnah’s insistence and the other, far more important, was the British change of position on defence as per Rajagopalachari’s advice on what Congress needed to give “some clarion call to the Indians which would stimulate them from their present defeatist attitude”. Thus, Britain would retain the responsibility for defence as part of the war effort but “the task of organising to the full the military, moral and material resources of India must be the re­sponsibility of the Government of India with the co-operation of the peoples of India” (Mansergh). At this juncture, came the criti­cal meeting with Gandhi. The Mahatma wasn’t impressed and he recalled to Louis Fischer: “He gave it [the draft Declaration] to me, and after a brief study, I said to him. ‘Why did you come if this is what you have to offer? If this is your entire proposal to India, I would advise you to take the next plane home.’ Cripps replied, ‘I will consider that.’” (A Week with Gandhi, 1942)

Despite the photo-ops, that meeting set the tone for the end-result. “Cripps was…met with a hail…of objections from Gandhi, including an objection to publishing the Declaration at all. Faced with this unpromising response, Cripps warned that this was the only scheme on offer, at least until the end of the war” (Clarke). Gandhi actually was willing to support the war effort but wanted immediate self-government. By the time Cripps met his old friend Nehru (who had been delayed in Allahabad by his daughter In­dira’s wedding) on March 29, the sky had darkened. Not only did they misunderstand each other when they met—partly because each underestimated the extent to which the other’s hands were tied—but their friendship came to be tested too by some­thing that had put “both men on trial”. When the interim but official Congress response came from Nehru and Azad on April 2, it highlighted four remaining areas of difficulties: the British unwillingness to use the word “independence”; the question of the princely states; the proviso on non-accession triggering fears of partition, unacceptable to Congress but inviolate for the League; and the devolution of defence.

What Cripps didn’t know at that point was that his authority was being undermined by Linlithgow’s rival cables to Churchill keeping him in the dark. But he got a shot in the arm with the arriv­al in Delhi of Colonel Louis Johnson, Roosevelt’s personal envoy to India. Forming an instant friendship, what they came up with was the “Johnson formula”. Since Congress could not accept a subsidiary defence post for an Indian member, Johnson proposed “dressing the doll up another way” and giving Indians the existing defence post while transferring war powers to the commander-in-chief. Linlithgow and Wavell accepted the Johnson formula but with the caveat that the commander-in-chief would exercise all powers barring those specifically kept for the new appointee. Cripps appealed to Nehru, who still believed it was not impossible to salvage the deal, to “drive it through to the desired end” and get Congress on board but Nehru, rather poignantly, replied: “…I am convinced that it is beyond my power…to get any considerable number of people to agree…That is a tragedy for all of us.”

It needn’t have been that tragedy since even at that late hour, Congress was on the verge of accepting. Ballast was added by the Rajagopalachari suggestion to Cripps that they turn the “definition of functions inside-out” and specify the powers of the commander-in-chief instead of those of the Indian defence member. Johnson elaborated the Rajagopalachari proposal and came up with the “Cripps-Johnson formula” which they believed was what Nehru needed to convince Congress. Linlithgow was given a fait accompli and everything was in the hands of Congress at this point. Cripps was upbeat since a settlement had never looked nearer at hand. But the viceroy spoiled the party by reminding Cripps that “the constitutional position of the Viceroy’s Council cannot be altered” and that he had to remind Congress in turn. When Nehru and Azad met Cripps on April 9, they, according to Spry’s account, questioned him repeatedly about how Linlithgow would actually function under the proposed new arrangements and were met with eva­sion. The distrust between Cripps and Congress (if not between him and Nehru), to which the Viceroy generously contributed by not wanting to be “held up as the bad boy” himself, would never go away. Nehru and Azad looked “tired, even gloomy” as they left. And Cripps’ own trust in Linlithgow had also been broken when he found out about the clandestine telegrams to Churchill.

By this time, all illusions of Cripps’ free hand had disappeared and Churchill’s pressure on him after Linlithgow and Wavell threatened to resign had constrained him severely in everything he said. “For Cripps,” Clarke remarks, “the political reality was that Congress would have had far more leverage once inside the Executive Council. He had banked on the view that ‘they were realists’.” Had Congress agreed, Indians would have had “absolute control of the situation”, Cripps believed. As he told Coupland, “[T]hey should take the power and make the most of it”. Spry noted that the Executive Council would be the government and so long as it resisted the pacifists and cooperated in the war effort, Linlith­gow wouldn’t have had a reason to interfere. Cripps’ imagery was not off the mark: “They [Congress] have come to the edge of the water, and stripped, but hesitate to make the plunge because the water looks so cold”. Congress would not take the plunge—to the viceroy’s relief. One thing that Cripps understood better than Johnson was that Congress would have to sign on first and only then the viceroy could be changed. In the end, as Clarke point­edly observes, Cripps missed a Willingdon, or a Mountbatten, just when he needed such a man most.

After the mission officially collapsed with Congress’ rejection, Johnson wrote: “He [Cripps] and Nehru could solve it in 5 minutes if Cripps had any freedom or authority”. Louis says: “The failure of the Cripps mission was an entirely satisfactory outcome for Amery, who then and for ever after argued that the British had put forward a reasonable proposal—independence after the war—which the Indians had rejected. ‘We can now go ahead with a clear conscience,’ Amery wrote in March 1942.”

RAJAGOPALACHARI WAS CLEAR-SIGHTED AS was Gandhi, albeit from opposite ends of the problem. Nehru was persuaded against his own instincts. Jinnah had a windfall. In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo knew the signifi­cance of what the opportunity meant and had appealed to Con­gress to take it. In this, he understood what Subhas Chandra Bose didn’t. Bose called the proposals “[A]n insult to India; let the British rather adopt General Tojo’s policy, now twice proclaimed of India for the Indians, and quit.” On March 31, Aurobindo publicly de­clared his support for the Cripps Mission and sent an envoy to the Congress Working Committee. He reasoned: “India had more to fear from Japanese imperialism than from the British who were on their way out. It would be better to get into the seats of power, now that the chance had come, without squeamishly arguing about the exact legal basis of the power. It was, again, an oppor­tunity for Hindus and Muslims to work together and thereby invalidate the ‘two nations’ theory.” (Amalendu De, Sri Aurobindo and The Mother on Indian Independence & on War and Peace)

It’s striking how closely Aurobindo’s thinking resembled Cripps’ own about Congress’ imperative to get into the seat of power immediately, for the opportunity wouldn’t come again. As for the non-accession proviso, it might seem too idealistic, but what Aurobindo was arguing was that Hindus and Muslims would have to work together to stay together—and they still had that chance. Not an unworthy goal at all, even if it called for hard political work. In this, Aurobindo’s insight into Nazism, deeper than most Indian leaders, played a big role. He saw in Hitler “the enslavement not only of Europe but of Asia, and in India, an en­slavement far more terrible than any this country had ever en­dured, and the undoing of all the work that had been done for her liberation.” It’s impossible to determine what kind of opportunity India had missed without taking recourse to a what-if, but that it was an opportunity that might have prevented the cataclysm of 1947 is acknowledged. The Mother, Mira Alfassa, had feared a great calamity and bloodbath when the Cripps Mission failed. That premonition did come to pass. And many Congress leaders would rue not listening to Aurobindo in 1942.

DA Low’s Britain and Indian Nationalism illustrated the ambigu­ity of the British position on India till 1942. They were determined to hold on to India but reluctant to resist the nationalists to the extent the Dutch in Indonesia or the French in Vietnam were. And in Lin­lithgow, who would be gone in October 1943, was perhaps the chief instrument of that ambiguity till Cripps arrived on the scene. It’s debatable whether Cripps had taken on a suicide mission, but his courage and willingness to sacrifice his career made him a man of honour. As Renoir’s Octave said, “Everyone has his reasons.” Even when it ends, as Nehru knew, in “a tragedy for all of us”.

1942freedom struggleIndian modern historyJawaharlal NehruMahatma GandhiStafford CrippsWinston Churchill