India, the Post-Imperial State: Part 2
War, Devolution and Negotiation
From 1757 to 1857, the East India Company administered India with the Crown’s blessing; after the Mutiny, the Crown took direct responsibility for India’s administration by essentially despotic governance. The First World War changed all this. The United Kingdom had been forced into a total war, where victory had only been attained through huge loss of life, vast expenditure of national resources, and the intervention of the United States.
The conflict had been of a completely different nature than Britain’s previous colonial adventures and shook the British people’s faith in the Empire. They had suffered tremendously to keep it, with little tangible gain. The mechanistic and totalizing aspect of the war destroyed their faith in the Victorian sense of optimism that permeated the prewar era. The European mastery of science and technology, used to dominate subject people and legitimize Western primacy in the eyes of colonizers and colonized alike, had been turned against the Europeans themselves to catastrophic effect. The idea of progress, in which Macaulay had believed so fervently, was fatally weakened by massacre on an industrial scale.
It had been a people’s war, which necessarily legitimized left liberal sentiment in the public life of the UK. The Labour Party would supplant the Liberal Party as the repository of radical and reformist political expression. The democratizing effect of total war on the British population made them somewhat more sympathetic to the Indian nationalist movement. When Gandhi visited Lancashire over a decade after the war, the mill workers gave him a warm reception (though he somewhat tactlessly, if truthfully, informed them their poverty was less severe than what existed in India.)
The war had a profound effect on Indian soldiers returning to the Subcontinent. On one hand, the mutual mass slaughter between Europeans made Indians doubt European superiority, and by extension, the legitimacy of British rule in India. At the same time, the sepoys were deeply impressed by the industrial societies of Western Europe, with their material plenty (more so than agrarian India even in wartime), the focus on national and individual identity rather than caste, clan, or tribal identification, and the relatively more equitable treatment of women. If the Europeans were proving unworthy of Indian obedience, they remained otherwise admirable and worthy of imitation. A Muslim Indian soldier named Khalil Ullah wrote to his village in Uttar Pradesh from France in the last year of the war:
“I am sending you a picture of an American lady aviator, I want you to study it and see what the women of Europe and America are doing. I want you to contrast them with our womenfolk, and to think what sort of education they can give to our children when they themselves are lacking in knowledge and training. I am hopeful that, if you pay careful attention to what I have written, you will be able to effect some improvement. The advancement of India lies in the hands of the women; until they act, India can never awake from her hare’s dream. Forgive me if I have spoken too strongly.”
Indian military participation proved vital to the British war effort on the Western Front and particularly in the Middle East against the Ottoman Empire. More radical domestic opinion in Britain supported Indian independence. Moderates and liberals supported moving India towards Dominion status, similar to what Canada and Australia enjoyed. Even conservative opinion conceded that Indian required greater autonomy and that Indians deserved to have greater participation in the civic life of the continent.
If anything, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre propelled India towards greater devolution. Not even Churchill, who despised Indians and consistently supported violent coercion of anti-colonial movements, could support the mass killing of hundreds of civilians in this instance. He declared to the House of Commons:
“The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything… When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed to the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, the fire was then directed down on the ground. This was continued to 8 to 10 minutes, and it stopped only when the ammunition had reached the point of exhaustion.”
Events moved quickly afterward and on December 23, 1919 King George V assented to the Government of India Act. The intention of the Act was to set India on a path to “responsible government”, meaning that Indians would be given greater local control, on a limited scale. The modern institutions of the Indian state began to appear in an embryonic form, like the bicameral legislature of the Legislative Assembly and the Council of States, which respectively developed into the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha of today’s Indian parliament. The Indian National Congress remained totally unsatisfied with this arrangement, as it desired a centralized state organized on majoritarian principles.
In 1935, Parliament passed another Government of India Act. The British objective was to retain control over Indian’s military, foreign policy, and finances for the indefinite future while neutralizing the nationalists by creating a domestic federation (including the princely states) while granting further power to provincial legislatures. Dominion status remained the theoretical end goal, but first, the British wanted to strengthen the hands of the Indian princes and pro-Royalist Indians. Their plans were dealt a blow when the INC won 7 out of 11 provincial elections, giving them a domestic mandate that the Crown was forced to acknowledge by the rules the British themselves had enacted.
World War 2 and the Inevitability of Independence
The Second World War rendered these calculations irrelevant. For the second time, the United Kingdom was forced to mobilize for total war, not just to preserve its empire, but its own sovereignty, if not existence. In retrospect, it seems impossible that an Empire could survive two people’s wars waged from its core. Once again, the Empire depended on India for military manpower. But this time, Britain’s far east possessions were attacked by the Japanese: Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma were all overrun in a series of decisive military disasters for the British. Tens of thousands of British, Australian, Canadian, Indian and Malayan soldiers were killed, wounded or captured at the hands of an Asian power.
The myth of the British Empire’s invincibility was utterly smashed in the eyes of all its subject Asian peoples. The British eventually amassed an efficient war machine in South Asia in the form of the 14th Army under General Slim that defeated the Japanese invasion of India in 1944 and crushed their forces in Burma. But at this stage, all but the most conservative diehards, like Churchill, accepted the post-war inevitability of Indian independence.
For one, the British trained and equipped hundreds of thousands of young Indian men to wage modern warfare, and they had performed very well in North Africa, Italy and Burma against extremely tough opposition. These men were entirely volunteers, despite the INC’s attempts to oppose Indian recruitment. As a practical wartime measure, Indians had been commissioned as officers and by the end were commanding companies and battalions; they had equal authority to white officers and in some cases commanded white soldiers. One British intelligence report indicated that sixty percent of Indian officers had pro-nationalist sympathies, though they remained motivated to fight the King’s enemies. This included the Japanese organized Indian National Army, which most Indian soldiers viewed as traitors and turncoats, especially given the intense hatred they developed against the Japanese during the Burma Campaign.
Furthermore, Britain’s allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, both supported Indian independence. While the British had suffered somewhat fewer casualties during the Second World War than in the First, it had sustained much greater physical damage to its home territory. The United Kingdom had exhausted its domestic capital to wage the war. It could not extract more resources from the dominions of Canada and Australia, which were firmly in control of their own economic resources, nor from its other colonies in Asia and Africa, which were too underdeveloped to assist the Imperial core. Rationing was maintained for several years after the war ended. As a result, the British were dependent on American economic assistance, particularly in the form of Marshall Plan aid. The United States desired the decolonization of Britain’s possessions, partly out of ideological conviction as well as the desire to open their markets to US economic influence.
Finally, the British and Commonwealth soldiers sent to retake the Britain’s Asian colonies were a far cry from the colonial adventures who served under Robert Clive. As one Sri Lankan lawyer observed, the British sent a citizens’ army, drawn from a broad cross section of British society. These young men were fighting to defend to their homeland against fascism, not reimpose Imperial control. Often, they displayed sympathy toward local nationalist aspirations. Alienated by the brutal Japanese occupation of Burma, the Burmese communist Thein Pe Myint fled from his homeland to British India. He was interrogated by a British colonel who declared his support for Indian independence and urged the Burmese dissident to joint the British in an “anti-fascist alliance.” Thein Pe’s British guard was a communist who addressed him as “comrade.”
When these servicemen returned home after the war, they elected Labour leader Clement Attlee (who fought alongside Indian soldiers in the First World War). Attlee had argued as early as 1933 that British rule was foreign to India and hampered its development. His election ended domestic British debate on the matter of Indian independence. From then on, it became a negotiation as to precisely as to who authority would devolve to and on what terms. I will discuss the Subcontinental leaders of 1947 in Part 3.
