THE Quit India movement, and the respective roles of the Congress and the Communists in it, deserve more detailed treatment than we are able to provide here. This is especially so because a great deal of distortion of this history has been done post facto by a variety of parties - the Congress, the CPI, the CPI (M) the Socialists, and more recently the Congress/Gandhi apologists such as Arun Shourie. The Congress has been out to glorify its own role; the leaders of the parliamentary Communist parties have been out to defend all of the CPI's actions at the time; and the Socialists, the BJP and Arun Shourie have been out to prove that the Communist ideology is anti-national and opportunist. An objective study is still needed.
Briefly, the situation in Europe was as follows. The rise of Nazism and Hitler in Germany from 1929-33 was accompanied by the wholesale slaughter of Communists by Nazi gangs. The Comintern in its Seventh congress (1935) passed a resolution focusing on German, Japanese and Italian imperialisms as the main instigators of world war, and called for anti-fascist fronts to be formed by Communists even with reformist organisations in countries where fascism was on the rise. The USSR upto 1939 focused all its diplomatic efforts in trying to arrive at a pact with the non-fascist powers to isolate the fascist ones. As early as in 1933 it had proposed a collective security pact against Germany and Italy in order to head off what it clearly saw as the main threat. The British Government's own records clearly bring out the number of such offers that the Soviet Union made in the 1930s but which were declined. The Chinese Communists were similarly, even by the accounts of bourgeois historians, the only solid resistance to the Japanese invasion.
However, countries such as Britain, France and the USA in the 1930s were by no means interested in fighting a war with Germany. Prominent Americans and Englishmen who actively opposed war with Germany included American senators Truman and Taft, the publishing magnate Hearst, the prominent American aviator and politician Lindbergh (who even visited Germany in an official status and praised it as a reliable friend), and the entire British cabinet (the few exceptions among British politicians, such as Eden and Churchill, had remained largely out of office). The logic was that if Hitler attacked Russia, which seemed increasingly possible, it would be all for the better. Robert Taft baldly stated that "Hitler's victory would be preferable to the United States". (In fact, the United States was to enter the war only in December 1941 - after the Soviet Union had already entered and after the USA had actually been attacked by Japan.)
As part of this policy of turning Hitler loose on Russia, British diplomats made their notorious strenuous efforts to appease Hitler. And it was the `neutrality' of Britain and France that allowed the fascists to win the Civil War in Spain: Whereas it was the Left, including the Communists, who fought Franco's forces. Britain and France even acquiesced to Hitler's acquisition of Austria in March 1938. Six months later, Hitler marched into the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia on the plea that he was concerned at the plight of Germans there. Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, went to Munich and concluded a pact with Hitler, effectively sanctioning this fresh acquisition. By March 1939, Hitler acquired the rest of Czechoslovakia. He seemed to be advancing step by step towards the USSR. Again Britain and France did not intervene. Since, throughout this period, all the Soviet Union's attempts to sign a treaty with the non-fascist powers had failed, it now signed an agreement - specifically titled a non-aggression pact (not a treaty of friendship) - with Nazi Germany. This non-aggression pact temporarily stalled the designs of Britain and France to allow the dismemberment of Russia by Nazi Germany.
It was in this situation that Communist parties, world-wide, considered the conflict between the Axis powers and the Allies to be an inter-imperialist war as from September 1939 to June 1941. They considered it not a war to defend any pro-people State, but one in which one imperialist bloc was fighting to win new colonies and the other imperialist powers were fighting to retain theirs. The British Government had not been willing earlier to fight Germany's fascism: if it was in the fight now it was because its own position as the head of the world's largest Empire was threatened.
Britain dragged India into the war without even asking her consent. The Indian working class responded with militancy: On October 2, 1939, 90,000 Communist-led workers of Bombay carried out a political strike against the war and against the repressive measures employed by the imperialists.
The Congress Ministries for their part demanded that if they were to be brought into the war efforts, there would have to be some indication that India would be treated as free after the war. After the Viceroy's negative response, the Congress ministries resigned in October 1939. From this point to 1941 the Congress was not struggling against the war efforts; on the contrary, it indicated that it would cooperate if it was recognised that India would become independent after the war and that during the war there would be a Provisional National Government at the Centre. The Viceroy's response conceded so little that the Congress was obliged, one year after the war had started, to launch a struggle. (During 1939-40, most of the Communist and other radical leaders had, of course, been detained by the Government under the Defense of India Rules for protesting against the war burdens, demanding independence, and carrying on other mass activity.)
However, Gandhi decided that the Congress-led struggle was not to be for freedom or against the war burdens. It was to be a satyagraha for asserting the right to free speech! The satyagrahis were to be individually hand-picked by Gandhi. These persons were required by him to inform the police beforehand as to where and when they planned to perform satyagraha. He also forbade satyagraha on Sundays, Christmas or before 9 a.m. so as to avoid giving the British excessive trouble.
It was not surprising that the number arrested at the height of this campaign were less than a fifth of the number arrested in 1931; Sumit Sarkar points out that it was "far and away the weakest and least effective of all the Gandhian national campaigns". Gandhi, in January 1941, told Birla (who, along with the Tatas and other big capitalists, had plunged into providing the British with war supplies at the outbreak of war) that he wanted "to minimise any embarrassment that may be caused by his movement." He was particularly worried about "the mentality of our young men.... Communism appeals to youth, unfortunately."
As S.K.Ghosh notes in his account, Gandhi sent his private secretary, Mahadev Desai, on an important mission in November 1940. This mission was to meet the Director General of Intelligence, the Additional Home Secretary in charge of the C.I.D., the Home Member of Viceroy's Executive Council, and the Viceroy's Private Secretary. Mahadev assured them that the civil disobedience was not intended to hinder war efforts, but to "live and let live", that Gandhi "takes every step with the good of the British always in mind", and that "the balance of advantage arising out of his great influence for restraint is greater than the disadvantages arising out of his opposition" (emphasis added). Gandhi wrote to the Home Member that he was pursuing only "a seemingly opposite course"; and Maxwell, the Home Member, replied that he was glad that Gandhi was "only seemingly in the opposite camp".
After the AICC resolution at Bombay in September 1940 Gandhi had explicitly stated that "if the Congress continued to abide by its policy of non-embarrassment which is inherent in its non-violence the Congress should for the moment abate agitation by way of direct action for independence" (emphasis added). He proposed his course of individual civil disobedience as an alternative to direct action.
"... it is repeated time and again that England's difficulty is our best opportunity. Let me tell you that the Bombay Resolution of the AICC precludes any such policy. How can we swear by non-violence and embarrass England in the hour of her difficulties?"
The Government wrote in a secret report:
"...the immediate and local effect of Gandhi's movement was good; it put an end to the sort of agrarian discontent that Nehru had been endeavouring to stir up."
It can be seen from the above that the Congress stand was not merely not to work unconditionally for the defeat of the fascist forces, but even to defuse or divert any sharp struggle for independence. Gandhi baldly stated that: "I am not, therefore, just not thinking of India's deliverance. It will come, but what will it be worth if England and France fall?" (September 9, 1939).
By contrast the Communists continued with militant anti-imperialist activities. Among the peasantry, they launched a campaign against payment of taxes and military recruitment in the North ("Na ek pai, na ek bhai"). The Communist-controlled Kerala Provincial Congress Committee organised a successful anti-repression day on September 15, 1940, in the face of widespread police firing. After this incident, Gandhi told an American reporter that "my country is not at present ready for mass action, and the unfortunate events in Malabar have come as a warning to the country and as a pointer to me also." Nevertheless, Communist-led peasant movements in the Malabar, north Bihar and north Bengal acquired a new militancy. In March 1941, four peasant teenagers in north Malabar were executed for a peasant-landlord clash: these were the famous "Kayyur martyrs". This period, in which the war jacked up prices, also saw widespread Communist-led workers' struggles for dearness allowance. Bombay saw a 40-day strike of 175,000 textile workers (starting March 5, 1940) and a general strike of 300,000 in solidarity (on March 10). A number of strikes took place in the jute industry in Calcutta. Mine workers in Dhanbad and Jharia and steel workers in Jamshedpur also struggled under Communist leadership.
The British concertedly attacked the Communists. In January 1941, Reginald Maxwell stated that 480 out of the 700 imprisoned without trial were Communists or their supporters; 6,466 activists were convicted; 1,664 were externed, interned, or otherwise restricted.
The Congress collaborated in this repression on workers' struggles and on Communists. When it was still in office in October 1939, it used the newly introduced Defense of India Rules to smash the strike in the British-owned Digboi Oil Company. The Communists were expelled from the Congress Socialist Party. Jayaprakash Narayan, General Secretary of the CSP, issued a circular attacking the Communists:
"There are irresponsible people... thoughtless and reckless enough to foster the spirit of violence... he (Gandhi) was able to see that our (C.S.P.) influence was exercised on the side of peaceful and ordered mass struggle."
Yet, by mid-1942 this situation was radically changed: the Congress was on the offensive and CPI leaders were supporting the War effort. What changed their respective positions?
It is worth diverting for a while to look into this question before we return to the narrative on Congress.
Let us first look at the Communists, since their role during World War II has been at the centre of a recently-revived controversy. Arun Shourie, in a recent set of articles and lectures (Illustrated Weekly, March-April 1984), has claimed the following: (i) before 1941, the Communists, while remaining members of the Congress, were conducting bitter attacks on Gandhi, Nehru, Bose, Jayaprakash Narayan, and other Congressmen for not being willing to fight in a full-fledged fashion for independence but being willing instead to compromise with imperialism; (ii) the Communists, upto June 1941, considered the World War a purely inter-imperialist war which they should oppose, but which produced crises they could utilise to advance their own activities; (iii) from June 1941 to December 1941 - i.e., for six months after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union - they stuck to what Shourie calls "the old line" though it was in fact a significantly different line and emphasis; for, according to the quotation employed by Shourie himself, "Our main slogan this November is, `Victory of the Soviet Union is bound up with the victory of all oppressed peoples over their exploiters. We must help to make Soviet victory possible, not by helping imperialist rulers in their war effort, but by fighting harder for our own freedom'."
Upto this point, Shourie's "charges" are merely a statement of his own positions. Given the Communists' understanding, they would not consider these to be charges. First, all we have described demonstrates that Congress leaders' betrayal deserved constant exposure. If CPI was carrying it out, Communists were unlikely to feel apologetic for doing so.
Secondly, as we have pointed out above, the particular decisions, machinations, and motivations of the imperialist powers, and their refusal to combine with the Soviet Union in crushing Hitler, made their war with Hitler merely a war for colonies.
Thirdly, even after the Soviet Union's entry into the war, it was perfectly logical that Indian Communists, while demonstrating solidarity with the Soviet Union"s struggle against fascism, should feel that there was no contradiction between their internal task of winning liberation from British rule and their international task of defending the single socialist base in the world. The CPI considered, to fight fascism, it needed freedom.
However, Shourie's next batch of charges are equally crucial to his thesis. He states, that (i) the CPI by December 1941 changed its position to wholehearted support of the British war efforts; (ii) it did soon the diktat of Moscow; (iii) it bore the major responsibility for sabotaging the Quit India movement, and operated in close collusion with the British administration and (iv) all the Communist leaders acquiesced in this policy.
The first charge is in essence correct, and it is by no means Arun Shourie's discovery. It was an openly stated policy of the CPI at the time. And it has indeed been a subject of open debate among Communists since the time of the decision. According to the Communists, the existence of the USSR was of vital importance as a socialist base for the world Communist movement. The USSR of that era provided guidance and material and ideological support to Communists the world over; it provided them an example that could be pointed to of how socialist society could rapidly develop; and it served as a platform for propagating Communist ideas. Further, it served as the backbone of the world-wide struggle against imperialism and reaction. Thus Communists considered its defense from attack a central task. But there were differing views on how to go about that defense. These differences had their in different approaches among the communists towards maintaining the autonomy of their party.
It is worth recalling here that there was unanimity among Communists about two things: (i) that the task of liberating India from British rule was primary and (ii) that the Communists themselves had to take full part in the nationalist movement. However there were various strains among the Communists in India. One advocated remaining within the Congress at all costs, allying with the so-called "Lefts" (e.g. Nehru) and not exposing the Congress leadership to the point where a break would occur. Another advocated a policy whereby the Communists would remain rigidly separate, the Trade Union Congress led by Communists would not merge with the organs led by the Congress leaders, the exposure of those posing as "Lefts" (especially Nehru) would be given top priority, and the Gandhian leadership would face the main fire.
The policy of the CPI throughout the 1930s and again in 1945-1951 see-sawed between these two positions. After the Meerut arrests, the CPI heightened its exposure of the Congress, especially of Nehru who was expelled from the League against Imperialism in 1930; in 1931, they separated the Red Trade Union Congress from AITUC; in 1934, after a series of successful strikes which alarms British, they were banned.
But by 1935, the Red Trade Union Congress rejoined AITUC; P.C.Joshi, an ardent advocate of a united front with the Congress leadership, became General Secretary of the CPI by 1936. R.P.Dutt and Ben Bradley of the Communist Party of Great Britain met and had a discussion with Nehru at Lausanne in early 1936; and by March 1936, they wrote an article in the British Communist journal Labour Monthly calling for the Communists to work within the Congress with the aim of converting it into an "anti- imperialist people's front". The Dutt-Bradley thesis disastrously assumed that the Congress leadership was nationalist, that it could be forced to allow any such conversion, and that the "progressive" elements such as Nehru would side with the masses.
Effectively, the CPI thus spent the middle and later 1930s tailing the ruling-class leadership of the Congress. Even when they had their best opportunity to expose Congress collaboration with the Raj, that is, when the Congress accepted the ministries in 1937, the CPI leadership decided "not to take a negative attitude towards the ministries". When the Congress Government of Bombay did the very opposite, with its repressive labour legislation and its police firings, the CPI did not take up a vigorous campaign of all-round political exposure but limited itself to protesting (albeit vigorously) on particular issues.
Such an attitude, of course, imposed constraints on even particular struggles. We find in April 1939 - after almost two years of Congress ministries - P.C.Joshi arguing in the party organ National Front that the "greatest class struggle today is our national struggle", of which Congress was the "main organ"; and so Congress-kisan unity had to be preserved. Precisely such obfuscation plagued the CPI throughout this period. In the name of national unity, those who collaborated with the British were not targeted.
Crucially, the CPI leadership during this period had not arrived at a concrete analysis of Indian society, as, by contrast, the Chinese Communists had. Thus they did not emphasise the potential of peasant revolutionary struggles.
In sum, during the 1930s, of the various trends among the Communists, the one tailing the Congress Party had temporarily won out. There is in fact no contradiction at all between P.C.Joshi in 1939 calling the Congress the "main organ" of the national struggle and proceeding in 1942 to give wholehearted support to the British war efforts: Both actions were part of a policy of effectively surrendering the autonomy of the Communist Party and of tailing one section or another of the exploiting classes.
The 1971 court statement, of nine arrested Communist revolutionaries in the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case, defending what they had stood for, rejected the 1942 policy categorically.
"It was wrong to say that the anti-fascist war had become a people's war, even before the fascists entered India and the people began to resist. It was wrong to renounce the anti- imperialist struggle for these reasons. This was a period when class collaborationist politics were adopted and practiced by the Communist Party so openly and so nakedly. The Indian Communists should have prepared the people for revolution by continuing the anti-imperialist struggle, according to their independent policies. The struggle should have been intensified, after the defeat of the Nazis in the Stalingrad Battle (February 1943)."India can attain independence through the revolution of the Indian people. The international situation, such as the defeat of fascism and the victory of socialism and democracy, only helps the revolution, but it cannot be a substitute for the revolution, nor can it complete the tasks which a revolution does. The Indian Communists of those days had deviated from this fundamental point. This laid the basis for class collaborationist policies."
Notwithstanding the slogan that the World War was already a "People's War" for the Indian people, the CPI did not arm and prepare the people for a people's war against fascist aggression. Instead, it mobilised people in support of the Government's war efforts: growing more food, digging canals, raising production, avoiding strikes at all costs, and persuading people not to undertake sabotage.
While all this is valid criticism of the CPI's policy during 1942-45, it is hardly a criticism that can rightfully be made by supporters of and apologists for the Congress and Gandhi! We have already demonstrated at great length how the Congress leadership betrayed every, important struggle for independence till 1942. We shall also show how the 1942 struggle, insofar as it was a mass struggle, was not in fact a struggle led by the Congress leadership. We shall see how the motivations of the Congress leadership had hardly anything to do with a desire for national independence. No propagandist of the Congress, such as Shourie, therefore, is in any position to criticise the Communists of that period. (Ironically, Shourie launched his attack in his M.N. Roy memorial lecture - whereas Roy quite openly collaborated with the British during World War II. It is documented that his organisation received large official funding during this period.)
Before we go into the Congress's conduct in 1942, two of Shourie's other charges deserve summary disposal.
First, his claim that the CPI's change in policy was due to Moscow's diktat. (This, Shourie claims, comprised just "three words from Moscow - viz., war is indivisible".) This is quite untrue.
Neither Moscow nor the Comintern had the power to dictate to the various Communist parties worldwide. Their guidance at the time was treated with respect, yet, if necessary, ignored. A notable example is the Chinese Communist Party, which for a length of time in the 1930s did not accept Comintern's advice, and charted out a different course of action. And eventually it was the Comintern that had to admit its error.
In India, by contrast, while in the early 1920s the Comintern had clearly warned against the compromising and treacherous character of bourgeois leadership of national movements, and pointed out in 1928 that Gandhism was openly aligned with reactionary forces, the CPI leadership vacillated in exposing these facts. Instead, P.C.Joshi referred to Gandhi as "the National Father and the most loved leader of the greatest patriotic organisation of our people". It was thus not any diktat from Moscow, but the CPI leadership's own opportunistic misinterpretation of the Comintern's overall guideline, that led to the 1942-45 policy.
Secondly, Shourie claims that the 1942-45 CPI policy had the full and enthusiastic support of all its leaders". This piece of untruth is indeed crucial to Shourie's thesis. It is surprising that he quotes virtually no CPI member except P.C.Joshi! Indeed, Shourie's own quotations make it clear that the policy did not have the support of all the CPI leaders.
Thus P.C.Joshi, in his conversation with Maxwell on May 12, 1942, assured him that the CPI publication Forward to Freedom "...was a political document written for the benefit of (as he put it) `the patriots' ... ". Maxwell asked Joshi if the confidential memorandum in which the CPI promised the British its support in war efforts "had the full authority of the Communist Party. He (P.C.Joshi) said it had and offered to sign the document at once, if so desired, on behalf of the Party. He added that the Party leaders in jail had not been consulted in regard to details but that their general views, were known and that their complete acceptance of the memorandum was assumed." (emphasis added)
Actually a considerable portion of the CPI leadership was in jail. Soli Batliwala, one of the then Central Committee members who left the CPI in 1946 over this issue recently pointed out in an interview (Onlooker, Nov. 23, 1984):
"The crucial question was whether we were prepared to work for people's war (i.e., whether World War II could be considered people's anti-fascist war for the people of India), if Indian independence was not granted; and on that a huge number of party members felt it cannot be done. It was not a stand which the Congress had prodded us to take. In fact we were inspired by patriotism."That was the crux of the Deoli thesis, which was formulated by us CPI detenues, at the Deoli detention camp. I know because I was the person at Deoli in charge of smuggling documents. The Deoli thesis, when it reached P.C.Joshi, was sent back to us with a note saying that we had bourgeois inhibitions and should get rid of them. He wrote us a horrible letter.
"In the thesis it was very clear that India should be declared independent before we could join the war." (emphasis added)
Contrary to, Shourie's claim, Batliwala did not acquiesce to the 1942 policy. He was released, not on making any such statement, but on medical grounds, in 1943.
Not only did the clique controlling the CPI then - including Joshi, Adhikari, and Ranadive - reject the Deoli thesis without a proper debate, but they proceeded to have secret dealings with British officials. Batliwala, in 1943, accidentally stumbled on the files with letters between Joshi and Maxwell. Horrified, he charged into Joshi's office.
"I went in and shouted: `Do you recognise, this file? This is not the party line. Who allowed you to offer the party to Maxwell?'. Then to my horror I saw this gentleman sitting at the table.... He was the army information chief.... (Joshi) took the file away from me and said: you sit here. I am calling a session of the Politbureau. Soon Adhikari and Ranadive came. He had a few words with them. Then they turned to me, and said: `We will look into your complaints'. Then they ordered me to leave for Delhi.... In Delhi, I was a virtual prisoner.... I demanded a Central Committee meeting. The Central Committee did not know about the letters. Except the politbureau nobody else knew. Committee meeting was postponed month after month."
Clearly, it was not "all" the leaders of the CPI, but a clique that consciously collaborated with the British in 1942. Little wonder that Adhikari, in the May 1943 Party Congress, spent much of his time attacking the "Left nationalist deviation" within the CPI ranks. P.C.Joshi's own testimonials to Maxwell of how effectively the CPI had stopped the Quit India movement were absurd exaggerations and as Shourie himself points out, were not taken seriously by the British themselves. They speak far more of Joshi's eagerness to collaborate than of any such eagerness among Communist cadre.
In fact, as Joshi mentions in a number of places, large numbers of Communist cadre were arrested on the charge of participating in the 1942 movement in Bihar, Andhra, Assam, and so on. Rather than go by P.C. Joshi's assurances of collaboration, one should make an attempt to assess actual participation of Communist cadre in the Quit India Movement. Shourie provides no such evidence at any point in his article.
In sum:
(i) The Communist cadre, far from being puppets of Moscow and traitors to India, had been particularly militant fighters for Independence;
(ii) Nevertheless, a section of the CPI leadership was able, without allowing a debate, to steer the Party into a policy of effectively supporting the British during 1942-45;
(iii) Not even all the leadership acquiesced in this policy, and only a clique were aware of any actual collaboration with the British;
(iv) The actual collaboration was not the main cause of the Quit India movement's rapid collapse.
What was, then, the main cause of the Quit India movement's collapse? In answering this, we need to look at why the Congress leadership undertook the 1942 struggle.
First, we must remember that upto early 1943 when the Nazis were defeated by the heroic popular, struggle of Stalingrad - it seemed likely that Germany and Japan would win the war. German forces had overrun almost all of Europe. Japan had conquered the British possessions of Singapore and Malaya with speed and utmost ease; in March 1942, it swallowed British Burma, with Rangoon falling on March 8.
What was Gandhi's attitude towards the fascist advance? He wrote on June 18, 1940:
"...imagine the state of Europe today if the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the French, and the English had all said to Hitler: `You need not make your scientific preparation for destruction. We will meet your violence with nonviolence. You will, therefore, be able to destroy our non-violent army without tanks, battleships and airships'. It may be retorted that the only difference would be that Hitler would have got without fighting what he has gained after a bloody fight. Exactly. The history of Europe would then have been written differently. Possession might (but only might) have been then taken under nonviolent resistance, as it has been. now after perpetration of untold barbarities. Under non-violence only those would have been killed who had trained themselves to be killed, if need be, but without bearing malice towards anybody. I dare say that in any case Europe would have added several inches to its moral stature. And in the end it is the moral worth that will count. All else is dross."
Even more crucially, Gandhi adds:
"I have written these lines for the European Powers. But they are meant for ourselves."
Thus Gandhi in the world historical conditions of the time, in effect, recommended abject surrender to the fascists.
Hitler included among his most remarkable atrocities the wholesale slaughter of Europe's Jewish population. As many as could be found were rounded up and sent to vast, hellish concentration camps where they were a source of forced labour. As starvation weakened them, they were sent in batches to be gassed. Horrendous medical experiments were performed on many. The skin and bones of many others were recycled for other uses.
What was Gandhi's remedy for this? Gandhi said in 1938 that if he were a Jew, he would start individual civil disobedience:
"I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example.... The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews.... But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God-fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep."
According to the generally accepted figures, at least six million Jewish men, women, and children were delivered into this "long sleep" by the concentration camps. In 1939, in response a Statesman editorial pointing out the futility of non-violence as an answer to fascism, Gandhi said that "I do not despair because Herr Hitler's or the German heart has not yet melted. On the contrary I plead for more suffering and more still till the melting has become visible to the naked eye"(emphasis added). This was, then, explicitly a policy of mass suicide.
Gandhi went further. He condemned any resistance to the fascists. He went so far as to criticise Jews sharply for hating the Germans and for wanting other countries to fight Germany on their behalf. He proceeded to fully defend this position against criticism (in a piece entitled "No Apology").
Gandhi also condemned (in January 1939) the Chinese people's armed resistance to the Japanese invasion.
"If China wins, and copies Japanese methods, she will beat Japan hollow at her own game. But the victory of China will not mean a new hope for the world. For China will then be a multiple edition of Japan... If China is defeated on the battlefield, your non-violence will remain undaunted, and will have done its work.... "
Suniti K. Ghosh, in his book, The Indian Big Bourgeoisie: Its Genesis, Growth and Character, provides an analysis of Gandhi's calculations.
G.D.Birla records in his autobiography, In the Shadow of the Mahatma, that (according to information given by Gandhi's private secretary), from the occasion of the 1940 Nazi victory in Holland, Hitler's stock had been "steadily rising" in Gandhi's eyes and Gandhi was convinced Britain would lose the war. In a letter to the Viceroy on May 26, 1940, he advised the British, Cabinet to "sue for peace", and wrote that "I do not believe Herr Hitler is as bad as he is portrayed".
The continuing rapid collapse of the Allies took Gandhi further along this path. Three days after the fall of Burma's capital, the British announced the Cripps mission to draft constitutional proposals for India's future. In effect, the Cripps mission was a plea for collaboration in the war against Japan.
Even Cripps' offers ultimately amounted to nothing more than the earlier vague promises. Nevertheless the Congress sections more closely connected with America (especially Nehru, who had assured the American President's Personal Representative, Colonel Johnson, that India would hitch her "wagon to America's star and not to Britain's" and to England (especially Rajagopalachari) were willing to accept the proposals. Even when the Congress ultimately rejected the proposals, Nehru came out for "total war against the Japanese", and Rajaji was soon to break from the Congress to support the British.
But Gandhi - the same Gandhi who had worked for the British with so much enthusiasm for four decades, who had even recruited for the British in the First World War, and who had assured the British collaboration at the start of the Second World War - was suddenly, for the first time in his career, adamantly anti-British. Significantly, he called the Cripps mission "a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank" (emphasis added) - the implication being that Britain was going to lose.
Burma had been a major trauma for the Indian comprador capitalists. Several had invested there on the assumption of the permanency of British rule. Now that Japan had overrun Burma, their investments were lost. We have mentioned earlier the Chettiars' massive investments; aside from this, there was considerable Marwari capital there, including a Birla starch factory.
After Cripps's departure, Gandhi prepared a draft A.I.C.C. resolution:
"The AICC is of opinion that Britain is incapable of defending India.... Japan's quarrel is not with India.... If India were freed her first step would probably be to negotiate with Japan... This Committee desires to assure the Japanese Government and people that India bears no enmity either towards Japan or towards any other nation....
As S.K.Ghosh puts it, the business magnates and their political representatives were convinced
"of the ultimate victory of the Axis powers. They were like rats seeking to desert a sinking ship. They thought of forging new ties with Japanese capital and wanted to put pressure on the British to quit India. This thinking is reflected in the words of Pattabhi Sitaramayya, Gandhi's lieutenant: `Should India make herself a trailer to a sinking steamship Or hitch her wagon to a falling star?'".
Indian tycoons chose this moment - not to press for independence but to switch masters. Walchand Hirachand told Edgar Snow that "as for the choice between the British and the Japanese, frankly he preferred to take his chance with the latter".
At least, some might say, this shows the Indian big bourgeoisie's desire to pick which imperial master it will serve. But it shows not even that. The ties of Indian compradors with Japan had been made through the 1920s and the 1930s. When in 1938 these ties were disturbed by Anglo-Japanese tension, the Indian big bourgeoisie did not choose and plump for Japan. It was only when Japan had advanced rapidly towards India, entered its north-east, and seemed likely to take India, that the Indian big bourgeoisie sought to keep open the option of serving Japan. Thus it was not any ability of the compradors to manipulate inter-imperialist rivalry but rather the respective strengths, advances, and decisions of the imperialist powers that dictated the Indian big bourgeoisie's actions.
The Congress politicians who were closely tied to the USA and the UK were aghast at Gandhi's willingness to send feelers to Japan. Nehru said of the draft resolution:
"If Bapu's approach is accepted we become passive partners of the Axis powers... the whole thought and background of the draft is one of favouring Japan.... It is Gandhiji's feeling that Japan and Germany, will win. This feeling unconsciously governs his decisions".
Rajagopalachari said:
"Japan will fill the vacuum created by the British withdrawal.... Do not run into the arms of Japan, which is what the resolution comes to."
Even now Gandhi was prepared not for a full-fledged anti-British struggle, but for a large-scale display of resistance. First, even though it was known by August 7-8 to all the AICC members that they would be arrested immediately after the August 9 resolution, they made absolutely no preparations to go underground or to set up any Congress organisational machinery to continue the struggle after their arrest.
The resolution itself outlined no programme of action. Everything was left to Gandhi, who was now given the title of "Generalissimo" of the movement. "Such a struggle", said the resolution, "must inevitably be under the leadership of Gandhiji and the Committee requests him to take the lead and guide the nation in the steps to be taken". The Andhra PCC confidential circular merely urged Congressmen to "be ready, organise at once, be alert, but by no means act... till Mahatmaji decides". Vallabhbhai Patel promised that victory would be obtained in a week - again, an indication that the Congress leadership was not seriously about to fight for freedom.
After the August 8, 1942, resolution, there were two largely unconnected struggles - one farcical, one heroic.
The farcical one began with the August 9 arrest of all the major Congress leaders, who had effectively offered themselves to the British police on a platter. Various persons, including CPI members, had forewarned the Congress leaders of the extensive preparations made for their arrest; but to no avail.
Indian businessmen also took part in the farce. In Bombay and Ahmedabad, many millowners such as Mafatlal Gagalbhai, Sarabhai, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, and so on, suddenly staged "lockouts". "Foremen and managers" says Edgar Snow, "simply told the workers to go home and promised to see that they got their wages. But when the owners saw that the revolt had failed they quickly reopened the factories". Govind Sahai, a pro-Congress historian of the 1942 movement, mentions that "mill-owners did not resent the absence of their workers".
Similarly, TISCO remained closed for about a fortnight from the night of August 20, 1942, costing the British 300,000 tonnes of steel production. Edgar Snow writes that, "just before Gandhi was arrested the owners inexplicably distributed a three-month `bonus' to all employees, who then promptly went on protest strike, led by their foremen!".
"In contrast", Snow points out, "practically none of the miserably paid workers in state-owned enterprises - and, most important of all, none whatever on the Railways -- made any serious move to back Gandhi."
However, when the British cottoned on, they bluntly told the Tatas that their contracts were at stake: Linlithgow told H.P.Mody of Tatas that "if they continued to play the fool we may have to send our orders in other directions". Ghosh points out: "The threat had immediate effect. Normal work was resumed in the TISCO in less than two days." Birla and almost all the major Indian industrialists too were tied by similar contracts, and their resistance had similar boundaries.
By contrast, the peasant masses came into open outright rebellion. In mid-August, northern and western Bihar, eastern U.P., Midnapore in Bengal, and parts of Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Orissa, all saw the virtual collapse of British administration.
Unlike in earlier movements, this time there were no Congress leaders to restrain the peasants. The result was what Linlithgow called, in a telegram to Churchill on August 31, "by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security."
By the end of 1943, 91,836 people had been arrested, 332 railway stations, 945 post offices and 208 police stations (72 in Bihar alone) had been destroyed or severely damaged, and there had been 664 bomb explosions. According to the Government underestimate, 1,060 had been killed by police or army firing (private estimates ranged upto 10,000), 63 policemen were killed by the mass upsurge, and 216 policemen defected (205 in Bihar alone). Aside from employing 57 army battalions, the British ordered machine-gunning from aeroplanes against crowds in Patna, Bhagalpur, Monghyr, Nadia, Tamluk, and Talcher. Public flogging was freely used by the British, as were grosser tortures such as inserting a ruler in the rectum.
Nevertheless, parallel popular governments could be set up in Satara (Maharashtra), Talcher (Orissa), Midnapore and Tamluk (Bengal). Not a single one of these storm-centres was actually organised by the Congress leadership or the Congress Socialists (who have, post facto, done their best to take credit for the struggle).
Jayaprakash's squad on the north Bihar-Nepal border was about the closest contact that the Socialists may have had to the peasant struggles. And, when the spontaneous movement suddenly collapsed, Jayaprakash and the Socialists were unable to do anything to revive it. For the rest of the war, their activities were confined to periodic secret organisation of "actions" which little bothered the British.
Incidentally, Congress Socialist activities did not earn the opposition of the propertied classes. As early as in December 1942, an illegal Socialist leaflet, "The Freedom Struggle Front", warned that "a virginly horror of outraging the class issues" should not "stand in the way of seeking and taking" the financial help of "the rich millowner or banker".
The collapse of the Quit India upsurge came very soon. By the end of 1942 the British were clearly victorious, with only scattered disruption continuing. Some attempt at setting up an underground network was made - for the first time, and therefore in an amateurish way - by Socialists. It was quickly dealt with by the C.I.D. (Gandhi also condemned any attempt at underground organisation.) For the rest, there seemed to be general belief that, as Patel had suggested, the fight would be brief and easy; when it was not, and there was no organisation to sustain it, demoralisation set in rapidly.
The official enquiry into the events in Balasore noted that a rumour had spread the "Swaraj would be attained within a week"; and the detailed account by Niblett (the relatively sympathetic magistrate of Azamgarh) makes clear that crowds besieged police stations in the belief that "Swaraj had now been attained". Similar rumours were reported widely. As Sumit Sarkar notes,
"Once that faith had been rudely shattered by British repression, the peasant upsurge tended to quickly melt away in the absence of concrete programmes geared to their more immediate needs."
D.D.Kosambi too wrote in an almost contemporary essay that though the AICC leaders knew before the August 8 `revolution' that arrest was imminent, and though most "had prepared for the event by setting their family affairs and personal finances in excellent order," not one of them "ever thought of a plan of action for the Congress and for the nation as a whole". Regarded on a class basis, this studied omission, says Kosambi:
"was quite brilliant, no matter how futile it may have seemed on a national revolutionary scale. The panic of the British Government and jailing of all leaders absolved the Congress from any responsibility for the happenings of ensuing year; at the same time the glamour of jail and concentration camp served to wipe out the so-so record of Congress ministries in office, thereby restoring the full popularity of the organisation among the masses. If the British won the war it was quite clear that the Congress had not favoured Japan; if on the other hand the Japanese succeeded in conquering India (and they had only to attack immediately in force for the whole of the so-called defense system to crumble), they could certainly not accuse the Congress of having helped the British." (Exasperating Essays, Pune)
Gandhi, of course, with lightning speed disowned the actual revolt. Five days after his arrest, he wrote to the Viceroy: "The Government of India should have waited at least till the time that I inaugurated mass action: I have publicly stated that I fully contemplated sending you a letter before taking any correct action.... I remain the same friend you have known me."
(Gandhi, incidentally, was not in a concentration camp, but in the Agha Khan's palace from where he wrote to the Viceroy in December 1942: "you have placed me in a palace where every reasonable creature comfort is ensured. I have freely partaken of the latter purely as a matter of duty, never as a pleasure.") According to Sitaramayya's memoirs, incidentally, the Working Committee members in captivity did not attempt to discuss questions of movement, but instead focused on philosophy, religion, and recreation.
Gandhi explained to the Viceroy (on September 23, 1942) that the revolt was not the Congress's doing:
"Wholesale mass arrests of the Congress leaders seem to have made the people wild with rage to the point of losing self-control. I feel that the Government, not the Congress, are responsible for the destruction that had taken place."
On July 15, 1943, he wrote to the Home Department:
"The Government action in enforcing India-wide arrests was so violent that the populace which was in sympathy with the Congress lost self-control. The loss of self-control cannot imply Congress complicity."
On May 6, 1944, Gandhi was released on medical grounds; he immediately revoked the mass civil disobedience portion of the August 8, 1942, resolution.
By the summer of 1945, as the defeat of the Axis forces became certain, the Congress showed its willingness to enter into a Provisional National Government with the Muslim League and other groupings.
To cap it all, on September 21, 1945, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and G.B.Pant issued a statement on behalf of the Congress. It clarified that the Quit India movement was not led by the Congress: "No movement had been officially started by the AICC or Gandhiji."
No truer epitaph could be placed on one of the Indian people's most glorious anti-imperialist rebellions.
Table of Contents Previous Chapter Next Chapter