THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIA
Fischer, Louis
The Struggle For India By LOUIS FISCHER DURING my stay in India in 1942, I saw a good deal of Sir Archibald Wavell, who was then Commander-in-Chief and has since become Lord Wavell, Viceroy. After...
...Wavell was then writing the second volume of his biography of Lord Allenby, under whom he served in the first World War...
...And Moslem groups not affiliated with the Moslem League, which is dominated by large landlords, declared that the League did not represent them...
...The Congress Party said, we have Moslems in our party, notably President Azad who ought to be in the Council...
...IAM sure it was in this spirit that Wavell went to London several months ago...
...It declares that there will be only 2 Britons in the new Viceroy's Executive Council, the Viceroy himself and the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India...
...India is 400,000,-000 people and occupies a key strategic position in Asia...
...UNTIL a few days ago, Indian leaders sat in conference with Wavell at Simla, India's Summer capital...
...Wavell will be Viceroy for 4 more years...
...It broke up in disagreement...
...There were 2 objections...
...It contended that the recognition of Jinnah's Moslem League as the sole spokesman of India's Moslems would imply that the Congress was a Hindu body only...
...He wants to do it with the greatest possible facility...
...The conference broke on the provision in the White Paper that the Viceroy's Council shall include "equal proportions of Moslems and Caste Hindus...
...One can imagine the difference to the world movement for Indian independence if Jawaharlal Nehru were chief of the External Affairs Department (he is the natural candidate) and if he appointed champions of Indian freedom to take the place of the puppet Indians who now speak for India in foreign capitals...
...The consequent perpetuation of the religious divisions in Indian political affairs would split India forever and prevent that harmony or unity among Indians which is a necessary preliminary to national freedom...
...After a while we reached an author-to-author relationship...
...Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the president of the Congress Party, is in fact an outstanding Moslem scholar...
...The British authorities wished to retain control of the entire administrative machinery as well as of real power...
...The Cripps offer accepted Pakistan in theory and for a time the British authorities in India nursed Jinnah to strength so he might act as a counterpoise to the Congress Party which they were trying to destroy...
...If a malicious, Machiavellian Tory had wished to torpedo the conference he could not have done better than insert thi*3 mischievous clause into the text of the Wavell Plan...
...The crisis came in this way: Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Moslem League, India's second largest party, a purely Moslem organization, contended that all Moslems appointed by the Viceroy to the Executive Council must be chosen from his list of Moslems...
...The postwar settlement, however, was based on principles which all Indian parties rejected for various reasons...
...And the Cripp3 offer was so framed that in rejecting its postwar features the Indians had to reject the whole offer...
...With a keen appreciation of the intricacies of politics, Wavell recounts how the entire Lloyd George Cabinet opposed Allenby...
...He sees, as many Tory imperialists do not, that the only way to keep India and the empire is to change...
...There is nothing more fundamental in the philosophy of Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress Party they lead than the principle that religious and caste distinctions must be eliminated from Indian politics...
...There will be others...
...The British Government at that time insisted on retaining the Viceroy's untrammeled veto...
...When Cripps was in India, the Viceroy's Council was also a subject of negotiation with Indians, and one of the questions on which the talks broke down then was the issue of the Viceroy's power to veto the Council's acts and decisions...
...He realizes the need for change...
...The veto caused no difficulty at the Simla conference...
...But when the Indians tried to translate this "immediate and effective participation" into life they got nowhere...
...According to the Wavell Plan, the Viceroy himself would appoint the members of his Council and he is empowered to dismiss them at will...
...India is seething and Wavell, on the spot, prefers not to sit on the hot lid...
...But Allenby persisted...
...LONDON is obviously groping for a 20th Century policy in India to substitute for the 18th Century policy pursued hitherto...
...India will play a crucial role in the postwar struggle among the Big 3. Without India or with a rebellious India next door to a China in civil turmoil, Britain's position as a great power will become even worse than it already is...
...The Wavell Plan, which the Viceroy and Amery announced simultaneously on June 14, is the product of Wavell's insistence...
...He is a British imperialist and he does not want to liquidate the empire anymore than Churchill...
...British imperialism, he said to me, had grown "fat...
...As an example to other Hindus he has lived in daily and intimate contact with Untouchables...
...If it worked there might be a gradual transition from it to a satisfactory peacetime regime...
...L. S. Amery, Secretary of State for India, admitted in the House of Commons on June 14, 1945, that "The Indian administration, overburdened by great tasks laid upon it by the war against Japan and by planning for the postwar period, is further strained by the political tension that exists...
...Will that not give India sufficient strength to break away from the empire...
...One chapter dealt with Allenby's career as High Commissioner of Egypt in 1922...
...For the provision makes a distinction, first, between Moslems and Hindus and, second, between caste and outcaste Hindus or "Untouchables...
...At last it is dawning on some British imperialists that they cannot long rule India unless they let Indians rule...
...How to do this ? Shall they abandon the traditional policy of divide and rule on which they have leaned for decades ? Can they dare to develop India's economic resources and human material...
...Wavell made one attempt at finding such a policy...
...They were ready to give the plan a test...
...In fact, Mr...
...The British are thinking of Russia in this connection...
...and has since on numerous occasions sought to maintain and widen the gap between the religious communities in order to rule by dividing...
...He wentrto London to put this over on the British Government...
...THE Wavell Plan is much more precise...
...That was the main reason for the failure of the Cripps mission...
...He gave me part of the manuscript to take home and read...
...Among the functions of the External Affairs Department would be the appointment of fully-accredited Indian diplomatic representatives abroad...
...That appealed to the Gandhi-Nehru Congress Party, the largest political party in India...
...London needs a policy to fit the new postwar circumstances in which every British imperial and commercial position will seem threatened by Russia or America or both...
...Now he has become too big for them to handle...
...Allenby had decided that the British protectorate over Egypt had to be replaced by an independent Egyptian regime...
...Yet there would seem to be logical justification for expecting Lord Wavell to abide by his pledge since if he did not, and instead used his veto frequently and unreasonably, the Indian members of the Council could resign and the parties could refuse to participate in a reorganized Council whereupon, of course, the whole Wavell Plan would die...
...He threatened to resign...
...This may look to some as a flimsy basis on which champions of Indian freedom might hope to proceed towards self-government...
...Gandhi has fought fiercely all his life against the cruel gulf between Caste Hindus and Untouchables...
...He knows he cannot do it if the present belligerent non-cooperation of the Indian nation continues...
...For the first time' in history, accordingly, Indians would take over the direction of India's Finance Department, the Home or Internal Affairs Department which runs the police and, notably, the Foreign Affairs Department...
...The Wavell Plan has one decisive advantage over the written offer which Sir Stafford Cripps brought out to India in March, 1942...
...Winston Churchill led the fight for the retention of the protectorate...
...Perhaps, too, they are afraid of weakening India by vivisecting it...
...The British face a serious dilemma...
...Congress has striven for decades to make Indian politics political rather than an arena for the play of religious passions...
...Under the new plan, the Viceroy likewise is invested with the full right of veto...
...The Cripps proposals included both a wartime and a postwar settlement...
...Nevertheless, Lord Wavell, in a broadcast from New Delhi on June 14, promised that the veto power "will of course not be exercised unreasonably...
...Wavell, moreover, knows the British weaknesses which gave Japan her quick victories in Singapore, Malay, and Burma...
...All other members would be Indians...
...IT has long been a profound conviction among Indian nationalists that the British Government in 1909 divided the Indian electorate according to religious comminifies (so that a Moslem can cast a vote only for a Moslem candidate for mayor or legislator and a Hindu only for a Hindu candidate, etc...
...The Cripps offer consisted of 5 articles, 4 of which were devoted to the postwar period and the 5th of which (Article E) merely said vaguely that "His Majesty's Government desire and invite the immediate and effective participation of the leaders of the principal sections of the Indian people in the couneils of their country, of the Commonwealth, and of the United Nations...
...He has to administer India...
...The injection, therefore, of this same religious division into the White Paper was sure to raise an insurmountable barrier to the success of the Simla conference...
...Jinnah wants that permanent split because he favors Pakistan or a separate Moslem Indian state...
...A Moslem India leagued with the Arab countries of the Near East might alter the balance of world power to the disadvantage of England...
...It is an interim scheme and its acceptance by Indians would not commit them to any postwar solution...
...The White Paper of June 14, however, provides that the appointees shall be chosen from among Indian national and provincial leaders...
...But will not an unhappy, discontented, hungry India flare up and burn out the British, perhaps with foreign encouragement...
...He is a highly-cultured person with a love of poetry and a fine prose pen...
...Moreover, the Congress Party is a political party comprising caste and other Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, and others...
...He had tremendous popularity and prestige as a military hero...
...Finally, the Government yielded and gave him what he wanted...
...Domestic politics will likewise reflect Britain's quest for new men and methods to preserve old gains...
...But the plan stands and will be the subject of further discussion with Indian groups...
...The conference failed to accept the Wavell Plan...
...The Congress Party fought for a basic principle...
...The Wavell Plan, on the contrary, confines itself to the war only...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 31
