In 30 Seconds
Story
In the spring of 1942, with Singapore fallen, Rangoon burning and Japanese bombs on Indian soil, the British War Cabinet sent to Delhi its most left wing member carrying the most advanced constitutional offer Britain had yet made to India, and within three weeks the mission had failed so completely that its principal flew home leaving behind a deadlock worse than the one he came to break. The Cripps Mission of March and April 1942 is the great hinge of the war’s Indian politics, the offer whose collapse opened the road to Quit India, and the arguments over who killed it, Congress intransigence, Churchill’s sabotage, the offer’s own poisoned clauses, began before Cripps’s aircraft left the ground and have never stopped.
The mission was conceived under compulsion. Japan’s avalanche had brought the war to India’s door and India’s loyalty into question, Chiang Kai shek touring Delhi to urge Indian freedom as Asian defence, Roosevelt pressing Churchill through emissaries and cables, Labour’s ministers pressing inside the cabinet, and Churchill, who had entered politics fighting Indian reform, conceded the mission, historians have long noted, in significant part to demonstrate to Washington that settlement was impossible. Sir Stafford Cripps, austere socialist, Nehru’s personal friend, fresh from the Moscow embassy and swollen with public credit, arrived on 22 March 1942 carrying a published Draft Declaration whose terms deserved better parents. After the war, India would receive full dominion status with the acknowledged right to secede from the Commonwealth, a constitution making body elected by the provincial legislatures would frame its constitution, and Britain would accept it, subject to one proviso of iron, that any province unwilling to accede might stand out and receive the same status separately, the non accession clause in which the Congress read Pakistan’s certificate and the League, reading the same words, a route to it requiring only provincial majorities. For the war’s duration, defence would remain with Britain, the Viceroy’s powers untouched, Indians to be brought into the councils of their country’s defence in a formula never quite written down.
The negotiation broke on the present, not the future. The Congress, whose Working Committee sat through the mission in continuous session, might have swallowed the post war scheme’s provincial option under protest, Azad’s and Nehru’s priorities lay elsewhere, but the immediate demand was a national government in fact, the Viceroy’s Executive Council functioning as a cabinet with an Indian defence member, responsibility now as the price of mobilising India for its own defence. Cripps, in the mission’s first week, spoke the language of cabinet government freely, and then the ground moved, Churchill and the Viceroy’s telegrams reining their emissary, the formula on defence shrinking through drafts, Colonel Louis Johnson, Roosevelt’s envoy, brokering compromises London disowned, until Cripps was offering consultation where he had implied control, and the Congress, concluding the cheque was post dated and the bank, in Gandhi’s attributed and disputed phrase, crashing, refused. The League rejected the declaration too, for conceding Pakistan only by implication, the Sikhs and the depressed classes rejected the provincial option that abandoned them to majorities, and on 11 April the mission announced its failure, Cripps departing with a broadcast that blamed the Congress, the Congress answering with the record of the shifting drafts, and Roosevelt cabling Churchill, too late, to reopen.
The post mortems constitute a literature. The official British account made the mission the proof of Indian impossibilism, the offer generous, the rejection perverse, and the files opened since have dismantled its simplicity, Churchill’s and Linlithgow’s obstruction documented, Cripps’s authority cut from under him in mid negotiation. The Congress’s critics answer with the other counterfactual, that a national government in all but name was within reach, that Rajagopalachari read the stakes truly, and that the refusal purchased, within four months, the wilderness of 1942 to 1945, the League meanwhile compounding at interest. What the failure certainly purchased was the sequence, Gandhi’s conclusion that Britain would yield nothing except to pressure, the Quit India resolution of August, the movement beheaded and jailed, the League’s unobstructed wartime ascent, and the non accession principle, once written into a British declaration, waiting in the drawer from which 1947 took it. The cheque was honoured after all, on schedule, at partition’s rate of exchange.
