In 30 Seconds
Story
Between the fall of France and the coming of Cripps, the constitutional history of wartime India consists of one offer nobody accepted and one movement designed not to succeed, and the pairing is less strange than it sounds. The August Offer of 1940 and the Individual Satyagraha that answered it were both exercises in holding a position, the government holding India for the war on the cheapest political terms available, and Gandhi holding the movement’s flag aloft in a manner deliberately calibrated to embarrass without endangering, the strangest campaign he ever led and, in its peculiar way, among the most revealing.
The August Offer was crisis diplomacy at Britain’s darkest hour. With France fallen and invasion expected, the Congress moderates under Rajagopalachari had pressed a bargain, national government now for full cooperation in the war, and even Gandhi’s veto of anything war supporting had been, for once, set aside by his colleagues. Linlithgow’s answer of 8 August 1940 offered instead the expansion of his Executive Council to include more Indians, a War Advisory Council, a post war body of Indians to frame the constitution, and, the offer’s one lasting clause, the assurance that power would not be transferred to any government whose authority was denied by large and powerful elements in Indian national life, the minorities veto, as the Congress read it, Jinnah’s position written into imperial policy. The Congress rejected the offer as mockery, the League rejected it as insufficient while pocketing the veto, and the episode’s residue was the hardened deadlock the next two years administered.
Gandhi’s response was a masterpiece of limitation. Full civil disobedience in wartime, he judged, would either collapse under repression or succeed into chaos while the invader stood at the gates, and he would not, he said, seek independence out of Britain’s ashes. But silence would concede the one liberty the war government had specifically annexed, the right to speak against the war itself, and upon that precise ground he built the campaign. The Individual Satyagraha, launched in October 1940, was civil disobedience by appointment, selected individuals, one by one, would announce their intention, at a stated time and place, to utter the forbidden sentence, an anti war declaration that it was wrong to help the British war effort with men or money, and court the arrest that followed. The first satyagrahi, chosen with Gandhi’s whole symbolic care, was Vinoba Bhave, the ashram’s scholar saint, unknown to the newspapers and introduced to India by his arrest, the second was Jawaharlal Nehru, taken before he could even offer his satyagraha and sentenced to four years, the third Brahma Datt of the ashram itself, and behind them the movement’s entire officer corps in ordered procession, Patel, Azad, Rajagopalachari, Prasad, until by the campaign’s height in 1941 the convicted numbered above twenty thousand, the Congress’s leadership and cadre transferred to prison with the decorum of a changing of the guard.
As pressure the campaign achieved, and was intended to achieve, almost nothing, the war effort untouched, the public unelectrified, the government, after early hesitation over Gandhi himself, processing the appointments with bureaucratic calm. As positioning it achieved exactly its objects. It kept the movement’s protest formally alive and its nonviolence formally intact, it preserved the distinction Gandhi prized between embarrassing the empire and endangering it in its extremity, and it lodged the leadership safely in prison through the period of the Nazi Soviet pact’s confusions, releasing them, by Linlithgow’s gesture of December 1941, on the very eve of Japan’s war. Its critics, then and since, have read in it the movement’s wartime irrelevance made ritual, Bose’s departure for armed struggle the same season standing as the counter argument in action. Its defenders answer that the campaign was a bridge, morale and organisation held together between the deadlock of 1940 and the storm of 1942, the officer corps seasoned by one more imprisonment for the great imprisonment to come. Both readings agree on what the campaign proved, that even at the empire’s weakest hour Gandhi would not strike to kill, and the knowledge shaped both the trust and the fury with which, eighteen months later, he finally said Quit India.
