In 30 Seconds
Story
On 3 September 1939, within hours of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow proclaimed India a belligerent. He consulted no Indian, neither the elected ministries governing most of the country nor the central legislature nor the party whose movement had filled the previous decade, and the omission, constitutionally impeccable and politically catastrophic, set the terms of everything that followed. Three hundred million people were taken to war by one man’s signature, and the manner of the taking, as much as the fact, drove the sequence of the autumn, the Congress’s demand, the government’s evasion, the resignation of the ministries, and the League’s Day of Deliverance, the fork at which the roads to 1942 and to Pakistan both opened.
The Congress’s dilemma was real, and its resolution the work of its own divided heart. Its sympathies in the war were not in doubt, the party had condemned fascism through the decade, Nehru, cutting short a China visit, holding that in a straight choice India’s place was against Hitler, and Gandhi, receiving the war’s news, spoke of watching Westminster’s possible destruction with tears. But sympathy for democracy’s cause collided with the demand that India be treated as democracy’s subject matter, and the Working Committee’s statement of 14 September, drafted in Nehru’s language, put the question with a clarity the government never met, that if the war was for democracy and freedom, the test was simple, apply the principle to India, declare Britain’s war aims for the colonial world, and let a free India choose alliance as an equal. Linlithgow’s reply of 17 October offered dominion status as the goal at an unspecified end, consultations after the war, and a consultative committee for its duration, and the offer’s poverty, seasoned by his ostentatious consultations with the princes and the League as equal parties, told the Congress what the war years would hold. The high command ordered its ministries out, and between 27 October and mid November the Congress governments of eight provinces resigned, the provinces passing under section 93 to the governors’ personal rule, where they remained until the war’s end.
The resignation has been debated as the movement’s great wartime blunder, and the case is serious, argued at the time by Rajagopalachari and later by many historians, that the ministries were the movement’s actual power, that office kept the Congress in the state’s machinery and the League out of the vacuum, and that seven years of governors’ rule handed Jinnah, gratis, the provincial ground his party could never have won at elections. The counter case is the movement’s own logic, that ministries serving a war imposed without consent made the Congress the empire’s recruiting agent, that the party of purna swaraj could not administer a belligerence it was denied any voice in, and that the resignation preserved the moral position from which 1942 was launched. Both cases proved true, which is the era’s tragedy in one sentence.
Jinnah’s response measured the vacuum’s value. He proclaimed 22 December 1939 a Day of Deliverance and thanksgiving that Congress raj had ceased, prayers and meetings marking, in the phrase, deliverance from tyranny, and the celebration, joined notably by Ambedkar and denounced by the Congress and by many Muslims, announced the League’s wartime strategy entire, alliance of convenience with a government that now needed Muslim cooperation as counterweight, the price to be collected in recognition. The government paid on schedule, the League’s ministries and coalitions spreading through the section 93 landscape, Jinnah’s veto acknowledged in the formula that no future constitution would proceed without Muslim consent, and within a hundred days of Deliverance Day came Lahore, the resolution the next chapter tells. The war Linlithgow declared over India’s head thus redistributed India’s politics in a season, the Congress out of power and heading toward the storm, the League in from the cold and drafting its map, and the empire, which had made the war an Indian matter without making Indians its partners, left holding a country whose largest party it would soon jail entire and whose second party was pricing the estate.
