Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Not having the wherewithal to paint, Branson spent his free time learning Hindi. He chafed at the restrictions that prevented soldiers from visiting villages or getting to know ordinary people. And many of his compatriots treated Indians “in a way which not only makes one tremble for the future but which makes one ashamed of being one of them.” Branson often had cause to defend a chicko, as when one boy burst into tears after being struck for not having understood a command in English.45

  Most of the British soldiers came from working-class or rural backgrounds and, to their astonishment, were treated with contempt by white expatriates in India. Here they were, ordinary soldiers expected to lay down their lives for civilization, but when they were on leave in a city they had no hope of landing a room in one of the better hotels, all of which seemed to be owned by whites. Only officers were entertained there. Such discrimination had its positive side, Branson felt: it gave the newcomers a hint of what the natives had to put up with. He was surprised and pleased when, after an Indian soldier was killed in an accident, a sergeant opined that the man should be thought of not merely as “another black bastard out of the way” but as a human being with, perhaps, a wife and child.46

  One night the squadron left for a two-day outing. Because the moon was full, the truck drivers switched off their headlights and coasted silently. Driving through a village, Branson caught a glimpse of peasants, the men all in white and the women “in brilliant colours, lit up by the moon,” sitting in front of a stage with a painted backdrop and watching a play by the light of two lamps. That was all he could see. “But what ideas crowded through my brain as we went on through the night. Of Indian student youth going to the peasants of Bengal, showing them in plays how to unite against Japanese Fascism. . . . How I wanted to stay, to see the play through, and talk to the peasants about it! But our worlds are different, so I had to go on with the white sahibs in lorries.”

  When day dawned, Branson got his first extended look at the countryside of western India. “Oh, why am I here as a soldier and conqueror, and therefore the prisoner of my conquest?” The trucks drove by an endless expanse of fields, tilled only by bullocks, with not a tractor in sight. “Past village after village where human beings live in hovels; a bit of roof resting against an old stone wall, with mud floor; a shelter of matting laid over sticks, improved with bits of tin, old carpet, some tenting, perhaps; just high enough for the occupants to sit up in on their haunches.” He had read in an armed forces’ magazine about the benefits that Empire had brought. But to see is to believe, wrote Branson. “Let our imperialists boast . . . never will any of us who have come to India for this war forget the unbelievable, indescribable poverty in which we have found people living wherever we went, and in millions.” If those at home knew the truth, surely “there would be a hell of a row—because these conditions are maintained in the name of the British.”47

  AS SOLDIERS POURED into India, and reports of forced evacuation of villages and destruction of boats flowed into his ashram, Gandhi became increasingly alarmed. “I see no Indian freedom peeping through all this preparation for the so-called defence of India,” he commented in Harijan on April 26, 1942. “It is a preparation pure and simple for the defence of the British Empire, whatever may be asserted to the contrary.” The abortive Cripps mission had convinced him that the United Kingdom was not about to relinquish its “stranglehold” on India, and the preparations for war indicated that this grasp was instead being tightened. Gandhi knew of Japanese atrocities in China and had no wish to exchange “one form of slavery for another possibly much worse,” he wrote. He believed, however, that if the Japanese were being drawn to India that was because it was an Allied base: removing the British would eliminate this “bait.”48

  The Indian National Congress was also receiving alarming accounts of the scorched earth program in Bengal; in July it exhorted the people to defy the requisitioning of boats and vehicles unless they received adequate compensation. Amery saw the proclamation as a petty ploy to obstruct the war effort and wrote to Churchill urging prompt action:Twice armed is he that has his quarrel just; But thrice armed he who gets his blow in fust.

  The viceroy notified British army and air force units to stand by for a crackdown. Not wanting to strike before he had a provocation, he waited until spies could confirm that the Congress was planning a program of civil disobedience.49

  Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek heard from Gandhi and informed Roosevelt that an uprising could still be averted if he would persuade the United Kingdom “to restore to India her complete freedom.” Roosevelt forwarded the letter to Churchill, asking only how the president should respond. The prime minister replied angrily that the president should “lend no countenance to putting pressure upon His Majesty’s Government.” From then on, a resigned Roosevelt ignored pleas to intervene that came from several quarters, including a cable from American writer Louis Fischer, who had interviewed Gandhi and who now warned that a “terrible disaster may be impending in India.”50

  ON AUGUST 8, 1942, the Indian National Congress, with much hesitation and doubt, adopted what came to be called the Quit India resolution. It was in part a last-ditch appeal to the United States. British rule, the document stated, was “degrading and enfeebling India and making her progressively less capable of defending herself.” If granted independence, Indians would eagerly throw in their lot with the Allies; but if this plea were denied, the Congress would sanction a nonviolent struggle “on the widest possible scale.” The party asked the people to hold together under Gandhi’s guidance “as disciplined soldiers of Indian freedom.” Should a time come when the leaders could no longer lead, everyone who desired liberation “must be his own guide urging him on along the hard road where there is no resting place and which leads ultimately to the independence of India.”51

  Early the next morning, all the senior Congress leaders were swept off to jail. Gandhi managed to call out the words “karenge ya marenge,” meaning Do or Die, as a final message to his countrymen before he was imprisoned. That evening, Amery spoke over BBC radio. In addition to the usual strikes and demonstrations, he said, the Congress had envisaged cutting telegraph and telephone lines, picketing army recruitment centers and government offices, and otherwise paralyzing the government. Such actions amounted to sabotaging the war effort. The broadcast successfully turned American and British public opinion against Gandhi and the Congress.

  Amery’s statement was in accordance with a War Cabinet resolve, from as early as September 14, 1940, that “if conflict with Congress should arise, it should appear as an outcome of war necessity rather than as a political quarrel unrelated to the war.” Although the radical action of paralyzing the government had indeed been suggested at a regional Congress meeting, the national party had not endorsed it. But Amery’s broadcast had an unintended effect. The sudden arrest of Congress leaders had left them with no opportunity to decide, let alone explain to their subordinates, exactly what form civil disobedience should take: Amery did it for them. Every Indian who heard the tactics he detailed took them as instructions direct from the Congress—and the very next day the country exploded in a seemingly coordinated rebellion. Enraged crowds attacked government offices, destroyed telegraph poles, and damaged railway tracks. In Bihar two Canadian airmen were lynched, leading to a retaliatory attack in which aircraft strafed crowds of protesters, killing several hundred.52

  Clive Branson followed all of this unrest closely. “Discussions go on night and day with views expressed ranging from two extremes: (a) I came to fight the Japs not the Indians, to (b) It would be all right to have a go at Gandhi and his Hindus; we should get some practice like the Japs got in China,” Branson related to his wife. Being a communist, he dismissed Gandhi as bourgeois and saw no virtue in pacifism; but when it came to the Quit India movement he felt that the problem was not so much Gandhi as his absence. The Labour Party had asked the Congress to call off civil disobedience—“how brilliant!! Doesn’t the Labour Party know that
the Congress leaders are in jail, and that is why the rioting is going on, anarchistic because without leadership,” he railed.53

  On August 20, 1942, when soldiers from his squadron were dispatched to “maintain law and order” in a nearby town, Branson stole off to a canteen to be by himself. “This sort of warfare is so distasteful to me that I take every care not to be detailed,” he explained to his wife. Perusal of the newspapers soon convinced him that British imperialists had deliberately provoked the rebellion, which offered “the long-sought opportunity to smash the nationalist movement.” To prohibit the Indians from fighting the war as free Allies was to damage the war effort, he opined, for now the natives cared not at all about the aggressor at the doorstep but only wanted to be rid of the one in the room. “We English fellows came out here to fight the Japs and face the possibility of finding a grave,” Branson continued. “We did not come here to be killed by Indians provoked by the insane reactionary policy of Amery and Co.”54 Figuring that the viceroy would “need as much British strength as possible in these difficult times,” Churchill stopped a division from being moved out of India as per an earlier schedule. There was no chance of the Japanese arriving during the monsoon, which allowed six weeks for 222,000 policemen and 57 battalions of soldiers to contain an uprising by essentially unarmed civilians. By May 1943, as many as 105 battalions would be involved—all of which were fed, clothed, sheltered, remunerated, and largely equipped at the expense of Indians. Meeting Churchill at a train station, Amery found the prime minister “looking very fit and in capital spirits,” as he wrote in his diary. “His only remark to me was ‘We’ve got them on the run.’”55

  SOON AFTER, HOWEVER, an Indian member of the viceroy’s council met Churchill and found him rumbling with rage. “What have we to be ashamed of in our Government of India? Why should we be apologetic or say that we are prepared to go out at the instance of some jackanapes?” the prime minister fumed. “If we have ever to quit India, we shall quit it in a blaze of glory, and the chapter that shall be ended then will be the most glorious chapter of that country, not merely in relation to the past but equally in relation to the future, however distant that may be. That will be my statement on India tomorrow. No apology, no quitting, no idea of weakening or scuttling.” That very day, while discussing his forthcoming speech with Amery, Churchill exclaimed, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”56

  The prime minister’s euphoria had rapidly soured into resentment because of the vital concession he had been forced to make: India would get dominion status after the war. With the American president prodding him, the offer would be hard to rescind. And once India became a dominion, it would likely opt for full independence—the ferocity of the repression had ensured that much. The tighter he grasped, the more surely the prize slipped away.

  In his broadcast on September 10, 1942, the prime minister announced that the Congress had finally thrown off its cloak of nonviolence. The conspirators, he asserted, had received help from “Japanese fifth-column work on a widely extended scale and with special direction to strategic points.” But there was no cause to worry, in part because “the numbers of white soldiers now in that country, though very small compared with its size and population, are larger than at any time in the British connection.” The speech infuriated Branson, who wrote home that it was “just filth,” without even the virtue of invented evidence to support the case. Despite Churchill’s insistence, the secret service had failed to turn up any links between fascists and Gandhi or other Congress leaders—there were none.57

  Summing up the Quit India movement in The Hinge of Fate, Churchill wrote: “What was at one time feared to become the most serious rebellion in India since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, fizzled out in a few months with hardly any loss of life.” In Midnapore district of Bengal, however, the uprising would lead to a lethal confrontation with authorities. It would also give birth to a secret government that would endure for two tortuous years, through famine of an intensity not seen since the Victorian era.58

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At Any Price

  The news of Gandhi’s arrest left the nationalists of Midnapore stunned. That August of 1942, after much discussion in their rural hideouts, the top leaders of the district’s Congress—brawny, mustachioed Satish Chandra Samanta and his close friend, the small and sharp-witted Ajoy Kumar Mukhopadhyay—decided on a course of action. On September 29, 1942, the people of Tamluk subdivision, where the Congress organization was strongest, would take over all government offices in the locale. Unarmed crowds would have to face down armed police and perhaps even soldiers.

  Sushil Dhara, the insurgency’s designated warrior, had built up a cadre of youths who seemed ready to risk their lives at his behest. But Dhara had been trying hard to live by Gandhian precepts, and he demanded to know how the planned program squared with a policy of nonviolence. So the elders sent him on a risky trip to Calcutta to meet a respected Gandhian educator. If enormous crowds approached government buildings, the guru postulated, the occupants might surrender without a fight. He also showed Dhara a publication in Hindi: in Gandhi’s absence, those of his disciples who had evaded capture were freely interpreting his enigmatic instructions—Do or Die—and their readings of their leader’s injunctions leaned increasingly toward allowing violence as a means of moving toward independence. Dhara returned to Midnapore “with a cloudless mind” and threw himself into planning the day of liberation. “I searched within my mind and found in it no fear,” he would write. From among his recruits he selected fifty whom he judged were also ready to face death.1

  On September 8, Dhara heard that police shootings had claimed three lives at a riverside rice mill at Donipur, near Tamluk. Arriving at the site, he found a few thousand agitated people surrounding the building. The small police force was inside, as were the bodies of the slain men. The day before, villagers had resolved to stop a barge loaded with 30 tons of rice from being dispatched upstream to the Ispahani Company, and women had used their conch shells to summon hundreds of people to the riverbank. The mill owners had sent for help, and an officer with five armed policemen had arrived the next morning. The villagers had asked to buy two kilograms of rice each, but the mill owners had refused. When the angry crowd entered the mill, the police had fired in panic. Dhara advised the villagers to distribute the rice among the needy but to let the officer and the other policemen go. Leaving a few subordinates at the site, he walked back to his hideout.2

  Dhara’s route lay through the town of Mohisadal, and past the home of the very police officer whose life he had just saved. It was 11 P.M. when he was striding by, and he spied a forlorn woman, clearly the officer’s wife, staring out of the window. She called to him, asking if he had seen any trouble on the road. “A wicked idea came into my head,” Dhara related later. Pretending to be just a passerby, he told her of having seen a large crowd holding a police officer hostage and threatening to burn him alive. A Congress leader named Sushil Dhara, he said, had been firing up the crowd by saying all kinds of angry things. Leaving the poor woman close to tears, he went on his way. Whatever the morals of this prank, it was the last time Dhara would do anything playful. As for the villagers, thirteen of them would serve up to two years of hard labor each, on charges of looting.3

  ON THE NIGHT of September 28, thousands of men armed with spades, shovels, saws, and axes slipped out of their huts to gather in darkness on the arterial roads of southern Midnapore. According to a history of the insurgency written by one of its participants, Radhakrishna Bari, they dug gaping holes in the road surfaces, broke through culverts, and sawed laboriously through ancient roadside trees—dropping them, branches and leaves and all, onto the path. “One guy told me he was bitten by a snake, but he threw it off and just kept on felling,” recalled Kumudini Dakua. “Fortunately it wasn’t poisonous.” There were no electricity poles to worry about, but the men snapped telegraph and telephone poles and slashed all wires within reach.4

&n
bsp; Through a network of informers, word reached the local police that the people were about to take back the government. Discovering that all communication lines were down, they used the wireless set at a military observation post outside Tamluk to warn the district magistrate in Midnapore town, to the northwest. Two truckloads of troops set off toward Tamluk, only to find the road impassable. Soldiers descended from the trucks, got people out of nearby hamlets, and set them to work at gunpoint, repairing breaches and removing trees.5

  Dawn found three processions, from the north, northwest, and south, making their way toward Tamluk town. (The Rupnarayan River flowed along the eastern side of Tamluk, blocking approach from that direction.) The people sang, shouted slogans, and waved green, white, and orange Congress flags; no one had weapons. “We’d hoped that the soldiers wouldn’t make it. If so, we had word that the police would surrender,” Bari would later recall. The son of a poor farmer, he had just left his Calcutta college to join the Midnapore insurgency and would become its chronicler.

  But when the crowd from the northwest detoured into a soccer field to listen to instructions, the military trucks pushed past it to reach Tamluk at 2:30 P.M. The demonstrators, arriving at the town’s police station half an hour later, found themselves facing rows of constables with lathis—bamboo rods, lethal in trained hands—and, behind them, soldiers with guns. The police charged into the crowd, but because it continued to edge forward, the soldiers fired, killing three. At about the same time, the southern procession reached a twenty-foot bridge spanning a canal, and sepoys stationed on the north side fired without warning. Many of the wounded started crying out for water: most of them were Hindu, and they believed a sip of holy water before death ensured salvation.6