Three Famines by Thomas Keneally Page A

party, did not seem to appreciate that there was a war in progress and that their British benefactors needed the unstinting loyalty of all Indians at this time of acute crisis. The British refused to discuss India’s future status with them until the war ended. The Indian leadership wanted to discuss it now, and in return they would promise to sanction India’s participation in the war, instead of resisting it with all their influence. Nehru at least said that the thought of fascism dominating any part of the world was repulsive to him. But, with some success, he did his best to soothe and court American opinion.
    To Linlithgow, as to London, this was a form of treachery second only to the collaboration of the Japanese with the Germans. The United States disagreed radically with the British over India. President Roosevelt himself believed the British position was inherently self-contradictory – Britain was supposedly fighting for freedom and independence, while refusing to extend such benefits to the Indians. He wished it was otherwise, so that everyone in India would be galvanised to resist the Japanese. Vice-president Henry Wallace recorded in his diary that the president had ‘a very profound concern about India and a definite belief that England has not handled India properly’. Liberal American newspapers and magazinesall hoped that the problem between the British and the Indians would be resolved positively through negotiations. The New Republic thought that negotiations between Britain and India, even in the midst of the war, might well ‘shape the destinies of white men as well as brown, black as well as yellow, for generations to come’. Even the soft-edged Saturday Evening Post thought it would be better if the British had left India years before. The manager of American Express in Calcutta declared that the British had the capacity to alienate even those Indians who were loyal. Nonetheless, while Roosevelt approved of Indian independence, there was much American criticism for the apparent willingness of Indian leaders to stand in the way of the war effort, particularly after the Quit India movement began.
    The war cabinet in London had sent one of its members, Sir Stafford Cripps, to try to settle the Indian question. But once more he could offer independence only as a condition of cooperation in the war, and when the war itself ended. The mission was, of course, a failure and led to serious results.
    The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885, and gradually became at least the Hindu organ of the struggle for Indian independence. As a member, Gandhi in particular had moved it away from its original character as an English-speaking, Indian middle-class body to appeal to a broader language and wider social membership base. On 8 August 1942, a ‘Quit India’ resolution – a call for a campaign of civil disobedience to make the British yield up Indian independence immediately – was being discussed by the Congress leadership at the Gowalia Tank Maidan, a park in central Bombay, when a crowd of supporters invaded thedusty reaches of the parkland and passed the motion. Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, and other senior members of Congress, had doubts about the wisdom of the Quit India motion, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, considered the Congress’s approval of Quit India a great blunder, an undue forcing of the pace at a time when the Empire was at great peril and so distracted by the war.
    Linlithgow viewed all this with bewilderment, and the war cabinet in London with enhanced, if not outright, fury. Linlithgow, against the wishes of a number of Indian members of his executive council, ordered the arrest of the Congress leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru. The depth of passions is demonstrated by the case of one Indian arrestee’s young daughter, who yelled at the arresting soldiers that they were rocks on the road to freedom and suckers of Indian