The war entered a new phase when Germany broke the Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union and launched a blitzkrieg against it on 22 June 1941. With the vast resources of most of Europe at their command and with an efficient military machine, the Nazis hoped to bring the Soviet Union to its knees within a few weeks. Initially, the march of Nazi troops and tanks into the Soviet territory did not meet with much resistance. Then began resistance which the Nazis had not bargained for.
Soon the Soviet Union and Britain concluded a treaty of alliance. In August 1941 the U.S.A. and Britain issued the `Atlantic Charter' as the statement of their war policy, declaring:
"They respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them."
But Britain's Prime Minister Churchill announced in the House of Commons in September that the `Atlantic Charter' did not apply to India, Burma and other British colonies.
On 7 December Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, an important U.S. naval base in the Pacific and destroyed the U.S. fleet there. She declared war on Britain and the USA. With the entry of the USA into the war, an alliance was formed between the Soviet Union, Britain and the USA. The Japanese swept through South-East Asia knocking down U.S., British and Dutch defences of their colonies with almost effortless ease.
The members of the Congress Working Committee, which met at Bardoli from 23 to 30 December 1941, differed on the question of non-violence. Nehru, Azad and Rajagopalachari wanted to discard non-violence and participate in war efforts if the British would be persuaded by the grim war situation to make some concessions and buy their support. But Patel, Prasad and some others insisted on no participation, refusing to compromise with their creed of non-violence, which had been of a more accommodating type in July 1940 and before. Gandhi, who had offered, and insisted on, unconditional co-operation with the raj in its war efforts at the initial phase of the war, refused to abandon non-violence, "the faith of a lifetime".(1) A resolution offering conditional support to the war was adopted by the Working Committee. At his request Gandhi was relieved of the responsibility of guiding the Congress.(2)
Meeting at Wardha in mid-January 1942, the AICC adopted the resolution with some minor additions. While declaring at the meeting that he "won't exchange ahimsa even for independence", Gandhi supported the resolution and asked other `believers' in non-violence to support it. Interestingly, he criticized China for defending herself with arms. At this meeting he announced:
"...Jawaharlal will be my successor. He says whatever is uppermost in his mind, but he always does what I want."(3)
Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang came to India in February 1942 to bring the government and the Congress closer. Chiang met the Viceroy as well as the Congress leaders. Nehru escorted the Chiangs, Madame Chiang in particular, to different places, and arranged an interview between Chiang and Gandhi. The Chiangs were among those who served later as links between Nehru and the Congress on the one hand and the U.S. authorities, including Roosevelt, on the other.(4) On being asked by the press whether he had discussed the Indian problem with Chiang, Nehru with his usual modesty replied: "Certainly, we discussed India. After all I am India." He thought of himself "as a symbol of India" -- "like the national flag".(5)
With the rapid advance of the Japanese in South-East Asia, U.S. President Roosevelt was afraid that India was as good as lost. He continued to put pressure on Churchill without offending much the susceptibilities of the British imperialists to grant dominion status to India.(6) The U.S. imperialists had been seeking an open door to the British colonies, especially India, and found in the war an opportunity to force Britain to relax her hold on India.
On 30 September 1939, soon after the outbreak of the war, Joseph Kennedy, then U.S. ambassador to Britain, wrote to Roosevelt:
"War regardless of the outcome, will merely hasten the process [of Britain's decline as a world power].... the leadership of the English-speaking world will, willy-nilly, be ours."(7)
In December 1940, when Nehru was extolling the USA as the champion of democracy and freedom, Virgil Jordan, the president of the National Industrial Conference Board of the USA, said in the course of his address to the Investment Bankers' Association:
"At best, England will become [after the war] a junior partner in a new Anglo-Saxon imperialism, in which the economic resources and the military and naval strength of the United States will be the centre of gravity. Southward is our hemisphere and westward in the Pacific the path of empire takes its way, and in modern terms of economic power as well as political prestige, the sceptre passes to the United States."(8)
Nehru was convinced like Gandhi that the end of the British empire was quite near. It became the burden of his many speeches that the British empire was disappearing, that India would soon become free and that "mostly Russia and China...are keeping up the British structure in Europe and Asia".(9) He was sure that "countless eyes from all over the world look up to it [the USA] for leadership in the paths of peace and freedom", that "The next hundred years...are going to be the century of America" --"America on whom rests a vast burden of responsibility, and towards whom so many millions look for right leadership at this crisis in world history".(10)
Nehru was highly critical of the `People's War' slogan of the CPI, which came to hold at the end of 1941 that after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union the imperialist war had changed into a People's War. Inaugurating the 19th session of the AITUC at Kanpur in February 1942, he denounced the communists, blamed the workers and peasants of the world for "arming themselves with guns and producing aeroplanes" and "destroying each other's countries", and held China and Russia responsible for keeping British imperialism alive. He exhorted the people to "organize themselves in accordance with the orders of the Congress and snatch freedom from this British Government..."(11)
Churchill yielded to US pressure as well as to that of his Labourite colleagues like Clement Attlee, who criticized "the crude imperialism of the Viceroy" as "fatally short-sighted and suicidal", believed that "To mark time is to lose India" and suggested that "some person of high standing" should be sent out "with wide powers to negotiate a settlement with India".(12) On 9 March, the day after Rangoon had fallen to the Japanese, the British cabinet decided to send Stafford Cripps, then an influential member of the cabinet, to India to negotiate a settlement with Indian leaders. The Tory members of the cabinet agreed more as a gesture to the USA than out of any genuine desire for a settlement. Cripps was to negotiate within the framework of a Draft Declaration of the cabinet: it was subject to amendments after discussion with Indian leaders provided the cabinet approved of them. As Secretary of State Amery wired to Linlithgow, he was far from sure "whether Cripps succeeds in squaring the circle or not". He expected adverse Congress reaction as "the nest contains the Pakistan cuckoo's egg".(13)
Arriving in India on 22 March, Cripps had discussions with the Viceroy and preliminary talks with Indian leaders of different political persuasions and then announced at a press conference the cabinet's draft declaration. It provided for an elected constituent assembly after the war was over, which could opt for dominionhood or independence. It gave the provinces which were not prepared to accept the constitution framed by the constituent assembly the right to opt out of the Indian Union. It invited "the immediate and effective participation of the leaders of the principal sections of the Indian people in the counsels of the country, of the Commonwealth and of the United Nations". While this was worded vaguely, the draft made it clear that defence would remain the responsibility of the British government.(14)
Even before Cripps came and the proposals were known, Gandhi had decided to reject them. Mahadev Desai had written to Birla on 14 March:
"Let Cripps come, if he likes. What does he hope to get from Bapu? He should get busy placating Jawaharlal and Rajaji."(15)
When Cripps met Gandhi on 27 March, the latter "expressed the very definite view that Congress would not accept the document".(16) Gandhi wrote to Nehru who was in favour of acceptance of the British proposals: "I am clearly of the view that we cannot accept this `offer'."(17)
Gandhi was then more than convinced that the collapse of the British empire was imminent. When Rangoon fell, "the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat" lay over India, as Churchill himself said.(18) Even earlier, on 21 February, in a broadcast to the country, the deputy chief of General Staff in India, General Molesworth, had warned that the Japanese warships which were on the prowl in the Indian Ocean, might increase their activities, and that Japanese raids and landings on Indian coasts were feared. The Andaman Islands were occupied by the Japanese on 23 March. At such a moment the Gandhis did not think it prudent that India should "make herself", to quote Sitaramayya, "a trailer to a sinking steamship or hitch her wagon to a falling star".(19) They preferred, as we shall see, to hitch their wagon to the `rising sun' of Asia. Cripps wired to Churchill on 4 April that the "Gandhi wing of the Congress" regarded "Great Britain as defeated and unimportant so far as the future of India is concerned".(20) Dismissing the Cripps proposals as "a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank",(21) Gandhi refused to wait in Delhi until the end of the negotiations and left for Sevagram on 4 April. But before leaving Delhi, Gandhi again warned Nehru that the Cripps offer could not be accepted.(22)
The Gandhi-Patel wing of the Congress would not compromise itself in the eyes of the Japanese whose victory seemed to them imminent. "Indeed", writes R. J. Moore, "Cripps imagined Gandhi to be `actually desirous to bring about a state of chaos while he sits at Wardha eating vegetables'."(23)
Nehru, too, as Gandhi said, "is convinced that the British empire is finished".(24) But Nehru believed in the ultimate defeat of the Axis Powers and in the emergence of the USA as the dominant power which would shape the future of the world. As noted before, it was the Americans who, in consultation with the British government, arranged his visit to Chiang Kai-shek in 1939. He was all praise for the US ruling class, "the ally of the rotten Kuomintang generals" and various other reactionaries. The US ruling class also was depending on him. In February 1942, Roosevelt sent Nehru "a friendly message through Edgar Snow", requesting Nehru to write to him telling him what Nehru "wants me to do for India". Snow was told to send Nehru's reply "through our diplomatic pouch".(25)
Throughout the war the US ruling class was putting irresistible pressure on the British to loosen their hold on the empire. After the fall of France the Americans agreed to give the British some military hardware in exchange for long-term leases to set up US naval and air bases in various British possessions in the Western hemisphere.(26) Early in 1942 the Americans demanded and ensured the dismantling of the system of imperial preference as a quid pro quo for their lend-lease aid (Article 7 of the Lend-Lease Agreement), rejecting Churchill's pleas.(27) They insisted on an `open door' for U.S. capital and goods into India and other British colonies and on exploiting their natural resources. The theoreticians of US imperialism were openly proclaiming its aim of building up a world-wide informal empire. In the beginning of 1941, Henry Morton Luce, the publisher of Life, Time and other journals, declared in an article entitled "The American Century" in Life that the USA should take over world leadership on the basis of its vast power.(28)
Perhaps Nehru echoed Henry Luce when he described the next hundred years as "the century of America" in an article "India's Day of Reckoning", which was published in the March 1942 issue of Fortune (Chicago).(29)
In December 1941, Roosevelt told Churchill that he favoured termination of India's colonial status, to which Churchill reacted strongly. But Roosevelt continued to raise this issue through his personal envoy Harriman as well as through correspondence.(30)
The ultimate objective of the US ruling class was to drive out the old imperialist powers like Britain, France and the Netherlands from their colonies and semi-colonies and turn them into parts of their own informal empire. But, during the war, their primary aim was "to uphold the Allied coalition" in order to ensure defeat of the Axis Powers. Only victory in the war would pave the way to the USA's cherished goal -- world domination. As Eugene V. Rostow, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, said later:
"in many ways the whole postwar history has been a process of American movement to take over possessions...of security which Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium had previously held."(31)
Within the basic framework of this policy and without disrupting the wartime alliance, the USA exerted pressure on her ally to relax Britain's imperialist grip on India.
Col. Louis Johnson, who afterwards became US Defence Secretary, was appointed the US President's Personal Representative in India and came during Cripps' talks with Indian leaders. He tried to mediate when the negotiations seemed to have failed. The Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution on 2 April, rejecting the Cripps proposals, though it was not released to the press until 11 April when the talks finally broke down.(32)
The differences actually centred around two issues -- the character of the reconstituted Executive Council of the Viceroy and control over Defence. The Working Committee wanted the Council to work like a de facto cabinet with the Viceroy as the constitutional head and sought to have an effective control over Defence. But on these issues the British government refused to make any concessions.
On 4 April Johnson wired to Roosevelt and appealed to him for personal intervention with Churchill to prevent a breakdown.(33) Nehru met Johnson on 6 April, when Nehru told him that the Congress would not break on the issue of the right of a province not to accede to the Indian Union. "Nehru had then gone on to speak of hitching India's wagon to America's star and not Britain's." Johnson assured him that the USA, which "would have the leading place at the peace table" after the war, would do its best to enable India to attain "her ambitions", provided India "had wholeheartedly backed the war effort". "But", he warned, "the matter would be far otherwise if she did not." Nehru said that the talks with Cripps would fail "if they were not satisfied" on the issue of Defence. But he promised "to assist the war effort even if the `Cripps proposals' did not go through." Nehru confessed to Johnson that "he would lose his followers, if he compromised with the British on the Defence issue".(34)
Meeting Cripps on 7 April, Nehru admitted that his "main difficulty" was "fear lest if he accepts office, Gandhi will turn the mass of Congressmen against him".(35)
A new formula on the issue of Defence was devised by Cripps and Johnson to narrow the differences and handed over to the Congress leaders. The Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief Wavell were not consulted. This was too much for Linlithgow who, while appreciating the pressure exerted by Roosevelt's representative on the Congress Working Committee in favour of accepting the offer, very much resented his intervention on the Defence issue.(36)
Though Cripps was very hopeful that the scheme, "largely owing to very efficient and wholehearted help of Col. Johnson", might succeed,(37) it was torpedoed by Churchill, and the concessions made on the Defence issue, the crux of the problem,(38) were withdrawn. With the failure of the negotiations Churchill, Amery, Linlithgow and Co. as well as Gandhi and his closest associates were happy. Though Churchill and Amery believed that the effect in the USA was "wholly beneficial", Roosevelt, who made a last-minute effort to get Cripps' departure from India postponed, held the British solely responsible for the deadlock.(39)
In a letter to Roosevelt on 12 April, Nehru regretted the failure "for the present" of the negotiations and blamed the British government for not permitting the Congress to rouse the people to fight for "the larger causes of freedom and democracy". Yet he assured the President that "still we shall do our utmost not to submit to Japanese or any other aggression and invasion".(40)
At an interview to a News Chronicle representative, soon after Cripps' departure, Nehru "tried to represent that though Congress has rejected the Cripps offer, India was willing to help the British". He also promised to make a broadcast from the All India Radio obviously in support of the war efforts and was only dissuaded by Azad from making it.(41) Earlier, on 6 April, Johnson had received the impression from his talks that Nehru would help war efforts "even if the `Cripps proposals' did not go through".(42) And on 11 April, after the negotiations had fallen through, Johnson reported to the State Department: "I shall have his complete help; he is our hope here. I trust him."(43)
When the AICC met at Allahabad at the end of April, Shiva Rao, correspondent of Hindu and Manchester Guardian, who had close contact with Congress leaders, carried Johnson's message to Nehru, inviting him to pay a short visit to Washington and discuss the Indian problem with Roosevelt. The US mission in Delhi would make all arrangements for his flight to Washington and back. Nehru declined the invitation for fear of strong objection from his Congress colleagues.(44) Before Johnson left India in mid-May, Nehru assured him in a confidential communication that no hindrance would be placed in the way of the Allied forces in India, "no embarrassment of any kind", and production, instead of being interfered with, would be encouraged.(45) After Johnson's departure Nehru maintained cordial relations with the Americans through the American mission in New Delhi.
The invitation to visit the USA for personal contact with Roosevelt came from another American, Claire Boothe Luce, wife of Henry Luce. A member of the U.S. Congress from 1943 to 1947 and, later, an ambassador to Italy, Claire Boothe in her letter of 4 June to Nehru wrote that "the mysterious impact of great personalities" like Roosevelt and Nehru might strike the sparks that would light India on the road to freedom, for "Washington and the White House are deciding the destinies of the nations".(46)
Claire Boothe had come to India, and together with General Brereton, met Nehru(47) before she flew to visit the Chinese front on 2 April with General Stilwell.
Claire Boothe sent a letter, dated 25 August, to Nehru who, then in prison, received it much later. Her messenger was Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate who lost in the presidential election in 1940 to Roosevelt. Willkie flew round the world in a US military bomber as the President's envoy in 1942-3. The rumour that he might visit India gave the British the jitters and through diplomatic pressure it was prevented.(48) In her letter Claire Boothe greeted Nehru as "the greatest and truest friend that the cause of Democracy and the cause of the United Nations has in all of Asia". She wrote: "The delivery of this letter in India by Mr Wendell Willkie means the thing of greatest importance to us, the United Nations, and to you, the Indian people". What message Willkie would convey to Nehru in a "face to face" talk between the two is not known, but before concluding, she wrote: "The hope that this letter carries is so much greater than any words can express that I feel foolish, inept, trying to put it into any words."(49) In India, the hopes of the US imperialists were pinned on Nehru.
For some time before and after Cripps' departure from India, Nehru went on emphasizing that nothing should be done to embarrass the British war efforts or those of the Americans who would be coming. He wanted "production to go on full speed ahead" and the Indian people "to resist the Japanese to the uttermost", even by resorting to guerrilla war. He told the press that he did not agree with Gandhi on the question of scorched earth policy.(50)
Though Nehru resolved to fight Hitler and Japan, he was not wholly without admiration for Hitler. While expressing his dislike for Hitler's "hideous gospel", he said on 21 February:
"...this can be said to his [Hitler's] credit that he represents something against the defunct order.... Hitler, in the way he dealt with unemployment, which England and America failed to solve, represented some elements of a progressive order."(51)
On 15 April Gandhi sent a message warning him. "I see no good", he wrote, "in entering into a guerrilla warfare when the American and Chinese forces enter India."(52)
It is worth noting that the Working Committee's resolution rejecting the Cripps proposals agreed in principle to the partition of India. Though the committee stood for the unity of India, the resolution stated:
"Nevertheless the Committee cannot think in terms of compelling the people in any territorial unit to remain in an Indian Union against their declared and established will."
As Sitaramayya observed,
"this passage concedes the division of India into more than one political State and gives the go-by to the unity and integrity of India."(53)
During the negotiations with Cripps, the Congress leaders did not "rule out the Pakistan idea".(54) In his confidential note to Louis Johnson, dated 11 May 1942, Nehru stated:
"While we are entirely opposed to the break-up of India and will try to prevent it, we recognize that in the last resort we cannot compel a territorial unit to remain in the Union against its declared and established will".(55)
It may be noted that in reply to Birla's letter of 14 July 1942, arguing in favour of the partition of India on religious lines, Mahadev, Gandhi's devoted secretary, wrote on 16 July:
"Now about your letter.... Bapu has given it careful attention.... The question is not of Pakistan or separation as such, but of the real content of these conception [sic!]."(55a)
Gandhi appeared to have had hardly any objection to the partition of India on religious lines: his concern was about the "content", that is, areas that might be claimed for inclusion within Pakistan.
The view that the Congress leaders felt obliged to accept partition in the interests of communal peace and freedom early in 1947 -- only after communal holocausts had started and after the functioning of the Interim Government in 1946-1947 had revealed to them the impossibility of working with the Muslim League -- a view propagated by Congress leaders like Rajendra Prasad, and others like Sumit Sarkar, is far from correct. The facts are: the Congress leaders exerted as much pressure on the British raj as possible to make a deal with them alone and hand over to them an undivided India (of course, within the imperial framework), but as `freedom' would be the product of negotiations between three parties -- the raj, the Congress and the League -- they were afraid from the time the League raised the demand for separation that "in the last resort" they would have to agree to the partition of India on a religious basis. More of it later.
The situation on the war-front grew from bad to worse. Early in April, Colombo, the capital of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Trincomalee, the headquarters of the British fleet, as well as Visakhapatnam and Kakinada in Andhra were bombed by the Japanese. The sea approaches to the Indian coast were commanded by the Japanese fleet. On the basis of a report of a spy about a projected invasion by the Japanese, Madras city was hastily evacuated. In a broadcast on 21 April, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian Army warned that "the Japanese may raid India. They may even seek to occupy a portion temporarily..." The British prepared a plan of adopting the scorched earth policy and blowing up even the Tata Iron and Steel Works at Jamshedpur, withdrawing from Assam and Bengal and building a new defence line across Bihar. As D.D. Kosambi wrote, the Japanese "had only to attack immediately in force for the whole of the so-called defence system to crumble..."(56)
The people's anti-British hatred became intense. The government forced people to evacuate their homes on one or two days' notice in many villages in some coastal areas of Bengal. Boats and cycles, the only or main means of communication and transport in many areas, were taken away from the people and their normal lives were disrupted.
When with the Japanese attack, the British fled from Malaya, the Indians there were left to fend for themselves. So with the Japanese occupation of Burma, the Indians there were forced to rely solely on themselves. Streams of refugees -- hundreds of thousands of them -- started on their long trek through inhospitable places into India, and were denied any protection or help by the British. On the contrary, invidious distinction was made between British and Indian evacuees. Separate routes were fixed for the whites and the browns; the former were provided with food, shelter and means of transport while the latter were denied them. Thousands of Indians perished on the `black road' for want of food and drink and due to diseases. On reaching India, the Indians were discriminated against as usual. Tales of horror to which they had been subjected spread throughout India and added to the people's hatred of the British raj.
Two factors caused resentment among the big bourgeois against the British. Those who had stakes in Malaya and Burma could hardly reconcile themselves to the losses. As the Governor of the Central Provinces, Twynham, wrote to Linlithgow, "the losses incurred in Malaya and Burma have stricken the Banias and Marwaris to the soul."(57) Second, the scorched earth policy that the government threatened to pursue in the event of Japanese penetration into India was a nightmare to the tycoons. They could hardly stomach the prospect of seeing their industries going up in flames. Edgar Snow, who met many of them at the time, wrote:
"Indian industrialists and capitalists were among the most suspicious and worried groups. Would not `scorched earth' ruin their factories?"(58)
Thakurdas strongly criticized the policy at the annual session of the FICCI on 8 March 1942, and the FICCI communicated its opposition to the Viceroy. On 27 March G.L. Mehta, FICCI president, issued a press statement criticizing such a policy.(59) Birla wanted Gandhi to write on `scorched earth': Mahadev assured him that Gandhi, who was "opposed to a scorched earth policy", would do so.(60) In an article Gandhi condemned the "Russian technique of scorched earth" and opposed its introduction in India.(61) But for some time he deferred "final judgement" so far as the forcible eviction of people from their homes, seizure of boats, etc., were concerned.(62)
The big compradors had hailed the war and desired it to last long, but such a war as would scorch their factories and reduce them to ashes was not to their taste. The illusion about the invincibility of British arms lay shattered before their eyes. A section of them waited to welcome the Japanese. Walchand Hirachand told Edgar Snow that "As for choice between the British and Japanese, frankly he preferred to take his chance with the latter".(63)
The Congress leadership was a divided house. Gandhi resented Nehru's call for co-operation with British war efforts and advocacy of guerrilla struggle against the Japanese in case of invasion. While warning Nehru, he advised Patel to resign from the Working Committee. He himself decided not to attend the next meeting of the Working Committee and the AICC at Allahabad on 27 April and subsequent days.(64)
Rajagopalachari was full of resentment at the rejection of the Cripps proposals and shared his feelings with the Madras governor, A. Hope. He told the governor that he would break with the Congress to form a new party, if the Working Committee would not reconsider their decision at its next meeting.(65) On his initiative the Madras Congress Legislature Party adopted two resolutions for consideration of the AICC: one, deeply regretting the failure to establish a `national government' in order to organize effective resistance against an invasion by a foreign aggressor and asking the AICC to accept the League demand for partition of India and not "to sacrifice the chances of the formation of a national government for the doubtful advantage of maintaining a controversy over the unity of India"; the other, proposing the restoration of the ministry in Madras.(66)
Azad had faith in the ultimate victory of the Allies but, unlike Nehru and Rajagopalachari, was for conditional co-operation with the British. He was opposed to extending co-operation to the British while they refused to concede any of their demands; he was also opposed to the launching of any anti-British struggle. And he did not agree to the League's demand for partition.
Patel, Prasad, Kripalani, etc., followed Gandhi unhesitatingly.
Gandhi decided to wait no longer. Two factors mainly shaped his decision: one, his conviction that Britain's defeat was imminent; the other, the British cabinet's scheme of allowing option to provinces to secede from the Indian Union. As he told the American journalist and author Louis Fischer, hardly had Cripps gone, the idea of asking the British to withdraw from India immediately "seized hold upon me".(67) The loss of Burma and the retreat of the British army into Egypt, the latest in the unbroken series of military disasters faced by the Allies, coincided with the Cripps visit and the moment of Gandhi's inspiration.
"I have waited long, and I can wait no longer", he asserted.(68) The apostle of non-violence affirmed: "We have to take risk of violence to shake off the great calamity of slavery." He would launch a non-violent movement but if violence broke out in spite of him, then it was God's wish. They would "have to take the risk of anarchy if God wills it". He hoped that "pure ahimsa will arise out of such anarchy".(69)
In the article "Foreign Soldiers in India", Gandhi looked upon "the introduction of foreign soldiers as a positive danger thoroughly to be deplored and distrusted". American aid would amount "in the end to American influence, if not American rule added to British". Second, he asked the British to leave India to her fate before being forced to do so as they were forced to leave Singapore. If they did as he desired, "non-violent India would not lose anything. Probably the Japanese would leave India alone." Third, "the Nazi power had risen as a nemesis to punish Britain for her sins of exploitation and enslavement of the Asiatic and African races." Fourth, with the withdrawal of the British, "The fiction of majority and minority will vanish like the mist before the morning sun of liberty. Truth to tell there will be neither majority nor minority in the absence of the paralysing British arms."(70)
Gandhi sent a draft resolution to be placed at the meetings of the Working Committee and the AICC due to meet at Allahabad on 27 and 29 April respectively.
The draft said :
First, "Britain is incapable of defending India."
Second, "Japan's quarrel is not with India" and "If India were freed her first step would probably be to negotiate with Japan". And "if the British withdrew from India, India would be able to defend herself in the event of Japanese or any aggressor attacking India."
Third, "the British should withdraw from India."
Fourth, on the withdrawal of the British from India the question of majority and minority, "which is a creation of the British Government,...would disappear".
Fifth, the draft resolution assured "the Japanese government and people that India bears no enmity either towards Japan or towards any other nation". It asked people "to offer complete non-violent non-co-operation to the Japanese forces" as well as to the British in the event of Japanese invasion and refusal of the British to withdraw.
Sixth, the draft opposed the scorched earth policy so far as it sought to destroy what belonged to or was of use to the masses.
Lastly, the resolution opposed the introduction of foreign soldiers and sought their removal from India.(71)
In a note in Harijan Gandhi wrote that it was the British presence which was "the incentive for the Japanese attack". If the incentive were taken away, the Japanese were not likely to attack India. Gandhi repeatedly stressed that when his movement would be launched "only against the British", the Japanese could "expect us to sign a neutrality pact with them". With the withdrawal of the British it would be possible "to come to terms with Japan".(72)
Criticizing Gandhi's draft resolution, which was supported by Patel, Prasad, Kripalani, etc., Nehru said at the Working Committee meeting:
"If Bapu's approach is accepted we become passive partners of the Axis Powers.... the whole thought and background of the draft is one of favouring Japan.... It is Gandhi's feeling that Japan and Germany will win."
Rajagopalachari said :
"Japan will fill the vacuum created by the British withdrawal.... Do not run into the arms of Japan, which is what the resolution comes to."
Sardar Patel warned Nehru and the others who differed:
"We have ever since the outbreak of war tried to pull together. But it may not be possible on this occasion. Gandhiji has taken a definite stand.... I am not in favour of making any approach to Jinnah.... I have placed myself in the hands of Gandhiji. I feel that he is instinctively right, the lead he gives us in all critical situations."
The CSP leaders, Narendra Deb and Achyut Patwardhan, who were among the invitees, supported the draft resolution as amended by Rajendra Prasad.(73)