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Authors: Yasmin Khan
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death for “twenty English dogs” for every INA man executed.’ 16 Ultimately, during the Partition that ensued, Indians turned against each other rather than against Europeans, but it was not immediately apparent that this would be the case.
Power was slipping out of British hands and morale in the civil service, especially among European officers, reached its nadir. ‘Many of them are feeling the reaction from the strain of the war years here, and see little prospect of constructive or pleasant work,’ reported the Governor of Assam on the anxious atmosphere among his civil service cadre. ‘Among subordinates there is an increasing uneasiness and feeling that it might be wise to ally oneself with the winning side’, while among British military officers there was an itchy impatience to return home. From Bombay, by the beginning of the following year, the assessment was that 70 per cent of the European civil service officers were ‘in a mood to go this year’. 17 The anti-imperial rhetoric became ever more grandiloquent and nationalist leaders deftly fused the post-war economic strains, the memory of the Bengal famine and the suppression of the 1942 movement into a powerful invective against British rule.
The stout, mustachioed leader Pandit Pant, an influential Congressman and linchpin of the party in the United Provinces, looked out at a packed crowd of faces in a village in the district of Benaras, in the plains of the River Ganges. Like many others, he had abandoned a promising legal career in the 1920s and had dedicated his life to the Congress. He had been beaten and left disfigured in
lathi
charges, and had spent years in prisons, sharing a cell with Nehru who had become a close ally. On the raised platform, garlanded with heavy strings of flowers, he saw around him villagers who eagerly anticipated freedom, or
swaraj
. Two members of this village had died in 1942 during clashes with the British during the Quit India movement. Now Pandit Pant did not curb his words. ‘These days poor women cannot afford to buy cloth to cover their bodies,’ he told his listeners. ‘Bribery is so much rampant that nothing is available without greasing the palms of officers. In Bengal,
lakhs
of people died and nobody knows even their names. But they all have become martyrs and their matyrdom will be recorded in history in letters of gold. Now we can no longer tolerate the misbehaviour of officials. We have to finish the present Government and throw it away in the sea.’ 18
Congress politicians, trying to keep abreast of the popular mood, did not rein in their words as they might have done in the past. The ruthlessness with which the Quit India agitation had been suppressed was fresh in the memory of Congress supporters, and British officials were starting to resort once again to the degrading suppression of political agitation; the Whipping Act was being applied in cases of rioting in Bombay. As in so many other cases, authoritarian violence was a product of a government in a position of weakness rather than flowing from a position of strength.
Things went from bad to worse for the imperial state when a dynamic outburst greeted the British attempt to prosecute three officers of the Indian National Army at the end of the war. The officers were leaders of the break-away force that had been recruited from Indian army prisoners of war, after the Malayan campaign and the fall of Singapore, and had, under the command of Subhas Chandra Bose, fought with the Japanese in an attempt to dislodge British imperialism from the subcontinent. Soldiers captured while fighting for the INA had been court-martialled in 1943 and 1944 but the Indian public's sympathy for the rebellious army was subdued until the British decided to hold public trials of several hundred INA prisoners, seven thousand of whom had been dismissed from service and detained without trial. 19 Three officers, Prem Kumar Seghal, Shahnawaz Khan and Gurbaksh Dillon, were
Power was slipping out of British hands and morale in the civil service, especially among European officers, reached its nadir. ‘Many of them are feeling the reaction from the strain of the war years here, and see little prospect of constructive or pleasant work,’ reported the Governor of Assam on the anxious atmosphere among his civil service cadre. ‘Among subordinates there is an increasing uneasiness and feeling that it might be wise to ally oneself with the winning side’, while among British military officers there was an itchy impatience to return home. From Bombay, by the beginning of the following year, the assessment was that 70 per cent of the European civil service officers were ‘in a mood to go this year’. 17 The anti-imperial rhetoric became ever more grandiloquent and nationalist leaders deftly fused the post-war economic strains, the memory of the Bengal famine and the suppression of the 1942 movement into a powerful invective against British rule.
The stout, mustachioed leader Pandit Pant, an influential Congressman and linchpin of the party in the United Provinces, looked out at a packed crowd of faces in a village in the district of Benaras, in the plains of the River Ganges. Like many others, he had abandoned a promising legal career in the 1920s and had dedicated his life to the Congress. He had been beaten and left disfigured in
lathi
charges, and had spent years in prisons, sharing a cell with Nehru who had become a close ally. On the raised platform, garlanded with heavy strings of flowers, he saw around him villagers who eagerly anticipated freedom, or
swaraj
. Two members of this village had died in 1942 during clashes with the British during the Quit India movement. Now Pandit Pant did not curb his words. ‘These days poor women cannot afford to buy cloth to cover their bodies,’ he told his listeners. ‘Bribery is so much rampant that nothing is available without greasing the palms of officers. In Bengal,
lakhs
of people died and nobody knows even their names. But they all have become martyrs and their matyrdom will be recorded in history in letters of gold. Now we can no longer tolerate the misbehaviour of officials. We have to finish the present Government and throw it away in the sea.’ 18
Congress politicians, trying to keep abreast of the popular mood, did not rein in their words as they might have done in the past. The ruthlessness with which the Quit India agitation had been suppressed was fresh in the memory of Congress supporters, and British officials were starting to resort once again to the degrading suppression of political agitation; the Whipping Act was being applied in cases of rioting in Bombay. As in so many other cases, authoritarian violence was a product of a government in a position of weakness rather than flowing from a position of strength.
Things went from bad to worse for the imperial state when a dynamic outburst greeted the British attempt to prosecute three officers of the Indian National Army at the end of the war. The officers were leaders of the break-away force that had been recruited from Indian army prisoners of war, after the Malayan campaign and the fall of Singapore, and had, under the command of Subhas Chandra Bose, fought with the Japanese in an attempt to dislodge British imperialism from the subcontinent. Soldiers captured while fighting for the INA had been court-martialled in 1943 and 1944 but the Indian public's sympathy for the rebellious army was subdued until the British decided to hold public trials of several hundred INA prisoners, seven thousand of whom had been dismissed from service and detained without trial. 19 Three officers, Prem Kumar Seghal, Shahnawaz Khan and Gurbaksh Dillon, were