In November 1945 Auchinleck Told London That Putting Down a New Rising Would Mean Reconquering India. Fifteen Months Later Britain Named the Date It Would Leave.

On Friday 22 February 1946 the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, gave the House of Commons a summary of the week in India. On Monday 18 February, he said, every rating below the rank of petty officer in HMIS Talwar, the Royal Indian Navy’s signal school at Bombay, had “refused duty.” By Wednesday 7,000 ratings had joined them. “The mutineers have been told that only unconditional surrender will be accepted,” Attlee said, and a cruiser of the Royal Navy was on its way.

Fifteen years earlier, on 23 March 1931, the Raj had hanged Bhagat Singh in Lahore. Indians argue about which of the two events did more to end British rule. Bhagat Singh’s life and Bose’s army each have their own piece here. This one is about what the British and Indian papers say when the two are put side by side, and about the historians who read them differently.

What the claim can carry

The claim usually comes in two halves. The first says non-violence alone did not end the Raj. The second says force, in Bhagat Singh’s tradition, did. The documents support the first half well. They support the second only in part.

The historian Peter Fay, who combined the published British papers on the transfer of power with the memories of INA veterans, judged that the army and the Red Fort trials gave Britain’s willingness to leave “a powerful, perhaps decisive, boost.” The introduction to the volume of Subhas Chandra Bose’s collected works edited by Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose says his strategy succeeded in “supplanting the loyalty of the Indian soldiers to their enslavers with a new loyalty to their country’s freedom.”

Bipan Chandra and his four co-authors, in India’s Struggle for Independence, answer that the popular picture of the barracks and street upsurges of 1945 to 1946, the naval revolt among them, is “quite out of touch with reality.” Britain left, they argue, because its “legitimacy to rule had been irrevocably eroded over the years,” by a Congress strategy that combined mass non-violent movements with constitutional politics. Two other historians give the revolutionaries more weight. Kama Maclean’s book on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), Bhagat Singh’s party, examines relations with Congress that its publisher calls “far less antagonistic than is frequently imagined.” Cambridge University Press describes Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists as “placing political violence at the center of India’s campaigns to win independence.” None of the passages quoted here puts a number on each strand’s share.

The record does not support the idea that the HSRA’s own actions drove the British out. By the account of Chandra and his co-authors, once Chandrashekhar Azad died in a shooting encounter in an Allahabad park in February 1931, the revolutionary movement “virtually came to an end” in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

A photograph on sale in every city

The hostile witness is the Raj’s own political police. In 1933 the Intelligence Bureau compiled a confidential handbook, India and Communism, with a preface signed by its director, H. Williamson. Of Bhagat Singh he wrote: “The prisoners’ dock became a political forum and the countryside rang with his heroics. His photograph was on sale in every city and township and for a time rivalled in popularity even that of Mr. Gandhi himself.” The same pages record that the Governor-General had to issue a special ordinance in 1930, “without which their trial might never have been brought to a conclusion.”

Pattabhi Sitaramayya, whose history of the Congress appeared in 1935, wrote about the Karachi session of March 1931: “It is no exaggeration to say that at that moment Bhagat Singh’s name was as widely known all over India and was as popular as Gandhi’s.” Young men had met Gandhi’s party at a station outside Karachi with a black flag demonstration, and Gandhi, in Sitaramayya’s telling, “gracefully received the black flowers from their hands.” The session passed a resolution that, in the words Chandra and his co-authors quote, disapproved of “political violence in any shape or form” while admiring “the bravery and sacrifice” of the three hanged men.

Nehru, in his autobiography, put the cause of the fame outside the bomb. Bhagat Singh “did not become popular because of his act of terrorism, but because he seemed to vindicate, for the moment, the honour of Lala Lajpat Rai, and through him of the nation.” He added that Bhagat Singh “became a symbol; the act was forgotten, the symbol remained.”

Seven weeks before the gallows

On 2 February 1931, from the condemned cell, Bhagat Singh wrote a letter To Young Political Workers. He expected to be misread. “Apparently I have acted like a terrorist,” he wrote. “But I am not a terrorist.” Then: “I do not mean that bombs and pistols are useless, rather the contrary. But I mean to say that mere bomb-throwing is not only useless but sometimes harmful.” The party’s armed wing, he said, “cannot and should not work independently.”

He had no more faith in the Congress leadership than in the bomb. The movement then under way, he wrote, was “bound to end in some sort of compromise or complete failure,” because “this time the real revolutionary forces have not been invited into the arena.” And: “The real revolutionary armies are in the villages and in factories, the peasantry and the labourers. But our bourgeois leaders do not and cannot dare to tackle them.” Gandhi and the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, signed their pact on 5 March.

In early 1930 the HSRA had put its case to Gandhi in harder terms. The Philosophy of the Bomb answered Gandhi’s Young India article ‘The Cult of the Bomb’, and Chandra and his co-authors say Bhagwati Charan Vohra drafted it at Azad’s request. It said: “Terrorism is not the complete revolution and the revolution is not complete without terrorism.” Chandra and his co-authors quote the 1931 letter and say that before his arrest in 1929 Bhagat Singh “had already” abandoned “his belief in terrorism and individual heroic action.”

Auchinleck’s two appreciations

On 31 October 1945 the commander-in-chief in India, Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, told the Secretary of State that “the Army as a whole will accept the policy of limited trials” and that “the majority view is that they are all traitors.” Fay quotes both lines.

The first Red Fort trial opened on 5 November. Next day the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, warned London of an attempt by Congress “to subvert by force the present administration in India.” Field Marshal Alanbrooke, chief of the imperial general staff, had been in Delhi the day before, read the note, and remarked that in serious disorders he had “no idea where the troops would come from.” On 16 November the Chiefs of Staff asked Auchinleck whether, if a second and larger Quit India rising came, he could rely on his Indian battalions.

Punjab, where the Indian Army found most of its fighting men, was reporting too. In Fay’s summary of a memorandum from the governor, Sir Bertrand Glancy, dated 17 November, most Punjabis thought the three accused were heroes, and a death sentence carried out would bring agitation worse than the one before the Amritsar massacre of 1919. On 24 November Auchinleck proposed an end to trials for treason and sent the Chiefs his answer. Without a firm declaration that force would be used, “the loyalty of the Indian Forces is likely progressively to deteriorate.” If a rising then came and the army failed, “To regain control of the situation, nothing short of an organised campaign for the reconquest of India is likely to suffice.”

Attlee wrote to Pethick-Lawrence on 6 December that everything depended on “the reliability and spirit of the Indian Army.” In a secret letter to senior British officers in February 1946, Auchinleck explained why he had remitted the sentences on the three officers. Indian officers admitted the offence was grave, but “practically all are sure that any attempt to enforce the sentence would have led to chaos in the country at large, and probably to mutiny and dissension in the Army, culminating in its dissolution.”

Fay reads the episode this way: the army “no longer had the capacity to compel.” Whether it would have obeyed an order to fire, “It is impossible to say.” He adds: “The Army was never put to the test.”

Seventy-eight ships

By the count in India’s Struggle for Independence, 78 ships and 20 shore establishments, with 20,000 ratings, were affected. The revolt began, its authors say, over “flagrant racial discrimination, unpalatable food and abuses.” It reached Karachi on 19 February, and sympathy strikes touched military units from Madras to Aden. Congress, Muslim League and Communist flags went up together on the masts. On 22 February, they write, two to three hundred thousand Bombay workers downed tools, and 228 civilians died in the city, with 1,046 injured.

In the Commons Attlee said the Congress Party “officially disclaim participation.” Callaghan, the member for South Cardiff, asked whether the men’s complaints would be investigated, “for which, I suggest, there is considerable justification.”

Indian leaders did not back the mutiny. Gandhi wrote from Poona on 23 February that it was “not, in any sense of the term, non-violent, action.” On 26 February: “It is a matter of great relief that the ratings have listened to Sardar Patel’s advice to surrender. They have not surrendered their honour.” He added that “they were thoughtless and ignorant if they believed that by their might, they would deliver India from foreign domination.” Patel had written to Nehru on 22 February that the naval and military force gathered in Bombay “is so strong that they can be exterminated altogether.” Jinnah’s advice to surrender, the book notes, was addressed to the Muslim ratings alone.

What Attlee told the Commons

On 15 March 1946, as the Cabinet Mission prepared to leave for India, Attlee told the Commons: “The temperature of 1946 is not the temperature of 1920 or of 1930 or even of 1942.” He had just described how the First World War had sped Indian ambitions. “A tide which runs slowly in peace becomes in wartime vastly accelerated,” he said. Then: “I am quite certain that at the present time the tide of nationalism is running very fast in India and, indeed, all over Asia.” And a little later: “Today I think that national idea has spread right through and not least, perhaps, among some of those soldiers who have given such wonderful service in the war.”

He did not name Gandhi. The three years he chose, 1920, 1930 and 1942, are the years of Gandhi’s three mass campaigns. The speech sets 1946 against those three earlier years and names the soldiers as part of what had changed. He also said that if India “elects for independence, in our view she has a right to do so.”

The Cabinet Mission had been announced on 19 February, the day after the mutiny began. Chandra and his co-authors give 22 January 1946 as the day the Cabinet took the decision, and say the announcement had been fixed a week before it was made. They call the argument that the mutiny prompted the Mission, which they trace to the Communist writer R. P. Dutt, “obviously untenable.”

On 20 February 1947 Lord Pethick-Lawrence read the government’s new statement to the Lords: “The present state of uncertainty is fraught with danger and cannot be indefinitely prolonged.” Britain, it said, intended to transfer power “by a date not later than June, 1948.” Its first paragraph noted in passing that “the Civil Administration and the Indian Armed Forces rely to a very large extent on Indian civilians and officers.” Power passed on 15 August 1947.

The case against

The strongest objection to the force thesis is the size of the mass movement. In the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 and 1931, which opened with the Salt March, over 90,000 people went to jail by Chandra’s count, more than three times the figure for Non-Cooperation in 1920 to 1922. By the end of 1942, the same authors write, over 60,000 had been arrested in the Quit India rising. On 31 August 1942 the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, wired Churchill that he faced “by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857,” Fay records. Fifty-seven battalions, perhaps 40,000 men, were in the field at the height of it. Fay adds that non-violent tactics in that rising “coexisted uneasily with, or collapsed before, the violent instincts of individuals and mobs.”

The second objection is what the British did in February 1946. In the Chandra account the revolt showed that “the British wherewithal to repress was intact.” Wavell’s verdict a few days after the strike began was: “On the whole, the Indian army has been most commendably steady.” Contrary to a popular belief that Indian troops refused to fire, they add, a Maratha battalion rounded up the ratings in Bombay, and six ratings were killed forcing the surrender at Karachi.

The third is the Viceroy’s own estimate, which they quote: “We could still probably suppress such a revolt but we have nothing to put in its place and should be driven to an almost entirely official rule, for which the necessary numbers of efficient officials do not exist.” British officers in the Indian Civil Service, they add, fell from 587 in 1940 to 429 in 1946. Both camps can use that sentence.

The fourth is money. By the end of 1945 India held £1,321 million in sterling balances in London, which the economist Marcelo de Paiva Abreu sets against the $4,400 million of the Anglo-American loan and lend-lease settlement. Abreu’s paper concerns the balances, not the decision to leave.

The story of the word minimal

In 1956, according to a letter first printed in 1978, Attlee told P. B. Chakrabarty, then Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, that the main reason Britain left was the erosion of Indian soldiers’ and sailors’ loyalty, which he put down to Bose’s military activities, and that Gandhi’s influence was “minimal.” The retired army officer G. D. Bakshi repeats it in Bose: An Indian Samurai.

The only source is Chakrabarty’s letter of 30 March 1976, twenty years after the talk. A facsimile appears in an appendix to the Bengali historian R. C. Majumdar’s memoir Jibaner Smritideep (1978). We could not examine that book. A fact-check republished by Counterview in September 2022 finds no corroboration and says that nowhere else in Attlee’s speeches and writings does he say anything like it. After Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948 Attlee, as Prime Minister, said: “For a quarter of a century this one man has been the major factor in every consideration of the Indian problem.”

Father of the Nation, on the radio

On 6 July 1944, with the INA fighting on the Imphal front, Subhas Chandra Bose broadcast a message to Gandhi. His collected works print it as “Father of Our Nation.” Bose told Gandhi: “For Indians outside India, you are the creator of the present awakening in our country.” Of his side’s view of non-violence he said: “These men and women honestly feel that the British Government will never surrender to persuasion or moral pressure or non-violent resistance. Nevertheless, for Indians outside India, differences in method are like domestic differences.”

Gandhi answered after the war. To senior INA officers in 1946 he said: “You failed in your direct objective, i.e. to defeat the British. But you have the satisfaction that the whole country has been roused and even the regular forces have been stirred into a new political consciousness and have begun to think in terms of independence.”

Set side by side, the papers fit a narrower claim than either camp makes. The mass movement is the tide Attlee named in 1946, with 1920, 1930 and 1942 as its marks. The army’s reliability is what Auchinleck and Wavell wrote about in private. Fay and Chandra differ over how heavily the second weighed against the first: “a powerful, perhaps decisive, boost” in one account, one pressure on a government already persuaded that its legitimacy had gone in the other. Bhagat Singh, in his letter of February 1931, put the weight on the villages and factories.

Bose ended the broadcast of 6 July 1944 by turning to Gandhi: “Father of our nation: In this holy war for India’s liberation, we ask for your blessings and good wishes.”