The Indian Express (March 3, 1946)
‘Course of civilisation depends on settlement in India’
Task before Cabinet committee
By Prof. Harold J. Laski
LONDON (Mar. 1) – The mutiny which has broken out in the Indian Navy and Air Force, the grave street riots in Calcutta, Bombay and Karachi, the new intensity of the hostile feelings toward Europeans and the dread of approaching famine in India which may be arrested and mitigated but is tragically certain to cost many deaths in the next few months, all these combine to make swift action on the political plane imperative.
The parliamentary delegations which returned a few days ago were unitedly convinced that delay would be fatal. In their opinion, India is at that turning point where there must be swift agreement or a terrible catastrophe. The government has taken decisive action at the eleventh hour, it is sending out a cabinet committee to reinforce the Viceroy in negotiating a full settlement with India.
It is a powerful cabinet team. It includes Lord Pethwick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India; Α. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Sir Stafford Cripps, president of the Board of Trade, who so nearly succeeded in his own mission three years ago. For all practical purposes, whatever the cabinet committee can get agreed with the Indian leaders will be acceptable to the cabinet in London.
The committee will not be handicapped, as was Cripps, by having to work under the most rigid instructions and in the shadow of Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, who was as pompous as he was unimaginative. Lord Wavell is an admirable Viceroy and is not hidebound as was his predecessor by the conventions and ceremonials of office. Personally liked, it is generally understood that he realises the critical nature of the position.
The government’s anxiety to solve the problem was demonstrated by the careful and conciliatory statement on the mutiny made in the Commons by Prime Minister Attlee. It was a model of what such things should be. He did not condone the mutiny but there was no word of anger in what he said and an instant promise of investigation.
I think the Labour government now realises what the Labour party affirmed in its special conference in 1944, that peace depends on an Indian settlement. Attlee and his colleagues have made the kind of start the Churchill government should have made in 1940. If they succeed, they will have earned the gratitude not only of Britain but of the world.
No one can afford to deny the magnitude of their task. They will be dealing with a sullen and resentful people, suspicious of their good faith, fully convinced that almost any British proposal is bad because it is British, and sharing the tendency of most frustrated people to think more of past grievances than of future hopes. Hostility was increased between the Indian National Congress and the Moslem League by the latter’s insistence on the subdivision of India by the creation – I think it a fantastic proposal – of a Moslem state, Pakistan.
There is the difficult issue of the depressed classes and their social status in an anachronism like the Hindu orthodoxy; there are special claims of minorities like the Anglo-Indians, the Indicans, the Indian Christians and the Sikhs. The Indian princes have treaties with the British crown and will, no doubt, exhaust themselves by their efforts to retain their hereditary and mostly indefensible power. There is the interest of the European community in India, important because it has such powerful backing in Britain itself.
The negotiations are to take place with groups as complex and as hard to persuade as the groups who are, somehow, to conclude the European peace treaties. All Indians who matter are agreed on India’s right to independence. All are agreed that history has passed the stage where dominion status was adequate.
If the new India accepts association with the British Commonwealth of Nations, it must be as a free state, deciding for itself. If the Cabinet Committee does not start on that as the premise of negotiations, it might as well stay home. I think the psychology of the Indian situation leaves the committee no option but to start with the premise of independence.
The problem then becomes one of finding men with whom it can negotiate. Partly this depends on the result of the provincial elections, partly it depends on the Viceroy securing forthwith an all-Indian cabinet, not of his own chosen officials but of men and women who are accepted as representing great sectors of Indian opinion.
There is the difficulty of Jinnah’s insistence that he will not negotiate unless the concept of Pakistan is accepted in principle before the opening of the negotiations.
There is the difficulty of the scale of intrigues and manoeuvres which will weigh down each issue and each moment of the long task of arriving at agreement. There is the difficulty of public rumours. India is one of the most rumour-mongering countries in the world. In this aspect, the sheer clamour which will arise as every rumour goes on its expanding way is likely to be one of the major handicaps on the road to success.
There must be success. No one on any side can afford to contemplate failure. So that while British responsibility is heavy, I pray that Indians of all shapes and opinions may recognise that theirs is a heavy responsibility, too. They and the British committee are not merely making a constitution but, in a very real sense, may be deciding the fate of civilisation.
That is why all must enter the negotiations not with the resolve to get their claims a hundred percent, but with the passionate determination to arrive at a reasonable agreement. Jinnah has not merely to answer as to what he accepts to the Moslem League, but must answer to the whole future India. So, too, with the British committee, with Gandhi and Azad, with Nehru and Dr Ambedkar.
They have all come to the stage where, if they cannot see their demands in world perspective, they betray civilisation. Pot in their capacity to find common principles depends peace and war, the future of many nations and the whole shape of things to come in Europe as well as the Far East.
A successful agreement will immediately ease all the deep tensions in the Middle East. It will soften the acerbities of the Mediterranean issues. It will enable fuller attention to be given to the urgent tragedies of ravaged Europe and, not least of all, it will turn much of what is the finest of the political leadership of India from a destructive to a constructive task.
It will enable the Indians to give all their might and heart to what is the central problem of India – the power to transcend the ruthless, crippling poverty in which its 400 millions largely live.
I have been in favour of Indian independence for over 20 years, ever since, by mere chance, I sat in the English Amritsar libel case and learned at first hand the truth of the great saying that no nation is ever fit to govern another nation.
I believe that if we had the good fortune to make a treaty which will give a free India full right to govern itself and if that treaty is made in the spirit of magnanimity, its achievement will clear the dark atmosphere into which our civilisation has passed. It will begin the great task of using the victory of the Second World War to accomplish the aim for which it was fought.
The Attlee government has taken a big step forward. If its members in India go on patiently and fearlessly along the same path, they may find in India leaders with the same patience and lack of fear that this first step has revealed.
We have been in the dark and had an ugly time for more than a generation in the relations between Britain and India. I hope with all my heart that all those to whom this mighty issue has been confided will have the wisdom to draw back the curtain and let in the first light of dawn.