the Eighth Route Army in the north-western field of operation against the
Japanese, and to the Congress Medical Mission there, when his trip was
cut short by the outbreak of war, and a trade mission to the Guomindang’s
headquarters would have been an appropriate hedging of bets for
the future. Both Nehru and Cripps had individually been struck by the
ineffectiveness of the Guomindang and of the non-functioning of the
GMD–Chinese Communist Party’s united front against the Japanese.
Meanwhile, the bargaining over possible cooperation continued. In
May 1940, Winston Churchill, the old enemy of Indian independence,
took control over a wartime coalitional government. On August 8, 1940,
during the Battle of Britain, an ‘August offer’ was made, so hedged about
with reservations that all parties in India rejected it. It offered an
expansion of the Viceroy’s Executive Council to include more Indians, and
dominion status within twelve months of the end of the war. The Congress
was waiting for a better offer – this was not much more than a repetition
of the viceroy’s offer of October 17, 1939. A concern for world opinion
dictated what was offered to India at the time; but by May 1940,
Linlithgow and Home Member Sir Reginald Maxwell had also prepared
the Revolutionary Movements Ordinance in case they should need it
against a large-scale civil disobedience campaign.
Gandhi now devised what he thought was an appropriate tactic for the
Congress’s response to British rebuffs: ‘individual satyagraha’. This was a
curious form of political protest, driven by the need to do something
rather than the desire to be effective. His earlier, interim response to the
declaration of war had required provincial ministries not to resign but to
refrain from providing more than moral support to the war effort; now,
‘individual satyagraha’ was to oppose government censorship regulations
on free speech but not to embarrass the government – so it was to be a
symbolic sort of movement, although it was to pick up speed over time.
The first person selected by Gandhi as morally disciplined enough to
undertake this activity was his close disciple, Acharya Vinoba Bhave. The
second was Nehru, who was profoundly sceptical about the usefulness of
opposing such minor details of British policy as censorship regulations at
such a time. But if this was to be a game of symbolic politics, the govern-
ment was equally capable of responding with its own, not necessarily
symbolic, disciplining apparatus. The satyagrahis were arrested.
Nehru was sentenced on three charges (based on three speeches he
made), under the wartime Defence of India Rules, to one year and four
THE END OF THE RAJ 109