purpose. But in making such an offer, he had apparently overshot the
mark, and was forced to climb down, saying he had been misunderstood.
The pressures on him were obvious: the viceroy, Linlithgow, continuously
complained to London that his authority was being undermined, and
Churchill telegraphed Cripps that he had not been authorised to offer
so much. At any rate, the Congress and the Muslim League rejected the
Cripps proposals, and the Mission had failed.
AFTER THE CRIPPS MISSION: THE DEBATE WITHIN
THE CONGRESS, AND THE QUIT INDIA MOVEMENT
With the Cripps Mission having failed, and the Japanese fast approaching
the north-eastern frontiers of British India, the Congress sat down to
debate terms of possible cooperation or conflict with the government. This
was now a hard debate within the Congress, watched anxiously at every
step of the way by the British, whose intelligence services and reporters
worked overtime. The working committee was divided on what approach
to take. It was, however, generally felt that the British had demonstrated
their lack of good faith conclusively; moreover, many had begun to feel
that the time for a compromise with the British was over, and the more
pressing need was for a beginning of negotiations with the advancing
Japanese, who were almost inevitably going to enter India in the near
future. Gandhi’s succinct statement on the Cripps offer – a ‘post-dated
cheque’ (to which a journalist had added ‘on a crashing bank’)^17 – summed
up the mood. Gandhi himself said that India had no quarrel with the
Japanese; it was Britain that was at war with Japan. Such statements were
given much publicity by the government’s propaganda departments
during the war to demonstrate the Congress’s defeatist position and
thereby to justify the incarceration of the Congress leaders.
But Gandhi’s statement represented only one side of the debate; and
he was by no means clear about what he anticipated. Paper positions,
clarified retrospectively, do not altogether reflect the dilemmas and
confusions of those anguished days of debate, in which the old alignments
of left and right were no indication of what position someone might take.
Gandhi took the most militant line of his career, backed by a combination
of the Congress’ right wing and some members of the CSP; strong action
was opposed by some moderates as well as by the CPI, for different reasons.
Nehru, on the latter side, argued that it was not possible to do a deal with
THE END OF THE RAJ 115