sense of the impending end of British rule. Linlithgow wrote to Churchill
at the end of August that the rebellion was ‘by far the most serious
rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so
far concealed from the world for reasons of military security.’^20 The Quit
India Movement of 1942 has acquired the status of legend in the Indian
nationalist imagination, but it is a much disputed legend. Retrospectively
it has been described as the ‘almost revolution’, the expression of collec-
tive national consciousness, a spontaneous outburst of anti-imperialist
anger. In some versions, this revolution was betrayed by the perfidious
Communist Party of India, who refused to support the movement because
the Soviet Union was by this time among the allies of Britain in the
war. This view was particularly strong among the Congress Socialists,
many of whom played an important leadership role once the Congress
leadership was in jail, organising popular resistance, including acts of
sabotage of communications that lasted far longer than popular protest
and violence. In reality, although the CPI’s leadershipdecided not to back
the movement, so as not to disrupt the anti-fascist war effort, many party
members participated in the movement. It should also be remembered
that throughout the 1930s, the CPI (having been illegal since 1934) had
worked from within the CSP, and many among the primary levels of active
political workers were unused to making sharp distinctions between the
CPI and the umbrella organisation of which they were a part. A further
irony, of course, was that several of the Congress’s own leaders, Nehru
among them, had argued strongly against anti-British agitation at that
juncture.
The British government’s response was brutal. Secretary of State
Leo Amery decided that one of the best ways to restore order at minimal
cost to British manpower was to bomb or machine-gun agitating crowds
from the air. Churchill and Amery had pioneered this policy in the 1920s
in Iraq during their respective stints as Secretary of State for the Colonies
(the airman responsible then for bombing the Kurdish population being
‘Bomber’ Harris, later immortalised for another bombing of civilian
populations in Dresden). Additional forms of chastising the errant natives
included imposing collective fines on entire villages from which people
had been deemed to have participated in the movement, and public
floggings of individuals in order to set an example to others. Amery
qualified the punishment regime somewhat: there should be no fines for
Muslim villages (Muslim participation was not very high – according,
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