THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAto distribute grain in Bengal, but by that time the famine had already
claimed its victims, many of whom had died within sight of rice bags
whose contents they could no longer afford to buy and which they did not
dare to snatch because they were used to a regime which maintained law
and order very rigorously.
Subhas Chandra Bose, who had escaped to Germany in the hope of
enlisting Hitler’s support for the Indian freedom movement, was
thoroughly disappointed there and by the time he reached Japan—where
Hitler had sent him after a great deal of prevarication and delay—there
was no longer much scope for Bose’s initiative. He organised an ‘Indian
National Army’ recruited from among Indian prisoners-of-war in
Southeast Asia and some units of this army did actually reach Indian soil at
Imphal in the course of the Japanese conquest of Burma. But then the great
retreat began and the cause of India’s liberation from outside was lost.
Bose’s heroic endeavour still fires the imagination of many of his
countrymen. But like a meteor which enters the earth’s atmosphere, he
burnt brightly on the horizon for a brief moment only. He died even before
the war was over, in an aircraft which is thought to have crashed while
flying over Taiwan.
In the last years of the war, when they felt sure of an Allied victory, the
British in India kept the nationalists at bay. When Gandhi went on a fast in
prison in order to protest against British accusations that he was
responsible for the ‘August revolution’, his jailers kept sandalwood ready
for his funeral pyre and were not at all alarmed at the prospect of his dying
in their custody. Gandhi, however, survived and in May 1944 was released
for reasons of health. His talks with Jinnah later that year ended without a
result. The freedom movement had been eclipsed in the last years of the
war by the debate about the partition of India demanded by Jinnah.
No longer Gandhi but Jinnah dominated the political scene. The British
were looking forward to the end of the war with some trepidation. The
unrest in the aftermath of the First World War was still within living
memory, and even more demobilised soldiers were returning to India this
time. They had seen a great deal of the world and knew how to handle
modern weapons. Postwar economic problems were also going to be
difficult to cope with. Gandhi had asked the British to ‘Quit India’ in 1942.
‘Divide and Rule’ had been a safe watchword for a long time; now they
found another one: ‘Divide and Quit’.
The partition of India
Like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Mohammad Ali Jinnah had
asked for his pound of flesh; he did not, however, find a Portia willing to
concede it to him provided that no drop of blood be spilled by its
excision. Much blood was spilled when India was divided. Millions of