publicly acknowledging that it was one, even if remaining suspicious in
private of a war that the Congress believed still had imperialist objectives).
Nehru attempted to use his personal connections to sound out British
opinion, because the Congress could hardly lower the stakes on its initial
demand now that it had been made public. In December 1939, Stafford
Cripps visited India – this was the first visit of a man soon to be regarded
as an ‘expert’ on the ‘Indian problem’ – and met Nehru. Nehru asked
for a sign that he could sell to Indian opinion which would enable the
Congress to participate in the war effort with honour, and suggested to
him that a definite commitment from Britain on Indian independence
was essential – no sidetracking through the communal question was now
possible if agreement was to be reached with the Congress. Cripps assured
Nehru that Linlithgow had promised he would not exploit the Hindu–
Muslim question (Linlithgow had either lied to Cripps, or Cripps was
being economical with the truth).
Nehru had not been overly optimistic about Cripps’s semi-private
diplomatic initiative – at the time, Cripps had no official standing,
having been expelled from the Labour Party in January 1939, although
official opinion in Labour circles hoped his personal diplomacy might
have a positive impact – or the prospects of British policy taking any
of the discussions on board; in this his political judgement was sound.
‘I understand Cripps very well,’ Nehru wrote to Krishna Menon. ‘His visit
will make no difference to us, or very little, but I hope it will help him
to understand a little more of the Indian problem.’^9 By 1942, when Cripps
reappeared in India, he had been reincorporated within officialdom –
the demands of wartime politics had brought a national coalition into
being, and Cripps had from June 1940 to January 1942 been ambassador
to the USSR before returning to Britain and joining the Cabinet. For the
time being, he was engaged in personal diplomacy: in January 1940 he
wrote to Nehru from Chungking [Chongqing], ‘I want to do all I can to
encourage Trading and economic relationships between China and India
as in the future for a free India I am sure it will be important. There are
masses of openings of every kind from Finance to secondhand machinery.
Could your Congress people send a Trade Mission to Chungking...? It
sounds awfully capitalist but at the moment it is the only way to start
the relationships and also to help China where Great Britain is failing.’^10
The Congress had already sent a medical mission to the Communists’
Eighth Route Army; Nehru’s China visit was to have included a visit to108 THE END OF THE RAJ