difficult to disaggregate the various motivations for popular unrest
even now; at the time, it was particularly difficult. What political leaders
saw was unrest, strikes, violence of various kinds, and almost millenarian
expectations of momentous change.
The Congress took up the cause of the INA officers. Nehru and
Bhulabhai Desai were on the INA defence committee, along with the
liberal, Tej Bahadur Sapru, who had so recently been able to accept a seat
as one of the eight Indians on Linlithgow’s Executive Council, Nehru
revisiting his past to dig out his barrister’s robes. In the outside world,
unrest attributed to the perceived persecution of members of the INA
was severe. In November 1945 and February 1946, there were serious
anti-European and anti-Eurasian riots in Calcutta. Processions through
the streets of several Indian cities alarmed the British by their show of
cross-sectarian solidarity, carrying flagpoles on which the flags of the
Congress, the Muslim League and the hammer and sickle of the CPI had
been tied together. In February 1946, the Royal Indian Navy mutinied,
protesting, among other things, differential pay rates for its white and
Indian members. Once again, a reluctant Congress was forced to provide
moral support retrospectively. The RIN mutiny underlined the fact that
the armed forces could no longer be relied upon to underpin British rule.
When the government decided to drop proceedings against the INA, they
were making a considered, strategic retreat; both sides had made their
symbolic moves; as head of the interim government, Nehru diplomatically
accepted a compromise on the issue of the remaining INA prisoners from
the new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten: a few individuals accused of specific
crimes rather than the generic charge of ‘waging war against the King’
remained in prison, the others were released.
Those who hoped for a united independent India saw this period as a
hopeful sign of a true popular nationalism replacing the ‘communalism’
of the kind promoted by the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha,
but this may well have been wishful thinking. This was another instance
of the mutual unintelligibility of elite and popular politics, even as their
paths diverged, interlocked or crossed over.128 THE END OF THE RAJ