214 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
India if it was rid of the British presence. He regarded the “ordered an-
archy” represented by the British raj to be worse than “real anarchy.” In
the spring of 1942, the apostle of nonviolence was even “prepared to
take the risk of violence” to end “the great calamity of slavery.”^32
Since October 1941, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Lieutenant
General Oshima Hiroshi, and the military attaché, Colonel Yamamoto
Bin, had been holding meetings with Subhas Chandra Bose. The Japa-
nese military victories in Southeast Asia, Bose’s activities abroad, and
Gandhi’s increasingly militant mood combined to cause great nervous-
ness among British war leaders. Winston Churchill came under pres-
sure from the U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and from his own
Labour party colleagues in the British government, to do something
to conciliate Indian nationalist opinion. Stafford Cripps had returned
from a successful stint as British ambassador to Moscow, and had
joined the cabinet a few days after the fall of Singapore. The British
viceroy in India, Lord Linlithgow, was a hard-liner opposed to any con-
cessions to Indian demands. In late January he had reported the exis-
tence of “a large and dangerous 5th column in Bengal, Assam, Bihar
and Orissa,” and said he regarded the “potential of pro- enemy sympa-
thy and activity in Eastern India” to be “enormous.” “Sarat Bose has
been a lesson,” the viceroy told L. S. Amery, the secretary of state for
India. “India and Burma,” Linlithgow wrote in prose that would have
done Macaulay proud, “have no natural association with the empire,
from which they are alien by race, his tory and religion, and for which
as such neither of them have any natural affection, and both are in
the empire because they are conquered countries, which have been
brought there by force, kept there by our controls, and which hitherto
it has suited to remain under our protection.”^33 After the British sur-
rendered at Singapore and fled from Rangoon, Linlithgow’s candid
observations sounded like obduracy in London. With the utmost reluc-
tance, the British prime minister agreed to send Cripps on a mission to
India, hoping both that it would placate his ally across the Atlantic and
that it would fail.
Having shed his Ital ian disguise, Bose was ready to take full advan-
tage of the military and psychological repercussions of the fall of Sin-
gapore. On February 26, 1942, he submitted an ambitious eleven- point