istration and the soldiers of the Raj). In April 1919
a large crowd gathered in Amritsar in the Punjab.
The demonstrators were not armed, but in an
atmosphere in which rebellion seemed possible the
British commanding officer in Amritsar overre-
acted, committing an atrocity by ordering his
troops to fire on the crowd, killing more than 300
and wounding another thousand. For Gandhi this
act of bloody violence changed his outlook: there
could no longer be cooperation with the British
Raj. By a campaign of non-violent civil disobedi-
ence India would be made ungovernable.
Gandhi was imprisoned for a time, the first of
several arrests. In 1930 he led the famous salt
march 240 miles to the coast in defiance of the
government’s salt tax. Picking up a handful of
sand on the seashore, he boiled it to extract the
salt. By this simple act he demonstrated that salt
could be obtained from nature with no need to
pay the British Raj for it. His defiance reverber-
ated throughout India. He was arrested again,
only to be released later and sympathetically
received by the viceroy. He created a sensation
when attending, in his loincloth, a conference on
reforms in London in 1931. A renewal of civil dis-
obedience in India led to another spell in prison.
The popular British press might derisively refer to
Gandhi as the Indian ‘fakir’, but in official
London and Delhi he was regarded with a
mixture of irritation and admiration for the power
he wielded by his simple example; the Indians
called him Mahatma, ‘great soul’.
In the 1930s Britain tried again to advance
Indian representation. The Government of India
Act was passed in 1935. The Raj, after the civil dis-
obedience campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, had
become convinced that preparation for Indian
independence had to be taken seriously. The Act
of 1935 set up eleven British Indian provinces
with their own elected parliaments and limited
control over their affairs. The religious communal
groups would be placed on different electoral reg-
isters. A federal Indian state was the goal, with the
princely states free to join or not. Meanwhile the
viceroy reserved crucial powers to himself and, at
the centre, the nationalist Indian politicians would
have only limited influence. It looked like a work-
able compromise from the British point of view,
but to the leaders of the Indian National Congress
the centre would be too weak, the viceroy’s pow-
ers negated the demand for Indian independence
and the veto the conservative princes were to be
allowed would condemn India to a patchwork of
federated and independent states. Indian national-
ists suspected that the British, acting on the age-
old principle of ‘divide and rule’, were deliberately
encouraging religious and princely separation.
Only the provincial assemblies were elected in
1937 and only that part of the Act came into
force. This was nevertheless the start of the demo-
cratic parliamentary process in India and the
restricted electorate of some 35 million voters
overwhelmingly returned Congress members to
the provincial assemblies; local administrations
were then formed. But how little genuine power
had been devolved soon became evident. When
the viceroy in 1939 simply declared India to be at
war after Britain’s own declaration of war on
Germany, Indian national leaders were not even
consulted. The provincial ministries resigned. But
Congress had meanwhile grown in power, with a
legitimate electoral base – and so had the Muslim
League, of which Jinnah was president.
After the outbreak of war in 1939 the viceroy of
India had to revert to direct rule, since Congress
led by Gandhi and Nehru had refused their coop-
eration and had brought the constitutional
advances of the Government of India Act, which
they hated, to an end. India’s reaction to the out-
break of war in Europe and the Middle East, a
fight for survival for the mother country, was
split. On the one hand, the nationalist politicians
were uncooperative; on the other, the Indian
army fought with bravery and distinction under
British and Indian officers far away from home,
in the Middle East, in North Africa and later in
Italy. Their loyalty was never in doubt.
With the sudden Japanese attack on Malaya in
December 1941, British, Commonwealth and
Indian troops fought together; tens of thousands
were inhumanely treated in Japanese prison
camps, beaten, starved and killed. For the Indian
soldiers the Japanese offered an escape, to join an
Indian liberation army sponsored by the Japanese.
Even when the only major Indian nationalist who
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