India and the Quest for One World

The Peacemakers

M. Bhagavan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137349835
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

India and the Quest for One World revolutionizes the history of human rights, with dramatic impact on some of the most contentious debates of our time, by capturing the exceptional efforts of Mahatma Gandhi and the Nehrus to counter the divisions of the Cold War with an uplifting new vision of justice built on the principle of "unity in diversity."

1

The World at War

Staring into the abyss

In the summer of 1941, the world trembled in fear. The Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan had unleashed devastating force in campaign after successful campaign. Adolf Hitler had launched his blitzkrieg on Europe two years back, taking Poland, France and the Netherlands, and had now begun a major assault on the Soviet Union, in contravention of the Hitler–Stalin pact. German and Italian forces were spread throughout Northern Africa. And Japan, already deep inside China, was pushing into Southeast Asia.¹ How had it come to this?

The First World War (also known as the Great War) which had come to an end with the Armistice of 1918 and the Peace at Versailles in 1919 between the Allied Powers (which included Great Britain, France and the United States) and Germany was supposed to have been the war to end all wars. Most Europeans were exhausted from the fighting, worn down by the grinding attrition of trench warfare. They longed for peace and wanted to stay out of conflict at any cost.

Versailles had captured the mood of many, and the imagination of millions. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, had put forward his Fourteen Points, a set of principles and plans through which Wilson sought to establish lasting peace in Europe. Among the most innovative of Wilson’s proposals was a suggestion to establish a new international organization dedicated to partnership and an enduring alliance of all states. It was to be a League of Nations.

But Wilson failed to sell his plan to his own people, and the United States ultimately rejected membership in the new institution. Without the United States, the League could not hold universal sway. Powers squabbled among themselves and the organization proved incapable of carrying out its mission to head off conflicts and diplomatically solve international crises.

The League led a short and troubled life, its decline mirroring the deteriorating emotional health of Europe and the larger world in the face of a new looming threat. There was real euphoria at the end of the Great War, but the Treaty of Versailles (and several related agreements such as the Treaties of St. Germain and Sèvres) created an imperfect peace from the start. The United States, which had entered the conflict only at the last moment, remained reluctant to involve itself politically in the affairs and squabbles of Europe, though economically and culturally it embraced numerous ties.² Britain and France were utterly depleted by the war, and developed a revulsion to further conflict. Both countries were deeply in debt to the United States, which refused to forgive their loans. Since they equally desired to exact punitive revenge on the Germans, the victorious powers devised an elaborate system to resolve the matter. Germans would have to pay heavy reparations to the British, the French and the Belgians, who in turn would pay the United States back with the money. But first the Germans would receive the money to pay for reparations in loans from the United States.³

The arrangement left the Germans feeling humiliated and resentful, a perfect environment for Hitler to breed his hate. Hitler spelled out his racialized view of the world in his Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926. As the book came to be circulated widely in Germany and Europe, Hitler used his warped charisma to rise to power. He lashed out at perceived enemies, especially Jews and Marxists.⁴

When the American stock market crashed in 1929, the loans–reparations–repayments triangle collapsed as American banks tried to pull their money back in. Governments canceled both reparations and loans to contain the crisis but simply did not act fast enough, and the Great Depression soon spread globally.⁵

In the United States, the Depression led to the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) in late 1932. In his “First Hundred Days,” Roosevelt moved quickly to combat the Depression, his policies coalescing into his New Deal. His warm, ebullient personality also helped fight the utter despair of the times, forging a new bond between the American people and the government.⁶

Inversely, the weak republican government of Germany did not address the situation effectively, and the resulting turmoil gave Hitler and his Nazis greatly increased support, reflected in rising parliamentary strength. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and weeks later used a mysteriously set fire at the Reichstag building (home of the German Parliament) to increase his authoritarian powers and crush his opposition.⁷ Within a year and a half, he had absolute control over the German state.

Hitler was determined to create a new German empire. He wanted a purified space for Germans to live and operate, free of the other peoples of the world he deemed inferior. To help accomplish his goals, Hitler entered into an uneasy alliance with Italy and Japan, both of which had sided with the Allies in the First World War, but were unhappy with their spoils of victory. Both Italy and Japan wanted to increase their spheres of control, the former into Africa, the latter into China and the rest of Asia.

Each of the three had begun expanding in the late 1930s, notching up several major victories. The Western powers were unable to effectively meet these challenges. The Soviet Union was jolted by Japanese attacks in 1938 and 1939. In China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai–shek and his Kuomintang withdrew inward in the face of Japanese aggression.⁸

Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 finally led France and Great Britain, with their empires in tow, to declare war. The United States, although neutral, would, in time, begin to aid the Western powers. In January 1941, Roosevelt used his annual speech on the State of the Union to rally the American people with a new call to support the Four Freedoms essential to liberty: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear.⁹ All four, Roosevelt argued, were at risk because of the Axis.

Over the year, FDR increased American support for the war effort. He reached out to the Soviet Union after they had been surprise attacked by the Germans in Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, despite the Hitler-Stalin pact’s mutual agreement of nonaggression. Shortly thereafter, the United States and Great Britain laid out the principles of what would become known as the Atlantic Charter, a vision for the post-war world essentially founded on the Four Freedoms.

The United States officially entered the war after the Japanese surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7. Weeks later, those who stood against the Axis signed onto the Declaration of United Nations in support of the Atlantic Charter. A new global alliance was born, and with it, the prospect of a new post-war world.

The crisis of imperialism

As the war raged, nationalists in India struggled to find the right response. Throughout the 1930s, they had been in discussions with the British government on the nature of some kind of post-colonial settlement. The British government in India had passed an Act in 1935 that served as a new constitution. The Act authorized national elections and enfranchised most of the indigenous population. Hope for full freedom from the colonial yoke had grown steadily over these years. But after the German Anschluss with (annexation of) Austria and as the Nazis marched across the Sudetenland expanding their control into Czechoslovakia, Britain and the other European powers had to focus their eyes closer to home.

As the British focused their attention on Hitler, Indians turned their gaze toward Gandhi. By the late 1930s, Mohandas K. Gandhi had emerged as the unquestioned leader of the Indian nationalist movement. There were, of course, nationalists of many different stripes, with varying ideologies and agendas, and a host of organizations, from the Communist Party of India to the religious nationalist Hindu Mahasabha, vied for legitimacy and authority. But Gandhi’s Indian National Congress was the most important organization for much of the early twentieth century, and by far the most dominant power, further strengthened by the elections that followed the 1935 Act, when they emerged as the victor in virtually every contest.

For Gandhi and his colleagues, the underlying cause of the new world war, as much as the previous, was imperialism. Expansionist policies, racist views and the will to dominate inevitably led to conflict and grief. Imperialism simply found its most egregious expression in Hitler.

This was a troublesome conclusion, for it clouded the way forward. In the wars that Gandhi had lived through previously, especially the Great War, he had sided with the British. Though an ardent champion of non-violence, he had argued that the British, on the wrong side of many issues related to India, were nonetheless friends and good people. It was India’s obligation to come to their aid as best they could. Gandhi organized an ambulance corps, and later even urged his compatriots to join the war effort. While non-violence was his paramount concern, he had to balance his belief in this principle with his sense of obligation to his colonial brethren. British promises to reward India for her support no doubt figured in the equation.

But the British did not follow through on these pledges. So when it appeared in the late 1930s that Britain would again have to forego their commitments to India to face down another war, Indians generally, and Gandhi in particular, were hesitant. Britain could not simply take Indian support for granted. Imperialism was an evil that had to be removed, as much for Britain’s soul as India’s mortal condition.

So in 1938, the Congress passed a resolution at its meeting in Haripura adopting an anti-war stance. They specifically charged Great Britain with fighting to defend their imperial interests, rather than the cause of liberty as they claimed.

Gandhi also wrote if not favorably of Hitler, at least of him as an opponent who needed to be confronted the same as any other. He counseled negotiation and reason and saw no reason why Hitler, as the British themselves with regard to India, could not eventually be made into a friend.¹⁰

But as the 1940s dawned, so too did the realization that Hitler was someone categorically different from almost any other person Gandhi had encountered. Gandhi had trouble coming to terms with this. His entire philosophy and way of life was premised on the ideal that anyone—everyone—could feel the kinship of humanity. By resisting opponents in a certain way—one that treated them with respect and dignity while simultaneously shedding none of one’s own—a certain empathic bond would be created between the clashing parties. It was Gandhi’s universal principle, and it meant that all people, in a sense, were one. All were capable of realizing the error of their ways, and thus all were potentially good.

Hitler confounded this view. Gandhi struggled with reconciling his deeply held beliefs with Hitler’s existence. Gradually, he came to see Hitler as the exception to the rule. Hitler was the opposite of everything that Gandhi stood for, the Moriarty to Gandhi’s Holmes. He was Gandhi’s negative and had to be stopped. But for Gandhi, there was only one way to achieve this. He counseled: “Hitlerism will never be defeated by counter-Hitlerism …. If my argument has gone home, is it not time for us to declare our changeless faith in non-violence?”¹¹

Gandhi saw Hitler as the ultimate expression of violence, and thus only non-violence could effectively combat this kind of threat. If Hitler was beyond reach, this was not so for the millions of Germans who followed him. They could be touched, and empathic bonds built, he concluded.

But few understood these details of Gandhi’s thinking. To many people, even his closest friends and admirers, Gandhi seemed erratic. Many feared that the old man was in decline. To an extent, Gandhi realized his own marginalization and therefore named Jawaharlal Nehru his successor in January 1942.

Nehru was Gandhi’s dashing lieutenant. He came from a family of great privilege—Kashmiri Brahmins who had moved to Delhi in the service of the Mughal Empire. Nehru’s father, Motilal, was an acclaimed and wealthy lawyer and a prominent member of the Indian National Congress in his day.¹²

Growing up, Nehru wore his aristocratic pedigree on his sleeve. He was schooled at Harrow in Britain, and completed his higher education at Trinity College at Cambridge University.

But Nehru was one of the first to fully realize Gandhi’s significance and soon became the Mahatma’s closest friend and associate. The two shared a deep bond, even if they did not always see eye to eye on matters.

In 1942, with Nehru’s future as leader now official, the Congress high command had to confront an unhappy membership. Nearly three years had passed since the war had begun and Britain’s attention remained far from India. Everyone realized what the United Kingdom and its Allies were up against, but they also felt the needs of India’s millions could no longer be pushed aside. As early as 1939, the Congress had broached the idea of supporting Britain’s war effort in return for independence, though these efforts gained no traction.

In March 1942, finally, Winston Churchill, named British prime minister in 1940, sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India to discuss a possible deal. Many in India held out high hopes for the Cripps Mission. This made the disappointment they felt sting all the more once they concluded that Cripps simply could not deliver the goods. Cripps seemed to have good intentions, but publicly was non-committal and vague. The Indians wondered if he actually had any authority. The dialogue went nowhere.

Quit India

The British, though, were in an increasingly precarious place. The Battle of Britain and the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic, during which the Germans unleashed their air and sea power against the Allies, and the attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor had brought into vivid relief what an existential threat the Axis Powers posed. Now, the Japanese were at India’s eastern doorstep. Churchill did not want to be distracted by India’s concerns but desperately needed its support. This did not mean that he was ready to concede to the nationalists’ demands. Bringing India into the Allied fold had been the primary motivation for sending Cripps to the subcontinent.

Gandhi and the Congress high command were aware of this when the Mission failed, so in short order they proposed India’s full support in return for immediate governmental power. The British, however, did not take them up on the offer.

After huddling in consultation, the Congress demanded the immediate independence of India in July. This was Gandhi’s call. Nehru, the actual head of the organization, disagreed with the decision but deferred to his mentor, trusting his wisdom, instincts and judgment.¹³

A few weeks later, on August 8, 1942, the All-India Congress Committee passed the Quit India Resolution at its meeting in Bombay. Gandhi had originally introduced the Resolution in late April, but it was rejected in favor of a version drafted by Nehru.

Gandhi’s document asked for the immediate withdrawal of Britain from India. In the face of an Axis attack led by Japan, India would allow Britain to fight them and would assist by offering non-violent resistance to the aggressors...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• The Cast
• Prologue
• 1. The World at War
• 2. India in New York
• 3. Showdown in San Francisco
• 4. The New Hope
• 5. India International
• 6. Toward a Better Future
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index