This post was triggered when I read an article in “The Pioneer’’ by Arun Nehru — an otherwise pragmatic man — who made the customary reference to India’s unique non-violent independence struggle. (“Many at the time advocated use of violence and armed struggle, and the opportunity was ripe as the British Empire was weakening. But in a world dominated by the imperial feudal order and where exploitation was based on the power of superior weapons, the Mahatma roused the conscience of the nation and led a non-violent freedom movement to liberate India from the tyranny of the British”).
I felt an uncontrollable urge to demolish this Gandhi-got-us-our-Independence nonsense. It prompted me to compile all the forces that were at work which finally made the Brits leave India. Let us Indians stop believing in the fiction that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s non-violent movement was the only dynamic that forced the British to leave India.
There were several other, far far more important ones. Read on..
(1) The British public were tired of wartime hardships, including food rations, and were no more willing to share meagre resources with the task of maintenance of the empire — they even voted out Churchill. There would have been little chance of the empire’s demise if Churchill continued to be the British PM. (and, for the record, his successor Attlee, when once asked by Chief Justice P.B. Chakrabarty of Calcutta High Court about MKG’s contribution to Attlee’s government’s decision to leave India, replied with one word — “Minimal!”).
(2) The US led by Roosevelt, as the victor of WWII as well as “the upholder of freedom” was pressurising the UK to grant freedom to its colonies, esp. to India. This was the Americans’ way of showing the British who was the new Superpower of the World.
(3) The system of Imperial Preferences, which allowed the transfer of wealth from the colonies to the UK through an elaborate systems of tarriffs, had to be dismantled as a condition of the US giving a GBP 5 billion loan to the UK to fund the UK’s deficit (a bit like China is funding the US’ deficit now). This took away the economic rationale of the empire. Since the British are a “Nation of Shopkeepers” according to Napoleon (ha ha!), this must have been a very solid argument to shut the imperial shop. The Americans, of course, insisted on this condition, not merely to demonstrate their love of freedom, but also to cut the British down to their right size, and even to help US companies get a foothold in the huge markets of the former empire. Three birds with one stone!
(4) The Naval Mutiny in Mumbai in 1946 proved that the British could not continue to take it for granted that they could rule India with the help of Indian soldiers as they had been doing since 1857 or thereabouts. This issue is always downplayed by the Kaangresis who want to live off the fiction of the Gandhi/Kaangrayce led independence struggle.
(5) The crumbling of the British empire’s South Asian outposts in the face of Japanese assaults, aided by the INA, also exposed its Achilles heal. Attlee also admitted to this.
(6) Finally, those quantitatively inclined might be interested to know that the number of Indians who participated in the Quit India movement never exceeded 1 lakh in a pre-partition population of 34 crore !!!. (some estimates made by Gandhians themselves are as low as 30,000….http://appliedgandhi.blogspot.com/2008/12/who-gave-independence-to-india.html). Compare this with the 87,000 Indian soldiers who gave their lives in WWII (wikipedia) — the numbers tell their own story.
There’s enough archival material to show that these dynamics weighed heavily on the Brits’ minds in the mid-to-late 1940s. There are a large number of dispatches, in the archives, from India’s British Administrators to their higher-ups in London, which express grave concerns about the difficulty of holding on to India now that the Indian soldiers were no longer blindly loyal to the British. These soldiers were certainly not Gandhi’s moronic satyagrahis who took a perverse pride in being beaten up like beasts. Even if all 340 million Indians of the time offered themselves to be beaten to pulp, there was no way that would compel the British to give us our freedom.
Let’s stop deifying M K Gandhi — his blind worship has done enough harm to India and continues to do so every day by denying India a whole host of policy/strategic options in the domestic as well as international arena. It has tied 1.1 billion people down to the fetishes of one man.
Let us propagate the real history of India, not the Kaangresi/JNU chicanery that passes off for history.