How World War II shaped India

There can be little doubt that the period 1930-1950 was a watershed for modern India. It was in these years that the ideas for self-government developed, constitutional discussions and elections took place, alongside a political struggle for the freedom of the country.

These were also the years in which the idea of Pakistan and the subsequent division of the country happened.

Only when you read Srinath Raghavan’s study of World War II and its impact on the subcontinent can you understand just how transformational this event was, and how important it is to study the period.

Wars are, of course, always unsettling since their consequences can be catatstrophic and their course uncertain.

India has not really fought any real war since it gained Independence. The wars against Pakistan and China have been limited skirmishes, even though in the 1962 and 1971 wars, subjects of two earlier studies by Raghavan, had important consequences, both geopolitical and psychological.

Peripheral War

India was not a theatre by itself in World War II; it singed our periphery in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Nagaland and Manipur. But as Raghavan has shown, it had enormous domestic political, social and economic consequences, and it made the South Asia that we know of today.

Raghavan’s great achievement is to knit together the conduct of the war through the filter of its Indian participants, with the developments back home. His account of the Indian particpation in the various campaigns is unvarnished and uncommonly lucid. The campaigns took the Indians to East Africa, Libya, Italy, Iraq, Burma, Malaya and Singapore.

Though the military contribution of the 2.5 million men India trained and deployed and the 90,000 lives it sacrificed was somewhat limited as they were often deployed in penny-packets, the bonus in Raghavan’s account is the integration of Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army into the narrative.

However, in the end, where the PLA, after winning the civil war in China had a hardened force ready to invade Tibet in 1950, the Indian Army was not only found itself reduced drastically in size, but split, and, in a sense, at war with each other.

In any case, the experience the jawans, especially the officers, gained in being recruited, trained, deployed and sent into combat in various theatres combined to create a new class of self-confident Indians whose self-awareness was signified by the support they gave to their INA counterparts and the ease with which they transitioned into a national army subsequently.

In the civilian side, too, Indians were thrust into responsibilities which the British often kept them away from in the pre-War period. Indian industry, held in check by imperial preferences, too, came into its own with manufacturing registering a huge growth in the war years evident in the figures for corporate taxes which grew from Rs 41.4 million in 1940-41 to Rs 840.6 million in 1945-46.

Though this must be seen in the perspective of the war-induced inflation which hit the middle-classes badly in terms of higher food prices. The conditions of the poorer people were even worse and there was significant deprivation in large parts of India, as well as the terrible Bengal famine which can be attributed directly to the war and its mangement.

The more important consequencs were political. Conventional wisdom has it that the war had fatally weakened the British empire. However, as Patrick French’s book on the last phase of the British empire brought out, the game was up for Britain in the 1930s, and some of their best people knew it.

The task was to create an outcome that would be the most comfortable for UK. And the British leadership managed to do just that, though, this is not to claim that Partition was some deeply laid conspiracy. It was, on the other hand, an unexpected result of the inability of the Empire to manage the multiple variables, amongst them, the social and political changes that the war had wrought.

The economic and social forces unleashed by the war, catalysed the political trends, some for the good and some for the bad. It can perhaps be argued that the most momentous event for the country — its bloody Partition — was shaped by the war.

The resignation of the Congress ministry, the British encouragement of MA Jinnah and the Muslim League which supported their war effort, the theatrical Quit India movement, the failures of the Cripps and the Cabinet Mission and the 1946 provincial elections followed by widespread violence appear inexorable.

Yet there could have been another result had Viceroy Linlithgow handled the Indian entry into the war with greater finesse.

Different Course

A contrafactual history of post-Independence India may have steered a different course, seen united India emerge as the pivot around which the politics of the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean revolved.

This huge India would have been the natural security provider for this vast region, as indeed, it had been in the years of the Raj. But that was not to be. Divided, we have been locked into South Asia and only now are trying to feel our way about in the larger southern Asian region.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)