7 - The 1940s: triumph and tragedy

Summary

On 3 September 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War, the viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared India, alongside Britain itself, at war with Hitler's Germany. Two months later, in protest against this unilateral act, which appeared to Indians as a reassertion of high-handed British imperialism, the Congress ministries in the provinces resigned. In March of 1940, taking advantage of what they saw as a fortuitous ‘deliverance’ from Congress rule, the Muslim League, at its annual meeting in Lahore, enacted the Pakistan Resolution, with its ill-defined demand for independent Muslim states. The stage was set for the crises that were to dominate the decade of the 1940s – the war, the Congress's final movement of non-cooperation, the rise of Muslim nationalism, and then, finally, in 1947 independence, with the devastating partition of the subcontinent into two states.

The unilateral declaration of war, a provocative act of the sort that had so often characterized British policy in India, was a tactical blunder. So too, arguably, was the resignation of the Congress ministries, which set in motion a protracted series of negotiations and acts of civil disobedience that were to culminate in the climactic August ‘rising’ of 1942. During the later 1930s Britain and India had been drifting slowly towards an amicable parting of the ways. Britain's stake in India had been declining as economic nationalism took hold around the world, while on the political front, after 1937, Congress politicians had demonstrated an ability to govern that augured well for an independent India.