China Hand. John Paton Davies, Jr.
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no revelations, I asked why, if statements made to me were correct, was there no published accounting of Gandhi’s Harijan Fund, ostensibly for improving the lot of the untouchables. This flustered Nehru, I reported to Stilwell, “Why that’s a most unusual question,” he exclaimed, “a most unusual question. Why, certainly statements have been published of the use of the fund. Of course, I have nothing to do with the fund. I don’t know anything about the administration of the fund.”
I was prepared to believe that he had nothing to with the fund. In any event, Nehru launched into a tirade about how badly the outcastes of Dr. Ambedkar’s (leader of depressed classes) category abused outcastes of even lower grade. Inevitably, Nehru moved on to a dissertation on the inequities of the British, in historical depth. He then returned to a theme he had earlier expounded to me—how Indians listened regularly to Japanese broadcasts and “gloated” over the British reverses. He now added that the Japanese propaganda was clever. It told the Indians not to be impatient; they would soon be liberated by an Indian army of liberation—composed of prisoners taken in Burma and organized by the Japanese. He implied that the Indian listeners more than half believed what they heard on these broadcasts.
Several days after this conversation, Nehru went to Wardha to get the word from the Mahatma. After his return to his home in Allahabad I flew there on June 2 to find out what I could. Nehru said that he had not tried to present his own views to Gandhi in any detail; that he listened and told the Mahatma that he would go home and think over what he had learned. Nothing definite had been decided, nothing drastic was contemplated and, although the contradiction was not acknowledged, Gandhi demanded the withdrawal of the British even if chaos ensued.
But he and Gandhi were fully aware, I commented to Nehru, that a mass civil disobedience campaign hampering the war effort would alienate American and Chinese sympathies for the Indian nationalists. Furthermore, I failed to see how Gandhi could through such measures persuade the British to quit India. Although Nehru was noncommittal, my impression was that he was in agreement with what I said. But he was obviously not in a happy frame of mind. I felt that he was going through one of his recurring struggles between his intellectual convictions and his loyalty to the Mahatma.
This contradictory, indecisive personality, then, was Gandhi’s heir apparent. An upper class Indian by birth and an upper class Englishman by education, Nehru was bicultural, an elegant, intellectual, ornamental aristocrat. Gandhi had overcome the anglicizing influence of his English education and re-Indianized himself. But not Nehru. I wondered if some less diluted Indian would not succeed the Mahatma. And I did not see in Nehru indications of force and command. Curiously, he was perhaps a greater international figure than national figure. Mrs. Naidu had commented that it was unfortunate that in the United States Nehru was regarded as the leader of the Congress Party. He was not. He was the theorist. Patel was the practical man of action.
Ghulam Mohammed told me that he had gone to school with Nehru in England. At the height of the campaign, back in India, to wear homespun and eschew English textiles, G.M. returned one day to the quarters that he shared with Nehru and discovered that Jawaharlal had in the transports of nationalist protest consigned G.M.’s expensive English suits to a bonfire of imperialist fabrics. This annoyed G.M., whose nationalism was not of Nehru’s burning kind. Years later, in 1942, Ghulam Mohammed said to me that Nehru was being spoiled by American adulation. G.M. summed up Nehru as “intellectually dishonest and a weakling.”
To the Western mind, Rajagopalachari was more comprehensible than Gandhi, and even Nehru. The position that he took at the Allahabad Congress meeting was characteristic of his practical approach to politics, his willingness to work with what might be possible rather than rejecting any condition that was not, for him, perfect.
Rajagopalachari was cool and matter-of-fact on a subject that was becoming for me a major concern regarding the future—an antagonistic division of the postwar world in two, with the United States and its European allies reestablished in their Asian colonies in one camp and the non-white peoples of the world, opportunistically championed by the Soviet Union in the other. The white peoples, Rajagopalachari said when I saw him on October 20, 1942, cannot afford to continue to antagonize the colored peoples of the world. The colored peoples are going to win their freedom sooner or later. The whites had better grant that freedom sooner rather than later and so avoid the cumulating legacy of hatred.
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The Congress Party was under the sway of Gandhi. But the Muslim League was controlled by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. In contrast to Gandhi’s ostentatious, loin-clothed simplicity, the lean fine-featured Jinnah was something of a fop in his precisely tailored and sharply pressed suits. After several conversations with him, I commented in January 1943:
Jinnah, as astute and opportunistic a politician as there is today in India, fulfills the role of fuehrer called for by the circumstances in which the Muslims find themselves (a minority feeling discriminated against by the Hindus.) He has skillfully exploited the apprehensions of his community and has built up the Muslim League as a disciplined organization obedient to his will.
The political credo of the Muslim League, and Mr. Jinnah’s battle cry, is Pakistan. Pakistan is a vaguely defined program for a more or less independent Muslim state in the areas where the Muslims are in the majority.
Ghulam Mohammed, whose tailored wardrobe Nehru had patriotically reduced to ashes, was one of those polished, astute Indians who moved urbanely through the two worlds of Asia and Europe. He left what was in effect a sub-cabinet post in the Government of India to become the Finance Minister of Hyderabad. His final position after the creation of Pakistan was Governor General of the new state within the British Commonwealth.
G.M. was a man with few illusions. Once while in Switzerland, he told me, he had been asked by a European friend (Salvador Dali as I remember it) to describe India. He did so: a great oversized head above and in drifting clouds, a small emaciated body, wizened and ribs showing, then enormous, bloated legs, afflicted with elephantiasis and standing in mire. “That,” he said, “is India.”
Neither Congress nor the League was a workable political solution for India, Ghulam Mohammed exclaimed to me. The only feasible Indian government, he said, would be one composed of a few politicians—Rajagopalachari and two or three others—some of the more able Indians then serving the British raj, and several of the very competent big business executives.
Like all of the educated Indians with whom I conversed, Ghulam Mohammed was convinced that as the Allies began to win the war the British would be less and less inclined to grant India its independence. Because India was too weak and divided to overthrow British rule, its only immediate hope was that the American newcomers might induce London to grant independence to India. But the Americans, my Indian acquaintances said, were under the British spell. The war against Germany and Japan, they all lamented, would end in another Versailles; as the United States betrayed China at the 1918 peace conference, so it would turn its back on India, in the settlements made by the victors of World War II.
Ghulam Mohammed, like Rajagopalachari and some other Indians whom I drew out on the subject, asserted that American solidarity with Britain at the expense of Indian independence would eventually lead to conflict on the basis of color. Expanding the subject, G.M. said that the Anglo-American bloc had the strength to impose a peace that would be against the desires and will of the peoples of Asia. But that kind of peace would produce fermenting hatred of the whites. It would be a peace only for our time and would end in a war of Asia against the whites.
The president of the racially extremist Hindu Mahasabha was V. D. Savarkar. He lived in a modest house in Bombay’s suburbs, where I called on him in May 1942. “A Sikh watchman with a dagger,” I wrote at the time, “let me in the gate. I was taken upstairs to one corner of the house where the Hero Advocate of the Hindu people had his small, rather grubby bedroom. Mr. S received while sitting on his bed, clad in a white pajama-like suit and one sock minus its foot. His free toes were agile. Mr. S. was apparently nearsighted—he wore glasses with very thick lenses. Hanging on the walls of the bedroom were four or five pictures of my host, some in color.”
The conversation that followed was one-sided. My few questions were