How India Won Independence in 1947

Bombay. The eighteenth of February, nineteen forty-six. A thousand sailors at a Royal Indian Navy signals school called Talwar sit down in front of their dinner... and don't pick up a fork. Their slogan is four words. No food, no work. By Wednesday, seven thousand ratings have joined. Within five days it's more than ten thousand men, across sixty-six ships and shore establishments. And in London, one question with no good answer. If the Indian armed forces stop taking orders... who exactly is running India? Wind back four years. The eighth of August, nineteen forty-two. Gowalia Tank Maidan, Bombay. Gandhi tells a crowd to stop behaving like subjects and start behaving like a free nation. Two words carry the whole speech. Do or die. The British don't wait. Five in the morning, the very next day, they take Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad — the entire leadership, before the movement can even organise. Gandhi goes to the Aga Khan Palace in Poona. More than a hundred thousand people are detained. On paper, the Raj wins. Except paper is exactly where the empire was losing. Britain finished the Second World War victorious... and broke. By the middle of nineteen forty-five it owed the rest of the world three thousand three hundred and fifty-five million pounds in what were called sterling balances. And the single largest creditor? India. Roughly a third of the total. By some accounts, closer to half. Sit with that. The colony was the bank. The historian B. R. Tomlinson has argued Britain's wrecked finances were a necessary precondition for handing over power in South Asia. So: the Raj is bankrupt, the gaols are stuffed with politicians. And then, Talwar. The anger starts small. Bad food. A commanding officer accused of improper treatment. British crews on better pay scales. But look at what fourteen delegates put in front of the flag officer in Bombay. Speedy demobilisation. Royal Navy rates of pay. And this — every demand to be settled in the presence of a national leader, whose name they would supply later. That is not a strike about dinner. That's a political ultimatum from men in uniform. It spreads. A sit-down mutiny aboard the Hooghly in Calcutta, about a hundred and twenty ratings. Rioting in the streets. And on the twenty-second of February, Prime Minister Clement Attlee stands up in the House of Commons and reads out the position. The mutineers, he says, are mainly contained in barracks... but some are in possession of several small ships. Ships which are, in his careful phrase, covered by guns. British guns. Trained on British ships. Crewed by Britain's own Indian sailors. And here's the answer to the question. The Raj was never held by British numbers. It was held by Indian soldiers, sailors, clerks and policemen doing as they were told. Quit India proved the people wouldn't cooperate. The sterling balances proved the money was gone. Talwar proved the last thing — the guns — could turn too. You can crush a mutiny by force. But you'd better be certain of the men you send to do the crushing. Nobody in Delhi was certain of anything any more. The twentieth of February, nineteen forty-seven. Attlee announces Britain will leave India by June nineteen forty-eight at the latest, and packs off Lord Louis Mountbatten as the last Viceroy. Mountbatten lands in March, takes one look at the country, and decides even that is too slow. On the third of June he gives the new date. Not next year. The fifteenth of August. Ten weeks. Two nations, two constitutions, an army to divide, and five hundred and sixty-five princely states cut loose from the Crown. Which brings us to a London barrister named Cyril Radcliffe. He had never set foot in India. That was considered a qualification — nobody could accuse him of favouritism. He reaches Delhi on the eighth of July, nineteen forty-seven, with maps, census tables, and about five weeks to draw a border through Punjab and Bengal. Through villages. Canals. Railway lines. Families. And the boundaries aren't published until the seventeenth of August. Two days AFTER independence. Millions celebrated freedom without knowing which country they were standing in. That line is still there. The fence, the floodlights, two nuclear-armed neighbours still arguing over a map drawn in a hurry. And the debt? Under the interim agreement of the fourteenth of August, nineteen forty-seven, India got thirty-five million pounds released immediately. The remaining eleven hundred and sixty million... in instalments. For years. Empires don't usually end in surrender. This one ended with an overdraft, a hundred thousand arrests, and ten thousand sailors who simply pushed their plates away.