Seventy-nine years ago, a sunset accompanied the dawn of Britain’s victory in the Second World War. Having cast the shadow of her domination over a quarter of the globe for much of the previous three centuries, Britannia, shattered by the rigours of war, began descending into darkness. The sun was finally setting on the British Empire. Winston Churchill lost the general election of 1945, which swept Clement Attlee and his Labour Party into 10 Downing Street. Plans were soon afoot to facilitate, as King George VI announced, “the early realisation of full self-government in India”.
Churchill chafed at this, but he and the Tories could do little to prevent it. So insolvent was Britain after Second World War that John Maynard Keynes, the chief architect of Britain’s postwar economy, acidly told Attlee that the country, trapped in infrastructural breakdown and soaring national debt, was facing a “financial Dunkirk”. Her Treasury having run dry, Britain had no option but to seek aid from the United States — and cut her losses by divesting herself of the Empire.
Independence Day
The Red Fort trial
The process moved rapidly towards Independence — and Partition. In the Indian general elections of 1945-46, the Muslim League, which had expanded and consolidated its support while the Congress leadership was in jail during the war, secured 75% of all Muslim votes — a colossal increase from the less than 5% it had mustered in all previous elections. India’s freedom struggle was splintering on the question of whether religion should be the determinant of nationhood. Despairing for the future of their plural and progressive idea of India, the Congress began searching for an issue that could not only reinvigorate the freedom struggle but also rekindle the flame of religious harmony in the hearts of all Indians.
Almost on cue, the British, after practising the cynical politics of divide et impera for nearly a century and enabling the demand for Pakistan, unwittingly provided that issue. In a gesture so counter-productive that it could almost have been an act of expiation, the Raj clumsily gave the clashing factions a last chance of unity. Charging the Indian National Army with treason during the war, they placed on trial at the Red Fort three valorous soldiers — a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh — of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Fauj/Indian National Army (INA), thus indicting representatives of 98% of India’s population, and uniting all of it.
The result was a national outcry that spanned the communal divide. Whatever the errors and misjudgements of the INA men (and Nehru believed freedom could never have come through an alliance with foreigners, let alone foreign fascists), they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule. “The punishment given them,” thundered Jawaharlal Nehru on August 20, 1945, “would in effect be a punishment on all India and all Indians … a deep wound would be created in millions of hearts.”
Delhi’s Red Fort had been an enduring symbol of India’s quest for freedom ever since the Revolt of 1857. This is why the East India Company, upon crushing the resistance, decimated two-thirds of the Fort’s spectacular inner structures, displacing them with a hideous cantonment, complete with barracks, office buildings, sheds, and godowns. In a rousing speech delivered in Singapore in July 1943, Bose had spurred his Azad Hind Fauj to march onward, immortalising in the battle cry, “Chalo Dilli!”, his aspiration of seeing the Indian tricolour aflutter over the Red Fort. But when the heroes of the INA finally reached the Red Fort, it was to face charges of treason, punishable by death.
Protests that spread across India
The historic court martial commenced on November 5, 1945. On trial — charged with waging war against the King-Emperor, murder, and abetment of murder — were Captain Shah Nawaz Khan and Lieutenant Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon of the Punjab Regiment, and Captain P.K. Sahgal of the Baluch Regiment. As the hearing proceeded, throngs of Indians encircled the walls of the Red Fort, demanding justice for the lionhearts and roaring on and on: “Laal Quila se aayi aawaaz, Sahgal, Dhillon, Shahnawaaz!” Condemning the trial and demanding that all INA soldiers be exonerated, the All-India Congress Committee had, in September itself, constituted an INA Defence and Relief Committee, which ultimately formed the triumvirate’s glittering 17-member defence team. This dream squad of eminent Congress barristers included one whose disinclination to practise law had coincided with the nationalist rejection of such institutions of the Raj as its judiciary. Donning after 25 years his barrister’s gown and wig, Nehru leapt to the defence of these men, who had fought for India’s liberation alongside Bose, his former comrade. Both the Congress and the League rose to the trio’s side; as slogans of “Death to British Imperialism!” and “Hindu-Muslim Unity Zindabad!” suffused the air, the flags of both the Congress and the Muslim League waved above the protests. Pro-INA protests, spearheaded primarily by the Congress, fanned out across India. Holding aloft banners that bore such slogans as “They are Patriots, not Traitors”, Indians of all faiths marched shoulder to shoulder, hurling clenched fists into the air and thundering “Jai Hind!”. While in Madras the police opened fire on protesters, killing five, Calcutta, Bose’s hometown, became the epicentre of these protests, with students from several political organisations virtually encamping in the streets for four days in late November, only to be joined afterwards by factory workers and Sikh taxi drivers. Eventually, the police opened fire and 97 protesters perished. The residents of Delhi, Lahore, Bombay, Patna, and Lucknow turned out in droves to support the triad on trial at the Red Fort.
Beginning of the British end-game
But the moment passed: the defence of three patriots was no longer enough to guarantee a common definition of patriotism. The ferment across the country made the conviction of the trio almost irrelevant: freedom was inevitable, but so was Partition. By the time the trial got under way, it was apparent that the ultimate treason to the British Raj was being contemplated in its own capital. London, under the Labour Party, exhausted by war, was determined to rid itself of the burdens of its Indian empire. In February 1946, Prime Minister Attlee announced the dispatch of a Cabinet Mission to India “to discuss with leaders of Indian opinion the framing of an Indian Constitution”. The endgame had begun.
Today, as we mark the 77th anniversary of our Independence, facing again an India that some politicians would divide on religious grounds, let us not forget that glorious flicker of national unity that marked the Red Fort Trials. The Empire descended into discredit from that moment, its extinction made inevitable by its own flailing attempt to assert itself over rebellious Indians.
As Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru hoisted the tricolour over the Red Fort for the first time in free India, against the dazzling sky in which fluttered the flag of freedom, he was standing at the site of a glorious failure — a testament to what we, the people of India, are capable of aspiring to when we stand together, united and undeterred, in the service of a larger cause, and yet a moment of rebirth that was also an abortion, with the nation torn into two. Let us hope that, eight decades later, our leaders find the wisdom to commit themselves again to what unites us as a people, rather than promote the forces of division. This time at the Red Fort, all of us are on trial.
Shashi Tharoor is the fourth-term Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (Congress) for Thiruvananthapuram and the bestselling author of 25 books, including the Sahitya Akademi-award winning An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
