Jawaharlal Nehru: Speeches on the Granting of Indian Independence

Context

India came under British rule after the failure of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (also known as the Sepoy Mutiny), in which diverse princely states of the Indian Subcontinent united to resist British occupation (mainly through the British East India Company) of Indian territory. Power transferred to the British Crown soon thereafter, in November 1859, and Queen Victoria was crowned empress of India in the Delhi Durbar of 1877.

The foundation of the Indian National Congress (INC) in 1885 was the first step in organized political resistance to British rule in India. Although the INC was initially formed by groups seeking reform within the framework of British governance, those groups were gradually estranged by a series of repressive acts and policies that ran counter to the welfare of the citizens. The watershed moment was the partition of Bengal in 1905 into the East (Muslim dominated) and the West (Hindu dominated), ostensibly for administrative purposes but in reality an extension of the British policy of “divide and rule.” Although the partition was revoked in 1911 after it caused widespread discontent and resistance, it had engendered three major strands in the national struggle. First, the revolutionary swadeshi (“own country”) movement, with military and ideological dimensions, provided a framework for different revolutionary movements as well as a phenomenon identifiable as Hindu nationalism (including nation worship in the form of a goddess), which furthered a rift between Hindus and Muslims in the country. Second, the foundation of the Muslim League in 1906 in support of the partition and the interests of the Muslim community in India established the success of the divide-and-rule policy by centering communalism as a key theme of the national struggle. Third, the immediate outcome of the partition was the INC's adoption of swaraj (“self-rule”) as a goal.

The subsequent history of the national struggle may be seen as developments of these three strands. The revolutionary movement, which adopted violence and counterterrorism (as opposed to the state-sponsored terrorism that was dominant in the colonial hierarchy) as a means of procuring freedom, spawned several incidents of skirmish and resistance. Armed military movements, such as Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti, in the two sides of the partitioned Bengal, led by the ideologies of Bipin Chandra Pal and Sri Aurobindo Ghose, asked people to avenge the violence inflicted on their motherland. Other significant events in the revolutionary protest that left a deep impression on the public mind included the Ashe murder case (1911), in which the district magistrate (Robert W. D. E. Ashe) of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli), Pondicherry, was killed as part of a political conspiracy; the Buribalam incident, in which an Indian revolutionary leader fought against the British police force and was martyred (1915); the Rampa Rebellion, which was a tribal uprising against British occupation (1922); the Delhi Central Assembly Hall bombings by Indian revolutionaries (1929); the Chittagong armory raid, in which revolutionary youth seized arms and ammunition (1930); and the Azad park shootout between police and the revolutionary Chandrashekar Azad (1931).

The activities of the revolutionaries provided both sentimental value to the freedom movement and iconic value to the struggle, and revolutionary heroes assumed demigod status in the imagination of the masses. Moreover, the repression that was brought to bear upon the revolutionaries and Indians in order to counter militancy further spawned mass discontent. One of the more famous instances of repression, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919), in which a British general massacred 379 unarmed men, women, and children who had gathered in a park in Amritsar for a peaceful protest, led to widespread and international condemnation. In a symbolic gesture of protest, the Nobel laureate and poet of the masses Rabindranath Tagore rejected the knighthood conferred upon him by the British monarch. The revolutionary movement also revealed a rift between the moderates (led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the initial stages) and the extremists (led by such leaders as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and, later, Subhas Chandra Bose) within the INC. The moderates were more inclined toward a freedom struggle based on political negotiation, while the extremists wanted noninterference from the British in matters of Indian culture and religion and espoused the idea of armed revolutionary struggle. The revolutionary dimension of the freedom struggle is one of the major issues in the two speeches by Nehru.

The Muslim League, which negotiated between the British government and a section of the Muslim community in India, supported the partition and condemned INC support for the swadeshi movement. The revocation of the partition was viewed by the league as a betrayal of trust, and the fortunes of the league dwindled. It was revived from this state by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Initially a member of the INC and a supporter of Hindu-Muslim unity, Jinnah later came to adopt the two-nation theory, namely that a separate nation for Muslims was necessary for the protection of Muslim interests, as Muslims were a minority in India. In the Lahore Resolution (1940), the Muslim League resolved to demand autonomy within territories with a Muslim majority, namely, the northwestern territories (the future West Pakistan) and the eastern territories (the future East Pakistan), an idea that led to the formation of the independent nation of Pakistan in 1947.

The INC found its most powerful leader in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi, who first came to prominence in South Africa with his method of nonviolent resistance inspired by the Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience, termed satyagraha (“appeal or force of truth”), returned to India in 1915 and found the time ready for a mass civil resistance–based freedom struggle. Gandhi started his first satyagraha campaign at Champaran in 1917. (Satyagraha refers to Gandhi's philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance, which he deployed in a variety of ways meant to pressure the British to grant Indian independence.) From the 1920s the INC increasingly relied upon civil disobedience as a means of struggle—one of the reasons for its splintering. Both Bose and Jinnah had been members of the INC before their differences of opinion with the Gandhian mode of passive resistance.

The crisis came to a head with the start of World War II. The initial victories of the Axis powers were condemned by the INC, which opposed illegal occupation of foreign territory. Thus the INC's support for the Allies was explicit, though guarded. The leaders of the INC felt that the Allies were in the right, although the Allies were themselves invaders of Indian territory. The INC refused to support the Allied war effort without an assurance of Indian independence. Sir Stafford Cripps, a senior British politician and government minister in the war cabinet, was sent to India in March of 1942 to secure India's cooperation in the war. India was promised dominion status by the British after the war, which was intended as a compromise, but this plan was rejected by the INC on the ground that it did not promise complete independence. In the same year, on August 8, the All India Congress Working Committee passed the Quit India Resolution, which resulted in swift retaliation by the British government. All of the major leaders of the INC were arrested the next day and imprisoned.

At the same time, the war also afforded militant nationalists the opportunity to develop an organized army wing. This wing was led by Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose had resigned the presidency of the INC over differences of opinion with Gandhi and left to form his own party, Forward Bloc, in 1939. Bose saw the war as an opportunity to rid the country of the British, and for this purpose he took the support of the Axis powers. He left for Germany in 1941 and in 1943 assumed the leadership of the Indian independence movement from Rash Behari Bose in Tokyo. Thereafter he organized the Indian National Army and started a march toward India to fight the British. However, the movement collapsed in May 1945 as the Axis powers lost the war. Bose himself died under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash on August 18, 1945.

The war had brought about all but the complete collapse of British rule in India. The deteriorating economy of Great Britain, the mounting communal tension within India, the loss of military resources in the East at the end of the war, and the hardships faced by Indians that had given rise to a militant desperation all contributed to the swift collapse of the British raj after the war. In 1945 the Labour Party claimed victory in Great Britain. Their focus was on reform of the economic depression, unemployment, and other internal social ills. At the same time, they lacked a definite program on how to deal with the colonies. Thus, their victory further accelerated the process of Indian independence. The Cabinet Mission Plan was announced on June 16, 1946, granting complete independence to India while accommodating Muslim demands for regional autonomy. On this basis, a constituent assembly was convened to draw up a constitution, and in the meantime the viceroy formed an interim government.

On September 2, 1946, the interim government of Nehru was sworn in. However, differences of opinion between the INC and the Muslim League led to nationwide communal violence, which the British failed to control. Lord Louis Mountbatten, who assumed the position of viceroy of India on March 24, 1947, announced a quick plan for British withdrawal from the Indian Subcontinent in August as well as a plan to partition the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. The partition of India plan, known as the Radcliffe Plan, orchestrated a territorial division on communal lines and also necessitated a movement of Hindus and Muslims across borders. One of the largest mass migrations in recent history, it was a source of unbridled suffering as people were uprooted from their ancestral lands and moved to a new territory as the result of political exigency. On August 14, 1947, Pakistan emerged as a free state, and on August 15, 1947, India won independence.