The Cripps' Mission

Upon his arrival in India, Cripps held talks with Indian leaders. There is some confusion over what Cripps had been authorised to offer India's nationalist politicians by Churchill and Leo Amery (His Majesty's Secretary of State for India), and he also faced hostility from the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. He began by offering India full Dominion status at the end of the war, with the chance to secede from the Commonwealth and go for total independence. Privately, Cripps also promised to get rid of Linlithgow and grant India Dominion Status with immediate effect, reserving only the Defence Ministry for the British. However, in public he failed to present any concrete proposals for greater self-government in the short-term, other than a vague commitment to increase the number of Indian members of the Viceroy's Executive Council. Cripps spent much of his time in encouraging Congress leaders and Jinnah to come to a common, public arrangement in support of the war and government; however, the Congress leaders felt that whatever Cripps might say, his political masters were not interested in granting the complete Indianisation of the Viceroy's Executive Council, its conversion into a Cabinet with collective responsibility, or Indian control over Defence in wartime. They were also suspicious of an opt-out clause which Amery was rumoured to have offered the Muslim League in any putative Dominion arrangement. There was too little trust between the British and Congress by this stage, and both sides felt that the other was concealing its true plans.

The Congress stopped talks with Cripps and, guided by Mohandas Gandhi, the national leadership demanded immediate self-government in return for war support. When the British remained unresponsive, Gandhi and the Congress began planning a major public revolt, the Quit India movement, which demanded immediate British withdrawal from India. As the Imperial Japanese Army advanced closer to India with the conquest of Burma, Indians pe...

Gandhi was thus firmly anchored to pacifism when the war broke out in 1939, but many of his closest colleagues and the rank and file in the Indian National Congress could not bring themselves to accept the feasibility of defending the country against aggression without resort to arms. Twice during the war—after the fall of France in 1940, and the collapse of the British position in South East Asia in 1941—when there was a possibility of a rapprochement between the Congress and the Government for a united war effort, Gandhi stepped aside rather than be a party to organized violence. The rapprochement did not come. The only serious British effort for a compromise was made in the Spring of 1942 with the dispatch of the Cripps Mission to India; it proved abortive.