India's festering sun beat down impartially on New and Old Delhi—on
the precisely geometric, grandly drab preserves of the British Raj, on the
noisy, squalid, sprawling native town. A sweat-soaked British wallah
might change his shirt four times before settling down to an evening
burra peg of bad Australian whiskey in the garden of the Cecil Hotel.
Even the calloused, naked feet of shirtless Indians burned as they
padded along the teeming Chandni Chauk. In the brassy glare, the
flowering trees near the Viceroy's residence seemed to bear sparks
rather than blossoms. The rind of an orange would shrivel the moment
it was peeled from its fruit. Here & there an exhausted cow rested,
sacred and undisturbed, in the traffic lanes of the boulevards. Delhi in the spring heat of 1946 was not relaxed; it was taut with
waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two Socialist lawyers and
a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat for 25 days in the
southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the
richest portion of empire that history had ever seen—to end the
British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by
William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess
Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny
merchant Lord Inchcape, and by the great Viceroys, austere Curzon
and gentle Halifax. The Raj was finished: scarcely a voice in Britain
spoke against independence; scarcely an Indian wanted the British to
stay; scarcely a leader in India questioned the sincerity of Britain's
intention to get out. The only questions were “when?” and “how?” Last week the three members of the British Cabinet Mission strove to
force Indians to take the ultimate step—agreement on the constitution
of an independent state. Much like a judge locking a hung jury in an
uncomfortable room, Ministers Lord Pethick-Lawrence, A. V. Alexander
and Sir Stafford Cripps prepared for a long Easter weekend in Kashmir's
cool mountains with a message that when they returned “they hoped to
find sufficient elements of agreement on which a settlement will be
based.” Inside the cream stucco Imperial Hotel, beneath the propeller-blade
fans, zealots and schemers argued, intrigued and speculated in more
tongues than the Ganges has mouths. When they repeated to each other
that now at last Britain's colonial policy had lumbered
to the point where Whitehall really wanted to free India, hope revived.
When they reflected that civil war had never been
closer, despair reached .its depth. The issue seemed to turn on one
man—Mohamed Ali Jinnah. Last week all India watched Jinnah's
words and actions.
