Was India’s loyalty in World War I a failed strategy?

The short answer

• Loyalty as investment. Support for the war was nearly unanimous among Indian politicians. They could point to Canada and Australia, white dominions being promised autonomy for smaller sacrifices, and ask why India should not expect reciprocity. Tilak, newly released from jail, urged recruitment; Gandhi’s recruiting campaigns in Gujarat puzzled even his followers. Their strategy had a clear purpose and dignity, but it depended on Britain paying a debt it had never explicitly agreed to owe.
• Lucknow: unity brokered at a price. Each party had something to gain at Lucknow. Congress wanted Muslim support for a national demand; after 1911 the League had learned that British favour could be fickle. Jinnah brought them together by accepting separate electorates and weighted Muslim representation in provinces where Muslims were few. This was a high point of unity, yet the agreement retained the communal constitutional structure within the shared programme.
• Champaran: the method finds its country. Gandhi had learned in South Africa, where Indians were a minority, that disciplined refusal could challenge a state dependent on cooperation. At Champaran he used documentation and accepted suffering to mobilize a district and press the Raj to legislate against its own planters. Ahmedabad and Kheda followed within a year. Nationalists now had a means of mass resistance in which repression could damage the authority using it.
• The war hollows the Raj itself. The victorious Raj emerged from the war with a weaker basis for rule. Prices doubled; Punjab recruitment quotas could shade into press-gangs; and influenza came home with troopships. Britain now owed money to India rather than the reverse. Compared with 1914, the government in 1919 had less consent, less cash and fewer reliable men, even as Indians expected a return for their sacrifices.

What it changed

A promise with no date. When Britain promised “responsible government,” it set no date for its arrival. The Government of India Act of 1919 instead introduced “dyarchy”: Indian ministers received education and sanitation, while Britons kept finance, police and the army. Politicians who had seen 70,000 men buried could regard this limited instalment as an insult. The distance between wartime promise and delivery helped Gandhi build mass politics.

The Punjab primed. The Punjab supplied three-fifths of the army, more men than any other province, and felt recruitment’s coercion especially sharply. In 1919 it rose against the Rowlatt Act; martial law and massacre followed. The province that had contributed so much to the war also suffered terribly in the postwar confrontation.

Jinnah’s first exit. Jinnah opposed the Rowlatt Act, but Gandhi’s mass agitation and religious idiom troubled a politician committed to constitutional methods. In 1920 the former ambassador of unity resigned from Congress, warning of “complete disorganization and chaos,” and later drifted to London. Chapter 9 follows his return in the 1930s to a changed political world. His estrangement began in these postwar disputes.