The history of India spans thousands of years and affects the current state of affairs. The recent history makes India what it is today. British people amounted to a small percentage of the entire population in India, but they still held a firm control over the majority of the population. From 1920 leaders including Mahatma Gandhi began highly popular mass movements to campaign against the British Raj using largely peaceful methods. Gandhi-led independence movement opposed the British rule using nonviolent methods like civil disobedience and economic resistance. This action made small steps of progress but others adopted a militant approach like the Indian National Army that sought to overthrow the British rule and led to the Government of India Act of 1935. This act gave all provinces full representative and elective governments, chosen by franchise extended now to some 30 million Indians. The British government still retained the ability to veto legislation they considered unacceptable. These steps of progress led to success but India was still under British control.
Gandhi’s Strategy
Gandhi did bridge the religious and political barriers with his spiritual leadership he exerted of the people. He used satya(truth) and ahimsa (non-violence) to guide his political movement. With those tools, Gandhi did assure his followers, unarmed India could bring the mightiest empire known to history to its knees. He was able to motivate his followers with his purity and fasting to show his devotion to the cause. Gandhi’s strategy for bringing the giant machine of British rule to a halt was to call upon Indians to boycott all British-made goods, British schools and colleges, British courts of law, British titles and honors, British elections and elective offices, and, should the need arise if all other boycotts failed, British tax collectors as well. The total withdrawal of Indian support would thus stop the machine, and nonviolent noncooperation would achieve the national goal of swaraj.
The Muslim quarter of India’s population became increasingly wary of the Congress Party’s promises and restive in the wake of the collapse of the Khilāfat movement. By 1930 Indian Muslims had begun to think in terms of separate statehood for their minority community, whose population dominated the northwestern provinces of British India and the eastern half of Bengal, as well as important pockets of the United Provinces and the great princely state of Kashmir. In 1933 a group of Muslim students at Cambridge, led by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, proposed that the only acceptable solution to Muslim India’s internal conflicts and problems would be the birth of a Muslim “fatherland,” to be called Pakistan. The Muslim League and its president, Jinnah, did not join in the Pakistan demand until after the league’s famous Lahore meeting in March 1940. Jinnah soon proved to Nehru that the Muslims were indeed a formidable “third” party. The years from 1937 to 1939, when the Congress Party actually ran most of British India’s provincial governments, became the seed period for the Muslim League’s growth in popularity and power within the entire Muslim community. In March 1940 the famous Lahore Resolution, later known as the Pakistan Resolution, was passed by the largest gathering of league delegates. The league decided that any future constitutional plan proposed by the British for India would not be acceptable to the Muslims unless it was designed that the Muslim-majority areas of India’s North-Western and Eastern Zones were grouped to make an independent State.
World War II
British India declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939. They sent over two and a half million volunteer to fight under British command and provided large donation to support the Allied campaign. The British government did not consult the Indian elected councils before declaring war. Over 87,000 Indian soldiers died in World War II. This along with insufficient consultation of the Indian council prompted the Indian National Congress, led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Maulana Azad, to launch the Quit India Movement The government was ready for this move. It immediately arrested over 60,000 national and local Congress leaders, and then moved to suppress the violent reaction of Congress supporters. By the middle of 1942, Japanese troops were approaching the borders of India. Pressure was mounting from China, the United States and Britain to solve the future status of India before the end of the war. A draft granted India Dominion status after the war but otherwise conceded few changes to the British Government Act of 1935. The draft was unacceptable to the Congress Working Committee who rejected it. On 7 to 8 August 1942, the All India Congress Committee met in Bombay and ratified the 'Quit India' resolution. Gandhi called for 'Do or Die'. The next day, on 9 August 1942, Gandhi, members of the Congress Working Committee and other Congress leaders were arrested by the British Government. These key leaders were kept in prison until June 1945, although Gandhi was released in May 1944 because of his health.
Subhas Chandra Bose (also called Netaji) broke with Congress and tried to form a military alliance with Germany or Japan to gain independence. Japan helped him set up the Indian National Army (INA) which fought under Japanese direction, mostly in Burma. Bose also headed the Provisional Government of Free India, a government-in-exile based in Singapore. It controlled no Indian territory and was used only to raise troops for Japan.
Post WWII
No progress was made in several of the Congress Party’s attempts to resolve Hindu-Muslim differences through talks between Gandhi and Jinnah. Soon after the war’s end in Europe, Archibald Wavell (viceroy) convened a political conference in Simla in late June 1945, but there was no progress made because neither group could see eye to and this meeting between the Congress and the Muslim League failed. Two weeks after the Simla talks collapsed in midsummer, Churchill’s Conservative Party government was voted out of office by the Labour Party’s sweep of British polls, and the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, appointed one of Gandhi’s old admirers, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, to head the India Office. London’s primary concern in India was how to find the political solution to the Hindu-Muslim conflict that would most expeditiously permit the British raj to withdraw its forces and to extricate as many of its assets as possible. At this point London saw India as a burden and liability rather than an asset.
In 1946 Secretary of State Pethick-Lawrence led a three-man team to New Delhi with the hope of resolving the Congress–Muslim League deadlock and, in the end, transfer British power to a single Indian administration. The subcontinent was to be divided into three major groups of provinces: Group A, included the Hindu-majority provinces (virtually all of what became independent India a year later); Group B, to contain the Muslim-majority provinces (the areas out of which the western part of Pakistan was created); and Group C, to include the Muslim-majority Bengal (a portion of which became the eastern part of Pakistan and in 1971 the country of Bangladesh) and the Hindu-majority Assam. The League and Congress Party Leaders accepted the Cabinet Mission’s proposal. Nehru later announced at his first press conference as the re-elected president of the Congress that no constituent assembly could be bound by any prearranged constitutional formula. Jinnah read Nehru’s remarks as a redaction of the plan, which had to be accepted in its entirety to work. Jinnah then convened the league’s Working Committee, which withdrew its previous agreement to the federation scheme and instead called upon the “Muslim Nation” to launch direct action in mid-August 1946. This started India’s bloodiest year of civil war since the mutiny nearly a century earlier.
The Hindu-Muslim rioting and killing that started in Calcutta sent deadly sparks of fury, frenzy, and fear to every corner of the subcontinent, as all civilized restraint seemed to disappear. Lord Mountbatten was sent to replace Wavell as viceroy as Britain prepared to transfer its power over India to some responsible hands by no later than June 1948. Mountbatten decided to divide Punjab and Bengal, rather than risk further political negotiations while civil war raged. Gandhi was the only major leader to stand against the partition. Britain’s Parliament passed in July 1947 the Indian Independence Act. It ordered that India and Pakistan we know today be divide by midnight of August 14–15, 1947, and that the assets of the world’s largest empire be divided within a single month. Boundaries were drawn that would benefit along religious lines. Roughly 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled from one side to the other in the process of division. This mass exodus had the tragic side effect of as many as one million deaths.
In 1947, with the new found freedom India struggled due to the resettlement process, economic disruption, lack of resources for basic needs, communal conflict, and unofficial war with Pakistan over Kashmir. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, took charge of governmental responsibilities.
The Pakistan war in 1965 was started by Pakistans president after he took control of civil and military affairs. The first assault brought what appeared to be easy victory on the outpost of India because India’s tanks were no match to Pakistans. Both side agreed to a cease fir and withdrew troops back to the original borders. Pakistan decided to strike again however India was better prepared and struck back attacking different cities. Again the U.N. stepped in and a cease fire was reached and troops pulled back. The United States and the U.K. put an immediate embargo on any weapons to India and Pakistan.