India's War of Independence-Role of Mahatma Gandhi.

Lord Linlithgow's initial refusal to discuss postwar plan with the Congress left any political prospects other than those it could win by noncooperation or violence. Soon after Japan joined the Axis powers in late 1941, and moved with such rapidity into most of Southeast Asia, Churchill's war Cabinet, fearing the imminent possibility of a Japanese invasion of India, sent the socialist Sir Stafford Cripps, a close personal friend of Nehru, to New Delhi with a postwar proposal in March 1942.

The Cripps Mission offered Indian politicians full "dominion status" for India after the war's end, with the additional stipulation, as a concession primarily to the Muslim League, that any province could vote to "opt out" of such a dominion if it preferred to do so.

Mahatma Gandhi irately called the offer "a post-dated cheque on a bank that was failing," and Nehru was equally negative and angry at Cripps for his readiness to give so much to the Muslims.

Cripps's hands had been tied by Churchill before he left London, however, as he was ordered by the war Cabinet merely to convey the British offer, not to modify it or negotiate a new formula. He flew home empty-handed in less than a month, and soon afterward Mahatma Gandhi planned his last satyagraha campaign, the "Quit India" movement.

Declaring that the British presence in India was a provocation to the Japanese, the Mahatma  called upon the British to "quit India" and to leave Indians to deal with the Japanese by nonviolent means, but the Mahatma and all members of the Congress high command were arrested before the dawn of that movement in August 1942.

In a few months at least 60,000 Indians filled British prison cells, and the raj unleashed massive force against Indian underground efforts to disrupt rail transport and to generally subvert the war effort that followed the crackdown on the Quit India campaign. Parts of the United Provinces, Bihar, the North-West Frontier, and Bengal were bombed and strafed by British pilots as the raj resolved to crush all Indian resistance and violent opposition as swiftly as possible.

Many Indians were killed and wounded, but wartime resistance continued as more young Indians, women as well as men, were recruited into Congress' underground. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States into the war as Britain's most powerful ally. By late 1942 and throughout the rest of the war, U.S. arms and planes steamed and flew into Calcutta and Bombay, bolstering British India as the major Allied launching pad against Japanese forces in Southeast Asia and China. The British raj thus remained firm despite growing Indian opposition, both violent and nonviolent. Indian industry grew rapidly, moreover, during World War II. Electric power output doubled, and Jamshedpur became the British Empire's foremost producer of steel by the war's end. Indian shipyards and light-manufacturing plants flourished in Bombay, as well as in Bengal and Orissa, and, despite many warnings, the Japanese never launched air attacks against Calcutta or Madras.

In mid-1943, Field Marshal Lord Wavell, who replaced Linlithgow as viceroy (1943-47), brought India's government fully under martial control for the war's duration. No progress was made in several of the Congress' attempts to resolve Hindu-Muslim differences through talks between Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah. Soon after the war's end in Europe, Wavell convened a political conference in Shimla in late June 1945, but there was no meeting of minds, no formula sturdy enough to bridge the gulf between the Congress and the Muslim League.

Two weeks after the Shimla talks collapsed in midsummer, Churchill's government was voted out of power by the Labour Party's sweep of London's polls, and Prime Minister Clement Attlee appointed one of Mahatma Gandhi's old admirers, Lord Petrick-Lawrence, to head the India Office. With the dawn of the atomic age in August and Japan's surrender, 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 from what seemed to the Labour Party to have become more of an imperial burden and liability than any real advantage for Great Britain.