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<text> <title> (1940s) Colonialism & Independence </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <link 07817> <link 07773> <link 00126><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Colonialism & Independence </hdr> <body> [When the Japanese invaded and occupied the Asian colonies of the European Powers--French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya and Singapore--the victory by a non-white Asian nation had very broad repercussions, giving the members of several independence movements the idea that they too could throw off the white man's domination. At the war's end, when the colonial powers returned, ostensibly to take up where they had left off in 1941, this idea grew even more appealing. The exception was the U.S., which kept its promise, made in 1934, to free the Philippines in 1946. But the French returned to an Indochina whose native forces had run the Japanese out of much of the country and were prepared to fight for independence. France would recognize the sovereignty of "Vietnam," the northern two-thirds of the country, but to Vietnam's leader, a shadowy Communist with many pseudonyms including Ho Chi Minh, those terms were unacceptable. The stage was set for 30 years of war.] (January 6, 1947) Last March, France recognized the Indo-Chinese "free state" of Viet Nam (the provinces of Tonkin and Annam) within the French Union. But this was not enough. The Vietnamese wanted to incorporate the southern province of Cochin China, because, they said, its people were mainly Annamese. The French agreed to hold an election to ascertain the wishes of the Cochin Chinese. Meanwhile, separatist case was not properly presented, the election would be unfair. Vietnam is headed by Ho Chi-minh (He Who Enlightens), president of the Indo-Chinese Communist party, who, with his little goat beard, looks something like a Mongoloid Trotsky. Ho and War Minister Vo Nguyen-giap have built up the Vietnamese army to about 100,000, outnumbering the French local force of 80,000. Viet Nam got some mortars and French 75s from the Japs, and has been manufacturing its own small arms. Last fortnight Ho and Vo sent conciliatory letters to several French officials, suggesting a renewal of negotiations. But while General Louis Morliere, the commander at Hanoi was reading his letter, a bomb disabled the power plant. Said Ho: "The battle will be long and difficult." The French garrison mopped up most of Hanoi and fought off heavy counterattacks but found it hard to get out except by air. Other garrisons in Tonkin were besieged. The rebels shelled Haiphong on Tonkin's coast, and Hue on Annam's coast. The French fought with planes and tanks; the rebels answered with mines, boobytraps, snipers and ambushes. The rebels claimed that Germans in the French Foreign Legion were deserting; the French answered that Japs in the Vietnamese army were committing hara-kiri. [Before the war the Dutch had been heavily reliant on the colonial East Indies as a source of raw materials and they wanted it back. But the Indonesians had fared better under the Japanese than many Asians, and had in fact been granted "independence" at war's end under radical President Sukarno. The Dutch were willing to cede only partial sovereignty, to a United States of Indonesia composed of three autonomous (and therefore more manageable) regions. This arrangement was proclaimed in 1946, but soon broke down.] (July 23, 1947) At midnight the Dutch struck. Troops seized the radio, the cable office, and Republican government buildings in Batavia, seat of the Dutch administration in Java. Next day, Dutch planes struck at the Republic's weak air force (about 40 old Japanese planes), which they caught on the ground. With artillery preparation, the Dutch army began an attack on the big north central Java city of Semarang. "In view of the almost constant Republican violations (of Dutch-Indonesian truce)," said the Dutch Acting Governor General Hubertus van Mook, "The Netherlands Government cannot further be bound by the truce and agreement, and retake their freedom of action." This meant that Indonesia would once again be plunged into a war of white men against brown men. The Dutch now had an asset they lacked when the first campaign ended: a well-equipped army of 100,000. On their side the Indonesians had 200,000 soldiers, poorly equipped. Time, and a world opinion that frowns on colonial wars, was also on the Indonesian side. In a radio broadcast, Indonesian President Soekarno asked for United Nations intervention. [Under U.N. auspices, and after multiple truces and truce breakdowns, the Dutch and Indonesians finally agreed on independence terms in the autumn of 1949--not as much independence as the Indonesians wanted, not as little as the Dutch wanted to yield. Of Britain's colonies in East Asia, Burma achieved independence in 1947, and others began a measured march toward full sovereignty. But the place where the defeat of European imperialists had the most resounding impact was that star of the British imperium, India. In 1942, Mohandas Gandhi and his followers had again begun agitating for immediate independence, notwithstanding that the Japanese were poised on India's eastern frontier ready to invade the subcontinent. Mass rioting followed. Gandhi was arrested, and accused of collusion with the Japanese, although his Congress Party had come out for resistance to Japan. By war's end, Britain was ready to give up, and agreed to Indian independence no later than 1948. The problem was, how many independences? Fanatical Muslim Leader Mohamed Ali Jinnah had long insisted on partition of the subcontinent to create a Muslim state; Gandhi and Congress held out for one unified India. After months of negotiation, it was conceded that in the face of Jinnah's intransigence, one India would not be feasible. Lord Louis Mountbatten represented England at the end.] (June 16, 1947) An uneasy truce prevailed in the subcontinent. Mohamed Ali Jinnah for the Moslem League, and Jawaharlal Nehru for the All-India Congress, had accepted the plan which meant that at least two new nations, Hindustan and Pakistan, would arise in India. Finally, Mohandas Gandhi gave his acquiescence. On a raised white platform in Delhi's Untouchable colony sat the Mahatma, crosslegged on a white cushion, a cooling wet white kerchief covering his bald head. Overhead glimmered a lone 80-watt electric bulb. Reluctantly he assented to the splitting of India. "What is past is past." he mourned. "I cannot blame the Viceroy for what has happened. It was an act of Congress and the League." The splitting of India was the Indians' choice. As an earnest of British intentions to get out as soon as possible, His Majesty's Government had promised Dominion status to the two Indians as soon as they could set up governments to receive British power. (August 25, 1947) At 11 o'clock, India's rulers gathered in the Constituent Assembly Hall, ablaze with the colors of India's new tricolor flag--orange, white and green. Nehru made an inspired speech: "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge...At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." And as the twelfth chime of midnight died out, a conch shell, traditional herald of the dawn, sounded raucously through the chamber. Members of the Constituent Assembly rose. Together they pledged themselves "at this solemn moment...to the service of India and her people..." Delhi's thousands rejoiced. The town was gay, with orange, white and green. Bullocks' horns and horses' legs were painted in the new national colors, and silk merchants sold tricolored saris. Triumphant light blazed everywhere. The people made it their day. After dawn half a million thronged the green expanse of the Grand Vista and parkways near the Government buildings of New Delhi. Mountbattenji drew the biggest applause of the day when he said: "At this historic moment let us not forget all that India owes to Mahatma Gandhi--the architect of her freedom through nonviolence. We miss his presence here today and would have him know how he is in our thoughts." The Mahatma, who more than any other one man had brought independence to India, was not in New Delhi on the day of days. He was in troubled Calcutta, mourning because India was still racked by communal hatred. Gandhiji had moved into a Moslem house in Calcutta's Moslem quarter, which had been assailed by his fellow Hindus. He appealed to Hindus to keep peace. Angry young Hindu fanatics broke up a prayer meeting at his house. For the first time, Indians stoned Gandhi's house. Gandhi spoke sadly to the crowd: "If you still prefer to persue violence, remove me. It is not me but my corpse that will be taken away from here." (October 27, 1947) In India and Pakistan since mid-August at least 100,000 have died, not of germs of hunger or what the law calls "acts of God," but of brutal slaughter. Scarcely one died in fair combat or with the consolations of military of morale. Everywhere the armed and the many devoured the helpless and the few. In Calcutta, in Lahore, in Amritsar, in Old Delhi and New Delhi and throughout the magnificent plain of the dismembered Punjab, in homes and shops and factories and farms and villages and in the religious sanctuaries of all faiths, amid the clotting of the terrified in depots an don guarded trains and on lonely station platforms and in the vast shelterless encampments of refugees and their hypnotized columns across the land, the devastation raged alike among Hindus and Moslems and Sikhs. In the first six weeks of Independence, about half as many Indians were killed as Americans died during nearly four years of the second World War. There is still no possible numbering of the wounded and the mutilated who survived, or of those who must yet die for lack of the simplest medical facilities, or of so much as a roof over their heads. It is unbearable, and unwise as well, to cherish memory of the bestial atrocities which have been perpetrated by Moslem and Sikh and Hindu alike. The world thought war was the ultimate horror, and civil war the worst of wars. It is not. India is what Macaulay called it, a "decomposed society." Even the British could not establish law; they merely kept order. A decomposed society cannot make war, which requires law, authority, organization. India and Pakistan may progress to the point where they can make war or even to the point where, being able to make war, they will decide to live in amity. But in the six weeks of the killing India and Pakistan were beneath war. When tragedy runs amok blame is universal, inextricable and irrelevant. That the horror was deeper than the ideals or ambitions of the leaders was ironically demonstrated when they tried to stop it. Mohamed Ali Jinnah urged restraint, but the killing did not cease. Gandhi fasted in Calcutta with ultimate local effect, but elsewhere the killing did not cease. When he visited their sanctuary, 30,000 groaning Moslems virtually adored him, but the killing did not cease. Nehru personally rescued two Moslem girls from a gang of Sikhs, but the killing did not cease. A conference between Nehru and Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan ended in complete accord and the Joint Defense Council ordered troops to fire on all rioters and looters, but the killing did not cease. The newly communalized police force proved ineffectual and sometimes took part in the riots, and the killing did not cease. The newly communalized armies, now that the British troops were inactivated, were like bodies from which the bones had been drawn. At length, by no outward control or rational cause, but only because destruction itself sickens, the violence quieted, for the time being, at least. Men, women and children and bullocks and groaning carts were plodding eastward and westward beneath the autumn skies and nights of the cloven Punjab; past unharvested fields, past empty villages and eviscerated villages and villages which resemble rained-out brush fires. Huge, forlorn concentrations of Sikhs and Hindus labored forward to leave the West Punjab forever. The refugee movement each way is now at a rate of about 150,000 each week; last week it was speeded up, for both Governments hope to finish it off by mid-November. From the East Punjab into Pakistan, 2,550,000 Moslems have crossed, leaving 2,400,000 still to be evacuated; 2,275,000 Sikhs and Hindus have crossed the West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province into their Dominion, leaving 1,800,000, chiefly in isolated pockets, still to come. It is one of the great exchanges of population in recorded history. [Gandhi's pacifism seemed more and more irrelevant in a subcontinent racked by continued communal violence and the threat of war between the two new nations over Kashmir, the northern state whose ruler was Hindu but whose population was Muslim. Gandhi succumbed to the violence; he was shot by a radical Hindu while at prayer in New Delhi.] (February 9, 1948) The shame spread through the world with the news of Gandhi's murder. The event brought the shock of recognition rather than the shock of surprise. More forcibly than anyone in his age, Gandhi had asserted that love was the law; how else should he die but through hatred? He had feared machines in the hands of men not wise enough to use them, had warned against the glib, the new, the plausible; how else should he die, but by a pistol in the hands of a young intellectual? The world knew that it had, in a sense too deep, too simple for the world to understand, connived at his death as it had connived at Lincoln's. The parallel between Gandhi's martydom and Lincoln's was close and obvious. Each went down in the hollow between the crest of political victory and the crest of moral defeat. (September 20, 1948) Out of the travail of 400 million in the Indian subcontinent have come two symbols--a man of love and a man of hate. Last winter the man of non-violence, Gandhi, died violently at the hands of assassin. Last week the man of hate, Mahamed Ali Jinnah, at 71, died a natural death in Karachi, capital of the state he had founded. </body> </article> </text>