Free The Towers Of Silence (The Raj quartet) by Paul Scott

were sensible men among them, the ex-chief minister in Ranpur, M. A. Kasim (known popularly as MAK ) was an example, but they were all either under Gandhi’s saintly spell or too weak-kneed to exorcize it, and the saintly spell of Mr Gandhi had finally been exposed for what it was: a cover for the political machinations of an ambitious but naïve Indian lawyer whose successes had gone to his head.
    His demand now that the British should quit India, should leave her to ‘God or to anarchy’ sounded fine, courageous, desperate and inspired, but it meant that they should leave India to the Japanese who were already on the Chindwin but with whom Gandhi obviously expected to make a political bargain. Unless you were stupid you did not make bargains with the Japanese but war. Even the liberal American Jew, Roosevelt, had been forced to understand this and it was entirely to placate Roosevelt that Churchill (who knew a thing or two, including the fact that the Americans’ only interest in India was that the sub-continent should remain a stable threat in the rear to Japanese ambitions in the Pacific) had sent out that Fabian old maid, Stafford Cripps, to do what Churchill knew couldn’t be done: put pepper into Indian civilians and politicians by offering them what they’d been offered before, but which a pinko-red like Cripps, unused to office, would see as new, generous, advantageous, a Left-Wing invention. The farce of this particular confrontation between an English pinko-red and grasping Indian leaders had not been lost on the English community. Its total and inevitable failure had been a smack in the eye to Cripps who went home eating crow as well as his bloody vegetables. Given a chance to show that a modern British socialist could achieve what the old-fashioned Right had never achieved, unity among Indians and political co-operation between Indians and English, he had also been hoist with the responsibility of office; a responsibility which meant, quite simply, having to make things work.
    And he couldn’t of course make them work because Indian politicians always wanted more if offered anything. Not understanding this he returned to Whitehall with that smile like a brass plate on a coffin and a conviction that while someone had been unco-operative it was not clear who. Once he had gone the Quit India campaign gathered momentum; which was also funny because it made Cripps look as if he had invented it; and early in August the Congress Party officially adopted the resolution calling for the British to leave or take the consequences. For once the government in New Delhi seemed to have been prepared. Within a few hours prominent Congressmen all over the country were detained under the Defence of India rules in an operation of arrest that gathered them in from Gandhi all the way down through the scale to members of local sub-committees in the towns and cities. Even the moderate ex-chief minister Mohammed Ali Kasim was reported arrested.
    The country held its breath and then with a fierceness not equalled in living memory the leaderless mobs rose and for three weeks the administration was virtually at a standstill.
    V
    From the Ranpur Gazette: August 15th, 1942
    ENGLISH WOMEN ATTACKED
    It has just been officially disclosed that on the afternoon and evening of August 9th two Englishwomen were victims of violent attacks in the Mayapore district of this province. In the first case which occurred in the rural area of Tanpur no arrests have yet been made. In the second which took place in the town of Mayapore six Hindu youths are being held. It is understood that a charge is likely to be made under section 375 Indian Penal Code. The prompt action of the Mayapore police in apprehending the suspects within an hour or two of this disgraceful attack will be applauded. The arresting party was under the personal command of the District Superintendent of Police.
    In a statement issued to the press DSP said, ‘It is not in the public