Ayer later wrote, of his arrival in Delhi on the 22nd of November, that he "straightaway attacked a pile of newspapers. They carried pages and pages of reports of the trial, which had opened on 5th November and then adjourned for a few days." As he went from paper to paper, "my excitement knew no bounds. The I.N.A. had literally burst on the country. . . . From the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin [it] was aflame with an enthusiastic fervour unprecedented in its history."
For once
Netaji's Minister of Publicity and Propaganda may not have overstated the case. India
was aflame. "There has seldom been a matter which has attracted so much Indian public interest and, it is safe to say, sympathy." Thus Sir Norman Smith, Director of the Intelligence Bureau, in a confidential note to the Home Department on November 20. Had Ayer seen the note, he would have protested that the DIB did not measure the clamor adequately. Never has a matter so stirred the public, he would have said. But at the same time he would have been pleased to learn that in Sir Norman's opinion "the general Nationalist Press," meaning the newspapers he himself devoured, was encouraging that clamor marvelously. "The effect the publications in question have is undoubted, for many of them are most popular and widely-read even in rural areas." Sir Norman did not see what could be done about it now. It was too late. "The country's ear has largely been captured."
In Lahore tension was palpable long before the trial itself began. Diwali, the Hindu festival, was near (Lahore then was almost as much a Hindu as a Muslim city), and students went about begging householders not to set out the usual Diwali lights—little clay cups holding oil and a floating wick which, when placed along walls and parapets, give residential quarters at night a magical appearance. Out of respect for the patriots whose trial would soon begin, Lahore must remain dark. When Diwali evening came, dark it remained. "Only at isolated points tiny earthen lamps faintly flickered."
The Lahore papers were full of pieces about the Indian National Army, and photographs too: of the three defendants, of Subhas Chandra in uniform, of jawans entering a Manipur village carrying Netaji's portrait (this was the photo Sivaram had identified as fake). Children roamed the lanes and alleys chanting "Azad Fauj Chhor Do, Lal Qila Tor Do." Let the freedom fighters go, tear down the Red Fort. And on November 5, the day the trial began, there was a general
hartal. All the shops and offices closed. Thousands of students took to the streets. If a school was reluctant to shut, they shamed it into doing so, or compelled it to. Elsewhere in the Punjab there was
hartal too, at Lyallpur to the west, at Rawalpindi to the north. And at Karachi, way to the southwest, the municipal corporation announced an INA day soon.
Simple to organize—it was just a matter of parading with tricolor banners, shouting "Chalo Delhi", demanding the release of the Red Fort prisoners—INA days multiplied right across the country. And right across the country, sub-divisional magistrates attempted to anticipate and stop them, usually by publishing orders that forbade (to use the stock phrase) "processions, meetings, and demonstrations in sympathy with the Indian National Army." One late November edition of the
Hindu reported ten such prohibitory orders in the course of forty-eight hours for Madras Province alone. In Vellore the prohibition was to last for one day only. In Salem it was to hold for fifteen. In Cocanada, three hundred miles up the coast, it was to remain in force for an entire month. One would love to know whether the magistrate there was able to make his prohibition stick. It may have been difficult when elections to the Central Legislative Assembly reached the town.
[...]At one point Nehru covered four hundred miles in three days and spoke fourteen times. And these were only his scheduled addresses. Villagers determined to have
darshan of the Pandit found that if they blocked the road he would stop, get out of his automobile, and say a few words.
His speeches, as usual, were passionate. To a sense of enormous impatience with British rule he added an implied appeal to violence, an appeal felt particularly by students in any audience. When, therefore, students took out processions (as the Indian expression goes) to protest the Red Fort trials, they were not easily checked, turned back, or dispersed. They stood their ground and threw rocks. A collision of this sort occurred at Madura, deep in the south (it was Ayer's home town), the day after the first trial began. The police there fired, leaving two dead and more wounded. Over the next two weeks there were similar encounters in half a dozen places. But it was at Calcutta, on the afternoon of November 21, that a really serious confrontation erupted.
It, too, started with an attempt by university students to observe an INA Day. The plan was to assemble at Wellington Square and march the half mile to Dalhousie Square, which, with its tank (as India calls an artificial stone or brick-lined pond); its gardens; the General Post Office on one corner; the Writers' Buildings across the north face; was as central and important an open space as Calcutta possessed. Police, however, stopped the column halfway up Dhurrumtolla Street. Dalhousie Square was a prohibited area, they pointed out. The students nevertheless persisted. There were more than a thousand of them. Onlookers swelled their number. They surged forward and were received with lathi charges, some delivered on horseback, until at last the police, who were being pelted unmercifully with brickbats, fired. Three persons fell. But the demonstrators did not scatter.
All night a hard core of students faced the police across the disputed stretch of roadway. In the morning they withdrew, then returned to resume the attempt, though Sarat Bose sent a note (and his brother Sunil came in person) urging them not to. This time they moved simultaneously up Bow Bazar and Dhurrumtolla. And this time, with enormous crowds at their back, they could not be stopped. The police gave way. Tens of thousands swept triumphantly into Dalhousie Square. But it was only the beginning. Already tram and bus drivers had quit work to show their support. Now the municipal sweepers and water workers, who had labor grievances anyway, came out too. Shops and offices closed, less in sympathy than from necessity—it was difficult to get to work. Mobs leavened with the professional thugs India knows as
goondas roamed the city, compelling Indians in European dress to take off their hats and ties, stopping British and American military vehicles at improvised barricades and setting fire to them, committing general mayhem. Outnumbered and savagely stoned, the police fired another dozen times. For three days Calcutta lived without transport, water, refuse collection, or order. Then, on the evening of the 24th, just as troops were about to be brought in, quiet unaccountably returned. But several score had been killed, hundreds injured, and some 150 burnt-out vehicles littered the streets.
[...]
You could go into town to do some shopping and discover that the shops were observing "
hartal, a boycott against the English." You could go into a shop that was obviously open, and stand there, and wait. And no one would serve you.
And then there was the open hostility.
Even in our little station there was a series of incidents, which were multiplied a thousand times all over the country. Bricks were thrown at Europeans in the dark, windows were smashed, women's handbags snatched and thrown away, and most of these acts were unpunished. In the military hospital which belonged to our transit camp an English nurse had her face slapped by a sweeper in full view of an Indian ward—and the authorities dared do nothing. Any spark, it was thought, might start a conflagration.
Sir Henry Twynam, Governor of the Central Provinces, was neither as calm as Sir Norman nor as agitated as Mrs. Candlin. In a late November letter to the Viceroy he dwelt at some length on what the trials and the Congress election campaign might be doing to the Army. "I am bound to say that I do feel some uneasiness as to the attitude which Indian troops may adopt if called upon to fire on mobs. The disposition towards a sudden change of attitude in a tense political atmosphere is present now, I think, as it was in the days of the mutiny." He meant, of course,
the Mutiny—the 1857 business. He had been reading in that regard, he continued, "some of the original reports printed in select State documents,"
and extremely interesting they are. It is extraordinary how Units which were thought to be perfectly loyal suddenly decided to throw in their lot with the mutineers. I do not for one moment suggest that there is any widespread disposition on these lines, but a slight uneasiness remains in my mind when I envisage the possibility of the Province being completely denuded of British troops.
At present in this Province I have 3 European Commissioners, 5 Deputy Commissioners, no Sessions Judges, no Assistant Commissioners, and 7 District Superintendents of Police. Altogether I have available 17 European I.C.S. officers, including 3 Judicial officers, and 19 European members of the Indian Police. These figures exclude people serving in the Government of India but include people on leave. This handful of Europeans has to deal with a population of 18 or more millions over an area of 100,000 square miles. It will be readily appreciated how difficult it will be for the administration if the present "hymn of hate" leads to the retirement of any substantial proportion of this handful of officers.
