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Nehru & Gandhi. No sooner had Sir Stafford reached India than rumors spread through the hotels and bazaars that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, spiritual head of the potent Indian National Congress Party, would come to New Delhi to see that the party vetoed Sir Stafford's plan. Sure enough, the wily Saint arrived, in loincloth and carrying a staff, after a 24-hour rail journey from his mud hut in central India. On the way he acted as his own pressagent, handing notes (he did not speak; it was his day of silence) through the train window to newsmen at the stations.
Though Gandhi was not a member of the Congress Working Committee, he attended sessions and dominated all but five of the twelve members, including the Moslem president of the Congress, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. However much Gandhi longed for India's "freedom," he balked at any plan which would involve India more deeply in the war. For two hours Sir Stafford did his Christian-Socialist best to sway the Hindu Saint. The little man with the minxy smile merely kept repeating: "India cannot be conquered by the Japs so long as we do not cooperate with the invaders." After the interview Sir Stafford was tired and exasperated. And presently the Holy Man began worrying about his wife's health and went off home.
But if Sir Stafford Cripps could swing Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, active leader of the party, away from Gandhi, there was still hope of a favorable Congress vote. Nehru's dilemma left him with both feet off the ground. He was fanatically loyal to Gandhi, but he also wished to be India's savior. He saw the point like a practical Westerner, yet he felt as a mystical Hindu. While the horns of the dilemma gored deeper, Nehru, sitting in his cousin's modern mansion, grew hourly more nervous and distraught. Outside in the garden beautiful young sari-clad Indian women sipped sherry.
One night Sir Stafford invited Pandit Nehru to dinner. After dinner they talked for hours, looking out on the rose garden bathed in full moonlight. The two men. both masters of crisp, precise English, made a potentially magnificent team. Both idealists, both intellectuals, both patriots, they were nevertheless separated by the mountainous past and by the cloudy future. Some day Sir Stafford Cripps might be the leader of an empire?or what was left of it. Nehru some day might be the leader of an empire which might be greater. Could those two empires be aspects of the same thing? Sir Stafford thought they could be; Nehru doubted it.
But Sir Stafford's plan was couched in practical terms. His plan stipulated that during the war the British would continue to direct India's defense. As Nehru well knew, the Congress wanted India?defenseless without the British?to "defend" itself, under its own Defense Minister. At week's end Congress President Azad, Pan dit Nehru and the British Commander in Chief in India, Sir Archibald Wavell, met to try to work out a compromise. There was talk that Nehru would be satisfied if he were given a post similar to that of the War Secretary in Britain. It was also reported that the Congress was asking for General Wavell to replace Lord Linlithgow as Viceroy.