(6 of 6)
Lord Wavell waited quietly while the endless corridor conferences proceeded. He had come far, he had no intention of jeopardizing the success of his mission now. The Congress leaders were willing to take office. The Moslem League would scarcely allow itself to be squeezed out of India's new government by the Congress ministers and nonLeague Moslems. This week, when the Simla conference convenes again, the prospects for settlement are bright.
Next, Dominion Status. The stakes were greater than India itself, for they included the Empire and the world. The Wavell Plan was the first step toward Dominion status. When that was accomplished, India would become an equal partner in the Commonwealth, free (if she so desired) to secede from the Crown. Was Britain not risking "the brightest jewel of the British Crown?" Indians were not Britons linked by ties of blood and sentiment to the islands in the distant northern sea.
Perhaps. But Dominion status would confer undeniable advantages. India would join a free concert of nations who wielded an influence in world councils more potent than the sum of their parts. Industrial India, with a swiftly rising output (mostly steel and textiles), would expand most rapidly under the careful nurturing of imperial preferences. If the princes* came in (as they almost certainly would in time), the Dominion of India would become a mighty anchor in the storms that might ravage postwar Asia.
In his poetry anthology, whose footnotes are often as revealing as an autobiography, Lord Wavell had quoted one stanza of Poet Matthew Arnold's long, gloomy Obermann Once More:
The East bow'd low before the blast,
In patient, deep disdain.
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.
But none knew better than Lord Wavell that India was no longer content to remain plunged in thought. All Asia was astir. If Britain wished to keep India in her Commonwealth, she could only hope to tighten the bonds of Empire by loosening them.
Not until that step of high statesmanship had been achieved would India's Viceroy be free to turn to another project —a biography of Belisarius, Byzantine conqueror of the North African Vandals.
*The princes rule 562 autonomous states (715,964 sq.mi., pop. 95 million), not as part of British India but under British suzerainty.