Britain entered WWI on this day: How its broken promises fueled India’s freedom struggle

How did Britain’s failure to reward India’s wartime sacrifices transform the struggle for independence?

The promise of self-governance

During the war, the Indian National Congress intensified its demands for constitutional reform. At its Lucknow session in 1916, the Congress passed a resolution urging Britain to declare that it was its ‘aim and intention… to confer self-government on India at an early date.’ Britain ignored the resolution, but it could not ignore the aspirations & unrest behind it.

Britain’s military needs only strengthened India’s bargain. Reid explains that Britain was fighting the Turks and depended heavily on the Indian Army in its campaign to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Mesopotamia along India’s frontiers. At the same time, “Muslim opinion in India was at risk of being alienated by the fact that Britain was fighting Muslims in the Ottoman Empire.”

In 1914, India possessed one of the largest voluntary armies in the world. “Of the 27,522 new recruits enlisted in India between August and 31st December 1914, 13,400 were from Punjab alone,” notes Santanu Das in India, Empire and First World War Culture (2018).

This loop of British dependence and Indian expectations created a belief that constitutional change was imminent. Speaking in the Imperial Legislative Council in 1917, Madan Mohan Malaviya declared that the war had “put the clock… fifty years forward.” Many assumed that once the fighting ended, reforms would pave the way for self-government.

Austen Chamberlain, then the Conservative Secretary of State for India, argued that India should be represented at the Imperial War Conference. “That seemed not unreasonable, as so many Indians had been taken half a world away to die in the mud and the cold of the Western Front…,” Reid notes. Yet little changed until Edwin Montagu succeeded Chamberlain as Secretary of State and Lord Chelmsford became Viceroy.

Together they introduced what became known as the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, bringing significant constitutional changes. The central legislature became bicameral, with the Imperial Legislative Assembly as the lower house and the Council of State as the upper house. Yet, writes Reid, “Until the end the powers of members were so limited, and the extent of the viceroy’s powers to suspend and override the body so extensive, that its role was nugatory.”

Honouring the dead

Britain’s commitment to India became apparent even in the way it commemorated those who had died. “Britain took trouble in deciding how to bury her own dead. The response was the creation of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and the principle of uniform headstones: comradeship in death,” notes Reid. Regardless of rank, each soldier’s name was individually recorded.

Indian soldiers, however, were treated differently. Many had fought and died in Mesopotamia during Britain’s successful campaign against the Ottoman Empire. Yet, the Memorial of the Missing at Basra records by name every British soldier (around 8,000) and all 665 Indian officers. “But,” Reid writes, “33,222 other Indian ranks are no more than numbers.”

Increased repression after the war

The end of the war brought neither prosperity nor political change. By 1919, India was gripped by economic hardship and growing unrest. Symbols of British authority increasingly came under attack. Further, progress towards Indianising the armed services remained painfully slow. “By 1930 there was still not one Indian officer with a rank higher than that of captain,” Reid notes.

More significantly, the hopes raised by wartime promises were undercut by fresh repression. In March 1919, just six months before the constitutional reforms were introduced, the emergency Defence of India Regulations were effectively made permanent through the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, better known as the Rowlatt Act.

Based on the recommendations of a committee headed by Justice Sir Sidney Rowlatt, the legislation empowered the government to imprison or deport political activists without trial for up to two years. Even possessing what authorities deemed a seditious newspaper could constitute sufficient evidence of guilt.

“The Act was wide-ranging,” Reid writes. “In addition to imprisonment without trial, it contained various powers to deal with anything the authorities chose to regard as terrorism or revolutionary tactics. There was strict control of the press and trial without jury.”

Mahatma Gandhi denounced it as the ‘Black Act.’ The limited scope of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, coupled with the sweeping powers granted under the Rowlatt Act, convinced many Indians that the sacrifices made during the war had been rewarded not with greater freedom but with greater repression. It was in response to this sense of betrayal that Gandhi launched his first nationwide Satyagraha and called for a nationwide hartal on 6 April 1919.

To make things worse, a “much bigger blow to any hopes that might have attended the reforms resulted from the massacre at Amritsar on 13 April 1919,” Reid wrote of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.

For many Indians, the sequence of events was impossible to ignore. After years of wartime sacrifice and promises of constitutional progress came limited reforms, repressive legislation and one of the most infamous acts of colonial violence. The result was a profound erosion of faith in British rule and a decisive turning point in India’s struggle for independence.