Removing the International from the Refugee: India in the 1940s

Abstract

Such a union can have nothing to do with imperialism or fascism and must be based on the fullest democracy and freedom, each nation having autonomy within its borders, and submitting in international matters to the union legislature to which it sends its representatives.1 -Jawaharlal Nehru, June 1939 At the end of March 1942, congress party leader Jawaharlal Nehru would dine with Sir Stafford Cripps, head of the British delegation designated to find a version of selfdetermination for Indian people that would also rally Indian nationalists to the cause of the Second World War. Cripps' report of the meeting highlights a concern that is not usually thought of with regard to India's road to independence or even the international dimensions of the famed Quit India movement. The conversation had left him with the impression that the negative attitude towards the war was, in a large part, because of 'the treatment of Indian refugees coming from the eastern seaboard to the central districts in comparison to the treatment of refugees.' 1 Nehru had spent some of that year in Assam, witnessing first-hand a difference in refugee experience that he saw as the inequality inherent in Empire. 2 In August of that same year, the Quit India resolution, largely authored by Nehru, would outline how India's freedom was a precondition both to voluntary participation in the war as well as the first step to overcoming racial hierarchy an equal World Federation that could maintain peace. The refugee, it would seem, had served as an embodiment of the predicament of India's national position in a changing world order.Indian visions of the International Order were closely tied to nationalism and extended beyond the Congress' realisation of the disadvantages of functioning as a junior partner in the British internationalist machine. A new internationalism had to be created for