Cripps Mission

Background

By early 1942, Britain faced a deteriorating military position in Asia, with Japanese forces advancing rapidly through Southeast Asia, including the fall of Singapore in February and the subsequent Japanese conquest of Burma, bringing the war to India's eastern frontier. Under pressure from the United States and China, both of which pressed London to secure Indian political cooperation for the war effort, the British War Cabinet under Winston Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labour minister and Lord Privy Seal seen as personally sympathetic to Indian aspirations and previously acquainted with Nehru, to negotiate directly with Indian political leaders. Churchill himself was reluctant to make major concessions and set narrow limits on what Cripps could offer.

The proposal

Cripps offered a draft declaration promising India dominion status with full self-government once the war ended, through a constitution-making body to be elected after the war. A key provision allowed any province, and by extension any princely state, to opt out of the new Indian union and negotiate a separate constitutional arrangement — a clause intended partly to address the Muslim League's demands and the position of the princely states. During the war itself, defense of India would remain under British control.

Rejection

The Congress rejected the offer, objecting principally to the continued British control of defense during the war — a point on which Cripps and the American presidential envoy sent to assist the talks, Louis Johnson, tried without success to find compromise language — and to the absence of any immediate transfer of real power; Gandhi is widely quoted as describing the proposal as a postdated cheque on a failing bank. The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, also rejected it, on the grounds that the opt-out provision did not explicitly recognize a right to a separate sovereign state along the lines the League was by then demanding under the Lahore Resolution of 1940, and that the mechanism for exercising the opt-out was unclear. Smaller parties and the princely states raised further objections of their own. Cripps returned to London without an agreement, and Churchill's government, relieved to have made a public gesture toward Indian self-government without conceding substance, did not pursue a further offer during the remainder of the war. The mission's failure left Congress convinced that further negotiation with the British government was unproductive, contributing directly to its decision to launch the Quit India Movement a few months later, in August 1942, demanding an immediate end to British rule.