Royal Indian Navy mutiny

Background and outbreak

Discontent among Indian ratings of the Royal Indian Navy had been building over poor food, racial discrimination in pay and treatment compared with British personnel, and the slow pace of demobilization after the Second World War. The immediate trigger was a protest over food quality at the signals training establishment HMIS Talwar in Bombay in mid-February 1946, which escalated after the arrest of a rating involved in the protest, B. C. Dutt, who had also been implicated in writing nationalist graffiti aboard the ship. Ratings at Talwar went on hunger strike, and the unrest spread rapidly to other ships in Bombay harbour and then to naval establishments in other port cities. Strikers raised the flags of Congress, the Muslim League and the Communist Party of India together, alongside the naval ensign, presenting the action as a nationalist rather than purely industrial protest, and in Bombay the mutiny coincided with, and helped provoke, wider civilian unrest and clashes with police and troops in the city.

Political response and settlement

The Naval Central Strike Committee, led by M. S. Khan and Madan Singh, coordinated the ratings' demands, which included better conditions, release of political prisoners including those associated with the Indian National Army trials, and withdrawal of Indian troops from Indonesia, where they were being used against the nationalist movement there. Congress and the Muslim League did not endorse the mutiny as a method, and senior leaders, including Vallabhbhai Patel and Jinnah, worked to persuade the ratings to stand down, concerned about a loss of control over the direction of the independence movement and about the risk of violent suppression. Facing the prospect of military confrontation and after receiving assurances against reprisals, the strike committee agreed to surrender on 23 February 1946, though the assurances were only partially honoured and many ratings were subsequently dismissed from service rather than court-martialled en masse.

Significance

Historians differ on how much weight to give the mutiny in explaining the timing of Britain's withdrawal from India, which followed within eighteen months. Some, including later Indian left-nationalist historiography, treat it as evidence that British authority over its Indian armed forces, the ultimate guarantee of colonial rule, could no longer be relied upon, and link it to the roughly contemporaneous decision of the Attlee government to set a firm timetable for transfer of power. Others regard it as one episode among several signs of postwar unrest, including the Indian National Army trials and general strikes, rather than a decisive cause on its own. The mutiny is also noted for its short-lived display of Hindu-Muslim-Communist unity among the ratings, in contrast to the communal polarization that dominated Indian politics in the same period.