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PARTISAN REVIEW
tured or not lost. A compromise peace is always a peace of 'grab what
you can.' Mr. Fielden brings forward his imaginary Indian to suggest
that if India were neutral Japan might leave her alone; I doubt whether
any responsible Indian nationalist has said anything quite so stupid as
that. The other idea, more popular in Left-wing circles, that India could
defend herself better on her own than with our help, is a sentimentality.
If
the Indians were militarily superior to ourselves they would have driven
us out long ago. The much-quoted example of China is very misleading
here. India is a far easier country to conquer than China, if only because
of its better communications, and in any case Chinese resistance depends
on help from the highly-industrialized states and would collapse without
it. One must conclude that for the next few years India's destiny is
linked with that of Britain and the U.S.A. It might be different if the
Russians could get their hands free in the West or if China were a great
military power; but that again implies a complete defeat of the Axis,
and points away from the neutrality which Mr. Fielden seems to think
desirable. The idea put forward by Gandhi himself, that if the Japanese
came they could be dealt with by sabotage and 'non-co-operation,' is a
delusion, nor does Gandhi show any very strong signs of believing in it.
Those methods have never seriously embarrassed the British and would
make no impression on the Japanese. After all, where is the Korean
Gandhi?
But against this is the
fact
of Indian nationalism, which is not to be
exorcised by the humbug .of White Papers or by a few phrases out of
Marx. And it is nationalism of an emotional, romantic, even chauvinistic
kind. Phrases like 'the sacred soil of the Motherland,' which now seem
merely ludicrous in Britain, come naturally enough to an Indian intel–
lectual. When the Japanese appeared to be on the point of invading
India, Nehru actually used the phrase 'Who dies if India live?' So the
wheel comes full circle and the Indian rebel quotes Kipling. And na–
tionalism at this level works indirectly in favour of Fascism. Extremely
few Indians are at all attracted by the idea of a federated world, the
only kind of world in which India could actually be free. Even those who
pay lip-service to federalism usually want only an Eastern federation,
thought of as a military alliance against the West. The idea of the class
struggle has little appeal anywhere in Asia, nor do Russia and China
evoke much loyalty in India. As for the Nazi domination of Europe,
only a handful of Indians are able to see that it affects their own destiny
in any way. In some of the smaller Asiatic countries the 'my country
right or wrong' nationalists were exactly the ones who went over to the
Japanese-a step which may not have been wholly due to igt.orance.
But here there arises a point which Mr. Fielden hardly touches on,
and that is: we don't know to what extent Asiatic nationalism is simply
the product of our own oppression. For a century all the major Oriental
nations except Japan have been more or less in subjection, and the
hysteria and shortsightedness of the various nationalist movements may
