ABSTRACT
The second item in the first of the 12 volumes of Professor Mansergh's great series of documents on India. The Transfer of Power is a letter dated 2 January 1942 from the distinguished Indian ‘moderate’ figure, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, to the Private Secretary to the Viceroy. It enclosed a copy of a telegram Sapru had sent on behalf of himself and a dozen others of his kind – the veteran ‘moderate’ Sir Srinivasa Sastri, and the subsequent President of India, Radhakrishnan, amongst them – to Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, in Washington. Following upon the entry of Japan into the Second World War, and consequently that of the United States, Churchill had gone to Washington to consult with President Roosevelt. Sapru's telegram was thus despatched at a critical moment. It made a careful, urgent appeal to Churchill for some ‘bold-stroke far-sighted statesmanship . . . without delay’ so as to transform ‘entire spirit and outlook administration India’ (sic: telegraphese). It called for the immediate establishment of a wholly non-official national government for India ‘subject only responsibility to Crown’. It asked for the re-establishment of ‘popular governments broadbased on confidence different classes and communities’ in those Provinces of British India which were currently ‘ruled autocratically’ by their British Governors, and it sought agreement with the propositions that India should be represented on all important war and peacemaking bodies at the instance of its own national government, which should be generally treated upon an equality with the other governments of the British Dominions. The telegram quite deliberately stated that detailed questions relating to the ultimate constitution of India should ‘wait more propitious times, until after victory achieved in this titanic struggle against forces threatening civilisation’. 1 So far as Sapru was concerned his despatch of this telegram represented the climax to a year's energetic labour. It derived its character from his lifelong involvement in such matters.
