New Delhi: Lakhs leaving cities with whatever they could carry, dangerous animals being killed, governments dispersing from administrative capitals — such sights would normally be seen in a country being invaded by a foreign army.
In this case, however, there was no such foreign invasion. It was just a panic situation or “flap” during World War II in India, said journalist and author Mukund Padmanabhan at a discussion about his new book, The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Panicked Over a Japanese Non-Invasion, at New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre.
The conversation, of which former diplomat Navtej Sarna too was a part, brought out the horrifying stories of how Indians — through British action or inaction as the case may be — left their cities in 1942 in droves, expecting a Japanese invasion.
The book describes the exodus that has now faded from popular memory. In late December 1941 and early 1942, the British armies in Malaya and Singapore were overwhelmed by the Japanese. Cities as far as Ahmedabad, Bombay (now Mumbai), and Vizag (Vishakhapatnam) emptied out due to the mass migration of residents. Even those in the Northeast left their homes. But the supposed invasion, Padmanabhan notes, never came.
“We know now that there was no invasion plan at all for India by the Japanese. With the men and material they had, they could not pull off a land invasion,” he said. All the Japanese wanted was to create disruption across India and send a message: The British cannot save you.
“I think [the exodus] fell through the cracks for many reasons. The first is that the invasion never happened. Second, the [exodus] did not fit into either the grand narratives of the struggle for independence and decolonisation,” said Padmanabhan.
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The ‘great flap’
A large part of the exodus, called ‘the great flap of 1942’ by the British administration, remained “unmapped”. It wasn’t heavily covered by the media at the time.
Most of the stories about the panic and the number of people who fled were “mostly found in single column articles buried in the inside pages of the newspapers at the time”.
As Padmanabhan writes in The Great Flap of 1942, almost 7,00,000 residents (about 90 per cent of the total population) in Madras (now Chennai), by one estimate, left the city.
“The colonial authorities favoured people leaving. They calculated that in the event of a Japanese invasion, the cities would be easier managed with the civilian population leaving. It was considered an administrative exercise,” said Padmanabhan.
He shared the story of how the Viceroy and Governor-General at the time, Lord Linlithgow, repeatedly said that the administration wanted “less useless mouths fed,” highlighting how they were “quite okay” with the flap.
The “panic set in well before there was any action seen in India”, said Padmanabhan, who shared how his own mother’s family left Madras, only to return a year later to an empty, pillaged home.
The fall of Malaya & Madras zoo
As the Japanese laid waste to Pearl Harbor in the United States in 1941, an army consisting of about 60,000 troops sailing from Hainan Island in China launched an amphibious assault on Kota Bharu in northeastern Malaysia. Led by the ‘Tiger of Malaya’ Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the operation was a success.
“The British also thought poorly of Japan’s army as being made up of men who were fearful, bandy-legged, and far-sighted with their squinty eyes,” writes Padmanabhan in his book.
This “false sense of composure and confidence” was echoed by Indian newspapers at the time, highlighting that Malaya and Singapore were impregnable fortresses that could not fall to Japan.
Those claims proved to be untrue. The fall of Kota Bharu, followed by the sinking of the battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse, started the first round of panic in India.
“Between 13 and 30 December 1941, almost 20 per cent of the population of Calcutta fled. By January 1942, 50 per cent of Visakhapatnam evacuated from the city,” said Padmanabhan.
Meanwhile, the Madras administration went on a rampage, shooting and killing animals in the city zoo. It seems that such a practice was the norm for big powers during wartime.
“Animals were shot and killed not only in Madras. It happened all across Europe as well. Within two weeks of entering the war, between 4,50,000 to 7,50,000 dogs and cats were killed in the United Kingdom. Even in Tokyo, animals in the zoo were killed,” said Padmanabhan.
Sarna chipped in and shared an interesting anecdote of Indian public diplomacy. “The Japanese killed two Indian elephants by starvation. After the war, 800 Japanese children wrote to PM [Jawaharlal] Nehru, saying: ‘We miss our elephants’. Nehru sent an elephant named Indira to Tokyo in 1949.”
“A few years later, Nehru sent an elephant named Shanti to Berlin,” he added.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)