‘There has seldom been a matter which has attracted so much Indian Public…

Concept

A comprehension question that asks who feels something, towards whom, and against whom is settled by locating the one sentence in which the feeling is reported and reading the three roles off it: the party in whom the feeling is said to arise, the matter or the persons it is felt about, and the party whose action produced that matter. Any qualifier attached to the feeling — whether it confines the feeling inside a single group or states that it runs past group boundaries — decides whether a group-specific reading is admissible at all.

Application to this passage

The sentence quoted in the question is the Intelligence Bureau note of 20 November 1945: "there has seldom been a matter which has attracted so much Indian public interest and, it is safe to say, sympathy … this particular brand of sympathy cuts across communal barriers." What the note records as having been attracted is Indian public interest and sympathy, so the feeling is reported of the Indian public taken as a body and not of any one community; and the qualifier "cuts across communal barriers" says in so many words that it is not bounded by community.

The matter that attracts this sympathy is named earlier in the passage: the public trials of the I.N.A. prisoners, the first of them held in the Red Fort in November 1945, with a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh — P.K. Sehgal, Shah Nawaz and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon — put on the dock together. The party holding those trials, dismissing 7,000 men from service and detaining them without trial, is the British. Reading the three roles off the sentence therefore gives: the Indians sympathise, the men who were to be tried are sympathised with, and the sympathy runs against the British.

Cross-check against the other readings

• Pairing Muslims with Shah Nawaz, Hindus with P.K. Sehgal, or Sikhs with Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon each shuts the sympathy inside a single community and ties it to that community's own co-religionist on the dock. That is precisely the reading the phrase "cuts across communal barriers" is written to exclude, so none of these three can be what the note records.

• The passage supplies independent support for the wider reading: Bhulabhai Desai, Tej Bahadur Sapru and Nehru appeared for the defence, and the Muslim League — a body that would have had no reason to defend a Hindu or a Sikh officer on communal grounds — joined the countrywide protest.

• B. Shiva Rao, visiting the Red Fort prisoners on the same 20 November, reported "There is not the slightest feeling among them of Hindu and Muslim", and added that a majority of the men awaiting trial was Muslim while some of them resented Jinnah keeping the Pakistan controversy alive — again a picture in which community is not the dividing line.

Hence the sympathy recorded in the note is that of Indians in general, felt for the persons who were to be tried, and directed against the British.