WI India remains neutral in World War II

I guess one way I could imagine it happening is if the effort to suppress the Quit India movement, instead of being successful and swiftly suppressed, instead blows up in the face of the British.

How?
There were only 216 desertions during the OTL Quit India Movement and the goodwill of the Indian army would be completely necessary for Congress to even begin a violent removal of the British. Furthermore, the Raj had 35.000 British troops in strategic reserve to support the 222.000 policemen tasked with containing the uprising. It could have been worse though. Say that the memo of Gandhi's Gujarat meeting isn't intercepted or the Madras CID doesn't seize the secret files outlining the entire uprising, then the Raj is far worse off and the QIM becomes a real pain to end.
 
The Viceroy had entered into a power-sharing arrangement with the India National Congress in 1937. Congress politicians objected to not being consulted over the entry of Indian in World War II, and withdrew from the power sharing arrangement and did their best to disrupt the war effort. In this case Congress is consulted, and the Viceroy declares India to be neutral.

By the way, India was a Dominion, not a Crown Colony, at the time.

One illustration of the difference is the case of Canadian entry into World War II. Canada declared war on Germany a few days after the United Kingdom did it, delaying to emphasize that this was an entirely separate declaration of war. And the Imperial War Cabinet faced limitations on how they could use Canadian forces. There was no Canadian declaration of war to take the country into World War I, it was just assumed they were at war when the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. Constitutionally, decisions about India going to war were not supposed to be automatically made in London.

Just an amusing fact to note, according to some constitutional scholars, Canada was automatically at war when Britain was, all that the separate declaration of war did was establish a precedent for not declaring a war in future.


Of course, as would happen anywhere but Ireland, had the PM stayed out, then the Governor General would have probably intervened.
 
Unlikely in the extreme. The Congress Party were offended when the Viceroy declared war for India without any consultation or approval by Indians. This led to widespread opposition to the British war effort in India, but only passive, not active. The Indian Army served loyally in the war, staffed by millions of Indian volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of Indians served valiantly in theaters from Burma to East Africa and Italy.

Had the Viceroy made a show of consulting the Legislative Assembly and the Council of States (the two chambers of the Imperial Legislative Council) , IMO both bodies would have approved the declaration of war.
 
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