Fighting Retreat, page 26
Wavell was magnificently magnanimous. In his final address to the Conference, he said, ‘I wish to make it clear that the responsibility for the failure is mine. The main idea underlying the conference was mine. If it had succeeded, its success would have been attributed to me, and I cannot place the blame for its failure on any of the parties.’ It was a pity that he had no support in London and that his political masters could not rise to the heights of which he was capable.
27
Independence and Afterwards
For much of the inter-war years, as has been seen, Clement Attlee was the principal Labour spokesman on India, the party’s Indian expert. He had been one of the Labour representatives on the Simon Commission in 1927, returning to the subcontinent several times after that introductory visit.
He wasn’t an enthusiastic member of the Commission, fearing that the time he would spend on it could imperil his chances of getting government office. Ramsay Macdonald assured him that that would not be the case, and Attlee discharged his responsibilities on the Commission, as he did everywhere, with thoroughness and a sense of responsibility. To the knowledge of India that he gained while visiting India with the Commission and afterwards, when he took a major part in writing the Report, he added further research and discussion over the following years. During the war, he continued to take a special interest in India, chairing the India Committee in Churchill’s absence and seeking to temper Churchill’s views with more moderate sentiments. He was, however, like his Labour colleague, Ernest Bevin, a strong supporter of the Empire. He was no firebrand; his approach to India was progressive but moderate.
Like most Labour politicians, he knew the Congress leaders much better than the Muslims. He and his friends were beguiled by the arguable and defensible case that the westernized Congress leaders put forward. They all seemed to share a liberal mindset that was essentially reasonable. As a result, he failed to recognize the steely determination with which Congress politicians would press their point when discussion really began. He also failed to understand the strength of Muslim nationalism and its determination not to budge. In the short period between taking office as Prime Minister in 1945 and Independence in 1947, Attlee had to face up to the irreconcilable desire of Congress for a single India and the Muslim League’s increasing insistence on two Indias. He learned, too, that it was not easy for either Congress or the League to accept that Britain would walk away, leaving India divided if need be. Attlee repeatedly said in later life that Indian independence might have occurred earlier if these realities had been understood in 1945.1
By now, it was clear to Wavell that it was too late for the sort of orderly transfer of power that would be done over a generation. That would have been possible in the 1930s but it was out of the question in 1945. He wanted public commitment to an early exit followed by withdrawal in a phased military operation. Attlee was very much against Wavell’s plan for retreat—rather strangely, given that he instructed Wavell’s successor, Mountbatten, to commit to independence in 1948 precisely in this way. He said of Wavell’s plan for withdrawal, codenamed BREAKDOWN: ‘I thought that it was what Winston would certainly quite properly describe as an ignoble and sordid scuttle and I wouldn’t look at it. I came to the conclusion that Wavell had shot his bolt.’2
In fact, Churchill had pretty well given up on India. When Wavell paid a courtesy call on him after the Conservatives lost the 1945 election, the former prime minister was staying temporarily at Claridge’s. He had now really given up on India. He told Wavell that without ‘the anchor’ [Churchill] India was now on ‘a lee shore with rash pilots’. At the end of their meeting, Churchill walked Wavell to the lift. As the door closed, he said to him, ‘Keep a bit of India.’3 Much later, he told his cousin Clare Sheridan that his life and work had ‘all been for nothing . . . The empire I believed in has gone’.4
Churchill’s views hadn’t changed, but he recognized that it was too late to do anything. ‘India must go,’ he said. ‘It is lost. We have consistently been defeatist. We have lost sight of our purpose in India.’5 That was what he said in private; in public, he kept his distance from government policy. He wrote to Attlee on 14 May 1946: ‘I consider myself committed up to the Cripps Mission in 1942, though you know what a grief this was to me.’ But if there were not an agreement between ‘the great forces composing Indian life . . . I must resume my full freedom to point out the dangers and evils of the abandonment by Great Britain of her mission in India’.6
Attlee, as was always his policy after the 1945 General Election, kept Churchill fully informed on what was happening, partly as a matter of courtesy to his wartime chief and partly to avoid eruptions in the House of Commons. He told Churchill that Wavell was to be replaced by Mountbatten. He might have expected no great difficulty, as Churchill had criticized and undermined Wavell throughout his own time and, on the other hand, was known to be a huge admirer of the dashing naval officer with his royal connections. He even explained to Churchill that Wavell was to go specifically because the Government rejected his evacuation plan—where again, Churchill might be expected to agree. Attlee hadn’t wanted Churchill to cause any difficulties in the Commons and was accordingly surprised and disappointed by the fact that he did just that. Attlee could not reveal to the House as he had privately to Churchill that Wavell had advised scuttle.
This put me in perhaps the most embarrassing situation of my whole career since I could not divulge in detail all the facts of the matter and therefore could not give the lie to Winston. I find it very hard to forgive him for this. The extraordinary thing is that I can forgive him. Winston could get away with this. In any other man it would have been damnable and utterly unpardonable.7
Churchill did nothing to help Attlee—unfair. All Attlee could say in reply was something that so many said of Churchill in relation to India: ‘I think his practical acquaintance of India ended some fifty years ago. He formed strong opinions—I might say prejudices—then. They have remained with him ever since.’8
On 18 May 1947, the new and last viceroy, Mountbatten, returned to London to get approval for a change to a plan that the Cabinet had already endorsed. They were taken aback to learn that the earlier plan, which Mountbatten had told them would be acceptable to all parties, needed to be replaced. Now, he recommended partition and an accelerated departure date. His plan included dominion status for India together with—an important new element—membership of the Commonwealth.
While he was in London, he visited Churchill, who had always admired his dash and elan. Mountbatten had been just the sort of flamboyant maverick that Churchill loved. He persuaded Churchill to support his policy. Churchill accepted that Indian unity could not be preserved and urged the Muslim leader, Jinnah, to accept the partition deal. Jinnah required very little urging.
Churchill, not yet out of bed for the day, was mollified by the idea that independence would be moderated by membership in the Commonwealth. Mountbatten regarded that as one of his great achievements. The Conservative Party did not oppose the Government’s Indian legislation. It would be wrong, however, to think that by now Churchill was happy with Indian developments, either out of regard for Mountbatten (whom Attlee may well have appointed to spike Churchill’s guns) or because he thought the cause was lost. He did not abandon his anachronistic and rebarbative views. He was distressed that the Attlee government was abandoning a continued British role in India. In speeches right up until Independence, he continued to rumble darkly about what was happening. Even after Independence, on a social occasion when Mountbatten approached Churchill full of bonhomie, he was rebuffed bitterly: ‘Dickie, stop. What you did in India is as though you had struck me across the face with a riding whip.’
Churchill’s reaction to the approaching independence was a sad acquiescence. He knew that India was going to go. He told one acquaintance that Britain had lost sight of its purpose in India. ‘India breaks my heart,’ he told Amery. When Mountbatten announced that Britain would withdraw on 30 June 1948 (in fact, the withdrawal came a year before that), Churchill made a speech in the Commons in which he suggested entrusting the problem to the United Nations, as in fact, the Labour Government would do with Palestine. He ended with one of his magnificent perorations:
It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire, with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind . . . we must face the evils that are coming upon us, and that we are powerless to avert . . . but, at least, let us not add—by shameful flight, by a premature, hurried scuttle—at least, let us not add, to the pangs of sorrows so many of us feel, the taint and smear of shame.
After Independence, when Partition and its attendant slaughter were underway, Churchill blamed the Government for the ‘hideous massacres, the like of which have never stained the British Empire in all its history’. When the Constituent Assembly described India as a ‘sovereign, independent republic’ Churchill was half-minded to argue that it should not be allowed to stay in the Commonwealth. Later, Attlee privately told Churchill that this would be unwise. ‘Mr Churchill in response at once went off the deep end with his usual attitude on Indian matters, and suggested that India should now be a foreign power.’9 He pulled back, of course, and accepted the deal: India was now an independent republic associated with the Commonwealth, recognizing the British monarch as its head.
For all his gut-felt opposition to Independence, at a human level, he did not want Indians excluded from the Commonwealth. Churchill wrote to his old friend, Jan Christian Smuts, and told him, ‘My heart gave the answer, “I want them in.” Nehru has certainly shown magnanimity after sixteen years imprisonment.’10 There’s an echo in these words of Churchill’s own magnanimity, typical and redeeming.
As Prime Minister again in 1951, Churchill found he could indeed work with Nehru. Even before then, while still Leader of the Opposition, he had begun to build bridges. Now he backed the Indian leader and saw him as a crucial figure in the defence of South Asia from communism. After all the years of unreasoning opposition to India and vituperation of the Indian political classes, he was doing as he always did, accepting a change in circumstances, whether a defeat or a victory, in a practical, amicable and constructive way. He had done this with South Africa after the South African War—Smuts remembered that. He adjusted very speedily to the changed relationship with Ireland. In 1918 and 1945, he moved at once from enmity with Germany. Now, he embraced independent India. That was the mark of the man.
28
The Heart of the Paradox
Born when he was and into the circle he occupied, it was inevitable that Churchill’s views on India and Empire started from the Whiggish premise that Britain had been in the vanguard of a movement that had transferred and, to an extent, was still transferring the world from uncomfortable barbarism to what he described as being ‘at or around the summit of the civilised world’. He wanted the advantages of ‘civilisation’—health, education, adequate food, medicine—and he wanted them for everyone. He wanted them for, amongst others, races that had not yet achieved ‘civilisation’ and were not yet fit for democracy. It seemed to him incontestable that a delegation of Kenyan Indians who came to see him in 1921 were ‘a vulgar class of coolies, and that they could not yet be allowed the same political rights as white men’.1 He agreed with Cecil Rhodes that there should be ‘equal rights for civilised men’; he did not believe for a moment that all inhabitants, or even the majority of inhabitants of the Empire, were civilized. That’s a view that may sound appalling and untenable today, but he was far from alone in holding it in his time.
And yet, in 1907, at the Colonial Office, Churchill reacted in horror to news of the massacre of Kisi tribesmen and was equally shocked by hearing reports of ‘disgusting butchery’ of Africans in Natal. These reactions, humane as they were, did not indicate that he regarded ‘the African Aboriginal, for whom civilisation has no charms’ as being entitled to or capable of holding the status of a European.
This belief in a distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ peoples must be distinguished from his cruel but thoughtless disparagement of other races, whether Germans (Huns), Italians (Organ-grinders), Negroes (N*****s), Chinese (Chinks and pigtails), Bedouins (Cut-throats who lived on camel dung), Arabs (worthless) and Indians (Baboos). This vocabulary, I have tried to suggest, though I aware how few readers of today will accept the argument, was offensive and ill-advised but of less consequence than it would appear to be. His ranking of the ‘civilised’ and educated (usually white) above the ‘uncivilised’ and uneducated (usually, but not always, not white) was also a product of its times, but less offensive: in its day, defensible on what his contemporaries would have regarded as objective observation. He must, as we all must, be judged by the values and attitudes of his time. Scarcely anyone in his days would have maintained that all societies were equally ‘civilised’. In his practical concern for the underdogs of all colours, he was ahead of many of his time.
When we consider the immoderate language he used, we should also remember the immoderate nature of his debating stance. Churchill worked by dialectic. He took the most extreme position he could in opposition to an argument that he did not accept. He held that the outcome of extreme debate would be an acceptable compromise. He had worked like this all his life. Those who were not familiar with the approach could find it disconcerting and offensive. Poor Alan Brooke, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff for most of the war, found Churchill’s debates with the service chiefs enormously wearing and wasteful of time. His diaries overflow with his frustration at something that was the opposite of calm, rational discussion.
This habit of enunciating extreme positions that Churchill would not, in calm reflection, have adhered to for a moment—indeed, would not have wished to have seen recorded—is reflected in many of the outrageous things that he said about India in the 1930s and, much more memorably, in the Second World War. A good example was given when Rab Butler, then Minister of Education, visited Churchill at Chequers in March 1943. Churchill ‘launched into a most terrible attack on the “Baboos”, saying that they were gross, dirty, and corrupt, and that he was quite happy to see Pakistan hived off from the rest of India’. Butler, for whom India was one of the three crucial elements of his life,* said that the whole purpose of the Raj had been to stand for unity, Churchill replied, ‘Well if our poor troops have to be kept in a sweltering, syphilitic climate for the sake of your precious unity, I’d rather see them have a good civil war.’ Clemmie, who was present and well aware of Winston’s ways, told him that, of course, he didn’t mean what he was saying. Churchill admitted that this was the case but—and this is the crux of the matter—added, ‘but when I see my opponents glaring at me, I always have to draw them out by exaggerated statements’.2 If Churchill is to be judged fairly, that trait of challenging his opponents with outrageous exaggeration has to be kept in mind.
In his very moving tribute in the House of Lords that he made the day after Churchill’s death, Lord Attlee brought out important truths about his great colleague, opponent and friend:
Not everybody always recognised how tender-hearted he was. I can recall him with the tears rolling down his cheeks, talking of the horrible things perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany. I can recall, too, during the war his emotion on seeing a simple little English home wrecked by a bomb. Yes, my Lords, sympathy—and more than that: he went back, and immediately devised the War Damage Act. How characteristic: sympathy did not stop with emotion; it turned into action . . . he had sympathy, an incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world . . . he saw himself . . . as an instrument. As an instrument for what? For freedom, for human life against tyranny.
His overall view is that Churchill was not reactionary but rather in favour of social reform and liberal administration and concerned for the welfare of the masses and the unity of the country.
Churchill attacked the ‘Hindoo Priesthood’ on the basis of books like Catherine Mayo’s Mother India,* a popular publication mentioned earlier that contained propaganda material about bigotry and prejudice in the subcontinent. Catherine Mayo’s book was published in 1927. It was sensational and popular, but manipulative; she was assisted by the Indian Civil Service. It focused on the Dalits, whose welfare was ostensibly such a concern for Churchill. In the Daily Mail article of 16 November 1929, which is mentioned above, he wrote that ‘Dominion Status can certainly not be attained by a community that brands and treats 60 million of its members, fellow human beings, toiling at their side, as “Untouchables”, whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is pollution.’ Mother India also dealt with child marriage, the position of women, the lack of sanitation and other social ills. It was anti-Hindu and reinforced Churchill’s own bias towards Muslims. Of course, Churchill undoubtedly paraded concern for the subordinated masses as part of his divide and rule tactics, but it would be simplistic to imagine that this essentially humane and emotional man was devoid of sympathy for those who so manifestly deserved it.
As a young minister at the Colonial Office, Churchill was regarded by the right as an opponent of the Empire, ‘a Little Englander’ in the sense in which that phrase was used at that time. His conservative opponents described him as a danger to the Empire, opposed to imperial expansion and grand visions of the country. In 1920, from the left—indeed, the very left—the Independent Labour Party’s James Maxton said that the Empire was approaching complete disintegration and that ‘it was not going too far to say that Mr Churchill had played a primary part in bringing about that state of affairs’. At that time, he was not only working to get rid of the Middle Eastern mandates as fast as possible; he was also negotiating with the Irish Nationalist leader, Michael Collins, to split off Southern Ireland, even though he was aware that doing so might end his political career.
