Churchill’s Endgame in India

AFTER A DISTINGUISHED CAREER in the Indian Foreign Service, which took him as a high-flyer to Indira Gandhi’s PMO and ended as Ambassador to Germany, Kishan S Rana has taken to academic research. In this second avatar, he has shown himself to be meticulous in his collation of his­torical facts, widespread and deep in his reading of primary and secondary sources, indefatigable in his search for information in archives near and far, and powerful in the exposition of his argument. As a nationalist of the immediate post-Independ­ence period, he is also passionate in his espousal of the Indian cause. He has marshalled his evidence. He is deliberately impassioned, relentless in his quest for historical justice, and determined to right a great wrong to his people and his nation. This well suits a diplomat. But does not academia demand some distance from the subject?

In Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal? (Routledge; ₹1,295; 214 pages) Rana presents his case against Churchill in polemical terms. The question mark is his favourite rhetorical de­vice. He piles fact on fact. His sources are unimpeachable. His sto­ry leaves the reader gasping. And yet, doubt remains as to whether all this righteous indignation would not be better expressed in a contemporary editorial than in a work of objective history.

EH Carr, in his monumental lectures on “What is History?” urged the historian to put himself in the shoes of the person­alities of the times they were writing about, in the ethos of those days, the values then espoused, in order to avoid being judgmental by hindsight. AJP Taylor demonstrated how even so decisive a document as the Hossbach Memorandum, much flaunted at Nuremberg, that laid out Hitler’s plans of conquest, could be looked at in a different perspective. I mention this because while there is no denying the accuracy of Rana’s story, what he leaves scope for is a quarrel with his interpretation.

That Churchill was an imperialist is not a revelation. He was—and mightily proud of it. That, therefore, he behaved as an imperialist in his dealings with India is hardly surprising as he made no attempt at hiding it. What we need to understand in 2023 is how right Churchill was in foreseeing that India was the only jewel in the crown that made the British Empire the mighty world power it had become. He knew that without India, the Great would be removed from Britain, leaving Little England as an isolated small island in the North Sea. As a proud Briton he wanted to avoid that—however inevitable. Had he been alive today, he would see that what he had envisaged after the End of Empire is the present reality of post-Brexit UK.

As Indians, seeking revenge for two centuries of exploitation, we might re­joice in that. But as historians, Churchill’s patriotic understanding of Britain’s place in the world needs to be kept in mind. For while Rana—and, indeed, all of us—are Indian patriots, we need to see Churchill as a British patriot. That does not excuse him. But it does explain him. Therefore, to dig for proof that he was a nasty impe­rialist is to seek the obvious.

Churchill’s imperialism should be seen as a dying call, not a bugle sound of victory. He knew the glory days were coming to an end; he did what he could to delay that day; but gracefully accepted the end when it came. Churchill needs to be seen as a man of his times who was reluctant to accept that those times had changed

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Rana notes but does not underline that once that High Tory, Lord Irwin, had concluded by the end of his term in 1930 that the Indian Em­pire’s day was coming to an ineluctable end, many Tories and all Labour worked in their separate ways to see how Constitutional progress might be ensured. Churchill remained beyond the pale. But he was not alone. Many of these Victorian-born Tories had been raised in the hey-day of Empire and were as immensely proud of it as they were reluctant to see it slip out of their hands. These recalcitrant grandees included Linlithgow, an unfortunately long-lived Viceroy for seven long years, 1936-1943. So, Churchill’s imperialism should be seen as a dying call, not a bugle sound of victory. He knew the glory days were coming to an end; he did what he could to delay that day; but gracefully accepted the end when it came. Churchill needs to be seen as a man of his times who was reluctant to accept that those times had changed.

Before rushing to judgement, let us note that everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Motilal Nehru and the leadership of Congress, with the sole exception of Jawaharlal Nehru, were trying to find a place for India within the Imperial system as a Dominion right till the end of the 1920s. Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose were the radicals who demanded a clean break: Poorna Swaraj! They did not prevail till Gandhiji backed them from 1930 onwards. Let us also acknowledge that racist allusions were so common at the time, as they constituted the raison d’etre of the mission civilisatrice, that even the Mahatma used language that today’s African nationalist objects to with reason.

But was Churchill racist? Rana quotes chapter and verse to show that he was utterly racist in his approach to “beastly Hindus and their beastly religion”. Yet, as a member of the British Victorian aristocracy, Churchill’s pride in Empire lay in bringing varied peoples of varied races together in a great historical enterprise—but subject to their being under British domination. He was equally vicious about the Germans, scathing about the French lack of spine, and vitriolic about the Bolsheviks—all white. Of Trotsky, he wrote: “A skin of malice stranded on the shores of the Black Sea and now washed up in the Gulf of Mexico.” His targets were foreigners, not foreign races—on the very British principle that “Wogs begin in Calais”.

However, in the British Parliament debate on Jallianwala Bagh, Churchill, as Rana reminds us, described Dyer’s actions as “monstrous” and famously laid down the precept, “Frightfulness is not a remedy known to British pharma­copoeia”. As war minister, in the face of opposition in his own ranks, he upheld the Army’s decision to reduce Dyer’s pay to half and revert him to his substantive rank of Lieutenant Colonel. This hardly smacks of racism.

If he was a racist, what needs explication is the heart-warm­ing welcome he extended in Westminster to Nehru—as brown and “beastly” as PM as he had been as a freedom fighter. As recounted by Rana, Churchill lauded Nehru in Westminster for having conquered “two great human frailties: fear and hate” and described him as the “Light of Asia” who could “give India a lead throughout Asia in relation to freedom and dignity of the individual as the ideal”. Rana also quotes former Foreign Secre­tary Jagat Mehta, who was present when Nehru first called on Churchill in 1949, as saying, “Churchill was virtually in tears and said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I have done you great wrong. You are like a prodigal whom we thought was lost.” Churchill’s racism was the obverse of his imperialism, not independent of it—and did not outlast the End of Empire.

His ‘Do Nothing’ policy on the Bengal famine of 1942-43 constitutes the core of Rana’s charge of racism. It was Churchill’s policy “to deny ships to ferry food grains to India, to the point of privileging Greece on the racist argument that Indians were used to food shortages.” (emphasis added). But Rana himself adduces a host of other factors, including “inaction by all of India’s rulers”; “wartime lack of supplies from Burma”; “official stockpiling in anticipation of Japan’s invasion of India”; and “hoarding” by Indian food grains merchants. The fact is that unlike Rana, who has the benefit of hindsight, it was not clear to Churchill and his cohort that the war with Japan in the east and the war with Germany in the west would inevitably be won by the Allies as the tide of German and Japanese victories had started to turn by mid-1942. The War had still to be fought hard and long for another three years with numerous setbacks and near-misses. While one might agree with Amartya Sen that British policy was marked by “confusion and callousness”, it was not Churchill’s alleged racism alone that was responsible for the disaster of the Bengal famine. There was a war to be fought against deter­mined enemies, which posed Hobson’s choices. Any wartime leader who rested his oars on the complacent insight that “the tide has turned” would never be forgiven.

Rana would have done well to explore further—albeit with a view to refuting—the agonising decisions that Churchill had to take. At page 122, he comes close to doing so when he cites the diary entry, for 24 September 1943, of Leopold Amery, secretary of state for India and a childhood friend of Churchill’s: “I fought my battle for Indian food…Winston very strong on the point that Indians are not the only people who are starving in this war… it is just as important to get food to Greece.” Rana complains that there is precious little about the Bengal famine in the papers archived at Churchill College, Cambridge. But British Government and British Indian government papers on the subject are abundantly available.

We might now turn to Rana’s jeremiad against the Churchill-Jinnah connection. Why is it so important that Rana believes the relationship is shrouded in mystery because it was clandestine? Jinnah was lobbying for his goals in London because he knew the Brits were the final arbiter. Why did Congress not do so? Actually, it did—through Krishna Menon with Labour, who delivered. But after the Gandhi-Irwin talks, Congress did not keep in touch with the right-wing, despite Churchill’s approbation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s denunciation of fascism at a time when Chamberlain and Halifax, much to Churchill’s disgust, were busy appeasing Hitler. Congress confined its lobbying to persuad­ing the persuaded on the left wing.

Congress, in particular Nehru, became convinced after the reverses suffered by the Muslim League in the 1937 elections, that Jinnah was a cipher. Jinnah roared back in 1940 with his un­ambiguous demand for Pakistan. And the Muslim community substantially joined him, particularly in the minority provinces like UP and Bihar where the bulk of Muslims were to be left behind as the carpetbaggers made their way to the ‘New Medi­na’. True, Linlithgow, second only to Churchill in imperialist pretensions, was instrumental in nurturing Jinnah’s ambitions, but Congress had left the field free for Jinnah’s separatist profes­sions by quitting their provincial government posts in 1939 and getting themselves locked up for three years on launching the Quit India Movement. That gave us freedom; it also doomed us to partition—for we divided, and they ruled. By the time Congress leaders emerged from incarceration, Jinnah prevailed, particu­larly in convincing even Labour that the Hindu-Muslim question was indeed the crux of settling the issue of post-colonial India. In such circumstances, why would the British defence establishment not relish the prospect of Pakistan providing facilities for them to safeguard their oil in Iran and West Asia, and find a base to confront the Soviet Union on its southern flank?

Churchill’s preference for Muslims and his contempt for Hindus played but a cameo role in the drama. We brought the horrors of Partition on ourselves by failing to build on the Hin­du-Muslim unity forged at the height of the Khilafat agitation. From the ’20s on, we were unable to prevent the slide to commu­nalism, just as India in 2023 is proving incapable of preventing the wave of majoritarianism sweeping through our heartland. To blame Churchill for alleged secret confabulations with Jinnah for the partition of India is, to put it delicately, ahistorical.

We have to thank Rana for stirring our memories of the freedom struggle. In doing so, he has recalled “old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago”. His book will revive feelings of outrage, antagonism and revanchism. But he himself wisely suggests in his Afterthought that some “might wonder if the thesis put forward deserves deeper examination”. I am sure he is right in pleading for more research—not because his thesis is wrong ab initio but because he is right in saying we should “set aside vindictive thoughts” and “look forward in hope and expectation” of better times to come.

About The Author

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Mani Shankar Aiyar, a diplomat turned politician, is a former Union minister and an author of several books