A Churchill-Jinnah Pact?

When did Churchill and Jinnah first meet? In 1929-35, Churchill was engaged with British India affairs as never before or since. His hatred for Gandhi, whom he saw as leading a ‘Hindu’ political party responsible for all of India’s failures, was juxtaposed with admiration for Muslims. That also worked to divide India’s demand for self-rule. He vehemently opposed the 1929 Irwin Reforms—which became the Government of India Act of 1935, introducing elections in the 14 provinces under direct British rule. For Churchill, personal bias and political calculation meshed together.

Jinnah had moved to London 1931-34, rapidly establishing a thriving legal practice. Given their congruent interests, it is logical and inevitable that Churchill and Jinnah met in those years, while hiding their collaboration (Alex von Tunzelman, Indian Summer, 2007 wrote of their ‘secret pact’, denied by Jinnah’s biographer Ishtiaq Ahmed, 2020).

Churchill was always conscious of image. During the 1932 3^rd Roundtable Conference, he ignored Gandhi’s message seeking a meeting; he later said: ‘it would not have done’. The huge volume of official and personal papers Churchill in 1962-64 to the Cambridge Archives named after him, were carefully winnowed; the oldest letter from Jinnah in that collection dates to late-1945, well after Churchill’s premiership.

In 2011, at Britain’s National Archives, while gathering material for my Churchill book, I chanced upon Jinnah’s 2 January 1941 letter to Churchill. Starting with an account of a published interview with a British MP, Jinnah boasted: ‘…if the internal intelligence service is working correctly it will endorse my claim most emphatically. Of the 90 million of Mussalmans in this country I speak for fully 90% and my following is growing regularly. We are willing to submit to any reasonable test…’ Jinnah followed up immediately with a telegram on 8 January offering to face a ‘plebiscite’ to prove this (Rana, Churchill and India, 2023, pp. 126-7). That letter lacks the flavour of a first communication. Of course, Jinnah’s boast was just that; in the 1937 provincial elections, his Muslim League (ML) did not gain majority in any province, and garnered under 25% of the total Muslim vote.

How did that letter, Jinnah to Churchill, in full text version, plus the two telegrams Jinnah sent within that week, survive? That includes a reply sent on 8 January 1941 by Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, on the PM’s behalf? That happened because Churchill circulated full copies to the British Cabinet, and those papers are held in the Cabinet Office, (besides some extracts from Jinnah’s subsequent messages to Churchill), though the originals, which were in Churchill’s custody, are not to be found.

Churchill’s active engineering of India events is visible through a series of other interconnected events. One: till mid-1940, the British Premier could not communicate in secrecy with the Viceroy; he had no direct channel of his own. In July 1940, the first of the major dissensions between Churchill and Amery took place, Churchill alleging that Amery had not kept him fully informed of his exchanges with Viceroy Linlithgow. PM’s private secretary Colville had to visit the India Office Cipher Section, and ‘suborn’ an official (invoking the PM’s name), to push him into sending a secret telegram to Linlithgow, without a single copy of that message reaching anyone in the India Office (Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955, 1985, p.20). But by April 1942, Churchill had his own direct communication link to the Viceroy; we know that they exchanged messages during the Cripps Mission, April-May 1942, without Cripps’s knowledge. Two, presumably that link was via the Secret Service in London, and its counterpart, the Indian Intelligence Bureau. Churchill was one of the earliest world leaders to grasp the utility of secret services (Stafford, David, Churchill and Secret Service, 2013). Logically, a reliable and truly clandestine communication channels for leaders almost always operates via secret service; that is the preferred option in many countries. Such a channel was presumably used for Churchill-Jinnah exchanges, not shared with anyone else. Further, the world over, such secret archives remain buried deep. Three: 1942 onwards, selected extracts from Jinnah’s messages to Churchill – but nothing of Churchill’s own messages to Jinnah – were circulated to the British Cabinet, and to President Roosevelt (Kimball, Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, Vol I, 1985, p. 387). No historian has commented on Roosevelt’s taunting message to Churchill of 11 April 1942: ‘…why if the British government is willing to permit component parts of India to secede from the British Empire after the war, it is not willing to permit what is tantamount to self-government during the war’ (Kimball, Vol 1, p 529). Roosevelt’s personal envoy, Harry Hopkins, was with Churchill in the War Rooms, and has written graphically about Churchill’s anger, including an hour of non-stop expletives, on receiving that message, and his threat to resign from the British Premiership, some of this recorded in a ‘draft message, not sent’ (Kimball, Vol.1). No Churchill biographer has commented on that key message. Nor have they seen that as evidence of one-sided partisanship favoring the Muslim League (ML) throughout 1939-45, leading to Partition. Churchill even swallowed Jinnah’s outright lie, that Muslims made up the largest component of the Indian Army. [Someone on Churchill’s staff, suspecting that claim, checked, and the facts emerged. Churchill then sent a correction via his letter to Roosevelt of 7 March 1942: the real Indian Army composition was 41% Hindu, 35% Muslim, 10% Sikh, 8.5% Gurkhas (Kimball, p 388)]. We should note that the Gurkhas were Hindu. Four: In December 1946, after their final meeting at Chartwell (when Jinnah and Nehru were brought to London for Attlee’s last-ditch effort at compromise), Churchill and Jinnah established a unique covert telegram link, via cables to their respective secretaries. That was activated via test messages, but we have no information on substantive exchanges. Against the looming Partition, it was perhaps too late to have any impact.

The above multi-sided Churchill-Jinnah collaboration should be seen against a total absence of British effort to reach out to the Indian National Congress, whose leaders were jailed in complete seclusion, from 8 August 1942 to mid-1944 – except for Gandhiji who had been released in March 1944. Gandhiji then sent his only direct message to Churchill on 17 July 1944: He offered help. ‘…(I) ask you to trust and use me for the sake of your people and mine, and through them those of the world.’ When Churchill did not respond after nearly a year, a duplicate was sent; a staff-level response declared that the letter never reached London and was perhaps misplaced the Viceroy’s Office! (Rana, 2023, pp 131-2). Was that not dissimulation by Churchill? Was such conduct worthy of the British Prime Minister?

Finally, we may ask: what was Churchill’s role in the Partition? With his patronage of Jinnah, he became of the engineers of that event. Yet, between mid-1942 when the die was cast for that eventuality, till 26 August 1945, when he demitted office as PM on losing the General Election, Churchill did nothing at all to prepare for Partition. True, Churchill hated Gandhiji and the leadership of the INC, and Hindus as a people. As Leader of the Opposition after 26 August, he produced accurate prognosis of the Hindu-Muslim carnage that Partition would produce. But right up to 26 August 1945, He was not a spectator. Why has no one held Churchill responsible for that dereliction of his basic, inescapable duty of governance of British India as Prime Minister, in the period 1942-45, when Partition was agreed and had been accepted in London by mid-1942?

Historians, and Churchill’s biographers, have perhaps not examined the above material in its entirety, nor drawn an inescapable conclusion from the evidence – Churchill’s massive failure of governance in undertaking no preparation for Partition and Britain’s final exit, preordained as the inevitable aftermath to the end of World War II.

About The Author

Kishan S Rana

Kishan S Rana is a former diplomat and the author of Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal?

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