Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (32 page)

In mid-November Churchill broke cover with an article in the staunchly imperialist
Daily Mail
. He did not criticize Baldwin or Irwin directly. Rather, he warned that nationalists were interpreting the Irwin declaration as a promise of Dominion status in the near future. This, he wrote, was not practical: it might be desirable as an ultimate object but the journey towards it would have to be ‘immense’. Hinduism was a particular object of his criticism:

Dominion status can certainly not be attained by a community which brands and treats sixty millions of its members, fellow human beings, toiling at their side, as ‘Untouchables’, whose approach is an affront and whose very presence is pollution. Dominion status cannot be attained while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of mediaeval wars. It cannot be attained while the political classes in India represent only an insignificant fraction of the three hundred and fifty millions for whose welfare we are responsible.
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Over the following years he would add to these arguments, but his fundamental message remained consistent: India was not a nation but a ‘geographical abstraction’,
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home to multitudes of competing races and religions. Only the rule of disinterested white officials, ‘quite impartial between race and race’, could hold the ring between them.
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(He claimed that the deadly Hindu–Muslim riots of 1931 were the result of the belief that the British were about to leave the country.) Britain had brought enormous material and social benefits to the toiling Indian masses; these would be horribly jeopardized were she to depart, as would the economic welfare of Britain as a self-governing India closed its markets. Gandhi’s financial backers, the wealthy Indian mill-owners, were hoping to benefit from this at the expense of both the British and the Indian masses. Britain, for its part, had no desire to exploit India, he claimed; the existing relationship was one of mutual benefit, although the British extracted ‘only a fraction of the blessings’ that the Indians got.
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He also came to argue – and this was one of the most compelling parts of his case – that the British government’s proposed reforms were excessively complicated and would not in fact satisfy nationalist opinion. Once they were granted, the demand for full independence would inevitably follow. The obvious counter-argument to this was that the very little reform he himself was prepared to grant would satisfy the nationalists even less. Churchill believed, though, that the British should ignore demands for political change and concentrate instead on improving the well-being of the population. The ‘plain assertion of the resolve of Parliament to govern and to guide the destinies of the Indian people in faithful loyalty to Indian interests’ could bring the existing turmoil to an end.
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His overarching belief was that British ‘abdication’ in India would be fatal to the moral authority and the concrete power of the Empire as whole. This was linked to events in Europe and elsewhere and his growing sense that a global crisis of apocalyptic proportions was approaching. ‘In my view England is now beginning a new period of struggle and fighting for its life, and the crux of it will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of commercial rights’, he wrote in 1933. ‘As long as we are sure that we press no claim on India which is not in their real interest we are justified in using our undoubted power for their welfare and for our own.’
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To what extent were such views consistent with those that Churchill had expressed prior to 1929? Critics liked to cite his 1920 Amritsar speech – his most substantive previous post-war comment on India – in order to imply that his views had changed.
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Churchill responded that he stuck by what he had then said: he abhorred the shooting of unarmed people, ‘and nothing is less necessary for the re-establishment of British authority in India’.
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Opponents also pointed out that he had been a member of the government in 1919 when Edwin Montagu’s Government of India Act was passed. (The Act foresaw ‘the progressive realisation of responsible government in British India’.) Churchill’s response to this was that he had had little direct responsibility for the legislation and that Montagu had at any rate represented it ‘as a mere experiment which could be arrested or reversed at any time’.
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It is worth noting that Churchill did tell Montagu, in October 1921, that ‘you are getting into rather deep water with the Dominion of India idea’;
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and he provoked him by saying that Gandhi ‘ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back’.
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In private he attributed the stiffening of his attitude to the failure of Montagu’s reforms to assuage the nationalists. He told a conference of ministers in 1922 that he believed that ‘opinion would change soon as to the expediency of granting democratic institutions to backward races which had no capacity for self-government’.
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Yet, at the 1921 Imperial Conference, Churchill himself gave a significant hostage to fortune. He said, at a dinner to honour the Dominion premiers and the Indian representatives, that the British ‘looked forward confidently to the days when the Indian government and people would have assumed fully and completely their Dominion status’. Irwin later took relish in drawing attention to this speech, and Churchill had great difficulty explaining it away.
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The true explanation for it is to be found in a letter from Neville Chamberlain describing Churchill’s behaviour at the dinner and the reaction to it of one of the Indian delegates, Srinivasi Sastri. According to Chamberlain, Churchill in his speech

clean forgot about India and talked about ‘our race’ ‘English speaking peoples’ and ‘the four great Dominions’ so that I could not help asking myself What does Mr Sastri think of all this. Towards the end of the speech someone handed up a card on which ‘India’ was written and Winston then produced an eloquent passage about the day when India would take her place on equal terms with the Dominions. But it was too late and when later on Sastri rose he administered in perfect English and with perfect taste one of the most scathing rebukes I ever heard.
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Overall, it is clear that Churchill did not see India as a priority issue at this time. In 1930, by contrast, he told Baldwin that he cared ‘more about this [Indian] business than anything else in public life’.
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The change cannot be put down simply to opportunism but can be explained, at least in part, by ideological and personal influences. One of the former was Katherine Mayo’s book
Mother India
, published in 1927. It was a sensational and polemical exposé (written with the cooperation of British officials) of India’s supposed incapacity for self-government. Although it dealt with genuine evils such as child marriage, untouchability and poor hygiene it had a profound anti-Hindu bias. Sexual excess, in Mayo’s view, lay at the root of Indian society’s problems, and had enfeebled Indian men’s hands so that they were ‘too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of Government’.
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Churchill told a friend, ‘He admires the book Mother India and would have no mercy with the Hindus who marry little girls aged ten.’
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He subsequently lent the book out to at least one fellow Conservative, and praised Mayo’s ‘powerful pen and vast knowledge’ of India.
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Clearly, Churchill had been no enthusiast for self-government before reading Mayo, but it seems plausible to suggest that she provided the basis for much of the anti-Hindu tinge of his later arguments. He was to be considerably more positive about the Muslims who, in line with contemporary thinking, he counted amongst India’s ‘martial races’.
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During his Indian campaign, Churchill’s fear that they and other minorities would be subject to Hindu tyranny led some Muslims to consider him a sympathetic figure.
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It seems likely that Lord Birkenhead reinforced the hardening in Churchill’s views. Birkenhead was two years older than Churchill. Unlike him, he had failed the Harrow entrance examination. But he did make it to Oxford University, and after early, brilliant success at the Bar he was elected as a Tory MP in 1906. His maiden speech was unconventional in that it was long, controversial, and very, very funny. In spite of their differences over tariff reform, he and Churchill struck up a warm friendship across the floor of the House, which blossomed further as the years went on. As Lord Chancellor in the Coalition government, Birkenhead condemned General Dyer’s behaviour at Amritsar, pointing out that if the same methods had been used in Canada or Scotland there would have been outrage.
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Yet as Secretary of State for India from 1924, he was determined to preserve the status quo. He established a commission, under Sir John Simon, to look into the country’s constitutional development precisely because he wanted to forestall possible radical moves by a future Labour government. With great cynicism, Birkenhead wrote privately that his ‘highest and most permanent hopes’ for the continuation of British rule rested on the permanency of the Hindu–Muslim divide.
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Churchill later wrote that his friendship with Birkenhead ‘kept me in close touch with the movement of Indian affairs, and I shared his deep misgivings about that vast sub-continent’.
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In 1928 Birkenhead stood down from the Cabinet in order to earn the money needed to fund his lavish lifestyle. Two years later, his health broken by years of heavy drinking, he died, just as India was becoming a major issue. Churchill was devastated. ‘Most of all did I deplore his absence during those years when it seemed to me that the future of India was at stake’, he recalled. ‘With his aid, I believe different and superior solutions might have been reached.’
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The increased importance that Churchill attached to India, though, came most of all from the international context. It was the conjunction of events in India with those in the Middle East that persuaded Churchill of the seriousness of the problem. The Labour government’s general weakening (as he saw it) on imperial issues risked creating a domino effect. In the summer of 1929 the long-simmering tensions in Palestine broke out into a terrible wave of anti-Jewish violence. In Churchill’s view, this was a reaction less to local conditions than to British pusillanimity elsewhere. He claimed that the Arabs had read the dismissal of Lloyd and British proposals to withdraw troops from Cairo and Alexandria as a sign that ‘the hour to strike had come’. Furthermore, he argued, ‘What has happened in Palestine is only a bloody foretaste of what will undoubtedly happen on a far larger scale throughout the Nile valley, and would happen on a gigantic scale from one end of India to the other once the sober, guiding, and pacifying influence of the British Imperial power were withdrawn.’
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He warned, ‘Any further mistakes made in Egypt will react in India, and from this limited scene the whole stupendous panorama of the East may be thrown into confusion.’
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In his view, then, the whole future of British power was now at stake.

But although he despaired of Baldwin’s reaction to this general imperial crisis, it took a considerable time for him to formalize the break. His timing and choice of issue surely did involve calculation from the point of view of his own career. During 1930 Baldwin ran even deeper into difficulties. Even relatively loyal colleagues such as his likely successor Neville Chamberlain thought him useless as Leader of the Opposition. Churchill’s friend (or crony) Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the
Daily Express
, was campaigning for ‘Empire Free Trade’, a euphemism for a form of imperial preference. He put up candidates against official Conservatives at by-elections and won. In spite of his own opposition to Beaverbrook’s views, Churchill helped him draft his public correspondence with Baldwin. (‘Amazing performance’, noted a Beaverbrook journalist who witnessed this. ‘Here is Winston – an ex-colleague of Baldwin in the last Government and still a member of his Shadow cabinet – advising Max [Beaverbrook] how to counter Baldwin’s letter.’)
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When, in October, Baldwin produced a stiffer protectionist policy of his own, Churchill found himself in a hole. He seemed ready to resign from the Shadow Cabinet but held back, doubtless calculating that, with the atrophy of popular support for free trade in the face of the slump, he would be on a sticky wicket if he did so.
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In the event he took his stand on India instead. In November, the government-sponsored Round Table Conference on the future of India opened. Indian representatives were present but Congress leaders stayed away; Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were at any rate both in jail. Baldwin supported the conference and noted, with a hint of satisfaction, Churchill’s gloom about it. ‘He wants the Conference to bust up quickly and the Tory party to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand’, he wrote. ‘He has become once more the subaltern of hussars of ’96.’
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In December Churchill did his best to live up to the caricature with a diehard speech to the Indian Empire Society, which had been set up to defend British rule. ‘Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed’, he warned.
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The speech brought him much criticism – ‘But I do not care at all, I am going on with it’, he wrote.
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The government continued to seek compromise. In January 1931 Irwin released Gandhi and his colleagues from prison with a view to starting negotiations. Baldwin’s support for this move triggered Churchill’s resignation from the Shadow Cabinet. ‘Winston has chosen his moment and his excuse for separating from the party very adroitly’, wrote Amery some days later, as backbench sentiment welled up against the leadership’s stance.
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