Churchill

Few episodes in Churchill’s long career have attracted more critical commentary than his opposition to independence for India in the early 1930s. Most of this criticism, even from otherwise sympathetic observers, is inaccurate and unfair. The subsequent history of the subcontinent, much of which Churchill predicted, has confirmed many of his reasons for caution about Indian independence, even though he might have been surprised to see India become the world’s largest democracy. Churchill might have been mistaken about the prospects for the success of self-government in India, but he was right in his main prediction that if India was prematurely granted independence, millions would be killed in religious riots and ethnic strife.

Much of the misperception and mischaracterization of Churchill’s views on India derive from the superficial and simple-minded ideology of anti-colonialism that became popular after World War II, when the economically prostrate European powers moved to liquidate their remaining colonial territories as quickly as possible. It is supposed that Churchill’s opposition to the government’s 1930 bill to grant “dominion status” to India—the first step to complete independence—arose from his attachment to imperialism, from his reactionary paternalism. The only reason the term “racist” was not applied to him was because the word was not in use at that time. Churchill thought granting dominion status was premature; he was not opposed to eventual Indian self-government. In his weekly column in the Daily Mail, Churchill wrote, “The rescue of India, from the ages of barbarism, internecine war and tyranny, its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilization [was], upon the whole, the finest achievement of history.”

In fact, Churchill was quite prepared to accept provincial self-government in India, provided Britain retained certain “rights of paramountcy,” which meant control of foreign affairs and defense. Moreover, Churchill regarded the obligations of British rule in India as a matter of stewardship rather than perpetual control or exploitation. In a speech in August 1930 that most historians ignore, Churchill set out his broader views: “let me... reaffirm the inflexible resolve of Great Britain to aid the Indian people to fit themselves increasingly for the duties of self-government. Upon that course we have been embarked for many years, and we assign no limits to its ultimate fruition.”

Churchill had two main doubts about India’s ability to achieve a fully functioning and peaceful democracy at that time. First, he understood that India’s ethnic- and religious-based caste system went against the basic democratic principle of equal rights. This was not a concern for India alone. Churchill had previously written that the real issue between the Boers and the British in the war almost thirty years before had been the refusal of the Dutch South Africans to “accept the equality of the Kafir.” More broadly, Churchill embraced the American understanding of the necessity of equal rights for all if a true democracy is to be established. In an Independence Day speech in 1918, when America and Britain were allies in the First World War, he said of the Declaration of Independence, “[B]y it we lost an empire, and by it also we preserved an empire. By applying its principles and learning its lessons we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas.” But India’s or any other nation’s acquisition of the “title deeds” of democracy required their embrace by the native population. Such an embrace by the Indians was doubtful in 1930.

At the time India was agitating for independence, the caste system was worse than Jim Crow segregation in the American South or apartheid in South Africa. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, leaders of the Indian National Congress, which was agitating for independence, were both members of the upper castes. Gandhi was a member of the Vaishan, the merchant caste, and Nehru was a Brahmin, the highest caste of scholars and priests. Both opposed the abolition of the caste system, which consigned seventy-five million untouchables—the “pariahs”—to work in occupations such as garbage collection. The caste system enshrined the Caucasian Brahmins at the top but shunned, as if they were lepers, the mostly Negroid “pariahs” at the bottom. For Churchill, dominion status should not be granted to India until the caste system was abolished.

In Churchill’s view, Nehru, a fellow old Harrovian, was more interested in seizing political power for himself than relieving the poverty of the unwashed millions in India. If Churchill had disdain for Nehru, he despised Gandhi. The Indian ascetic was a one-time British barrister who had left the black robes of law for the white “diaper” he wore to dramatize his “saintly” role as mystic father of the Hindus. Churchill contemptuously described Gandhi as a “seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the Vice Regal Palace to parley with the representative of the King.”

Beyond the problem of the inequitable and undemocratic caste system, Churchill worried that the ethnic diversity of “India” would make democratic institutions impossible to maintain. The prospect of civil war was never far from his mind. In India there were over two hundred languages, as well as four dominant ethnic strains—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, and Negroid. The relative success of the British administration of colonial India blinded many to the potential problems of this polyglot society set adrift. Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph, had once said, “Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity.”

It is too easy in the twenty-first century to condemn someone whose preconceptions and attitudes were the product of his Victorian upbringing. In 1930, the prevailing intellectual and literary voices of the time mocked the Victorian ideal of missionary do-good-ism and the sense of responsibility to take up “the white man’s burden.” They called for enfranchisement of the Indian masses.

If India became a dominion, Churchill charged, Hindus would drive out Muslims, and under Hindu civil service, profiteering and corruption would flourish. Nepotism, graft, and corruption would be “the hand maidens of a Brahmin domination.” Above all, the Hindus would tyrannize “the untouchables,” denying them all human rights.

About these “pariahs,” Churchill said, “they were a multitude as big as a nation, men, women, and children deprived of hope and the status of humanity. Their plight is worse than slaves, because they have been taught to consent not only to a physical but psychic servitude and prostration.”

Events in India bore out his warning. In March 1931, Muslim shopkeepers in Cawpore refused to close their stores during a period of mourning for a Hindu who had been executed for terrorism. In retaliation, Hindus attacked Muslim merchants in an orgy of murder, arson, and looting. Almost three hundred were killed.

Churchill, speaking at the Constitution Club on March 26, raised the specter of future mass murders and ethnic extermination:

Wednesday’s massacres at Cawpore, a name of evil import, are a portent. Because it is believed that we are about to leave the country, the struggle for power is now beginning between the Muslims and Hindus.

Churchill went on to say that these large-scale religious killings were only a foretaste of what loomed in the future:

The bloody riot in which more than two hundred people lost their lives, with many other hundreds wounded, in which women and children were butchered in circumstances of bestial barbarity, their mutilated, violated bodies strewing the streets.... But the feud is only at its beginning.

On May 13, speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill blasted the Indian mill owners for calling for a boycott of British manufactured items. Brahmin and Hindu interests, he charged, were orchestrating the boycott, appealing to the people’s superstition, prejudice, and greed. The effort would lead, he predicted, “to the spoliation of millions of people,” and the Muslims would be persecuted, bled, and exploited.

The debate over dominion status for India resumed in the summer of 1931. Churchill said that the Labour government of the last two years, with the support of Conservatives, could claim four accomplishments—the boycott of British goods in India, the ruin of Lancashire manufacturing, the broken credit of India, and “the horrors of Cawpore.” Muslims and Hindus were now “inflamed against each other.”

Britain, however, was in the depths of the Great Depression, and the Indian issue was soon moved to the back burner. The Labour government fell, and a new National government was formed comprising all the parties. Ramsay MacDonald, a socialist, was again the prime minister and the public face of leadership, but the real power shifted to Stanley Baldwin, the Lord President of the Council. In the reassembling of cabinet posts, Churchill indirectly was offered a major post, but he refused, knowing the price of power would be his silence on the Indian issue.

There was a popular misconception that Churchill entered into his political exile in order to challenge the government’s failure to see the menace of Hitler’s Germany. It was not his refusal to appease Hitler that drove him from government but his earlier decision to not acquiesce to Baldwin and the Conservative Party on India.

Stanley Baldwin returned as prime minister for the second time in 1935, a decade after his first stint in the 1920s. Since the aftermath of World War I and the departure of Lloyd George, Baldwin had become the dominant political player in Britain. He was a superb politician. Churchill said of him, “He had his ear so close to the ground he had locusts in his ear.”

In 1935, Baldwin—whose uncle, interestingly, was Rudyard Kipling, the novelist of Imperial India—again put forth an India Bill. It passed, despite Churchill’s spirited opposition. Yet because the bill fell short of the radical demands of Gandhi and Nehru, the Indian National Congress rejected it.

It was not until 1947 that India achieved its independence, which had been repeatedly promised to its leaders during the war with Japan, which menaced India’s borders. In 1947, Clement Attlee’s Labour government achieved what Baldwin had failed to do. Churchill, by then, was the leader of the Conservative opposition, having been ousted from power in 1945. Churchill’s friend and the king’s cousin Lord Mountbatten had become the Viceroy of India in 1946. Mountbatten strongly supported Indian independence and persuaded Churchill not to mount a vigorous opposition. Churchill, who knew that, with Labour’s large majority, independence was a fait accompli, grudgingly acceded, and Mountbatten went on to preside over the transition of power from the crown to Nehru, the new Indian prime minister.

Two-and-a-half million Indians would be slaughtered in 1947 because of the racial and religious hatred between Muslim and Hindu. One of the slain was Gandhi. The new Hindu government would do nothing, as Churchill feared, to rectify the evils of the caste system. Churchill’s opposition to the dominion of India in the 1930s attested to his political conscience.

India has become a great nation and now has one of the strongest economies in the world. But even this happy progress, which Churchill would celebrate were he alive today, has not effaced his worry about the ethnic and religious fault lines of the subcontinent. India and Pakistan remain deeply hostile to one another, both equipped with nuclear weapons that could reignite on a new scale the violence Churchill hoped to prevent.