After a private visit to Chartwell, Mohammed Ali Jinnah invited Churchill to lunch in London. Churchill declined. It might be wiser, he wrote, ‘for us not to be associated publicly at this juncture’. Churchill then wrote out for Jinnah the London address of his secretary Miss Gilliatt, telling the Indian Muslim leader: ‘I now enclose the address to which any telegrams you may wish to send me can be sent without attracting attention in India. I will always sign myself “Gilliatt”. Perhaps you will let me know to what address I should telegraph to you and how you will sign yourself.’769
Speaking on India in the House of Commons on 12 December 1946, Churchill noted that, although it had been several months since the last debate on India, the Indian drama was ‘unfolding itself remorselessly’. Nevertheless, the very fact that this new debate was taking place had been ‘deplored’, albeit in ‘moderate terms’, by Sir Stafford Cripps. ‘But it would be a pity,’ Churchill commented, ‘if the British Empire in India passed out of life into history, without the House of Commons seeming to take any interest in the affair, and without any record, even in Hansard, of the transaction.’
Those who had been ‘content’ with the course of British policy to India in the previous twenty years had hoped, Churchill pointed out, ‘that the desire of many Indians to be rid for ever of British rule and guidance would have brought about a melting of hearts among the vast populations inhabiting the Indian sub-Continent, and that they would have joined together to maintain the peace and the unity of India, and stride forth boldly into their independent future, on which we impose no bar.’
Such had not been his views, but ‘they are the views of a great number of people’. No such ‘melting of hearts’ had so far occurred, he said, and he went on to declare that, on the contrary:
…all the facts and all the omens point to a revival, in an acute and violent form, of the internal hatreds and quarrels which have long lain dormant under the mild incompetence of liberal-minded British control. This is the dominating fact which stares us in the face to-day. The House will probably be of the opinion that it is too soon for us to accept this melancholy conclusion, or to regulate our conduct by it. To me, however, it would be no surprise if there were a complete failure to agree. I warned the House as long ago as 1931, when I said that if we were to wash our hands of all responsibility, ferocious civil war would speedily break out between the Muslims and Hindus. But this, like other warnings, fell upon deaf and unregarding ears.
Churchill then drew the attention of the House of Commons to the words of Lord Randolph Churchill in 1886, and to their relevance in 1946:
I have always borne in mind the words my father used when he was Secretary of State for India 60 years ago. He said:
‘Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over a surface of, and keeping calm and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of humanity. Underneath that rule lie hidden all the memories of fallen dynasties, all the traditions of vanquished races, all the pride of insulted creeds, and it is our task, our most difficult business, to give peace, individual security and general prosperity to the 250 millions of people’—
there are now 400 millions—
‘who are affected by those powerful forces, to bind them and to weld them by the influence of our knowledge, our law and our higher civilisation, in process of time into one great united people and to offer to all the nations of the West the advantages of tranquillity and progress in the East.’
Having quoted these words of his father, Churchill continued:
That is the task which, with all our shortcomings and through all our ordeals, we have faithfully and loyally pursued since Queen Victoria assumed the Imperial Crown. That is the task which we have now declared ourselves willing to abandon completely, provided that we have such assurance of agreement between the Indian races, religions, parties and forces as will clear us from the responsibility of bringing about a hideous collapse and catastrophe.
‘We have no such assurance at the present time,’ Churchill commented.
Four months had passed since the Government had invited Jawaharlal Nehru to form a Government, based upon the Congress Party of which he was the head. By this invitation, Churchill declared, the Government had ‘precipitated a series of massacres over wide regions, unparalleled in India since the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Indeed, it is certain that more people have lost their lives or have been wounded in India by violence since the interim Government under Mr Nehru was installed in office four months ago by the Viceroy, than in the previous 90 years, or four generations of men, covering a large part of the reigns of five Sovereigns.’ Churchill’s speech continued:
This is only a foretaste of what may come. It may be only the first few heavy drops before the thunderstorm breaks upon us. These frightful slaughters over wide regions and in obscure uncounted villages have, in the main, fallen upon Muslim minorities. I have received from high and credible witnesses, accounts of what has taken place, for instance, in Bihar.770 The right hon. and learned Gentleman gave us his report. What happened in Bihar casts into the shade the Armenian atrocities with which Mr Gladstone once stirred the moral sense of Liberal Britain.771
We are, of course, cauterised by all that we ourselves have passed through. Our faculty for wonder is ruptured, our faculty for horror is numbed; the world is full of misery and hatred. What Mr Gollancz, in a remarkable book—which, I may say, shows an evident lack of peace of mind—has called ‘our threatened values’, do not stir us as they would have done our fathers or our predecessors in this House; nor, perhaps, after all our exertions and in our present eclipse, have we the physical and psychic strength to react against these shocking tidings, as former generations and earlier Parliaments, who have not suffered like us, would certainly have done.
Churchill went on to tell the House of Commons:
The official figure of the lives lost since the Government of India was handed over to the Interim Administration of Mr Nehru is stated at 10,000. I doubt very much whether that figure represents half the total racial and religious murders which have occurred up to date. An outbreak of animal fury has ravaged many large districts, and may at any time resume or spread its devastation through teeming cities and Provinces as big as England or the main British island. It is some comfort to recall, and I was glad that the right hon. and learned Gentleman reminded us of it, that both Muslim and Hindu leaders have joined together to arrest, or at least mitigate this appalling degeneration. I have been informed that it was Mr Nehru himself who gave the order which the Provincial Government of Bihar had been afraid to give, for the police and troops to fire upon Hindu mobs who were exterminating the Muslim minorities within their midst. That was certainly to his credit and may be taken, so far as it goes, as an encouraging sign.
Nevertheless, I must record my own belief, which I have long held and often expressed, that any attempt to establish the reign of a Hindu numerical majority in India will never be achieved without a civil war, proceeding, not perhaps at first on the fronts or armies of organised forces, but in thousands of separate and isolated places. This war will, before it is decided, lead through unaccountable agonies to an awful abridgement of the Indian population. Besides and in addition to this, I am sure that any attempt by the Congress Party to establish a Hindu Raj on the basis of majorities measured by the standards of Western civilisation—or what is left of it—and proceeding by the forms and formulas of governments with which we are familiar over here, will, at a very early stage, be fatal to any conception of the unity of India.
Churchill then spoke of the Muslims and the Untouchables, the minorities which were each in fact an ‘entity’, telling the House of Commons that, whatever might be the outcome of the divisions in India as a result of the present situation, in which the Muslims under Jinnah had refused to participate in the Constituent Assembly, there was ‘one thing’ that, whatever happened in India, ‘we must not do’:
We must not allow British troops or British officers in the Indian Army to become the agencies and instruments of enforcing caste Hindu domination upon the 90 million Muslims and the 60 million Untouchables; nor must the prestige or authority of the British power in India, even in its sunset, be used in partisanship on either side of these profound and awful cleavages. Such a course, to enforce religious and party victory upon minorities of scores of millions, would seem to combine the disadvantages of all policies and lead us ever deeper into tragedy, without giving us relief from our burdens, or liberation, however sadly purchased, from moral and factual responsibility. It is because we feel that these issues should be placed bluntly and plainly before the British and Indian peoples, even amid their present distresses and perplexities, that we thought it our bounden duty to ask for this Debate.772
Not India, but Palestine, prompted Churchill’s next Parliamentary speech, on 31 January 1947. The subject was recent Jewish terrorism, ‘this series of detestable outrages’ as Churchill called them.773 There were those who had argued for reprisals, or at least for a war on the terrorists. Churchill cautioned the House:
The idea that general reprisals upon the civil population and vicarious examples would be consonant with our whole outlook upon the world of affairs and with our name, reputation and principles, is, of course, one which should never be accepted in any way. We have, therefore, very great difficulties in conducting squalid warfare with terrorists. That is why I would venture to submit to the House that every effort should be made to avoid getting into warfare with terrorists; and if a warfare with terrorists has broken out, every effort should be made—I exclude no reasonable proposal—to bring it to an end.
Churchill also urged the House, as he had done in his previous speech on Palestine, not to turn its back on a Jewish National Home in Palestine:
All my hon. Friends on this side of the House do not agree with the views which I held for so many years about the Zionist cause. But promises were made far beyond those to which responsible Governments should have committed themselves. What has been the performance? The performance has been a vacuum, a gaping void, a senseless, dumb abyss—nothing.
The ‘outrageous acts’ in Palestine, Churchill pointed out, were being committed by a ‘small, fanatical desperate minority’. Of one Jewish terrorist, Dov Gruner, who was under sentence of death, Churchill commented: ‘The fortitude of this man, criminal though he be, must not escape the notice of the House.’774
Churchill then spoke of the financial aspect of British rule in Palestine:
We are told that there are a handful of terrorists on one side and 100,000 British troops on the other. How much does it cost? No doubt it is £300 a year per soldier in Palestine. That is apart from what I call a slice of the overheads, which is enormous, of the War Office and other Services. That is £30 million a year. It may be much more—between £30 million and £40 million a year—which is being poured out and which would do much to help to find employment in these islands, or could be allowed to return to fructify in the pockets of the people—to use a phrase which has dropped out of discussion now, but which was much in vogue at one time in Liberal circles, together with all sorts of antiquated ideas about the laws of supply and demand by people like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other worthies of that kind.
One hundred thousand men is a very definite proportion of our Army for one and a half years. How much longer are they to stay here? And stay for what? In order that on a threat to kill hostages we show ourselves unable to execute a sentence duly pronounced by a competent tribunal. It is not good enough. I never saw anything less recompensive for the efforts now employed than what is going on in Palestine.
There were those who said that Britain should stay in Palestine because otherwise ‘Jew and Arab would be at each other’s throats’, because there would be civil war. Churchill reflected on this that a civil war was ‘very likely indeed’, but was this reason ‘why we should stay’? and he added:
We do not propose to stay in India, even if a civil war of a gigantic character were to follow our departure. No, that is all brushed aside. We are not going to allow such things to make us stay. We are told to leave the Indians to settle their own affairs by getting a verdict from a body which is unrepresentative and then march out. In Palestine we are told we cannot go, because it would lead to a terrible quarrel between Jews and Arabs and there would be civil war as to who would have the land.
Churchill proposed that, henceforth, the responsibility for Palestine should be borne by the United Nations and not by ‘poor, overburdened and heavily injured’ Britain. He saw ‘absolutely no reason’ why Britain should continue to suffer ‘all this pain, toil, injury and suffering’; unless the United States was prepared to ‘come in with us shoulder to shoulder on a 50 per cent basis on an agreed policy, to take a half and half share of the bloodshed, odium, trouble, expense and worry’, then Britain should lay its Mandate at the feet of the United Nations:
Whereas, six months ago, I suggested that we should do that in 12 months I suggest now that the period should be shortened to six months. One is more and more worried and one’s anxiety deepens and grows as hopes are falsified and the difficulties of the aftermath of war, which I do not underrate, lie still heavily upon us in a divided nation, cutting deeply across our lives and feelings.
In these conditions we really cannot go on, in all directions, taking on burdens which use up and drain out the remaining strength of Britain and which are beyond any duty we have undertaken in the international field.
I earnestly trust that the Government will, if they have to fight this squalid war, make perfectly certain that the will power of the British State is not conquered by brigands and bandits and unless we are to have the aid of the United States, they will at the earliest possible moment, give due notice to divest us of a responsibility which we are failing to discharge and which in the process is covering us with blood and shame.775
‘I cannot help being interested in politics,’ Churchill told Lord Moran a month later; ‘the Government is doing so much harm,’ and he added: ‘Of course, it’s all anti-climax.’776
As Churchill had urged, the Cabinet now decided to transfer the Palestine Mandate to the United Nations as soon as possible. This decision was made public by Bevin on February 14. Six days later, Attlee announced that it was his Government’s intention, in India, to transfer power to ‘responsible Indian hands’ not later than June 1948, and that Mountbatten was to succeed Wavell as Viceroy. Churchill was convinced that such a transfer of power was at variance with the 1942 British offer of Dominion Status for India, an offer which, at the time, the Indian Congress Party under Nehru had rejected.
On March 4, in preparation for the debate on the Government’s proposals, Churchill received a series of notes from Enoch Powell, dealing with the legality of secession of a country with Dominion Status, and the terms of the earlier rejection by the Congress Party of Dominion Status when offered by Sir Stafford Cripps in 1942. Despite this rejection, Powell pointed out, Churchill had accepted his Secretary of State for India’s statement at the time, that despite the Congress rejection, the British Government, as L. S. Amery had expressed it, ‘stand firmly by the broad intention of their offer’.777
Speaking in the House of Commons on March 6, Churchill argued that the Government had now gone beyond the offer of Dominion Status in two respects. One was the ‘total abandonment’ by the Government of all responsibility for carrying out its earlier pledges to the minorities and to the depressed classes, as well as to the Indian States. ‘All these are to be left to fend for themselves,’ he said, ‘and fight for themselves as best they can.’ The second change concerned agreement between the Muslim and Hindu communities. Such agreement was ‘the essence of the Cripps declaration’ of 1942. ‘It is the Government which has broken away from the agreement….’
During the debate, there was an altercation between A. V. Alexander and Churchill on the subject of the Congress leader, Jawaharlal Nehru:
Referring to Mr Churchill’s reference to the Cabinet Mission, Mr Alexander denied that this Mission attempted to formulate a Constitution and force it on the Indians. Mr Churchill had attacked Pandit Nehru, but we had had evidence in the past to recognise Nehru as an experienced and cultured person, and if he and his colleagues were given a fair opportunity to co-operate with the other parties they would bring India through her present difficulties to power, prosperity, and peace.
Mr Churchill: I certainly have not made any personal attack on Mr Nehru, except to point out that he has good reason to be our bitterest enemy.
Mr Alexander said that for a man of Mr Churchill’s great experience to get up in the House and talk about Indian leaders of that kind, with whom we had negotiated and had got closer to than ever before, as if they were existing enemies of this country was a really fatal thing to do.
Nehru’s interim Government, Churchill continued, had been ‘a complete disaster’. It had been, and remained, a ‘critical mistake’ to entrust the Government of India in this interim period ‘to the leader of the caste Hindus, Mr Nehru’. Mountbatten was being sent out to India as Viceroy with fourteen months to secure a working agreement with Nehru on the future independence of India, in theory still as a Dominion. ‘Is he to make a new effort to restore the situation?’ Churchill asked:
…or is it merely ‘Operation Scuttle’ on which he and other distinguished officers have been despatched? One thing seems to me absolutely certain—the Government by the time limit has put an end to all prospect of Indian unity. In my view everyone will start to stake out their claims and prepare to defend them.
These 14 months will not be used for the melting of hearts and the union of Muslim and Hindu all over India. They will be used in preparation for civil war; and they will be marked continually by disorders and disturbances such as are now going on in the great city of Lahore. In spite of the great efforts which have been made by the leaders on both sides to allay them, out of sheer alarm and fear of what would happen, still these troubles break out, and they are sinking profoundly into India, in the heart of the Indian problem.778
At this point, Sir Stafford Cripps, as the Manchester Guardian reported, was ‘smiling cynically’.779 Churchill at once replied:
…the right hon. and learned Gentleman ought not to laugh. Although of fanatical disposition, he has a tender heart. I am sure that the horrors that have been going on since he put the Nehru Government in power, the spectacle we have seen in viewing these horrors, with the corpses of men, women and children littering the ground in thousands, have wrung his heart. I wonder that even his imagination does not guide him to review these matters searchingly in his own conscience.780
The fourteen months’ ‘limitation’, Churchill told the House of Commons, would ‘cripple’ Mountbatten ‘and destroy the prospect of even going through the business on the agenda which has to be settled’. Churchill then quoted a remark by Gandhi—‘one of his most scatterbrained observations’, he called it—at the time of the Cripps Mission in 1942. Rejoicing in the rejection by Congress of Cripps’s offer of Dominion Status once the war was ended, Gandhi had said: ‘Leave India in God’s hands, in modern parlance, to anarchy; and that anarchy may lead to internecine warfare for a time, or to unrestricted dacoities. From these a true India will arise in place of the false one we see.’
This statement, Churchill commented, was, ‘as far as I can see, a statement indistinguishable from the policy His Majesty’s Government are determined to pursue’.
Churchill then compared, as he had done in the Palestine debate in January, the Government’s policies on Palestine and India. He made the comparison, he said, ‘with bewilderment’:
There is a time limit for India, but no time limit for Palestine. I must say, that astonished me. Two bottles of powerful medicine have been prepared, but they are sent to the wrong patients. The policy in these two places taken together is incomprehensible. I do not understand how they can have originated from any coherent human brain; and even from a Cabinet which, no doubt, has many incoherencies in it, it is incomprehensible.
Can the House believe there are three or four times as many British troops in little petty Palestine as in mighty India at the present time? What is the idea behind such a thing? What is the point and sense of this distribution of our forces, which we are told are so limited?
I do not know where the sustained effort we are making in Palestine comes from, or what element of obstinacy has forced this peculiar assertion in the midst of general surrender and scuttle of British will-power in Palestine. I do not know where it comes from; but evidently some very powerful Minister has said he is going to have his way in it, and nobody has dared to withstand him. I cannot tell who it is. I have only my surmise.
The sustained effort we are making in Palestine, if applied in India, would have enabled the plan of the Cripps Mission to be carried out, fully discussed with full deliberation and firmness; and we should have kept all our pledges, and we should have gone steadily forward through this crisis.
It is indeed a paradox that the opposite course should be taken, and that here, in India, where such vast consequences are at stake, we are told we must be off in 14 months; whereas, in this small Palestine, with which we have been connected but 25 years, and hold only on Mandate, we are to make all these exertions, and pour out our treasure, and keep 100,000 men or more marching around in circumstances most vexatious and painful to them.
To the surprise of almost everyone present, Churchill then proposed for India the solution he had earlier proposed for Palestine: to ‘invoke the aid’ of the United Nations. The Government had now agreed ‘after six or seven months’ delay—a needless delay’ to involve the United Nations in Palestine. They should do the same for India:
We are told that we cannot walk out of Palestine because we should leave behind us a war between 600,000 Jews and 1,200,000 Arabs. How, then, can we walk out of India in 14 months and leave behind us a war between 90 million Muslims and 200 million caste Hindus, and all the other tribulations which will fall upon the helpless population of 400 million? Will it not be a terrible disgrace to our name and record if, after our 14 months’ time limit, we allow one fifth of the population of the globe, occupying a region nearly as large as Europe, to fall into chaos and into carnage? Would it not be a world crime that we should be committing, a crime that would stain—not merely strip us, as we are being stripped, in the material position—but would stain our good name for ever?
If the Government felt that it was right ‘in the case of little Palestine’ to lay their difficulties before the United Nations, what ‘conceivable reason’ could there be, Churchill asked, ‘for not following a similar course in the case of this vast sub-Continent of India?’ and he went on to ask, of Attlee’s Government:
…if they cannot, through their weakness and moral prostration, fulfil their pledges to vast, helpless communities numbered by scores of millions, are they not bound in honour, in decency, and, indeed, in common sense to seek the aid of the wider instruments and authorities? I say that if all practical hopes of Britain’s discharging her task have vanished—it is not my view, but it is the prevailing mood; it is the mood of those who are all-powerful today—if they have all vanished, then, at least, there is this new world organisation, brought into being by the agonies of two devastating wars, which should certainly not be overlooked or ignored.
He had spoken, Churchill said, ‘with a lifetime of thought and contact with these topics’. This was indeed true. More than fifty years had passed since he had been a young soldier in India; more than twenty-five since, in the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre, he had warned the House of Commons against using ‘frightfulness’ in its dealings with India; more than a decade since, during the India Bill debate, he had tried to persuade the Conservative Party not to be in such a hurry to give up Britain’s control over India. Now the days of the British Raj were numbered:
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. I am sure that in the hour of our victory now not so long ago, we had the power to make a solution of our difficulties which would have been honourable and lasting. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself. We must face the evils that are coming upon us and that we are powerless to avert. We must do our best in all these circumstances and not exclude any expedient that may help to mitigate the ruin and disaster that will follow the disappearance of Britain from the East. 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 sorrow so many of us feel, the taint and smear of shame.781
Churchill made a second onslaught on the Government six days later, during a debate on the economic situation. Having won the votes of only 37 per cent of the total electorate, he said, the Labour Party had committed ‘a crime against the British State and people’ by their Socialist legislation, ‘the consequences of which have hampered our recovery, darkened our future and now endanger our very life’. His denunciation of the Government continued:
…mouthing slogans of envy, hatred and malice, they have spread class warfare throughout the land and all sections of society, and they have divided this nation, in its hour of serious need as it has never been divided, in a different way from that in which it has ever been divided in the many party conflicts I have witnessed in the past. In less than two years, our country, under their control, has fallen from its proud and glorious position in the world, to the plight in which it lies this afternoon, and with even more alarming prospects opening upon us in the future.
That is their offence, from which we shall suffer much, and with the guilt and discredit of which their name and the doctrines of their party will long be identified in British homes.
Churchill turned a few moments later to the Government’s Palestine policy:
…£82 million since the Socialist Government came into power squandered in Palestine, and 100,000 Englishmen now kept away from their homes and work, for the sake of a senseless squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs, or God knows who.
‘Scuttle’, everywhere, is the order of the day—Egypt, India, Burma. One thing at all costs we must preserve: the right to get ourselves world-mocked and world-hated over Palestine, at a cost of £82 million.
Churchill then spoke of the increase in the number of civil servants under the Labour Government. The ‘Socialist ideal’, he said, ‘is to reduce us to one vast Wormwood Scrubbery’, and he went on to explain that at Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London ‘there is only one official to every four prisoners, whereas up to the present we have the advantage of only one official to look after every eight wage-earners or producers’.
Contrasting the philosophies of private enterprise and State control, Churchill told the House of Commons:
Let every man now ask himself this: Is it the interest of the wage-earners to serve an all-powerful employer—the State—or to deal with private employers, who, though more efficient in business, are in a far weaker position as masters? Is it the interest of the housewife to queue up before officials at public distribution centres, as Socialism logically involves, or to go as a customer to a private shopkeeper, whose livelihood depends on giving good and friendly service to his customers?
Of course, the State must have its plan and its policy. The first object of this plan should be to liberate and encourage the natural, native energies, genius and contrivance of our race, which, by a prodigy, have built up this vast population in our small island, and built up a standard of living which, before the war, was the envy of every country in Europe.
The first object then, is to liberate these energies; the second stage is to guide and aid all the forces that these native energies generate into the right channels. The Government have begun the wrong way round. They have started with control for control’s sake on the theory of levelling down to the weakest and least productive types, and thus they have cramped and fettered the life-thrust of British society.782