by Richard Toye
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.54
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’.55 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’.56 Churchill told a friend, ‘He admires the book Mother India and would have no mercy with the Hindus who marry little girls aged ten.’57 He subsequently lent the book out to at least one fellow Conservative, and praised Mayo’s ‘powerful pen and vast knowledge’ of India.58 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’.59 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.60
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.61 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.62 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’.63 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.’64
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.’65 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.’66 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.’)67 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.68
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.’69 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.70 The speech brought him much criticism – ‘But I do not care at all, I am going on with it’, he wrote.71 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.72
On 17 February Irwin met Gandhi for the first of a series of discussions, prompting one of Churchill’s most notorious remarks, in a speech made at the West Essex Conservative Association: ‘It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, 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, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil
disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’73 Later in the same speech Churchill described Gandhi, perhaps even more harshly, as a ‘malignant subversive fanatic’; yet it is the ‘half-naked fakir’ passage that has always resonated. In part this was because Churchill successfully conjured an image that jarred utterly with the popular view of Gandhi as unworldly and, no matter what his faults, sincere. For Churchill, Gandhi’s decision to abandon Western dress was repellent, marking a retreat from civilization itself; one would hardly do this, in his view, without some kind of ulterior motive. At the same time it probably confirmed his opinion that the adoption by Hindu Congressmen of Western thought and clothing was merely a veneer. As Churchill put it in another speech, the ‘Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism’ were in fact resolved to keep the Untouchables in ‘sub-human bondage’.74 (He made no acknowledgement of Gandhi’s own opposition to untouchability, not even to point out that his claim to speak for the Untouchables was heavily contested by their leader, B. R. Ambedkar. And he struggled to explain Ambedkar’s own support for self-government.)75 In response to the ‘fakir’ remark Gandhi wrote that ‘Mr Churchill has been kind enough to gratuitously advertise my loin-cloth to the world’ before going on to explain why he had adopted it. ‘European civilization is no doubt suited for the Europeans but it will mean ruin for India, if we endeavour to copy it’, he argued.76
Churchill was exultant at his speech’s reception. He told Clementine: ‘There is no doubt that the whole spirit of the Conservative Party is with me, and that much of their dissatisfaction with S.B. turns itself into favour with me.’77 On 5 March Irwin struck a deal with Gandhi. In exchange for prisoner-release and other concessions, civil disobedience would be halted and Congress would attend the next session of the Round Table Conference. A few hours after the agreement was reached, Gandhi came back to see Irwin looking ‘rather depressed’. The more radical Nehru had told him that he, Gandhi, ‘had unwittingly sold India’. (There had been no guarantees on future independence.) Irwin recalled: ‘I exhorted him not to let this worry him unduly, as I had no doubt that very soon I should be getting cables from England, telling me that in Mr Churchill’s opinion I had sold Great Britain.’78 Baldwin was ‘thoroughly bucked’ by the pact, which seemed to show that the strategy of negotiation was working.79
Press reaction in India to the Conservative Party’s internal divisions showed that Churchill’s views were not necessarily popular even with white opinion. The London correspondent of the British-run Statesman judged that ‘Mr Baldwin has done more than any other man to save the Conservative Party from humiliation and wreckage and to spare India a feeling of hopelessness and futility’. The feeling in the Commons, he wrote, was that Gandhi and Irwin had proved Churchill wrong and that ‘by his present campaign of vituperation against India and her leaders, he is digging his political grave’.80 Amongst the vernacular language newspapers, the Anand seemed to accept that an independent India might have a future within the British Empire. This, though, was subject to qualification: ‘If Mr Churchill and his reactionary companions so desire they can spend more over India by proclaiming martial law and showering bombs from aeroplanes but so far there is merely the question of partnership in the Empire but then India will decide to separate herself completely from it. Does Mr Churchill want to see that day?’ The more radical Navin Bharat warned: ‘In spite of Mr Baldwin’s tall talk of unity his party consists of enemies of India’s freedom like Churchill who think that India cannot be given anything beyond provincial autonomy. This shows that the appendix of safeguards will render independence nominal.’81 On 19 March the official Tory candidate triumphed over an anti-Baldwinite at a crucial by-election in Westminster. ‘[E]very Englishman in India is glad’, claimed the British-owned Times of India.82 Both Beaverbrook’s challenge to Baldwin and Churchill’s (slim) chance of supplanting him as leader were now dead.
III
In August a major financial crisis involving a collapse of confidence in sterling forced the resignation of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour administration. However, MacDonald immediately formed a new ‘National Government’ which included Tories and Liberals. The bulk of the Labour Party went into opposition and there was, predictably, no job for Churchill, who was now merely a government backbencher. He himself was in France when the government fell. As he set out from London a few days earlier he received the proofs of India Insistent, a book by a fellow Harrovian, Sir Harcourt Butler. A former Governor of Burma with wide experience of India, Butler argued ‘the need for caution in political advance on western lines’, adding that ‘one need not subscribe to the doctrine that the hands of the clock can never be put back’.83 Churchill quickly cabled Butler’s publishers from Juan-les-Pins: ‘I have read with entire agreement – a magnificent work, Churchill.’84 Within a few days he published a laudatory review of it, warning that ‘we should not lose sight of India amid the anxieties of the financial crisis and the excitements of a new Government’.85 Meanwhile, the more extreme sections of the Indian press affected indifference to the change of government yet nonetheless showed their fear of intensified repression. The Shakti wrote: ‘India should not expect anything from this national or for that matter any other Government in Britain. The Churchill party has gained in strength and will get stronger.’86 Gandhi’s view, by contrast, was that the British government was facing ‘such staggering domestic problems’ that it was unlikely to refuse India self-government.87 Arriving in Britain for the new session of the Round Table Conference, he told journalists that he wanted to meet his enemies, and that he would write to Churchill and Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere asking for an interview.88 But the Churchill–Gandhi meeting of 1906 was not to be repeated.
In October there was a general election in the UK, leading to a startling victory for the National Government. Although MacDonald was still Prime Minister, Baldwin held the whip hand, as 473 of the government’s 554 MPs were Conservatives. When Parliament reconvened after the election it debated the Statute of Westminster, formalizing the 1926 Balfour definition of Dominion status. Although Churchill had welcomed the definition at the time, he now backtracked. On the one hand, he feared that Ireland could use the legislation to repudiate the Anglo-Irish Treaty, including the oath of Allegiance to the Crown. (With Eamon De Valera about to take power in Dublin as Prime Minister this was a realistic concern, although ‘Dev’ was anyway unlikely to be bound by legal niceties.) On the other, he predicted that a ‘frightful disaster’ would befall India if full Dominion status as set out in the statute were granted to it.89 He now urged an amendment, restricting the scope of the statute by specifying that it did not affect the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1922, but this attempt to tie Ireland’s hands was rejected. On 1 December the Round Table Conference broke up without agreement between Gandhi and the Muslim representatives, who demanded separate electorates for religious minorities. MacDonald announced the government’s determination to press ahead regardless and to present, in due course, a reform scheme that would lead onwards to Dominion status. In the Commons debate that followed, Churchill complained that the Conservative Party was now fully committed to the ‘Socialist’ policy followed by the late Labour government.90 Again Churchill’s diehard line was defeated, this time by 369 votes to 43. Hoare, now Secretary of State for India, wrote of ‘the collapse of the Churchill movement in the House of Commons’.91
The turn of the year saw a new crackdown in India after Gandhi revived civil disobedience and was again jailed. Churchill continued to warn that ‘democracy is totally unsuited to India’, but 1932 saw something of a lull in his campaign while he worked on his biography of the first Duke of Marlborough and the government prepared its reform plans.92 The year was notable, though, for the Ottawa Agreements of the summer. This network of bilateral pacts with Dominion countries greatly extended imperial preference and confirmed Britain’s shift towards protectionism. It involved Britain imposing the dreaded ‘fo
od taxes’ on non-imperial produce. The year before, Churchill had announced his acceptance of tariffs as part of a programme of ‘imperial reconstruction’, but his conversion was clearly half-hearted.93 In private he referred contemptuously to ‘Rottowa’.94 His decision to swallow his distaste in public amounted to a realistic acknowledgement that he could not fight the National Government on all fronts at once. Meanwhile, Ottawa helped the Conservative Party buy off its other internal opponents. As Amery put it a little later, ‘the Government can only get away with its India policy if on other issues it is definitely imperialist, protectionist, anti-League of Nations, all the things in fact which appeal to the instincts of those who form the strength of the revolt over India’.95
A new source of difference arose in January 1933, when Hitler came to power in Berlin. Churchill was rightly concerned about the threat posed by a resurgent Germany, and urged rearmament to deal with it. The government (which did rearm significantly in the years before 1939) presented him as an alarmist. Although it is possible to identify inconsistencies in his thinking, he must be given full credit for having been, at the broadest level, right about the Nazis. At the same time, it must be admitted that his simultaneous predictions of the probable ghastly consequences of the government’s India policy devalued his warnings about Germany in the eyes of many. This was an issue he failed to address in his post-war memoirs, which barely touched on his massive effort over India and presented the 1930s as a straightforward story of how his prescience about Hitler had been ignored.96
In March 1933 the government’s White Paper on India was at last published. The plan was to establish self-government in the provinces as a step towards an all-India federal government. Federation, however, would take place only if enough of the Princely States were willing to join.97 It is important to emphasize that Churchill’s battle against the plan was not the obviously lost cause it might appear in retrospect. In his efforts to combat the scheme, Churchill could count on the support of many rank-and-file Tories and also on the sympathy, if not always on the votes, of a substantial minority of the Conservative membership of the Commons and Lords. In addition, he had the backing of the right-wing Morning Post and Rothermere’s Daily Mail. However, the Morning Post was by now virtually moribund, and the Beaverbrook press did not come on board; nor, crucially, did The Times or other significant high-brow papers.98 Furthermore, the BBC only once (in 1935) allowed Churchill to broadcast on the topic of India.99 This was in line with its policy that political talks should be ‘non-controversial’.