This blemish might in part be wiped away by fair government. Curzon’s programme of reform embraced every public institution and was dictated by what he judged to be in the best interests of the natives. Nowadays he is best remembered for his efforts to rescue from dereliction and refurbish the masterpieces of India’s ancient monuments, most famously the Taj Mahal. Less well-known was his timely intervention to save the Indian lion from extinction and his refusal to allow the Bombay government to take water from the Gorshoppa falls ‘for the sake of some miserable cotton mills’.
Enlightened, far-sighted measures would, Curzon hoped, restore Indian faith in the Raj and, in the process, Congress would wither. ‘The Congress is tottering to its fall,’ he claimed in November 1900, ‘and one of my greatest ambitions while in India is to assist it to a peaceful demise.’ By withholding concessions demanded by a minority, the government would show its firmness. India would continue to be guided by British officials, because, in Curzon’s judgement, they ‘possess partly by heredity, partly by upbringing, and partly by education, the habits of mind and vigour of character which are essential for the task’.62 Unbending in his adherence to the principles of the Raj, Curzon was also willing to take the offensive against Congress in its heartland, Bengal. At the very end of 1903 the government mooted a plan for the division of the province into East and West Bengal. This made administrative sense, given that the province covered 189,000 square miles and contained 78.5 million inhabitants, but, as Curzon had expected, there was a clamour from the Bengali educated class. One Dacca newspaper claimed that Bengalis in the new western state would be thrown into the company of ‘naked barbarians’ from Assam (racism in India was not just a British disease), but most protests centred on the notion that Bengal was some kind of political entity rather than the creation of administrative conveniences, which in fact it was. Curzon dimissed this uproar as nothing more than typical Bengali rhetoric which would soon burn itself out. Its intensity was an unmistakable sign that he had taken the right decision.
The issue of the partition of Bengal breathed some life into Congress, which had been flagging, but its influence over the national movement has been exaggerated. The preoccupations of the 1904 Congress were Curzon’s recent closing the door to further Indianisation of the civil service and preparations for a campaign of intense lobbying in Britain, where a general election was approaching. However, once Bengal had been sundered, its treatment was singled out as a symbol of Indian impotence and British despotism by militant nationalists who were exasperated by Congress’s reliance on persuasion and petition. Neither had yielded very much and Curzon’s viceroyalty had revealed a Raj which seemed as strong as ever.
Curzon resigned in August 1905, the victim of a campaign of deviousness and political string-pulling engineered by the commander-in-chief of the Indian army, Lord Kitchener. Differences over departmental responsibilities and arrangements for India’s defences had swollen into a row and then become a trial of strength. A vain, amoral self-seeker, Kitchener used a wide range of political chicanes: he bullied, intrigued, threatened resignation and used his toadies in the press and the Conservative party.
Within two years of Curzon’s departure, Sir Denzil Ibbetson, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, remarked disapprovingly that: ‘The native felt that he had the Viceroy at his back, and under such circumstances the Indian tends to presume and become impatient.’63 This was ironic, for Curzon had hoped that the sure-handed and humane exercise of absolute power would have satisfied the Raj’s subjects and swept away for ever incipient nationalism. This and the demand for more Indians taking decisions remained, and, henceforward, the Raj was forced to find ways in which to come to terms with its greatest contradiction. How could its subjects be called ‘British’ and yet be governed by a system of government which was un-British. The problem was bound to worsen, for those most troubled by the question, the Indian educated class, was growing year by year. Pressure for change would only increase and, as events had already shown, could easily take frightening forms. ‘The Extremists of today will Moderate tomorrow,’ predicted Tilak, ‘just as the Moderates of today are the Extremists of yesterday.’
4
Not Worth the Candle:
Wars, Real and
Imaginary,
1854 – 1914
I
There is a Russian chess manoeuvre known as a ‘Maskirovka’ which can be adapted for war and diplomacy. It involves a sequence of moves contrived to convince an opponent that certain of his vital pieces are at risk. He reacts by preparing for an offensive which never materialises; instead, his adversary strikes elsewhere, as he had first intended.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, successive Russian statesmen and soldiers employed the Maskirovka strategem against Britain. Through a mixture of diplomatic intrigue, disinformation, railway building and parading armies on frontiers, they persuaded their British counterparts that one day Russia would invade India, either through Persia or Afghanistan, or both. A reservoir of anxiety was created which the Russians tapped whenever it suited them, for it was the only way in which they could harm or exert pressure on a nation which consistently frustrated what they considered to be their rightful ambitions: possession of Constantinople and a free hand in the Balkans. If India was even remotely menaced, Britain had no choice but to strain every nerve and muscle to defend it because, as the Russians knew, it was a vital source of political and economic power. Britain had invested pride, energy and cash in India. Its possession underpinned Britain’s status as a world power and, by the end of the century, British investments there totalled £270 million. In a more and more fiercely competitive world market, India was a valuable customer, taking a fifth of all British exports. Popular and press responses to the Indian Mutiny were proof that British public opinion sensed that the loss of India would be a national catastrophe which had to be prevented whatever the cost.
All this was appreciated in St Petersburg which was why, whenever Anglo-Russian relations took a turn for the worse, there were unofficial hints to the effect that British rule in India was precarious and unlikely to survive a hard knock from outside. This was the message of Colonel Terentiev, whose Russia and England in the Struggle for the Markets of Central Asia was translated and published in Calcutta in 1875. It was designed to make the flesh creep, with the prophecy that if Russia ever mounted a serious military challenge to the Raj, the Indian army would turn on its masters and the masses would follow suit.1 General K. P. von Kaufman, the Russian commander in Turkmenistan, struck a raw nerve when, in 1876, he made the ‘impudent prediction’ that the British would soon plead for his troops to protect them from their Indian subjects.2 This rankled at a time when reports were filtering through to Calcutta which indicated that many Indians, including some princes, believed that Britain was frightened of the Russians and lacked the will to fight them. In the Madras residency, disgruntled peasants told tax officials: ‘Well, the Russians will be here before long and then we shall see!’3 This theme of the deep-rooted Indian discontent was revived during the 1884–85 Anglo-Russian confrontation, when an article in a Moscow newspaper claimed that Britain’s grip on India would dissolve once a Russian army appeared on its borders and the Cossacks would be welcomed as liberators. The author was supposed to be General Leonid Sobolev, a former chief of the Asian section of the Foreign Ministry, which suggested that the piece reflected official thinking.4 The notion of the Raj’s fragility soon became commonplace; during dinner in an outpost in the Pamirs in 1897 a Russian army doctor assured Captain Ralph Cobbold that the British garrison in India was ‘pampered’, and that the Cossack would prove no match for the sepoy who, when put to the test, would refuse to fight for his rulers.5
London and Calcutta reluctantly agreed with these forecasts. When plans were being prepared for India’s defence in 1885 a substantial force was earmarked for internal security.6 In 1901 it was estimated that at least 129,000 British and Indian troops would have to be
kept in reserve for police duties and guarding lines of communications to prevent religious strife, a crime wave and sabotage, all of which would be triggered by a Russian invasion.7 Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, India’s most illustrious soldier, agreed with this bleak prognosis. Always a Cassandra when it came to discussion of the Russian menace, he expected ‘grave unrest’ the moment the Russians entered Kabul, with worse to follow if they advanced any further.8 Forgetting for a moment the rough handling his army had received at the hands of the Afghans in 1879–80, he imagined that once the Russians had taken Kabul the whole country would swing behind them. He spoke loudly, often and with authority for the ‘Forward’ school of strategic thought, which insisted that any Russian threat to India, however indirect, had to be instantly countered by an offensive across the Afghan and Persian frontiers. Political considerations outweighed military, for if an Anglo-Indian army waited on the borders and passed the initiative to its adversaries, British prestige would slump. It would plummet beyond recovery if, by some mischance of arms, that army retreated on to Indian soil.
Roberts’s views became the dogma of a small but highly influential knot of senior officers and ministers. Their strength and persuasiveness lay in their knowledge of men and conditions in previously inaccessible regions. Some, mostly soldiers, had at great personal risk traversed deserts and mountains and knew intimately the tribesmen who lived there and the outposts and passes which had not yet appeared on the War and Foreign Office maps. Such knowledge had to be taken seriously by those who shaped policy, and its possessors were, almost to a man, Russophobes whose travels had strengthened their conviction that Russia intended to invade India when the time was right.
There was something in the heady, pure air of the Hindu Kush and Pamirs which infected explorers with a sense of foreboding and opened their minds to all kinds of phantoms. ‘No man,’ wrote Colonel Algernon Durand, ‘in his senses ever believed that the Russian army would cross the Pamirs and attack India by the passes of Hunza and Chitral, but we could not overlook the fact that in 1885 when war was in balance, some thousands of troops were moved towards the Pamirs.’9 He did not ask what might have happened when men and mountains met, nor did he look too closely at the transport and logistical problems which faced even small detachments in this region. A distinguished explorer and cartographer, Durand had led a small force into the Hunza valley in 1892 in a brief campaign of pacification, so he knew exactly what the Russians would be up against. Practical considerations were secondary in such matters; all that counted was the psychological effect of the appearance of Russian soldiers on India’s frontier. Durand and others of his mind had inherited the orthodoxy of the age when India was still being conquered. Then, aggression and audacity had won fear and respect in equal parts, and this reputation could only be preserved by attacking Russia without hesitation and with overwhelming force. So, by a strange paradox, the hawks in London, Calcutta and St Petersburg concurred: the Raj was brittle and its subjects’ allegiance depended on its capacity to engage its enemies impetuously and with vigour. Britain’s greatest source of strength was also its greatest weakness, and this made it easy for the Russians to play the Maskirovka gambit.
But to what purpose? The move was used on a chess-board that extended from the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean to the Chinese borderlands. It encompassed one, over-extended Muslim empire, the Turkish, and a decrepit one, the Persian. Beyond and to the east lay the decayed khanates of Khiva, Kokand and Bukhara, Afghanistan and a scattering of tribal entities whose semi-nomadic inhabitants never recognised frontiers and were a law unto themselves. Seen from the perspective of a ministerial desk in St Petersburg, this region represented a vast vacuum to be filled by Russia which had, during the eighteenth century, slowly built up a momentum of conquest whose direction lay southwards and eastwards. The pace of war and annexation was dictated by a small body of bored frontier commanders in search of glory and promotion, ultra-nationalists preaching doctrines of imperial destiny, Orthodox zealots hoping to reverse centuries of Muslim encroachments, and businessmen seeking fresh markets.
Their motives were blended into an intoxicating imperialist cocktail which was served as an aperitif before any new campaign to push back the frontier, and, it went without saying, advance civilisation. When Tashkent was stormed in 1865, a regimental chaplain exhorted his men to remember they were Christian warriors avenging hundreds of years of Muslim occupation of sacred Russian soil.10 Their commander, Colonel M. G. Cherniave, a Russian Clive, had defied orders by attacking the city with an army outnumbered fifteen to one, but when it had fallen he and his men were given decorations and cash for what Czar Alexander II called ‘a glorious affair’.11 Behind the armies came the railway engineers and entrepreneurs in search of customers and raw materials.
Fulfilling national destiny in Asia was always secondary to the quest for security in Europe. Geography had been unkind to Russia, confining its seaboard to the Baltic and Black Sea and giving it a land frontier that stretched from one to the other with no natural barriers. In the eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries this border had pushed steadily westwards until it embraced the Baltic States, Poland, and the Ukraine. There was room for further growth at the expense of Turkey, whose Balkan provinces would provide access to the Mediterranean and a position on the flank of the Austrian empire. To this end, Russian forces invaded what is now eastern Romania in the summer of 1853 and soon became unstuck.
Any infringement of Turkish sovereignty was a challenge to Britain. Ever since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, British regional policy had been guided by the need to create as cheaply as possible a vast buffer zone stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan, which would serve as India’s defensive glacis. Its perimeter encompassed the Turkish provinces of Egypt (then more-or-less independent), Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Arabia and Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan. A web of discreet power had been spread across this area. Its strands were treaties in which petty potentates exchanged subsidies for privileges; a string of consulates in major ports and cities; and a flotilla of warships which cruised in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and on the Tigris and Euphrates. There was a naval base and Anglo-Indian garrison at Aden and the Mediterranean fleet which, among other things, was an earnest of Britain’s intention to support the Turkish sultan and preserve the integrity of his empire. By these devices, India was protected by a cordon of weak states which Britain was pledged to uphold. If she failed to do so, the area was sure to be parcelled out by the European powers, most notably Russia which had already stripped Persia of its Caucasian territories and most of the Caspian shoreline.
India’s safety would be jeopardised if Russia were allowed to proceed with the dismemberment of the Turkish empire. This argument was invoked in 1853 and set Britain on a collision course with Russia, which culminated with the Anglo-French invasion of the Crimea in the later summer of 1854. The war which followed was a salutary humiliation for Russia; in less than eighteen months its armies suffered four defeats and it was forced to scuttle its Black Sea fleet and abandon the fortified base at Sebastopol. Furthermore, during 1854 and 1855 a British squadron had entered the Baltic, sailed at will and bombarded various shore installations. Worst of all, the war had revealed that the Russian army was hopelessly backward and its government lacked friends in Europe. On the other hand, Britain secured a French alliance and Austrian co-operation, which together tipped the military and political balance decisively against Russia. Fears that Britain might revive this coalition in the future made Russian diplomats extremely cautious in pressing claims in the Turkish Balkans or Persia.
A skilfully played Maskirovka gambit against India offered Russia its only chance to neutralise Britain. During the Crimean war there had been some high-level consideration given to a diversionary blow against India, but it was no more than wishful thinking since 1,800 miles of steppe, desert and mountains separated Russian outposts from the Indian frontier. Nonetheless, the Russian staff offic
ers imagined that their own and, for that matter, the British army could overcome geography without too much trouble. Soon after the end of the Crimean war, it was feared in St Petersburg that the British might follow up their victory with a two-pronged offensive from the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan against Russia’s fledgling colonies east of the Caspian. The result would be another catastrophe for Russia: ‘The appearance of the British flag in the Caspian Sea would be a death-blow not only to our influence in the East and to our external trade, but would jeopardise the political independence of the Empire.’12 The only defence against this hypothetical attack was a counter-stroke against India, but this was overruled by the Foreign Minister, Prince Gorchakov; with an exhausted army and 800 million roubles of outstanding debts from the Crimean war, Russia was in no position to fight anyone anywhere.
Whenever British and Russian military planners contemplated wars yet to be waged across the expanses of Asia, they were afflicted with a peculiar giddiness. Imaginations ran wild and each side attributed to the other unlimited ambition, grandiose masterplans and the capacity and willpower to see them through. The process of poring over maps, shifting make-believe armies, exploring unknown regions, discovering the temper of their inhabitants and everyday espionage was an extension on a larger scale of the Great Game of the 1830s and 1840s. The pace of play varied and results were hard to judge, although the conclusion of each round was marked by demands in Calcutta, London and St Petersburg for an increased military budget.
II
Contrary to what was conjectured in St Petersburg, Britain had no desire to push India’s frontiers into Central Asia. Admittedly there were a few bold spirits, still unchastened by the Afghan débâcle of 1838–42, who contemplated penetration of the region. In 1853 emissaries from the Khan of Kokand had asked Lord Dalhousie for modern guns, ammunition and British officers to prepare his army for a defensive war against Russia. The Governor-General was sympathetic on the grounds that nothing but good could result from making life uncomfortable for a rival Asian power. Sir John Lawrence disagreed violently and persuaded him to reject the khan’s pleas, which, if accepted, would draw Britain into an unnecessary and unwinnable conflict.13
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