The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  The ‘reality’ of India’s political situation in 1920 was defined by Gandhi’s movement of popular resistance. For the British and Indian elite alike, it was a bewildering new world.44 Gandhi’s vision of Swaraj was in many ways deliberately utopian. It appealed to a future freed not only from the oppression of British rule, but from any modern state or economic order. It refused any vision of colonial development. It was at odds with the aspirations of the established nationalist elite and it was pilloried as absurdly anachronistic by India’s emerging Communist movement. After 1945, despite his being acclaimed as spiritual leader of the Indian nation, Gandhi’s communalist vision would be ruthlessly sidelined. Yet Gandhi’s undeniable strength lay not only in his charisma, but also in his truly subtle understanding of political tactics. Day by day he gathered the forces of the uprising around himself, trying to gauge the possibility for increasing the pressure without provoking the British to the point where they had no option but to respond with lethal and massive force.45 Non-cooperation was a deliberate effort to craft a revolution that avoided Lenin’s headlong plunge toward a general conflagration or Sinn Fein’s Irish version of the same. It was a strategy perfectly designed to probe the legitimacy of a liberal empire, to the tenets of which Gandhi himself had so recently subscribed.

  Shocked by the horror of Amritsar and the calls for further blood that it provoked on both sides, Montagu and the Viceroy had sought to avoid any further escalation. But in London by the autumn of 1921 the cabinet was losing patience. As Lloyd George telegraphed to India, ‘I am convinced that the time has passed for patience and toleration . . . the majority of Indians are cooperating loyally in working the reforms, and it is essential that they should not be allowed to doubt which is the stronger, Gandhi or the British Raj . . .’.46 With the fate of both Ireland and Egypt in the balance, ‘the British Empire’ was ‘passing through a very critical phase, and it will not survive unless it shows now in the most unmistakable fashion that it has the will and the power to . . . deal conclusively with any who challenge its authority’. Lloyd George reminded Montagu and Reading that ‘the views formed by the cabinet are based upon a very wide survey of our position throughout the world . . .’. This was undoubtedly true. Imperial policy was world policy. But what the cabinet clearly lacked was any appreciation of the forces at work in India itself. Even amongst the India elite, the pressure for accelerated change was growing. Having lost the majority to Gandhi, the question was whether the British could sustain the cooperation even of the moderate minority. A failure to silence the radical nationalists would leave the moderates exposed. But a recurrence of Amritsar would create a situation as polarized as in Ireland.

  When Congress declared a boycott of the state visit to India by Edward, Prince of Wales, over the winter of 1921–2, the moment for confrontation seemed to be fast approaching.47 By January 1922, whilst massacres had been avoided, over 30,000 of Gandhi’s non-cooperators had been arrested by the provincial authorities. Montagu’s liberal policy of restraint and ‘non-confrontation’ was fraying. Desperate for a last- minute compromise in the third week of December 1921, Reading took up the idea of a constitutional Round Table. The risks were enormous. The Viceroy acted without approval either from London or the provincial governors and had every reason to expect howls of protest from both sides. The new electoral mechanism to which the Indian moderates had committed themselves was barely a year old. To be offering it up for revision so soon smacked of panic.

  In the event, what rescued Reading over the New Year 1921–2 was an uncharacteristically rash move on Gandhi’s part. Though there was substantial support for talks within the Congress leadership, Gandhi high-handedly turned down the offer of a Round Table.48 This was Reading’s salvation. Only days after he had issued his invitation, the entire idea was furiously condemned by Lloyd George and the provincial governors. If Gandhi had embraced the Viceroy’s offer at precisely the moment when it was disowned by London, it would have created an unprecedented public divide between the governments of India and Britain. Instead, by January 1922 it was Gandhi who was left isolated. His rejection of talks confirmed an important element of the Indian political class in their suspicion that he was a dangerous populist radical. The tide was flowing back in favour of the British.

  But to be talking in such terms was itself indicative of the extremity of the situation. By early 1922 it was evident to far-sighted imperial officials that for the foreseeable future Britain’s grip on India would rest neither on grand political gestures, à la Montagu-Chelmsford, nor on the sort of show of force being demanded by London. What was needed was day-by-day improvisation. In mid-January 1922 the Home Department of the government of India delivered a remarkably subtle assessment. ‘The struggle with Gandhi,’ the officials commented, had ‘always been a fight for position.’ The policy of non-confrontation adopted by Reading and Montagu in the wake of Amritsar had risked handing the initiative to the nationalists, and in November and December ‘the tactical advantage’ had ‘passed for a time to Gandhi’. But in early 1922 the officials sensed that ‘moderate opinion’ was ‘showing distinct signs of veering round in favour of the government’. After Gandhi’s high-handed rejection of the Round Table, influential Indians would support his arrest, so long as the British chose the right moment. That moment would come when Gandhi openly declared his intention of overthrowing British rule. He had ended 1920 by promising Swaraj within a year. One year on, he had failed to deliver. ‘...(S)ooner or later’, Britain’s imperial tacticians noted, he would be ‘forced into proclaiming mass civil disobedience . . . and then and then only, government will be in a position to enter on the final struggle with him . . . without the risk of alienating such support as we have in the country, and precipitating a crisis which would break the constitution’.49

  In fact, the moment came very soon indeed. In February 1922, just as the truculence in London was reaching boiling point, Gandhi’s grip failed him. After he had issued an open challenge to the government of India, thousands of young Indians began drilling in non-cooperation volunteer units. On 4 February, after police had violently dispersed a demonstration against the high cost of food at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh, the volunteers responded by burning down the police station, killing all 23 officers inside. London demanded Gandhi’s immediate arrest. As Lloyd George blared: ‘if there was an attempt to challenge our position in India, the whole strength of Britain would be put forward to maintain British ascendancy in India . . . with a strength and resolution that would amaze the world’. It was the same tactics of all or nothing that Lloyd George had used to intimidate the Irish. It was barefaced bluff, in India even more obviously than in Ireland.50 There was certainly impatience on the part of the British public toward their ‘ungrateful’ Indian subjects. But there was no appetite whatsoever for an enormous campaign of repression. The India Office replied in more realistic terms. The government of India must make clear, Montagu insisted, not simply Britain’s dominance but its commitment to India. It must be restated that it was a ‘complete fallacy’ for anyone to believe that Britain considered her ‘mission in India as drawing to a close’ or that London was ‘preparing for a retreat’.

  Gandhi himself was appalled by the violence at Chauri Chaura and on 12 February abruptly called off the civil disobedience campaign. As far as London was concerned he was now a wanted man, but even at this moment, at the urgent pleading of the Viceroy’s moderate Indian collaborators, Reading held back. Gandhi must be arrested, but first the government of India should solidify its moral position by removing the basic grievance that had driven the Muslim population into Gandhi’s arms. To restore its authority in India on liberal terms, the empire must reach a just peace with Turkey. Without gaining the backing of the full British cabinet, Montagu approved a statement to the press demanding for India a hearing on the question of Turkey. India’s services in the Great War were undeniable. In Mesopotamia and Palestine, Indian Muslims had laid down their live
s for the empire. On their behalf, the government of India insisted that there must be a withdrawal of all British and French forces from Constantinople, the traditional seat of the Khalif. The Sultan’s ‘suzerainty over the holy places’ must be restored. The Greeks must withdraw altogether from Anatolia. And the final boundary line with Greece must preserve Ottoman Thrace for Turkey.51

  Not surprisingly the Foreign Secretary, George Curzon, was outraged. That ‘a subordinate branch of the British government 6000 miles away’ should seek to dictate to London ‘what line it thinks I ought to pursue’ was ‘quite intolerable’. If the government of India was ‘entitled to express and publish its views about what we do in Smyrna or Thrace, why not equally in Egypt, the Sudan, Palestine, Arabia, the Malay peninsula or any other part of the Muslim world?’ This question, which went to the heart of the problem of how to govern a global empire under democratic conditions, was never answered. Instead, on 9 March 1922 Montagu was forced to resign. The following day, without uproar, Gandhi was arrested. Within a week, the man with whom Montagu and Reading had hoped to negotiate a new foundation for a liberal empire was sentenced to six years in prison.

  IV

  The British Empire survived the crisis. In its wake, a conservative interpretation of imperial destiny was to hold sway for years to come. But it was a hollow victory. The conservatives had won. But they had not had to carry out the violent deeds of absolute domination that were discussed with such hard-boiled enthusiasm in saloon bars across the empire. In practice, it was the subtle tactical manoeuvring between the despised liberals in the colonial administration and the more sophisticated nationalists that saved Britain from having to repeat elsewhere on the vast stage of empire the grisly and discreditable escalation that in Ireland had threatened to open the door to disaster.52 Liberalism saved the reactionaries from having to provide a full demonstration of how utterly untenable their position actually was. But in the process the liberal project itself suffered irreparable damage.

  Up to the very end, Montagu insisted that his policy in India had been undone by the irrational aggression of the Turkophobes. Even in his last speech as Secretary of State for India to the House of Commons, he doggedly held fast to Lord Macaulay’s famous justification of empire as a vehicle for progress. ‘India should realize,’ Montagu insisted, ‘that, based on goodwill and partnership there are no rights that will be denied her by the British parliament . . . if India will believe in our good faith . . . if she will accept the offer that has been made to her by the British parliament, then she will find that the British Empire, for which so many Indians and Englishmen have so recently died, and which at this present moment is saving the world, will give her liberty not license, freedom but not anarchy, progress but not stampede, peace and the fulfillment of the best destinies that the future can offer.’53 But Montagu ignored the contradictions repeatedly demonstrated by the liberal imperial model. Liberal visions were necessary to sustain empire in the sense that they offered fundamental justifications. But they were always likely to be reduced to painful hypocrisy by the real practices of imperial power and by the resistance of those subjected to empire.54 In the 1850s the liberal vision of empire articulated in the 1830s had been swept away by the Indian mutiny. A full revolution of the cycle from liberalism to repression was avoided in India in 1917–22. But the oscillation between liberalism and reaction was now accelerating into a dizzying and unrelenting switchback that sapped the will of empire.55

  Not, of course, that there was any realistic reassessment of the empire’s predicament in the wake of the crisis of the early 1920s. Complacency came easily. The empire had weathered the storm. And this reinforced the sense in London that through ‘timely redeployment’ Britain’s imperial operators would always be able to ‘outflank’, ‘outmanoeuvre’ and ‘disarm’ the forces of nationalist anti-imperialism. Crucially, the British expected the Hindu-Muslim pact of Lucknow to disintegrate, and as inter-communal violence resumed in the 1920s they were not disappointed. ‘Deft political and constitutional footwork’ and tactical finesse came to be seen as the defining characteristics of the masters of the empire.56

  But what was the positive project of empire beyond the fact of having survived as the only truly global power? In the 1920s one answer was the promise of economic development to be realized within a global Commonwealth. But attractive though it may have been to conservatives and liberals alike, economic development required investments that London could ill afford.57 In the 1920s loans continued to flow from the City of London to the world, but this increased Britain’s dependence on funds from America. Furthermore, even if the resources could be found, would economic and social development and the creation of an educated indigenous middle class not simply accelerate the emergence of anti-imperial opposition? That was, after all, how liberals like Montagu interpreted the rise of nationalism in India. And as the fervent economic nationalism of the Indians revealed, the encouragement of national development and the wider vision of a global Commonwealth could easily come into conflict. Following in the footsteps of Canada, Australia and South Africa, one of the first demands of Congress had been for tariff protection against British imports. Political concessions to nationalism fragmented the economic coherence that was one of the empire’s remaining justifications.

  Even more explosive tensions were aroused by the question of immigration. Australia and Canada and the White settler minorities in Kenya and South Africa were happy to encourage White solidarity. But this meant excluding the 320 million people recorded as the total population of India from the right to migration or land purchase and perpetuating discrimination against the Indian diaspora throughout the empire, which numbered at least 2.5 million.58 Gandhi had made his reputation fighting for Indian rights in South Africa before the war. In 1919 the demand for racial non-discrimination had been cut out of the League of Nations Covenant. But internally the British Empire could not escape the force of the point. As Lloyd George put it in July 1921 to the Imperial Conference: ‘We are trying to build up a democratic empire on the basis of the consent of all the races that are inside it . . . It really transfigures . . . the human story. The British Empire will be a Mount of Transfiguration if it succeeds.’59 The Commonwealth was to fall well short of such high aspirations, but it did vote over the furious protests of South Africa to affirm that there was an ‘incongruity between the position of India as an equal member of the British Empire and the existence of disabilities upon British Indians’ domiciled elsewhere in the empire.60 In the event, in 1923 Kenya introduced new exclusions on Indian settlement, but in so doing, along with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, and for that matter Britain itself, it put itself at odds with the very principle of equal treatment that was now acknowledged as a requirement of any consistent liberal vision of global empire.

  If the tensions between autonomy and coherence, racial hierarchy and liberalism, were ever more apparent, the British Empire nevertheless enjoyed a collective sense of triumph after 1918. The solidarity of the war was not forgotten. In 1919, in the wake of Amritsar, an ill-timed jihad by the Afghans across the North-Western frontier helped the British to restore their standing as the defenders of India with Sikhs and Hindus in the Northern provinces. Faced with a more significant foreign threat, the Commonwealth would surely rally together again. But given the stark financial and strategic realities of the 1920s, even this begged the question. World War I had certainly demonstrated the empire’s might. But it had also demonstrated that Britain’s far-flung empire was vulnerable to regional challenges by well-organized nation states. If the question was not merely one of maintaining British rule against popular resistance from within, but of securing the empire’s future as a global strategic unit, then even at the height of its power in November 1918 the idea of the empire standing alone was an illusion. In the absence of a truly powerful League of Nations, the empire’s viability depended on coming to terms with the potential challengers of the future
– Japan and Germany, the United States and a consolidated Soviet regime. But would a privileged relationship with one of these powers imply a dangerous antagonism toward the others, and were any of them in fact interested in an alliance with the British Empire?

  21

  A Conference in Washington

  In the summer of 1921 the ceasefire in Ireland set the stage for a grand Imperial Conference.1 The London Empire Conference, the first general imperial meeting for two years, was the matrix out of which the fully fledged idea of the British Empire as a Commonwealth emerged – enabling the newly formed Irish Free State to be squared with a continued claim to overarching imperial authority. But beyond the internal constitution of the empire, the overriding question of the moment was that of strategy. How was a Commonwealth stretched around the globe to protect itself? In 1918 the British Admiralty had proposed to answer this question by means of an imperial navy, jointly funded by contributions from each of the Dominions, with standardized training and a disciplinary code, participating on a footing of equality with the British Navy in an imperial naval staff.2

  To sell the idea Admiral John Jellicoe was dispatched on an 18-month tour of the Dominions. For the Western Pacific he projected a fleet of eight battleships and eight battlecruisers, one of which would be contributed by New Zealand, four by Australia and the rest by Britain. It would be commanded from Singapore and fuelled by a network of oil dumps across the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. If Jellicoe had had his way an integral part of the imperial fleet would have been a Royal Indian Navy, ‘manned and maintained so far as is possible by the people of India’. Like the French idea of a League of Nations army, this vision of military internationalism was quickly shot down. The Dominions and the government of India were too jealous of their independence and too wary of the costs involved. But they did applaud in London in June 1921 when Arthur Balfour announced the construction of a massive base at Singapore, which, in case of emergency, would allow the British fleet to be deployed to the other side of the world.3