Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  Amery may also have been irked by the reference to moneylenders—a hint that Churchill saw upper-class Indians, in particular Bengali babus, through the same lens as anti-Semites might perceive Jews. Others had made an explicit comparison. “All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to . . . the Jew of the dark ages,” Macaulay had written of the Bengali, who compressed into his diminutive form every loathsome aspect of the Hindu. “[A]s usurers, as money-changers, as sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them.” The Bengali babu, another writer had joked in 1911, was “something of an Irishman, something of an Italian, something of a Jew: if one can conceive of an Irishman who would run away from a fight instead of into it, an Italian without a sense of beauty and a Jew who would not risk five pounds on the chance of making five hundred.”41

  The frustration that Amery felt that August can perhaps best be gauged by means of an extraordinary three-page typewritten draft that is to be found among his files. Entitled “The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister” and appended with the initials W.S.C., the manuscript appears at first glance to have indeed been written by Churchill. But a finely penciled notation reveals the paper’s true author: “A skit by LSA after a harangue by WSC in Cabinet—only slightly exaggerated.” The last two words are underlined.

  “We have had enough . . . of shameful pledges about Indian self-government, and of sickening surrenders to babu agitation,” the document asserted. “If we went even further two years ago in an open invitation to Indians to unite and kick us out of India that was only because we were in a hole.” After the war was over, continued the paper, the prime minister would announce a new policy on the colony: “No more nonsense about self-government; down with all (brown) landlords and profit making industrialists, collectivise agriculture on Russian lines and touch up the untouchables.” The scheme would require removing all those Englishmen, beginning with the viceroy, who “would not only appear to have taken our pledges seriously, but to be imbued with a miserable sneaking sympathy for what are called Indian aspirations, not to speak of an inveterate and scandalous propensity to defend Indian interests as against those of their own country, and a readiness to see British workers sweat and toil for generations in order to swell yet further the distended paunches of Hindu moneylenders.”

  The numerous babus “who infest the government offices” would also have to be disposed of, and replaced by a new force of English re-educators who would uphold “our historic right to govern India in accordance with our own ideas and interests.” Every five villages would require “[o]ne English instructor in the new way of life and one English head policeman with five Indian subordinates drawn from the loyal martial races.” In total, the colony would require 160,000 instructors in “regeneration,” 160,000 English police officers, and 800,000 Indian policemen. Any criticism in the British Parliament of this “new Dawn over India” would be banned. “It will also be necessary, following an excellent Russian precedent, to forbid any but trusted officials to leave India or to allow any visitors from outside except under the closest supervision by an official Intourist Agency.”42

  Another penciled notation confirms that this paper was written in August 1944. Amery must have caricatured the prime minister’s ramblings in order to vent his anger, and perhaps also to explain to shocked colleagues why he had compared the beloved statesman to the man who would become the most reviled figure of the twentieth century. “I have stood much during these four years which I should not have stood but for the common danger and for Winston’s indispensable gifts as a war leader,” Amery confided to his diary. “Now the danger is over . . . while the dangers arising from his lack of judgement and knowledge in many respects and his sheer lack of sanity over India make him increasingly dangerous.”43

  Amery’s papers, which were opened to the public in 1997, decades after his death, may be seen as a plea for understanding. Amery had been an elder statesman, a gifted and respected Tory leader with more vision and liberality than most. Saddled with a thankless job for the duration of the war, he had done his best for Britain. But to the extent that posterity would remember him, it would be as the imperialist who had presided over the Bengal famine. It should not be surprising that Amery wanted to tell his side of the story, at a time when it could no longer harm anyone.

  ONCE AGAIN THE prime minister crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, consuming meals such as this one described by his personal secretary: “Oysters, consommé, turbot, roast turkey, ice with canteloupe melon, Stilton cheese and a great variety of fruit, petit fours, etc.; the whole washed down by champagne (Mumm 1929) and a very remarkable Liebfraumilch [sweet German white wine], followed by some 1870 brandy.” During dinner in Quebec on September 13, 1944, the prime minister argued with President Roosevelt for an hour over India. “Churchill talked rather angrily at length about the difficulties the British were confronted with administering India and on the lack of understanding in the United States about the Indian problem,” recorded an American observer. The prime minister offered his critics half of India to manage, to see if they could do any better.44

  Churchill was determined to recapture Singapore, which he described as “the only prize that will restore British prestige in this region.” India’s economy was still so fragile, however, that the viceroy was reluctant to use the colony as the base for a final, massed attack against Japanese forces, scheduled for 1945. That would require the colony to serve as home base for 27 divisions and more than 200 squadrons. The Chiefs of Staff debated whether Australia or the Middle East might make for a more stable headquarters—but the S branch held otherwise.45

  The supplies needed by the additional troops “would impose very little extra burden on the Indian economy,” an S branch paper argued. “Between 1939 and 1943 total expenditure on stores, hospitals, general measures, roads, etc. has amounted to only about £50 million as compared with an annual budget deficit of £250 million. A small increase of another few millions here would make little difference.” India’s primary burden, to the tune of £190 million a year, was that of supplying overseas war theaters. A “very drastic cut in our expenditure will be necessary to do much good,” Wilson elaborated in another memo, and that was not about to happen. Instead of forcing the Indians to deal with their problems, Wilson commented, Amery “prefers to shift the responsibility to us by telling us that we must not ask so much from India.”46

  Rather than decrease the financial load on India, the War Cabinet drastically increased it by giving all British soldiers in the east a pay raise. The viceroy was furious at not even having been consulted. General Auchinlek demanded a commensurate increase for native soldiers, who were already resentful of getting a third of what their white counterparts earned. Overall, the enhancement added £50 million to India’s crippling inflationary burden. “I have found H.M.G.’s attitude to India negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated,” a weary Wavell wrote in his diary.47

  The viceroy did, however, receive 660,450 tons of wheat in 1944—despite the fact that in the fall the Americans suddenly withdrew part of the shipping assigned for British civilian imports. Fending off a second Indian famine took the combined efforts of the secretary of state for India, the viceroy of India, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, the supreme commander in Southeast Asia, and the commander-in-chief in India. It would be beyond anyone’s power, however, to win the prime minister’s consent to loosening political control over the colony.48

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Split and Quit

  On August 8, 1944, Gandhi instructed all the insurgents who had gone underground to reveal their whereabouts to the authorities. In effect, he dissolved the renegade governments that had sprung up around the country. Gandhi believed that resistance should be open, courageous, and nonviolent: he disliked secrecy. He may also have hoped that the surrender of these rebels would persuade the Government of I
ndia to release the tens of thousands of Congress members who were entering their third year in prison.1

  “All my dreams were dashed,” Sushil Dhara wrote. Gandhi’s order had come on top of profound disappointment over the Indian National Army’s fortunes. Throughout the previous year Dhara had listened on a makeshift radio to Axis broadcasts and dreamed of the footfall of Subhas Chandra Bose on the muktanchal, or free zone, that he and other rebels had carved out on the shores of western Bengal. In Dhara’s fantasy, Netaji, or Respected Leader—as his followers called Bose—would arrive in the vicinity of Midnapore by submarine, along with his forces. Dhara would approach, flying a white flag, and with fervent humility and devotion invite the hero onto the soil of his homeland. The INA would rest and regroup in Tamluk for a week. Dhara’s Lightning Brigade would meld with it, and the women’s brigade would merge with the Rani of Jhansi regiment. The people of Midnapore would rise as one to welcome their savior, so that India’s army of freedom would swell by more than 100,000 exalted souls.

  But Bose had failed to come; and just as painful to Dhara was Gandhi’s instruction, which he felt he could not disobey. The Tamluk National Government had, after all, been born of the Congress directive that everyone should serve the cause of freedom according to his or her own conscience—but only so long as the leaders were unable to lead. The rebel government was on its fourth head of state, after the third one had also been arrested. But some of its activities, such as the courts for resolving civil disputes, were running smoothly and had become very popular. The senior members of the government did not want to disband their makeshift civil institutions, especially with independence nowhere in sight. Still, Dhara prevailed in his urging that Gandhi’s wishes be respected. It was agreed that one by one the renegade government’s officers would court arrest. By September 29, 1944, the second anniversary of Midnapore’s march to freedom, they would have disposed of all the pending court cases, balanced their ledgers, and settled other matters. On that day Dhara himself would surface.2

  “I assumed that I would certainly hang,” he recalled. By that time, Dhara was directly or indirectly responsible for close to a hundred assassinations—of police informers, grain speculators, and others whom the Tamluk government had judged guilty of heinous crimes. He was not proud of having taken these lives, Dhara would write, nor did he regret them—with a few exceptions. Information that he received after the killings had led him to believe that three or four of those executed might actually have been innocent.3

  One of those killed was the wealthy father-in-law of the elder sister of Kanu Mahapatro (the Tamluk government’s courier). “He was a good man—he did no wrong,” she later protested. As far as she knew, the victim’s only faults lay in being part owner of the rice mill where the police had shot three villagers in September 1942 and in having traded in rice from Orissa during the famine. Dhara had subsequently presented the bereaved family with a cow, but no one had asked him whether it was in expiation or just in sympathy.

  Biplabi, the underground newsletter, began to publish lists of the Tamluk government’s officials, along with the dates on which they would surrender. Dhara spent these precious weeks of freedom touring the countryside, resolving unfinished business and trying to comfort villagers who were fearful of what would befall them once their protectors had gone. Early on September 29, he bid farewell to loved ones, including Kumudini Dakua, who had been released from jail some months earlier. The whole village seemed to be in tears, and Dhara shed some quiet ones himself. Accompanied by three close associates, he took a meandering route into Mohisadal. The police were watching the main roads, and Dhara was determined to deny these adversaries a chance to claim the reward on his head. Appearing suddenly in the bazaar, the men shouted “Freedom to India!” and displayed flags. They ended up sprinting across the bridge and into the police station, chased by policemen—who eventually concocted a tale about the capture of the terrible outlaw and shared the 10,000-rupee reward for Dhara.

  Calcutta’s police and intelligence officers were thrilled to find the fish jumping into their net. Within days Dhara had been sentenced to ten years’ hard labor, for political offenses alone. He was also charged with twenty-nine murders, but despite their best efforts the police could not persuade a single witness to testify against him.4

  GANDHI’S GESTURE DID not induce the Government of India to release its Congress prisoners—and his attempt to engage Jinnah was equally fruitless. The more Gandhi pondered partition, the more he feared it. Hindus and Muslims could not be nations apart, he pleaded with Jinnah at the Muslim leader’s seaview mansion in Bombay. Surely religion alone could not so drastically separate peoples with almost a millennium of intertwined history.

  “We are a nation of a hundred million,” retorted Jinnah. Muslims, he said, had their “own distinctive culture and civilisation, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions.” The definition would seem to exclude the Muslims of Bengal, very few of whom spoke Urdu, the sophisticated language of Mughal courts that was favored by Muslims from northwestern India. Be that as it may, Jinnah insisted that only the Muslims of the disputed areas—and none of the other inhabitants— should vote in any plebiscite on the partition of their provinces. Moreover, he wanted the matter settled before independence, so that the British could force the Indian National Congress to keep any promises made to the Muslim League. Gandhi, in contrast, wanted independence first. As he saw it, the very presence of the British precluded the unity that the colonizers demanded as necessary before they would leave.5

  In the end, Gandhi and Jinnah could agree on nothing at all. “The two great mountains have met and not even a ridiculous mouse has emerged,” Wavell remarked caustically when the conference was over.6

  PERHAPS THE SECRETARY of state for India was uncomfortably aware of having inserted the partition clause into the Cripps formula that the War Cabinet had offered to the Indian National Congress in 1942. Although Amery had never wanted to break up India, he had ended up nudging events along that course. Or perhaps he was hoping to make amends for the colony’s suffering during the war. For whatever reason, Amery now put forth a breathtakingly radical suggestion: the viceroy should simply declare independence. He could simultaneously release the Congress internees and invite the political parties to draw up a constitution, even as the country continued to run under the current one. Certainly Churchill would protest; but with the war drawing to a close, Labour Party members of the Cabinet were becoming more assertive and might support the idea.

  As Amery saw it, the imperial presence had made Indian politicians irresponsible. “At the back of their minds they are always thinking that by stating their case in its extreme form they may get something more out of the British Government when the latter has to come to a decision,” he wrote. “To that extent there is, I believe, something in Gandhi’s argument that our presence in India impedes a settlement.” Amery seems to have feared that the assurance of British backing would induce Jinnah to demand exorbitant terms, to which the Congress would not agree, leaving partition as the only option. Once they were actually forced to assume responsibility, Amery argued, the politicians might be less inclined to strike poses and stake claims. And without some such powerful shove forward, “the existing antagonisms only dig themselves in more deeply and the rut gets worse.”7

  If the viceroy had agreed, he would have given valuable momentum to Amery’s lone attempt to spare India the slaughter to come. But Wavell dismissed the idea out of hand. “S. of S. [Secretary of State] has a curious capacity for getting hold of the right stick but practically always the wrong end of it,” he opined about Amery and his idea. As Wavell saw it, agreement among the natives had to come first, and independence second. The consensus that precedes freedom is acquiescence obtained at gunpoint—a consensus the viceroy regarded as necessary to ensure a “fair”
sharing of power between Hindus and Muslims.8

  Although they agreed on a great many things, Amery and Wavell had profoundly divergent views of Indians. Both used the paternalistic lexicon of the times to describe the colony’s subjects. Amery saw them as “neither parent nor child” but as young adults capable of assuming control of their own lives. Wavell, in contrast, held that the natives had reached at most the “tiresome age of adolescence” and needed tutoring in the use of freedom. He could find “hardly any sense at all of nationhood in India or of leadership likely to produce it,” and searched in vain for men of vision—among the princes. He might have had more luck among his prisoners. At the very least, the viceroy believed that he would need to stand over the desks of his charges while they wrote their constitutions; only then would they be ready to graduate.9

  There was something else. For reasons of personal history, Wavell was more inclined to sympathize with supposedly martial peoples such as Muslims than with Hindus. During World War I, he had helped conquer Palestine using Indian Muslim troops who had steadfastly guarded holy sites in Jerusalem. He had subsequently become friends with Lawrence of Arabia and sympathetic to Arabs’ fears of being overwhelmed in their own land by Jewish immigrants. When it came to India, he similarly believed that valorous and loyal Muslims deserved special protection from traitorous and wily Hindus of the Congress. The warriors Wavell and Churchill could agree on this much: the malevolence of Gandhi, whose half-naked frame, hair-splitting arguments, and refusal to put up his fists encapsulated all that was repugnant to them about Hindus.10