Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [121]
In 1920, Gandhi issued his revolutionary call for nonviolent noncooperation with the British government. The Indian National Congress followed Gandhi, finally abandoning decades of official support for the Raj.
Public opinion in England swung against Dyer as well. Lord Montagu, secretary of state for India, demanded of Dyer's defenders in Parliament, “Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation, and subordination?” Churchill called the massacre “monstrous”—“without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire”—and accused Dyer of destroying rather than saving British rule in India.36
In a desperate attempt to stave off independence, the British government of India made one last-gasp effort to maintain power through strategic tolerance. In the interwar period, official Britain scrambled to “Indianize” the upper echelons of the Indian Civil Service and the officer corps of the Indian army, both former bastions of white authority. On the economic front, the new official buzzwords were “industrialization” and “development.” In the future, India would no longer just supply raw materials; it would become an economically impressive trading partner for Britain, with mutual advantages for all—or so ran the party line. Most crucially, the British government of India sought to enlist the cooperation of India's increasingly powerful indigenous business community, mainly Marwaris from Calcutta and Gujaratis from Ahmedabad who after the war had come to control huge chunks of the Indian economy.
These concessions hardly stemmed from altruism. On the contrary, the first concern of the Raj was to marginalize India's radical nationalists. As the historian Maria Misra puts it, the government of India “was determined to concede as much economic power to Indians as was compatible with maintaining the imperial interest.”
Unfortunately for Britain, the Anglo business community on the ground in India went in the opposite direction, toward increasingly extreme intolerance. Rather than racially integrate their firms as the government of India encouraged, these Anglo-Indians refused to allow well-connected, capital-rich Indians like the Mar-waris and Gujaratis onto their governing boards or to employ even highly qualified Indians for managerial positions. Whereas the East India Company in its most successful days had actively recruited and allied itself with entrepreneurial Indians, Anglo-Indians in the twentieth century stubbornly opposed collaboration with indigenous business interests. This strategy of aggressive intolerance proved spectacularly self-defeating. The Anglo-Indians’ blatant racism intensified resentment among the Indian elite, who increasingly allied themselves with the mass nationalist movement and its calls for the nationalization or expulsion of British business interests.37
In 1946, civil war broke out among India's Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. India was now an albatross for the British. In 1947, London announced the partition of the subcontinent; thus were born the independent states of India and Pakistan. The following decades saw an exodus of British business, capital, and personnel.
It is of course impossible to know how history would have unfolded had the British behaved differently. Powerful forces like socialism, nationalism, and anticolonialism were gaining momentum in the early twentieth century. If not in 1947, India would certainly have achieved independence at some point. The days of European colonialism were numbered.
But perhaps India could have wrested itself from Britain in a way that was not so angry, so violent, so destructive of British interests. Throughout the ninety years of the British Raj, opportunity after opportunity to accept Indians as equals was squandered.