Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [131]
The mood of the world had changed. Britain was exhausted and bankrupt, France in a similar state. The two new world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, both professed themselves to be ‘anti-imperialists’, with varying degrees of plausibility. The United Nations, created in 1945 as the successor to the League of Nations, declared itself an institution committed to equal rights and self-determination. For years, the initiative had been shifting from the builders of empire to its dismantlers. Among those who, in Orwell’s delicious phrase, took ‘their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow’, (western) imperialism was An Inherently Bad Thing. But ideology was rather beside the point. The critical necessity was a sense of purpose. The objective of the breakers-up of empire was obvious enough. But what were the imperialists about? If the purpose of empire was really only to look after places until they could look after themselves – as had been maintained for years – then everything was reduced to a question not of principle but of timing. It is remarkable how hard it is to find evidence of really serious disagreement between the mainstream British political parties in the 1950s and 1960s about what ought to happen to the colonies: the claims for independence were undeniable. Both the left and right had decided that there was simply nothing to set against demands for self-determination – increasingly, those who did not feel a twinge of discomfort at the possession of an empire were simply ignorant. A Colonial Office survey in 1951 found that 59 per cent of those questioned were unable to name a single British colony, although one man did come up with ‘Lincolnshire’.
The most pressing question after the war had been what to do about India. This, the grandest imperial possession, also had one of the strongest claims to self-government, the most charismatic leaders and some of the most colourful and effective anti-imperialist campaigns, with a real capacity to cause international embarrassment. Nationalists had been committed to complete independence since the 1920s and nothing the British had tried, neither plans for some sort of federation nor mass arrests, had done anything to weaken their resolve. The Second World War did nothing to improve the popularity of the imperial British with nationalists, but then neither the ‘Indian National Army’ which fought alongside the Japanese nor Gandhi’s peaceful ‘Quit India’ movement had seriously imperilled British rule. Churchill, who had been passionately opposed to independence, had hoped that victory would make Indians feel more fondly towards Britain. It did not. His own indifference to a terrible famine which struck Bengal in 1942 and 1943 – he refused all entreaties to divert food supplies – had done nothing to help. And had they known how he spoke in private, nationalists would have felt even angrier. ‘I hate Indians,’ he exclaimed once. ‘They are beastly people with a beastly religion’ – ‘the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans’. As so often, he exaggerated: the people he really hated were not Indians in general, but what he called the ‘Hindu priesthood’ in the Congress movement campaigning for their country to be freed from the empire. Churchill’s almost religious devotion to empire meshed with a conviction that India was simply too diverse a country to function as an independent state. Minorities, such as the Muslims, would be oppressed, and in particular he worried about the effects of the country’s poisonous caste system, in which tens of millions of Dalits, or ‘Untouchables’, were condemned from birth to a life of discrimination and abuse. In a speech in 1931 he wondered whether ‘if Christ came again into this world, it would not be to the Untouchables of India that he would first