Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [132]
Churchill’s conviction that so-called Untouchables would be appallingly treated in an independent India has been horribly borne out since the British quit the subcontinent: even in the twenty-first century, Dalits suffer grotesque human rights abuses every day. The apparently paradoxical claim that only foreign occupation could protect indigenous people had taken root soon after Churchill first arrived in India as a cavalry subaltern in October 1896. Sharing a comfortable bungalow with two other young officers, he spent the long, hot hours between morning exercises and evening polo in a frantic course of self-improvement in which, first of all, he tackled Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its warning of how empires die. By the following summer he had worked out his convictions about the future of the British Empire: white colonies like Canada and Australia might be treated as near-equals, India never. Although he left the subcontinent that year, never to return, his views hardly altered for most of his life. In 1922 he was dismissing ‘the chatterboxes who are supposed to speak for India today’, contrasting them with the hundreds of millions of other people in the subcontinent for whom the empire was supposed to care. He told readers of the Daily Mail in 1929 that Britain had rescued India from barbarism and tyranny and that, thanks to the British, ‘War has been banished from India; her frontiers have been defended against invasion from the north; famine has been gripped and controlled … Justice has been given – equal between race and race, impartial between man and man. Science, healing or creative, has been harnessed to the service of this immense and, by themselves, helpless population.’ His devotion to empire found expression as paternalism – he described the people of India as ‘children’. Self-government was simply inconceivable to him.
When, in January 1935, the National Government in Britain produced the enormous Government of India Act, envisaging a federation not very different to the solution he claimed to favour, Churchill objected passionately, describing it as ‘a monstrous monument of sham built by pygmies’. Throughout the Second World War (to which – to the immense fury of many nationalists – the people of India were immediately committed in September 1939, on the signature of the Viceroy), Churchill retained his adamant objection to home rule. The Viceroy attempted to dampen Indian anger by promising that, when the war was over, the whole question of Indian government would be revisited. But in reality Churchill had no desire to reassess anything. (In 1944 he even sent the Viceroy a peevish telegram asking him why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.) Leo Amery, Churchill’s India Secretary, was so struck by the passion of his leader’s hostility that he wondered whether ‘on the subject of India, he is really quite sane’.
But India was a lower priority than fighting Nazi Germany and, under pressure from Labour members of the wartime coalition, a promise was made that, once the war was over, India would be free to decide its own future. This, he was told, was the price of Indian support against the Japanese. To meet Churchill’s concern about the rights of minorities, the British promised that whatever entity emerged it could not be a state whose authority was denied by substantial elements in Indian political life – a pledge taken by India’s many millions of Muslims as a promise that they would not be forced into a ‘Hindu Raj’, which in turn paved the way for the world’s first invented Islamic state, Pakistan.
With the British people’s ejection of Churchill at war’s end, everything changed. The mood for independence was as strong as ever. The British Labour party saw the possibility of a new relationship between the two countries and sent Lord Mountbatten to India as the last viceroy, with instructions to disengage as fast as possible.