Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [62]
Labour’s paternalism was not undiscriminating. Government ministers took it for granted that Indians deserved more respect than other Asian peoples, especially Burmese and Malays, let alone Africans. They had mixed with the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru and Krishna Menon, the Indian National Congress’s roving ambassador, who were Fabian socialists like themselves. Stafford Cripps was committed to constitutional change in India, since this had been the message during his abortive mission in 1942 when he had sought to bring the Congress into the wartime government. Attlee’s connections went back even further. He had been a member of another ill-fated constitutional investigation, the Simon Commission of 1927–9, which had similarly ended in mass civil disobedience. Yet even in the case of India, the Labour ministers still seem to have expected that the country would remain a dominion of the crown, and one with which Britain had continuing military ties. As for other peoples – Burmese, Malays, Arabs and Africans – they might well require decades more imperial tutelage before they could emerge into the light of freedom and democracy.
In the two years following the end of the Second World War socialist paternalism was in the ascendant in Britain. But other, more conservative shades of British opinion also helped maintain a fragile imperial consensus. This was the era of moral rearmament and Christian service was to be an ever-present if often unacknowledged motivator of the Empire’s war against communism and radical nationalism in several parts of the globe in the later 1940s and 1950s. The adjutant-general of the post-war Indian Army endorsed a paper on ‘Religion in the army’ by its chaplain-general. It was essential to teach religion to British personnel in India because, it stated, the ‘effect on the spirit of empire as a whole will be immense’. On Christianity would depend the ‘future of our race’.3 In the Colonial Office, civil servants contemplating the rebuilding of empire in Southeast Asia invoked ‘the Stewardship which God has entrusted to our Nation’. Was not the British Commonwealth an expression of the ‘Brotherhood of Man’?4 Secular reform was couched in terms of a ‘civilising mission’. But there were problems with this kind of language. In 1945 the British Empire governed more Muslims than any other power in history.
The Conservative opposition to imperial retreat was even more adamant. Churchill, the valiant fighter for the free nations of Europe, had never believed that that freedom should extend to the coloured races. Privately he had specifically excluded them from the Atlantic Charter of 1941, that great Anglo-American clarion cry for freedom which had so raised expectations across the colonial world. Churchill had mused to Wavell about the possibility of dividing the Indian empire into ‘Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan’, the last an amalgam of India’s princely states. The first and the third of these entities would remain within the British Empire no matter what happened to the ‘Hindoo priesthood machine’ and its commercial backers.5 Churchill’s parting shot to Wavell, on the viceroy’s visit to London in August 1945, was ‘keep a bit of India!’6 Anthony Eden, a powerful Conservative foreign relations expert, feared that the loss of Malaya with its rich resources of tin and rubber and of Hong Kong with its strategic position would reduce Britain to the status of a ‘bagman’ east of Suez. Far from believing that British rule in India was inevitably coming towards its end, many Conservative politicians, quite apart from the obdurate Churchill, believed that the Raj should continue to function in one way or another. Harold Macmillan, a man later considered a moderate Tory, thought that national servicemen might be sent to hold India. He recorded