India

Winston S. Churchill

• Éditeur: RosettaBooks
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780795329296
• Sujet: Letteratura
• Sous-sujet: Collezioni letterarie

A collection of speeches given by Churchill in the 1930s, fiercely opposing the India Bill and India home rule. In 1931, Britain's Conservative Party proposed the India Bill, a piece of legislation that would make significant changes to the way India governed itself under British rule. Winston Churchill was against the bill and defended his position with characteristic conviction and oratory brilliance. This book contains seven speeches and three important addresses Churchill gave on the subject, printed originally to generate popular support for Churchill's opinion. Churchill's opposition to Indian home rule is one of his more controversial political positions and led to a period of political isolation for him. Despite the strength of his oration, the India Bill was approved by Parliament in 1935. Documenting a rare loss for Churchill, these speeches provide an important insight into his mind and strategy as a political leader.

FOREWORD

In 1876 Prime Minister Disraeli proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India. Coming after a century in which British influence in India grew enormously as a result of brilliant commercial, diplomatic, and military enterprises, this was perhaps the greatest single act of imperial acquisition in history. A subcontinent with a vast population, with innumerable provinces, principalities and ethnic groups, became a mere colony of a small country thousands of miles away.

By way of cutting across the many local cultural barriers and consolidating its hold on India, Britain had introduced for the Indian elite a system of education that was based on English language and history and on European civilization. The education worked all too well. Several generations of aristocratic and middle class Indians became imbued with such Western notions as freedom and autonomy. These values led to the formation (in 1885) of the Indian National Congress and to agitation for independence, sometimes accompanied by violence. To meet this challenge, the British made some minor reforms by bringing a few prominent Indians into the councils of the Indian Government.

World War I accelerated the drive to freedom. Many of the best civil and military British administrators left India for more pressing duties in war-torn Europe, and the Indian notables saw that the country ran quite well without them. The war and its aftermath unleashed nationalist movements in Europe which also impressed politicians in Asia. Indians, moreover, expected to be rewarded after the war for the great help they gave Britain. Had not a hard-pressed Britain in turn given India promises similar to the ones it gave at the same time to Jews and Arabs, holding out (in August 1917) the prospect of “the gradual development of self-governing institutions”?

No wonder therefore that, once the war ended, the natural desire of a victorious Britain to return to the pre-war way of running India caused deep resentment. The tensions were exacerbated in 1919 when, in the course of a humiliating racist incident, British troops fired on an unarmed crowd in Amritsar, killing 400 and wounding 1500. Again Britain tried to defuse the agitation with reform rather than repression. Parliament passed the Government of India Act of 1919 (incorporating the Montagu-Chelmsford reform proposals). The Act seemed to concede to India eventual parliamentary self-government. It provided that in ten years a commission be set up to ascertain how far such self government could be carried at that time.

The Act pacified things only for a short while. Soon there were new irritants. At the Imperial Conference of 1926, the white possessions of Britain (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) were ceded Dominion status—that is, independence and equality—even while sharing allegiance to the Crown and membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Indian nationalists were presumptuous enough to ask that the same privilege be extended to colonies with people of color and, when Britain refused, renewed agitation and riots erupted.

These latest disturbances made their impact. In 1927, two years ahead of time, the British government appointed, as the 1919 Act had mandated, a commission headed by Sir John Simon to study the future of India. The new Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin (the same man who, as Viscount Halifax, would be the Establishment’s preferred choice for the Prime Ministry in May 1940) was sympathetic to the nationalists. He was willing to cut corners for their cause. So just before the Commission could make its apparently docile report, the Viceroy (on 31 October 1929) promised India Dominion status. He was working together with the Socialist Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and with the Leader of the Conservative Party, Stanley Baldwin. The latter urged his followers in Opposition to cooperate with the Labour Government in its liberal policy towards India.

If the Viceroy’s undiplomatic gesture was meant to appease the Indian nationalists, it boomeranged. The Indian Congress declared independence, and Gandhi began a fresh round of civil disobedience. He and some 50,000 followers were jailed. They soon had a good cause for martyrdom: the report of the Simon Commission, finally published in June 1930, did not recommend Dominion status. (The Viceroy had probably tried to undermine or influence it for that reason.) It recommended instead that the political future of India be the subject of negotiations among the British government, the Indian Government, and the Indian princes, who ruled absolutely their various states.

In November 1930, accordingly, began a Round Table Conference in London. The participants soon divided themselves into committees to draft a federal constitution. The Congress boycotted the Conference. The Viceroy realized that the Indian moderates who did attend could not deliver their country; to make the conference work, he needed the participation of the Congress. He therefore released Gandhi from jail and conferred with him. The negotiations between the two men (the “Gandhi-Irwin Pact” of March 1931) resulted in a cessation of civil disobedience, acceptance of a continued British role in such matters as foreign affairs and defense, and agreement for the Congress to send representatives to a second series of Round Table Conferences. In return, Britain would revoke all penalties on the civil disobedience campaigners. In a further attempt by the government to mollify the nationalists, Simon and his commission members were barred from the Conference, and the emasculated Report was shunted aside.

Churchill’s role in the story begins in late 1929, when the Viceroy’s slighting of the Simon Commission aroused his ire. He had lots more to be angry about a year later when the Round Table Conference, which he insisted had no legal standing, started to draft the constitution for India. In a series of sharp and frequent dissents during the following months, Churchill found himself opposing not only the Socialist Government but even many of his Tory colleagues.

In mid-1931, he collected his speeches and articles and rushed them into print. Asking Thornton Butterworth to publish the material, he wrote, “I have taken much more trouble with them than with any book I have ever written.” That sounds like a bit of Churchillian hyperbole. The publisher was closer to the mark when in his response he said that the book would “nourish the seed… which you have so carefully sown.” For the resulting work, INDIA, was meant to be a source of ammunition for the ongoing political guerilla warfare being carried out by Churchill and his small band of “Die-hard” followers in the House and in the hastily formed Indian Empire Society.

It was typical Churchillian strategy. In this case, the speeches on India were meant to awaken the public to the peril facing the Empire; to rally those conservatives who were troubled by Baldwin’s policy but reluctant to act as their conscience urged; to disrupt the temporary Baldwin-MacDonald alliance; and, above all, to smash the legitimacy of the Round Table Conference.

II

Since he is conscious, even proud, of fighting an unpopular and uphill battle, Churchill vehemently refutes the charges leveled at him in the current debate. These are, in brief, that he knows little about the India problem; that he advocates force and violence; and that he has no alternatives to offer to maintenance of the status quo.

As to the accusation of ignorance and in-experience, he cites his role of negotiator in the settlement of the Boer War in 1906 and of the strife in Ireland in 1922. On the strength of these, he lays claim to expertise in the matter of bringing self-government into being, of knowing the importance of gradualism and compromise. Perhaps he imperils his argument by inconsistently maintaining that India is a far different, far more complicated case. But India was more complex, a heterogeneous sub-continent with a rigid Hindu class structure. Churchill’s defenses of the Untouchables were more than opportunism; they were, equally, manifestly an expression of his sympathy for the underdog.

Potentially more damaging is the charge of militarist, of war-lover or war-monger, because those epithets had hounded Churchill since 1911 (when he became First Lord of the Admiralty) and especially since the years after World War I. He iterates that he does not favor force and that, in any case, force is unnecessary.

In countering an accusation, it is always good (as Churchill recommends in his other works) to be on record beforehand. Luckily he was. The 1919 British massacre of Indians in Amritsar had prompted Churchill to intervene in a speech of 1920 which roundly condemned the incident as a form of behavior that was not only counter-productive but utterly out of accord with British tradition and values.¹ He now shrewdly adds this speech to the collection of utterances from 1929–31. It is not only a prelude but also clear proof of his peace-loving credentials.

How then could a peace-loving man sound like a sabre rattler? He can if he is, as Churchill was, a student of Machiavelli. Churchill harps upon the Machiavellian theme that one must be tough in order to be gentle. In this view, the Viceroy has got things upside down. Trying to appease the nationalists by first anticipating and undermining the Simon Report and then treating Gandhi as a privileged person, he is merely raising the demands of the Indians. He eventually finds himself having to resort to force on a far larger scale than would otherwise have been necessary. Good intentions and “flowery speeches” only result in repressive measures; abhorrence of using force early brings about great bloodshed later. By contrast, a little force used judiciously and as part of a coherent policy will prevent widespread violence.²

In response to the third accusation, of being devoid of alternative ideas, Churchill insists that he has plenty of them. If he opposes both the appeasing British politicians and the unappetizing Indian nationalists, both the illegal (according to him) Round Table Conference and the irrelevant Blue Book (the proposed constitution) that resulted from it, he favors instead the Act of 1919 and the Simon Report of 1930, both of which allow for gradual self-rule. Specifically, he favors a policy of regionalism or localism. Britain should foster self-government in each of the many diverse Indian provinces before granting so heavy a responsibility to the central Indian Government. As in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, first comes the unit, then the federation. It would be self-government bubbling up from the bottom, solidly rooted in the local peoples and traditions, instead of being imposed from the top by a political elite on a society—a large set of societies, really—not yet ready for it. Even Europe, with all of its advancement and civilization, has not yet been able to federate. This position, one must concede, has a plausible Burkean ring to it.

A principle of military strategy that Churchill often refers to in his writings is that, when confronting two enemy armies, you must exercise choice. Use the smallest possible force on the defensive to pin down the weaker of the armies while gathering maximum power for the destruction of the other army; then combine your forces for the elimination of the remaining army. In like manner, even while carrying out a defensive holding action in this debate, Churchill brings the attack to the enemy. Or, to alter the metaphor, he follows the old maxim that the best defense is offense. And, however unpopular his position might have been in political circles, he does mount a formidable array of arguments.

To begin with, he hammers away at the supposed probity and purity of the Indian nationalists. They constitute, he says, a self-appointed, unrepresentative clique of professional politicians, financial tycoons, princes and intellectuals. These men have nothing in common with the average Indian, who is concerned only with physical survival.

Such an argument is familiar. Self-styled “freedom fighters” rarely are a product of democratic procedures (just who, for example, elected the Algerian FLN, the Viet Cong, the IRA, the PLO, the Sandinistas?). Cunning defenders of the establishment are quick to exploit this technicality. Nor is Churchill’s further observation, that the Indian plutocrats were eager to eject Britain so that they could themselves better exploit the huge wealth and vulnerable masses of the country, without its merit. Gandhi (like Socrates) was surrounded by some very rich and aristocratic types.

On the other hand, even patricians must be allowed to have ideals, and every movement, no matter how noble, will attract its quota of vultures and crazies. Tartufferie is an affliction not confined to seventeenth-century French Catholic circles. The existence of such a blight cannot be allowed to distract one from the principles of a great faith or movement, principles which stir millions of people. Besides, what is this grandson of a duke, a grandson used to having the best of everything, doing railing at patricians as a class? And would Churchill say that exploitative British plutocrats and oligarchs did not then exist, either in Britain or in India?

A much more telling point of Churchill’s is that giving autonomy to India is to consign the caste of Untouchables, numbering some sixty million, to permanent subjection, and to leave the Moslems, numbering some seventy million, at the mercy of the far larger Hindu community. This is an argument left over from the Boer War of three decades earlier. To a world which sympathized with the heroic Afrikaners seeking independence from the wicked old British Empire, Britain presented itself (with Churchill’s concurrence) as the truly liberal side because only the British presence kept the South African blacks from being exploited by the freedom-loving whites.

It is a venerable paradox, analogous to that of the American South seeking in the early 1860s the freedom to subjugate. Hypocritical statements that result in a double standard are the world’s oldest professions. Churchill is but updating Dr. Johnson’s unanswerable question at the time of the American Revolution: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Here is Churchill’s more verbose but no less biting version:

These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism, and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians, are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty millions of their own fellow countrymen whom they call “untouchable.” …And then in a moment they turn around and begin chopping logic with John Stuart Mill, or pleading the rights of man with Jean Jacques Rousseau.

British care for the untouchables is part of the larger mission of keeping peace among religions and ethnic communities sundered by superstitions and primordial hatreds. Churchill repeatedly warns that British withdrawal would bring about a renewal of the warfare that has been going on for centuries. Britain has a clear duty to guard the Untouchables, the Moslems, and the rest; it could not hand them over to be “bled and exploited.” Already in March 1931 at Cawnpore, Hindus attacked Moslems, and 300 people died in three days of rioting. British troops—the very people whom Gandhi et al wanted out—ended the riot. In fact, the vast majority of the fallen are not the victims of British arms but of “religious fights between Moslems and Hindus…. The feud is only at its beginning.”

His argument rises to an impressive climax when he insists that the very term “India” is misleading. India is not a country but a sub-continent. It contains a far larger number of language and religious groups than does Europe. Something like the dream of a united Europe, a reality in Ancient Roman days and revived for a moment under Napoleon, has been realized in India by Britain under far more difficult conditions. To throw this away looks more like a step backward than forward.

Certainly it would not be progress if the newly independent India became a tyranny or oligarchy. But that is exactly what will happen, Churchill implies, in a country that, filled with illiteracy, is not ready for democracy. Those measures of self-government which the British introduced in the past have not worked out at all. And if independence did not create a tyranny or a Hindu despotism, it would break up India again into the many warring entities that existed before Britain imposed a blessed unity on them. Always he holds up China, riven by wars and close to anarchy, as an example of what can happen to a large, heterogeneous Asian nation were Britain to leave.

The heart of Churchill’s argument is the “white man’s burden” (though of course he does not use this Victorian slogan). A small altruistic band of some tens of thousands of British civil servants has brought law and order to this vast continent of 350 million people. Britain has a moral obligation to continue its civilizing mission in India. It would be wrong to stop a policy which has produced such great strides forward in pacification, education, food production, hygienic standards, and legal procedures.

Why, if the results are so splendid, is Britain faltering in its task? The problem, as Churchill sees it, is not with the Indian agitators—devious, hypocritical, corrupt and fanatic though they may be in his eyes. They have, after all, been around for a long time. “The fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves.” The British public, coping with the beginnings of the Great Depression, is apathetic about the whole question—with the possible exception of textile-dependent Lancashire. But that apathy is a symptom of a reordering of priorities. Mid-nineteenth century Britain would not have flinched at paying the cost of the civilizing mission. Modern Britain has lost faith in that mission. It believes that the Indians have some merit on their side. The heresy of “Little England,” of tending to domestic matters rather than manning the ramparts of an empire, has won out. In confronting the Indian troublemakers, Britain’s morale is therefore sapped by defeatism, loss of will, lack of confidence, and a compulsion to appease. It is content to allow the politicians of all three parties in “collusion” to turn over political power to the Indians.

This, in Churchill’s reading of events, is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those Indians who serve Britain loyally in the civil and armed services see that the future lies with the agitators rather than the civilizers. They are making understandable preparations to switch allegiance from one side to the other. They do not want to suffer the opprobrium, on the morrow of the nationalists’ victory, of having been associated with the losing side. Thus it is that British apathy and defeatism, not the momentum of the Indians, is guaranteeing the victory of the agitators.

If the British public does not care, why should anyone bother? The best that Churchill can do is fall back on a version of the Rousseauist “General Will.” That “sleeping giant,” the British public, once it is apprised of the larger picture (which he himself does his best to outline in these speeches) will come out of its lethargy and do what is right and noble. All that it needs is a heightening of awareness, with an attendant reinfusion of confidence in itself. And that can come only when the layers of illusion are ripped away, when everyone is forced to face the facts, the practical politics of the case. Self government in India is ruled out by nothing less than “those limits arising from Time and Facts.” As Time eventually reveals...