Gandhi & Churchill (57 page)

The very day he arrived in India, a riot in Calcutta cost one hundred lives and lasted two weeks. In 1926 alone there were thirty-five Hindu-Muslim clashes that qualified as “serious.”
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Like Gandhi, Irwin was aware that Indians were facing a potential sectarian meltdown. He performed one indispensable service during his tenure in office: he was the very first viceroy to publicly raise the issue of what would happen when the British left India. The answers were not encouraging. Unless the British could help Indians achieve religious and social reconciliation, Irwin concluded, the result would be catastrophe.

A devout Anglo-Catholic, Irwin hoped that his own religious faith might bond a trust with Indians like Gandhi. “It is a change of soul that India needs today,” Irwin had told a mixed audience of Indians and Britons in his first public speech in India, at the Chelmsford Club in Simla in July 1926. He hoped (or perhaps assumed) that he was the man to bring it about.
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For this reason Irwin bitterly regretted agreeing to have no Indians on the Simon Commission. He had to look for another way to build bridges before the next wave of civil disobedience, or perhaps something worse, struck the Raj. Most Indians, he supposed, felt the same. “In nearly all quarters,” he wrote in January 1929, as the Congress’s count-down started, “there would be very genuine relief if some face-saving device which afforded an excuse for the introduction of saner counsels could be found.”
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Although he was a Tory, Irwin saw his chance with the election of a Labour government in July 1929. He and the new secretary of state, William Wedgwood Benn, saw eye to eye on India, as did Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. So while the Simon Commission was drafting its report for Parliament, Irwin cleverly arranged for the final version to include a plan for a federal constitution for India and a series of conferences with Indian representatives to hash out the details.

Finally, on October 31, 1929, he issued a wordy but weighty statement from New Delhi. “I am authorized on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to state clearly that in their judgement it is implicit in the [Montagu] declaration of 1917 that the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress as there contemplated is
the attainment of Dominion Status
.” In short, Irwin stated that India was now officially on track for independence on a scale that only former white colonies like Canada and Australia had ever enjoyed.
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But was it true? Indians felt they could not be sure. Since Amritsar, few were willing to trust the Raj’s word on anything.
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But Irwin had alerted Indian leaders of his plan beforehand and struck a vein of cautious optimism among Moderates and National Liberals. One of them, M. A. Ansari, met privately with Gandhi and afterwards assured the viceroy that the Mahatma, while not exactly enthusiastic about the announcement, “on the whole” was pleased with Irwin’s words.
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Now, like everyone else, he would wait to see what happened in Britain.

What happened was a political explosion that rocked Whitehall, and especially the Tory party. Most politicians understood that Irwin’s words were, after all, only words. The timing, circumstances, and final form that India’s Dominion status might take were still open. Prime Minister MacDonald even ventured to say that Irwin’s statement represented nothing new in British policy toward India.

However, Lords Birkenhead and Reading, the former secretary and former viceroy, were “horrified.” They knew that the term “Dominion status” had a new meaning under the so-called Balfour formula of 1926 (later embodied in the Statute of Westminster); it would give India virtual carte blanche on matters of foreign and defense policy—the very areas where India was so vital to British interests.
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Sir John Simon was furious at Irwin for in effect trumping his commission’s report before it came out. The Liberal leader, Lloyd George, also quietly seethed at the news. As for the Tories, Baldwin at first endorsed Irwin’s statement because he assumed it had been cleared with Simon. (It had not.) When he learned the truth, Baldwin realized he had been made to look foolish, and he too lived to regret the whole incident.

But none of this compared with Churchill’s reaction, when he landed back in Britain on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 1929.

He was already in a belligerent mood. First, he had to confess to Clementine that all their American investments had been wiped out in the Wall Street crash. Now Irwin’s announcement made him feel that his worst fears about India were being realized. Just ten days before, on October 26, he had published an article in
Answers
magazine prophetically titled, “Will the British Empire Last?” There he had stated, “The idea that India is a nation, or could ever be fashioned into a nation is known to be a delusion by everyone acquainted with the facts.” Unfortunately British officials there had a tendency to believe that “they are merely a rearguard…shuffling continually backwards as part of the final retreat.”

It was time to reverse this passive fatalism, Churchill had declared. “Unless the British race has a high confidence in its mission to guide forward these Eastern peoples” to the moral and material advancements of civilization, the empire would be doomed.
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Already the Labour government had sacked Lloyd George and withdrawn British troops from Egypt to Suez—“an immense blow at our prestige throughout the East.” Churchill balefully predicted that the Egyptian capital would soon “sink into an Oriental slum” and the country into chaos.
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Now India bade fair to end the same way.

The very day he arrived back in London Clementine informed him that a half-dozen worried colleagues were waiting for him in the drawing room. As Winston burst in, they rose and expressed their fears about the Irwin declaration. Baldwin was wrong on India, they believed, but they might face reprisals if they bucked the party leadership. Not to worry, Winston told them. He would speak for everyone who believed India should remain British.
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On November 8 Winston went down to the House of Commons for its first debate on the government’s policy on India. According to one observer, he was “demented with fury.” While Baldwin spoke in support of Irwin’s declaration, he sat red-faced and glowering. When Lloyd George attacked it, he raucously cheered. He was not alone in his anger. When Baldwin declared, “If ever the day comes when the Party which I lead ceases to attract men of the calibre of [Lord Irwin], then I have finished with my Party,” the rest of his Tory colleagues greeted his words with icy silence.
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A battle was brewing—not only for India, but for the heart and soul of the Conservative Party. On one side stood Baldwin, most of the party leadership, and Viceroy Lord Irwin, who certainly had no regrets about his decision or the uproar it had caused. On the contrary, Irwin believed his words would rally “moderate opinion” in both India and Britain, he told his father, and put the “extremists in a quandary.”
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Those “extremists” were Churchill and other Tories determined never to surrender British rule in India, including most former Indian officers and civil servants like George Lloyd.

In between the two sides were the long rows of Tory backbenchers. They were men of neither oppressive intellect nor deep reflection. Few knew much about India; most came from rural constituencies and had no connection to cities like Manchester and Liverpool that had a commercial stake in India’s £500 million annual trade with Britain.
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Baldwin believed that when push came to shove, these men would support him on India. Party loyalty was a Tory tradition; certainly most members in 1929 believed in obeying the leadership. During the war and after they had followed the leadership into a Liberal-led coalition government. They had followed it into giving up Ireland. Later they would follow it in appeasing Nazi Germany.

But India was different. The British presence there was still a palpable legacy inherited from their fathers and grandfathers. Everyone knew someone who had served there, in the army or in the civil service. They had all read verses by Kipling in school about lonely British outposts in the Hindu Kush and the “white man’s burden.” They had sat in parish churches hung with flags of regiments that had fought and died at Lucknow, Assaye, and Cawnpore.

As boys they had collected cigarette trading cards of “Military Uniforms of the British Overseas,” showing the multicolored ceremonial uniforms of Indian troops from regiments with names like the Poona Horse and the Maharaja Holkar’s Infantry. They had thrilled to stories in
The Boy’s Own Paper
about heroic subalterns, the products of public schools like theirs, fearlessly vanquishing wild-eyed tribesmen on the Northwest Frontier, as loyal
sowars
from the Bengal Lancers helped them foil another evil plot against the Raj.

Now in middle age, these men were prepared to hand India over, if their leaders asked them to. But they would never rid themselves of the feeling that something precious, even romantic, was passing out of their lives—and that it was India that had made Britain great.

Today this view is held in contempt, understandably so. Still, the notion that India existed to gratify the emotional yearnings of white men was not limited to Tory imperialists. It extended to New Agers like Romain Rolland. In a profound way, it even included high-minded figures like Lord Irwin. Deplorable or not, that romantic sentiment was very much alive in 1929, and not only in the Conservative Party. It would give Churchill and his fellow “diehards” an elusive but palpable advantage in the great fight that was to come.

They also enjoyed another advantage: the defeat in July had, paradoxically, increased their influence in the Conservative Party. Instead of numbering 60 out of 400 seats, they now numbered 50 out of 261.
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In addition, they had a leader of tremendous energy and resolve, namely Winston Churchill, who would make the battle over India the defining moment of his career.

Average middle-class Britons lived the link to India vicariously; Churchill knew it firsthand. He had not just
read
about the intrepid young ensign on the Northwest Frontier: he had
been
that ensign thirty-five years earlier. The Raj was his father’s legacy in a very literal sense. No way would he give it up to Irwin or Gandhi, or anyone else, without a fight. And now he would mobilize all his skill and energy to convince the waverers in Tory and Liberal ranks to fight as well.

His declaration of war on the Irwin policy appeared in the
Daily Mail
on November 16. He blasted giving India Dominion status as nothing less than a “crime,” and recited all the reasons why British rule had been not only good for India, but essential.

“The rescue of India from ages of barbarism, tyranny, and internecine war, and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilization constitute upon the whole the finest achievement of our history,” he wrote. 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.” All this had been achieved “by the willing sacrifices of the best of our race.”

But now this legacy was threatened “by a growing lack of confidence at home in the reality of our mission” and the “undermining repercussions of these doubts upon British officials in India,” meaning (although Churchill did not say) the viceroy himself. Out of these doubts had come a plan to hand India over to a Hindu elite, with “their veneer of European politics and philosophy,”
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so that the subcontinent could become the helpless victim of their “utopian dreams and predatory appetites and subversive movements.” This was an unmistakable reference to Gandhi and his supporters.

Churchill finished by declaring that Dominion status must never be given to a society undeserving of it. Certainly that exalted status was not suitable for a society that branded sixty million of its inhabitants as untouchables “whose very presence is pollution” or one that was “prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions” or one whose educated political classes were barely a fraction of the “three hundred and fifty millions for whose welfare we are responsible.” Rather, this “criminally mischievous plan” demanded “the earnest resistance of the British nation” and the full mobilization of the “sober and resolute forces of the British Empire” in order to safeguard “the life and welfare of all the peoples of Hindustan.”
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The article set off shock waves across his party. However, it came as no surprise to another Tory colleague, Leo Amery. For a quarter-century he and Churchill had clashed over the future of the British Empire. Amery’s view was closer to Irwin’s: that it was time for the empire to modernize itself and accommodate the nationalist urges of the peoples living within its orbit. Indeed, Amery foresaw the day when Britain’s “imperial mission” existed in name only, as a bond of common heritage and cultural influence and nothing more.
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However, “the key to Winston is to realize that he is mid-Victorian,” Amery wrote in his diary, and “steeped in the politics of his father’s period.” Churchill “can only think in phrases, and close argument is really lost on him.” Churchill’s “verbal exuberance and abounding vitality” managed to disguise that fact from others, Amery admitted. But “on essentials he is still where he was 25 years ago,” Amery concluded, including on India.
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Other thoughtful Tories felt the same way. That weekend Winston appeared at a country house party in Hertfordshire, “very full of his article in the
Daily Mail
.” His host and fellow Conservative, Lord Lytton, called the article “thoroughly mischievous” and sternly warned Churchill that he was only feeding the Indian distrust of Britain that Irwin was trying to dispel. Lytton said there was a crucial difference between a doctor telling a patient that he was definitely on the road to recovery and one telling him that recovery might be slow but sure. The one offered hope; the other just repeated a meaningless cliché.