The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (145 page)

But the social expression of Hinduism is the doctrine, or, more accurately, the practice, of caste, and though its scholars find the subject distasteful, the historical origins of this pernicious system lie in a racism starker than any bigotry found in the veld of South Africa or the red clay of northern Georgia. Over a thousand years before the birth of Christ, Aryans of uncertain origins conquered the black Dravidian and Munda natives and imposed a hierarchical structure on the entire subcontinent. Brahmanism and its major gods—Siva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, and the creator Brahma—evolved through successive generations, but the basic principle, or lack of it, endured: the lighter your skin, the higher your caste. Historically, the four great castes are the Brahmins, scholars and priests; Kshatriyas, soldiers and administrators; Vaishyas, merchants; and Sudras, servants and manual laborers. Gandhi was a Vaishya; Nehru, a Kashmiri Brahmin. But there are countless subcastes, including one for prostitution: if a girl is born into it, she spends her life as a whore; if the child is a boy, he will be a pimp until, having raised another generation of whores and pimps, he dies. You can see his sisters and daughters today, locked in the Cages of Bombay.
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One caste makes beds, another washes dishes, a third dries them—which is why every British household in the Raj required swarms of servants. Any member of any caste would perish before moving his own garbage, which is the duty of those who have no caste at all—the Untouchables. There were between sixty and seventy million Untouchables in Gandhi’s day. He called them
harijans
(“beloved of God”) and worked hard to better their lot, but even Mahatma (“great-souled”) Gandhi never suggested the abolition of caste, a reform which, Churchill held, would be absolutely necessary before India could be considered civilized.

Vaishyaism was not the only theological influence in Gandhi’s childhood home. Jainism was also esteemed there, and his respect for it was to shape the destiny of the subcontinent. Jains believe in tolerance, vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and ahimsa, the doctrine of the sanctity of every living creature. A devout Jain will not even swat a mosquito. Gandhi never went that far, but his belief in nonviolence was absolute. That was why he had become a stretcher-bearer, not a soldier, in the Boer War, and
satyägraha,
Hindi for “nonviolence,” was to be his most effective tactic in the struggle for Indian independence; among its subsequent converts were American civil rights workers, who adopted it in the 1960s. Punishing a man who keeps turning the other cheek is frustrating and, eventually, pointless. Beginning in the 1920s, Raj policemen arrested thousands of the Mahatma’s
satyägrahis,
who cheerfully lined up outside prisons, waiting to be escorted to their cells. Unfortunately, the tension between Hindus and Moslems mounted as their enthusiasm for the movement grew; and the possibilities of violence multiplied. The Mahatma sought to overcome it by calling for national unity, coining the slogan
“Hindu-Moslim ek hai!”
(“Hindu and Moslem are one!”) Few accepted it, however, and after a series of sinister ritualistic murders a congress mob stormed a police station in the United Provinces and slew the constables. Gandhi called off his campaign. His people, he said, had failed to grasp his message. But the British, who had been itching to get their hands on him, arrested him just the same, and on March 18, 1922, he was tried for sedition in what the docket called “Case No 45 of the Ahmedabad Sessions,
Rex Imperator v Gandhi
.” The evidence was a series of articles he had written in his political journal,
Young India.
He pleaded guilty and asked for penal servitude: “To preach disaffection towards the existing system of Government has become almost a passion with me… I am here therefore to submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me, for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.” The puzzled young English magistrate paid tribute to his sincerity and sentenced him to six years, adding: “I should like to say in doing so that if the course of events in India should make it possible to reduce the period and release you, no one would be better pleased than I.”
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Gandhi was out in two years. He found his movement was in disarray. It had split into two factions over whether or not to accept a British invitation to join local legislatures. More depressing, the enmity between Hindu and Moslem members was deepening. Gandhi fasted for three weeks; it solved nothing. In London, Birkenhead, adamantly against any concessions to congress demands, was winning every skirmish. Immediately after the war Parliament had authorized an investigation of the Indian political scene by a royal commission. Appointing the members was F.E.’s job. In 1927, after a long series of delaying actions, he named a panel of undistinguished British back-benchers—not a single Indian—under the chairmanship of Sir John Simon, of whom Birkenhead said patronizingly: “How much better in life and how much more paying it is to be blameless rather than brilliant.”
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By the fall of 1929 Simon and his colleagues (who included the still unknown Clement Attlee) were completing a ponderous document which, when published the following year, would omit any mention of dominion status, the key issue in India. Then Lord Irwin surprised everyone by facing the issue squarely. He asked Labour’s William Wedgwood Benn, father of the future Tony Benn and later Birkenhead’s successor in the India Office, to summon a conference which would include, not only Britons, but also members of the congress and representatives of the maharajas ruling India’s princely states. Wedgwood Benn was delighted. Depressed by the stodgy Simon Commission, Labour had been searching for some way to mollify the Indian nationalists. Here, clearly, was a superb opportunity. Notice of the conference was published in the
Indian Gazette
of October 31, 1929. The same issue carried Irwin’s declaration that granting dominionhood was implicit in the humane, enlightened tradition of the Raj, and Baldwin’s endorsement of this position.

Uproar followed. Birkenhead furiously attacked Irwin in the House of Lords. Lord Reading, following him, said flatly: “It is frankly inconceivable that India will ever be fit for Dominion self-government.” In the House of Commons, Baldwin was facing a revolt. Tories were questioning, not only his wisdom, but also his integrity. On October 23, when Winston was visiting the War Museum in Richmond, examining a tattered Confederate flag, the Conservative leader had informed the shadow cabinet of Irwin’s coming statement and added that he approved of it. Churchill would disagree, of course, and so would the City, with its massive investments in the subcontinent, but Baldwin believed that the voters, weary of India, would be glad to shuck off the burden. With the exception of Sir Samuel Hoare, the prime minister’s senior colleagues had told him they thought it would be a mistake to support the viceroy. They thought they had convinced him. And now he had done it anyway. Three of them threatened to resign. Faced with the possibility of a party split, he offered lame excuses. He had acted in his “personal capacity,” he said, not as leader. They weren’t having any of that. Then he told them he had been under the impression that Irwin had spoken out at the urging of the Simon Commission. But the commission hadn’t completed its inquiries, and friends of its members knew the report would be weak. The shadow cabinet meeting broke up in confusion. To make sure his views were understood, the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, son of the great prime minister, wrote Baldwin: “
I need not say what a shock
it was to learn that the declaration was to be made before anything had been laid before the country, though we had appointed a Commission for this very purpose.” He felt mortified: “What a dislocation! Poor Conservative Party!” Salisbury regarded Indian self-government as an “extreme absurdity” and hoped “you will be able to stop it, to convince the Gvt and to convince Edward Irwin that the Party will be shaken to its centre” if this line were not abandoned. He ended: “We must resist it.” George Lane-Fox sent Irwin word that the Tories were “not very comfortable” with his position. Geoffrey Dawson, who thought the viceroy was right, nevertheless wrote him: “The tide here is running pretty strongly against your ideas, and you cannot hope to carry them out by depending on the Labour Party alone.”
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Baldwin refused to budge. As leader of the Conservatives and a superb politician, he had resources stronger than his party critics’, even though they constituted, at that time, a majority. The whips belonged to him, and also the party machine, including the constituency committees and associations. He could count on the support of
The Times
and of Reith at the BBC. Most of his MPs were indebted to him in one way or another. He called in these IOUs and had just about suppressed the rebellion when, on Tuesday, November 5, Winston Churchill returned from the United States.

E
arlier, Irwin had urged Churchill to update his views on India by talking to some members of the congress. Winston had replied: “I am quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.” Since leaving Bangalore in 1899 he had taken little interest in the subcontinent. He seems to have been unaware that the Simon Commission and all that followed were the consequences of a pledge made by Lloyd George in 1917, defining England’s aim in India as “the granting of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.” But although Winston had seldom thought of the Raj, his feelings about it were strong. No Englishman was more persuaded of Queen Victoria’s wisdom in saying, “I think it very unwise to give up what we hold.” Indeed, that summed up his attitude toward the entire Empire. He considered it, among other things, a matter of national self-interest. To Churchill, Amery observed, “England is still the starting point and the ultimate object of policy.” The Empire gave Britain its prestige; it made Britain the world’s most powerful nation. Without its imperial possessions the country would be merely an obscure island lying off the European continent. England deprived of its imperial possessions would, for him, be like Samson shorn of his hair or Antaeus without his feet on earth. Moreover, his vision of India, in particular, was crowned by a romantic nimbus. It was the magic land he had known as an impressionable young cavalry officer, a realm of rajas’ palaces, the Taj, shikar, bazaars, fakirs, temples, shrines, and howdahs, a symbol of imperial splendor and proud glory, Britian’s most priceless possession. To yield it, he said, would be “a hideous act of self-mutilation.”
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Many, including some who were close to him, concluded that he lived in the past, a “mid-Victorian,” as Amery called him in August 1929, “steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern view.” Certainly Churchill often quoted pronouncements about the subcontinent made long ago by men now deep in their graves. One of them, indeed, was Lord Randolph: “Our rule in India is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity.” Another was Lord Morley: “There is a school of thought who say that we might wisely walk out of India and that the Indians could manage their own affairs better than we can. Anybody who pictures to himself the anarchy, the bloody chaos that would follow from any such deplorable step might shrink from that sinister decision.” And, from J. R. Seeley’s
Expansion of England,
published in 1883, when Winston was an Ascot schoolboy, he remembered the judgment that British withdrawal from the subcontinent would be “the most inexcusable of all conceivable crimes and might possibly cause the most stupendous of all conceivable calamities.”
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There was another side to this, and it should be examined thoughtfully. As a boy at the Crystal Palace Winston had described the ruffian who accosted Count Kinsky as a “sort of Kaffir” and a “Mulatto.” In Cuba, fresh out of Sandhurst, he had distrusted “the negro element among the insurgents.” He never outgrew this prejudice. Late in life he was asked if he had seen the film
Carmen Jones.
He had walked out on it, he replied, because he didn’t like “blackamoors.” His physician was present, and Winston asked what happened when blacks got measles. Could the rash be spotted? The doctor replied that blacks suffered a high mortality rate from measles. Churchill said lightly, “Well, there are plenty left. They’ve got a high rate of production.”
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He could greet Louis Botha and Michael Collins as equals, but his relationship with any Indian, even an accomplished barrister like Gandhi or a fellow Harrovian like Nehru, could never be as between compeers. It followed, therefore, that their country must remain a vassal state. This was the underside of his position in the great debates over India’s future which began in 1929. Today it would be called an expression of racism, and he, as its exponent, a racist. But neither word had been coined then; they would not appear in the Oxford English dictionary or Webster’s for another generation. Until recently—beginning in the late 1940s—racial intolerance was not only acceptable in polite society; it was fashionable, even assumed.