A reckoning of Churchill's India phobia

A hero to some and a villain to others, Churchill's admirers may find it challenging to dispute Walter Reid's finely argued judgments while examining the anomalous record of his public life

Fighting Retreat: Winston Churchill and India

Author: Walter Reid

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 332

Price: Rs 699

No 20th century leader, other than, perhaps, Henry Kissinger, who died recently, has polarised opinion more than Winston Churchill. In Britain, he is an unambiguous hero, standing up to Adolf Hitler when Europe was on its knees. The public turnout at his funeral procession was second only to Princess Diana’s. Most biographies, from Martin Gilbert’s onwards, have been appreciative, with criticisms limited to the odd strategic wartime decision and personal habits (drinking brandy at breakfast or conducting government business in the bath or at all hours from bed).  Indians, on the other hand, remember him best for his unabashed imperialism.

So was Churchill a hero or villain? Walter Reid doesn’t address crude polarities but examines the anomalous record of Churchill’s public life to explain his dogged opposition to Indian self government and independence in Fighting Retreat. Mr Reid is part of a group of British historians that abjures the Niall Ferguson “colonialism-as-a-force-of-good” school of thought and fully acknowledges the exploitative nature of the Raj. An earlier book Keeping the Jewel in the Crown: The British Betrayal of India was a detailing of, in his words, Britain’s “deceitful and hypocritical attempts to thwart India’s entirely reasonable political aspirations”.

In researching that book, he says in the preface to this one, he was “taken aback” by the extent of Churchill’s role in this deception. “I was aware of his determination not to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire but I was not prepared for what I found: Disingenuous and unprincipled opposition to any initiative which might edge India, however slightly, out of the clutches of Great Britain.”

Churchill was, he adds, “capable of … concern for the generality of mankind. But not for India.” Why not? The easy answer is that he was born in Victorian England when crude racial theories were gaining traction and the empire the basis of national pride. In a chapter titled “The Imperial World” Mr Reid contextualises but does not excuse Churchill’s language and views, pointing out that many Victorians did not share that outlook.

This was the same man who said of the Boers that there should be “no barrier of race, colour or creed”, who as Secretary of State for War censured General Dyer for Jallianwala Bagh (he called it “a monstrous event”), and as Colonial Secretary pushed for the secession of southern Ireland from the Empire.   

But for Churchill India was not a White Dominion populated with Englishmen abroad nor a utilitarian worldwide scattering of British-owned coaling and trading stations. It was a “conspicuous ornament…the source of immense riches ….”  Beyond the romance, Mr Reid highlights the calculus of electoral politics. Biographers praise Churchill’s decision to switch parties from the ruling Conservatives to the Liberals over the attempt to replace the free trade regime with Imperial Preference in 1904. True, his opposition was driven by his belief that free trade was the basis of the empire. But an Indian dimension figured too: “The abolition of Free Trade meant that tariffs could be adjusted to tax cotton imports from Britain, thereby stimulating the indigenous cotton industry.” 

Churchill represented a cotton constituency in Manchester in Lancashire, which depended on the Indian market for its finished products. When he shifted to Dundee, which he represented from 1908 to 1922, he remained within the orbit of a trading community that depended for its existence on Indian textiles. As Mr Reid writes, “for twenty-one years, Churchill was dependent on political support for the cotton interest, and the British cotton interest was uncomfortably aware that its prosperity rested on resisting Indian economic autonomy. Independence was even more unthinkable.”

Mr Reid shows that even after Churchill stopped representing a cotton seat, the cotton mafia continued to brief him in the 1930s when he was a rambunctious backbencher leading the right wing of the Conservatives , to wreck the Government of India Bill. 

As prime minister, his views on India congealed. He offered the misleading argument that independence would result in the oppression of the Dalits by upper caste Hindus. Those “beastly people with a beastly religion” reflects his visceral aversion to the Hindu leaders of the Congress. Like many Britons, he was partial to the spurious theory of “martial races” of which northern Muslims were seen as manly representatives. But his “concern” for India’s Muslim minority was embedded in the Raj’s divide and rule policy that played its role in Partition.

Mr Reid records in masterly detail Churchill’s glee at the (inevitable) failure of the 1942 Cripps Mission, which allowed the British PM to “kick the Indian problem away for the foreseeable future”. He tackles Churchill’s culpability in the 1943 Bengal Famine, which has foregrounded debates over Churchill’s war record after the publication of Madhusree Mukherjee’s book Churchill’s Secret War. Mr Reid reprises Amartya Sen’s critique that blaming Churchill absolved the Raj administration of rank inefficiency, including checking hoarding by local grain merchants.

He examines the record and concludes that despite Churchill’s tasteless remarks about feeding Greeks rather than Bengalis there was no evidence that he did or said anything that resulted in a reduction in famine relief. His plans to import Australian grain to feed Bengal were stalled by Roosevelt, who declined to provide US shipping to transport it. And it was the Cabinet that took the decision to not divert scarce shipping from troops and defence equipment.

This is a thoughtful and even-handed history that does not need the assiduous endorsements that preface it. Churchill’s admirers may struggle to refute its finely argued judgements. Indian readers will find that, finally, a Briton has taken a better measure of the man.