Keeping the Jewel in the Crown
The British Betrayal of India
Walter Reid
Penguin
288 pages; Rs 599
During the last three decades of the Raj, the British authorities repeatedly declared their commitment to progressive self-rule for India. Drawing from archival evidence, Walter Reid demonstrates that “while there were men and women of good will who did seek to promote the concept of Independence, most politicians and senior administrators… were concerned to do nothing to move India steadily and purposefully towards her destiny.” We “repeatedly find Indians being offered a form of words which is known to mean one thing to them and quite another to those making the promise.”
The finding itself will come as no great surprise to Indian readers but this very readable book presents much new evidence and offers some fascinating pen portraits of leading British statesmen.
The story starts with the Montagu Declaration of 1917, which offered the “gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.” Mr Reid reveals that the word “self-government” in the initial draft was substituted, at Curzon’s instance, by the ambiguous term “responsible government”. Moreover, India was to remain permanently “an integral part of the British Empire”. Thus, the promised “self-governing institutions” did not amount to “self-government”, leave alone “independence”. Mr Reid concludes that under the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, “devolution was intended only to tie in a larger element of society to the status quo”.
Reading, who succeeded Chelmsford as Viceroy, was equally sceptical about Indian self-government in the foreseeable future. However, he was remarkably prescient in some respects. He recognised that racial discrimination was the basic flaw in British rule and, even more remarkably, that the imperial policy of divide and rule would have dangerous long-term consequences. He warned London in 1924 that Hindu-Muslim conflict was a “menace to the peace of the country. Some, doubtless, think that this is to our advantage, but, if so, they fail to realise how grave the situation might become if the feeling between the two communities continues to grow more antagonistic and fails to be alleviated by some compromise.” London, deeply concerned over the prospect of Hindu-Muslim unity held out by the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League, rejected Reading’s advice and instructed him to separate the two communities. Reading’s warning proved prophetic. The Raj ended ingloriously in a communal carnage.
Mr Reid offers an interesting perspective on the Government of India Act of 1935. “The Act,” he writes, “was meant to preserve British India for at least another generation — perhaps even permanently…. If the India Act had been implemented in full measure it would have led to an India no more independent than the Egypt or Iraq of the 1930s.”
As late as in January 1939, the Viceroy, Linlithgow, felt that that any general impression that “public opinion at home, or His Majesty’s Government, seriously contemplate evacuation in any measurable period of time, seems to me astonishing”. His policy was to strengthen the Muslim League in order to counter Congress’ demands for constitutional advance. It was on his request that the Secretary of State for India stated in parliament that agreement between Hindus and Muslims was a pre-condition for constitutional changes.
Linlithgow, “heavy of body and slow of mind” (in Nehru’s words), failed to understand how World War II would undermine the foundations of the Raj. He was strongly supported by the notoriously anti-Indian Churchill. “I hate Indians,” Churchill declared in 1942. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Churchill was Catholic in his prejudices; he also hated “people with slit eyes and pigtails” and despised “hottentots”. It is true that he was a product of his times but Mr Reid is unconvincing when he seeks to partially exonerate Churchill: “He was not a racist except to the substantial extent that he unalterably believed that the British race was superior to the races in the black colonies, that Britain had a civilising duty and that it was neither in the interests of Britain or of the subject races that there should be any transfer of power.”
The Viceroy who emerges with most credit in Reid’s account is Wavell, the “first man to hold the office to apprehend that Britain had been dishonest in what she had said to Indian nationalists. He also saw that it was now too late to end the Raj in good order.” Delving into the record before assuming the post of Viceroy, Wavell had already concluded: “We were proposing a policy of freedom for India, and in practice opposing every suggestion for a step forward.” Wavell had a clear, analytical mind but he was no politician. Seeing that the days of the Raj were numbered, he drew up a plan of evacuation for a staged British withdrawal province by province, leaving behind an India divided on the basis of district-wise communal majorities. It was a soldier’s plan for an orderly retreat, which altogether ignored political optics.
The deficit was supplied by Mountbatten. Though an indifferent naval officer, Mountbatten was gifted with PR skills that might be the envy of a Hollywood star. As Mr Reid observes: “Mountbatten was bound to succeed to some extent, in that the commitment to immediate departure was known. He could not fail to hand over power to India by June 1948.” Mountbatten’s achievement was to stage an amicable withdrawal from a sub-continent set afire by the policy of divide and rule, and to do so with the pomp and ceremony befitting an empire.
(The reviewer, a retired Indian Foreign Service officer, is currently a member of the UN Committee for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights)
