Read Gandhi & Churchill Online
Authors: Arthur Herman
*113
When war broke out in 1939 First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill extended the same procedure to the Indian Navy. He told Tom Phillips that Indian officers were to be treated to the same recognition and promotion as white officers—even to the rank of admiral. “But,” he added characteristically, “not too many of them, please.”
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*114
This was the conference at which Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on a policy of unconditional surrender to end the war against the Axis.
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*115
He chose Daniel Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
.
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*116
Later Lord Linlithgow told his successor General Wavell that he believed the rumors were true.
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Chaudhuri, like Linlithgow, came to believe it was true.
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White and Indian officials were equally to blame. Bengal’s Muslim League majority ministry failed miserably, while many of its Hindu members made huge profits trading in rice during the shortage.
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*119
It read in part: “Of all the high functionaries I have had the honor of knowing, none has been the cause of such deep sorrow to me as you have been. It has cut me to the quick to have to think of you as having countenanced untruth…I hope and pray that God will some day put it into your heart to realize that you, as the representative of a great nation, have been led into grievous error.”
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*120
On the contrary, Hitler admired the British Raj’s skill in subduing and ruling hundreds of millions of what Hitler considered subhumans. He particularly liked the Hollywood movie
Lives of the Bengal Lancers
and made it compulsory viewing for his SS, as a model of how to rule an empire of inferior races with a handful of men.
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*121
Likewise his remark on the battle for Imphal: “a story written with our blood and more so with our sweat.”
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*122
At Tehran both men held an extraordinary discussion of India behind Churchill’s back. Roosevelt in effect endorsed Nehru’s view and thought the best solution to India’s problems “would be reform from the bottom, somewhat on the Soviet line.” Stalin, who knew a lot more than Roosevelt about how the Soviet system really worked, disagreed. He said “reform from the bottom would mean revolution” and that the interactions of caste and class made the Indian question “a complicated one.” But both men agreed it was best not to raise the issue with Churchill.
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*123
When the Southeast Asian Command was formed in 1943, Americans derisively said its initials SEAC stood for “Save England’s Asian Colonies.”
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*124
Written for the Ministry of Labor by William Beveridge, left-leaning Liberal Party stalwart and later vice chancellor of London University.
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In fact, he was not shocked. The bloodbath remark only confirmed Wavell’s view that “Gandhi’s professions of non-violence and saintliness are political weapons against the British rather than natural attributes.” He was right, but not in the way he thought.
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This phrase was particularly ironic, since it had also been the battle cry of Subhas Chandra Bose, the man Nehru had helped oust from the Indian National Congress.
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He did not realize that Wavell had proposed wrapping things up even sooner.
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It is not really clear who dreamed up the June 1 date. Mountbatten later claimed he did, but according to R. J. Moore, the idea of setting a “date certain” for British withdrawal, in hopes it would concentrate the minds of Indian politicians, was already in Attlee’s thinking when he made Mountbatten’s appointment.
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*129
According to Andrew Roberts, as events and the violence built to a climax that July, Lord Louis spent several days personally designing the flag he would carry as the new governor-general of India and Pakistan and worrying about how to get his Buick limousine flown into Karachi for the installation ceremony.
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Jinnah did get his revenge: he steadfastly refused to accept Mountbatten as Pakistan’s governor-general and instead appointed himself, thus denying the former viceroy the one title he really wanted.
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“Hindus and Muslims are brothers!”
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Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ancestor of today’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
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He never got it. Once they settled the fate of Kashmir, in September 1948 Nehru and Menon dispatched troops to force Hyderabad to accept union with India, on the grounds that while the ruler was Muslim, its population was overwhelmingly Hindu—ironically, the opposite of the rationale they used to intervene in Kashmir.
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*134
See Chapter 9.
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*135
His country would lose its debate at the United Nations over Kashmir; Pakistan and India would fight two more wars over the disputed province. A war of terror there is still going on today. The Islamic nation that Quaid-e-Azam had fought Gandhi so hard to found would go through decades of turmoil and instability, even dismemberment. In 1971, with India’s connivance, its eastern province would break away and form an independent state, Bangladesh.
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†136
Ironically, Gandhi’s murderers would also quote from the
Gita
at their trial, which began in Delhi’s Red Fort on May 27, 1948. “My respect for the Mahatma was deep and deathless,” Godse said in his final statement. “It therefore gave me no pleasure to kill him. Indeed my feelings were like those of Arjuna when he killed Dronacharya, his Guru at whose feet he had learned the art of war.” But Godse could not forgive Gandhi for his pro-Muslim bias. Speaking in English, Godse said: “I felt convinced that such a man was the greatest enemy, not only of the Hindus, but of the whole nation.” The trial lasted more than a year, with more than 149 prosecution witnesses. Godse and Apte were found guilty and sentenced to death; they were hanged side by side on November 15, 1949, nearly two years after Gandhi’s assassination. Vinayak Savarkar, the man most responsible for what had happened, was acquitted on all charges. He lived as a free man until his death in 1966.
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*137
An angry Labour MP rose to point out, correctly, that millions had died during the 1943 famine under Churchill’s watch. Churchill replied, also correctly, that under British rule India’s population rose by 100 million and that there was a difference between failing to prevent food shortages and deliberate murder.
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*138
What follows is related by Churchill himself, in a document not released until after his death.
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*139
Which was still being rationed as late as 1956.
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*140
Knowing that Winston was having troubles maintaining his house, a group of wealthy businessmen bought it for him after the war as a donation to the National Trust. After Churchill’s death the heir to the house would be the Trust, not Randolph.
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*141
To forge the familial bond, Eden had even married Winston’s niece Clarissa.
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Everywhere, that is, except where he had started the fight, in South Africa. The last living link to the South Africa of Gandhi and Churchill, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, died in 1950. Power passed into the hands of radical racialists. Macmillan’s 1960 warning about the “wind of change” only made them more determined to fight to preserve their system of racial segregation or apartheid (which Smuts had opposed). Shortly afterward riots broke out in the black township of Sharpeville, and police killed more than sixty anti-apartheid protesters—the prelude to three decades of conflict in which Gandhi’s name and example would be invoked more than once by resisters like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
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