August 20, 2007
Churchill and India Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 AM EST A couple of days ago Alexander Burns linked to a review of a couple on books on the partition of the Indian sub-continent, which appeared in a recent article in The New Yorker. I have now read the piece, by Pankaj Mishra, and I think it makes a number of unpersuasive remarks about British responsibility for the creation of Pakistan, and particularly Winston Churchill’s “destructive role in the history of the Asian subcontinent.” Mr. Burns concludes his post by noting that “it’s not as easy to plan the future of men and states as some would like to believe, and the history of India and Pakistan is a good reminder of that.” This is true and wise, but it is also true that after a certain point, some historical outcomes seem very likely. My sense is that long before Churchill had anything much to do with the history of the subcontinent, partition was such an outcome. Mishra writes that “As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain ‘a bulwark of British rule in India.’ Certainly Churchill, who did not want his views on India to be ‘disturbed by any bloody Indians,’ was disinclined to recognize the upsurge of nationalism in India. . . . In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Churchill had been loudest among the reactionaries who were determined not to lose India, ‘the jewel in the crown,’ and, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he tried every tactic to thwart Indian independence. . . . In 1942, as the Japanese Army advanced on India, the Congress Party was willing to offer war support in return for immediate self-government. But Churchill was in no mood to negotiate. . . . Churchill’s divisive policies had already produced a disastrous effect on the Indian political scene. Congress Party leaders had refused to share power with Jinnah, confident that they did not need Muslim support in order to win a majority vote in elections. These attitudes stoked Muslim fears that the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru was a cover for Hindu dominance. While the Congress leaders were in prison, Jinnah, with Churchill’s encouragement, steadily consolidated Muslim opinion behind him.” Churchill could be nasty (and remarkably foolish) about Gandhi, and he was certainly hostile to the prospect of Indian independence, but I don’t think any hopes he may have had about the effects of Hindu-Muslim antagonism had any discernible effect on the fact, intensity, and consequence of sectarian consciousness, and my guess is that in the long run his aggressive hostility to Indian independence probably had little effect on the course of Indian history. Churchill was out of power when he made some of his silliest remarks about India (from 1929 through 1932), and while the offensive remarks he made at that time have hurt his reputation, they had little if any effect on British policy. After 1935 Churchill’s attention turned from the threat of Ghandi, which he misread, to the threat of Hitler, which he did not. When he became prime minister, in 1940, he was generally more concerned with the latter threat, and after 1941 with the threat of Imperial Japan, than with the challenge of Ghandi, except when they intersected, as they did in 1942. There is a school of thought that blames Churchill for the failure of the 1942 Cripps Mission—which is what Mishra does (the Cripps Mission was an attempt to secure Indian support for the war effort in return for full dominion status and, if desired, full independence after the war). There is also a school of thought that blames Gandhi and the Congress Party for the failure of the Cripps Mission, and a theory, which Mishra seems to share, that had the Cripps Mission succeeded, there would have been no bloody partition of India. There is something to be said for both of the first two positions, but the last, I think, is almost certainly wrong. Mishra writes that “nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable.” Maybe, but my impression is that much current scholarship tends to push back rather than forward the date at which partition became very, very likely, back, in fact, to the 1920s, when Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) left the Congress Party over differences about Muslim needs and rights. I think current scholarship tends to put more of the blame for partition on Congress and specifially on Nehru, both of them being unwilling to take Muslim fears of Hindu domination with sufficient seriousness, and a bit less of the blame on malevolent and inept British authorities. British authorities were sometimes inept and malevolent, but after the First World War Indians made more and more of their own fate. Jinnah did not need encouragment from Churchill to reject a strong, unitary state, and had Churchill not jailed the leaders of Congress in 1942, they seem unlikely to have successfully reversed decades of growing Muslim sentiment. There was indeed a long period during which Indian Muslims would have accepted a weak federal state, but Congress kept demanding a strong and centralized one. These were incompatible demands, and partition was the result. Mishra implies that Congress was made obdurate by British policy (such as holding elections, which Hindu majorities won), but it seems a little strange for an anti-imperialist to greatly blame a colonial power for holding honest elections. Mishra is right to point out that (as in Iraq) simple majority rule in multi-confessional and multi-national states can have ugly consequences, but the acceptable moral alternative (other than partition) is not wholly clear. Mishra does not like British imperialism. Fair enough, although I am generally struck by the fact that in most respects its record compares well to all the other varieties of imperialism we know about, including the ones practiced by various subcontinental regimes before the British arrived, and in some cases after they left (if you think about Kashmir or Afghanistan). The tragedy of partition, real and ghastly, contains many lessons. The notion that it was largely the fault of post–World War I British imperial policy is not, I think, one of them. As for Churchill, while he tried (and failed) to protract British imperialism, it may be worth recalling that he did manage to cut short the career of German imperialism. Old-fashioned souls persist in thinking that the latter achievement may outweigh the former intention.
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