Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Amery protested to Churchill that he was “side tracking me from the real conduct of the war.” Not so, the prime minister responded: it was important to ensure that India contribute as much as possible to the war, which might even move east. Amery was not persuaded, and believed that Chamberlain had urged against his appointment to the War Cabinet. Historian William Roger Louis holds, however, that by giving him a relatively subordinate role Churchill sought to contain a potential rival, one reputed to be “a man of integrity and judgment who had the courage to speak his convictions regardless of consequence.” Eventually the patriot in Amery prevailed—even as he maintained a private hope that a cabinet reshuffle would bring him closer to power. He accepted the position.5

  The new secretary of state for India rapidly put mechanisms in place “to utilize Indian supplies to the utmost,” as he described in his diary, and moved to impart to the marquess of Linlithgow, the viceroy in New Delhi, emergency powers of arrest and detention, control of the press, prohibition of seditious groups, and so on. “My whole conception is that of India humming from end to end with activity in munitions and supply production and at the same time with the bustle of men training for active service of one sort or another, the first operation largely paying for the cost of the second,” Amery explained to Linlithgow.6

  The Indian Army was slated to play a crucial role in the war, and in June 1940 the prime minister directed Amery to ensure that additional divisions were shipped westward. “The fact that we are somewhat reducing the quality of our British garrisons [in India], makes it all the more desirable that a larger number of Indian troops should also be employed outside India,” Churchill explained. That is, because recent recruits from the United Kingdom, who were in need of training, were replacing more experienced white troops in India (the latter were either returning home to defend Britain or moving to the war theaters), any mutiny by the native soldiers would be all the more difficult to quell. So India’s internal security required that as many of the sepoys as possible should also be abroad. Moreover, Churchill continued, it appeared that the war would “spread to the Middle East, and the climate of Iraq, Palestine and Egypt are well suited to Indian troops.” The prime minister’s greater apprehension of a mutiny than of an external attack would mean that when Japanese forces suddenly and ominously arrived at India’s eastern border in March 1942, the colony’s most highly trained and best-equipped divisions would be on another continent.7

  Apart from supplying soldiers for some of the toughest combat in countries around the Mediterranean Sea, India was designated to provide the bulk of supplies for those theaters. Starting in May, Amery oversaw the effort to ship from India around 40,000 tons of grain per month, a tenth of its railway engines and carriages, and even railway tracks uprooted from less important train lines. The colony’s entire commercial production of timber, woolen textiles, and leather goods, and three-quarters of its steel and cement production, would be required for the war. Factories near Calcutta were soon turning out ammunition, grenades, bombs, guns, and other weaponry; Bombay’s mills were producing uniforms and parachutes, while plants all over the country were contributing boots, jeep bodies and chassis, machine parts, and hundreds of ancillary items such as binoculars for which the need had suddenly swelled. Apart from the United Kingdom itself, India would become the largest contributor to the empire’s war—providing goods and services worth more than £2 billion.8

  Leopold Amery had not visited India since he had left it as a small child. He sought to travel there, to gauge first-hand the manifold problems with the war effort, but discovered that the viceroy was too protective of his turf to acquiesce. Lord Linlithgow was an acknowledged expert on India and had been viceroy since 1936; Amery, being far less familiar with the colony’s affairs, needed his cooperation. Yet over a lifetime of service to the needs of the empire, Amery had acquired a special skill: devising constitutions that ceded power to colonies in small and careful doses. Resolving to maximize India’s contribution to the war, he decided to apply this expertise toward breaking the prevailing impasse with the country’s nationalists.9

  AMONG INDIANS, THE advent of war had brought anxiety mingled with hope. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, now seventy, had retired from active politics because he was unhappy with the socialism pro-pounded by younger leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. The attractive and erudite Nehru, who turned fifty in 1939, had long played a prominent role in the Indian National Congress. Early in his career Nehru had been emotionally and ideologically close to Gandhi, but they had since diverged on a number of issues. Bose, who was eight years younger than Nehru, was a passionate radical who had spent most of his adult life in prison or in exile because of his extreme antipathy to colonialism—which included, on more than one occasion, expressing a sympathetic interest in armed rebellion.

  Both Nehru and Bose asserted that India needed to be industrialized along socialist lines, under the paternal guidance of a powerful state. Gandhi, in contrast, held that industrialization begat violence: it drew power away from individuals and toward large centralized entities, and it demanded the massive use of natural resources as well as expanding markets that could be acquired only by force. In the late 1930s, Gandhi had occupied himself with rejuvenating villages, believing that India’s salvation lay in reviving cottage industries such as spinning, which would employ and thereby restore power to individuals in their homes. But World War II thrust upon him a moral challenge that would bring him back to the fore.10

  In 1935, after a prolonged civil disobedience movement in India, a coalition government in London had granted limited powers of self-rule to the colony. Many members of the Labour Party were sympathetic to Indian aspirations, and even some Tory politicians held that Britain could not forever oppose some measure of self-government in the colony. But an earlier viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, had explained to Amery that Indians could probably be appeased, by “some façade which will leave the essential mechanism of power still in our hands.” Accordingly, by 1935 London’s socialists and conservatives had hammered out a compromise: a franchise of around 30 million voters would elect Indian ministers to run the provinces and send a few representatives to the viceroy’s executive council in New Delhi. The viceroy, along with governors in the provinces, would retain ultimate control over defense, finance, foreign affairs, and internal security. As a colleague explained at the time to Churchill, this constitution would allow Indians to rule the provinces “as long as they do it properly, and leave the Governors absolutely free to take over the whole or any part of the administration themselves should the machine not function properly.”11

  The Indian National Congress contested the elections mandated by the 1935 act and won handsomely. Eight provinces (out of eleven) gained Congress ministries. But three years later the fiery Bose became president of the Congress and reiterated the call for independence. “Ours is a struggle not only against British Imperialism but against world Imperialism as well, of which the former is the keystone,” he declared. “We are, therefore, fighting not for the cause of India alone but for humanity as well.”12

  As president, when Bose gazed at the thunderclouds of world war on the horizon, he perceived a silver lining: the conflict was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to wrest freedom for India. With the United Kingdom facing a mortal threat that left it utterly dependent on Indian men and materials, its leaders would be forced to give way to nationalists’ demands. In early 1939, he trounced a candidate favored by Gandhi to win reelection as Congress president. Gandhi described the election as a personal defeat. At his instructions, on February 22, 1939, almost the entire senior leadership of the Congress Party resigned their positions, denying the president any way to implement his ideas.13

  Bose was deeply hurt by this public repudiation and fell ill. In the 1920s, while imprisoned in Burma on unspecified charges, he had acquired a mysterious fever that recurred in times of stress. Undeterred, he urged at his inaugural address (which his br
other had to deliver, Bose being too sick) that London be handed an ultimatum. If the United Kingdom did not liberate India within a specified time limit—he had in mind six months—the Congress should begin a nonviolent civil disobedience struggle with the objective of winning independence. Gandhi countered that civil disobedience would inevitably degenerate into civil war. “I smell violence in the air I breathe,” he wrote to Bose. Communal tensions had escalated in recent years, and clashes between Muslim peasants and Hindu landowners, fueled by economic disputes, had already claimed many lives in eastern Bengal.14

  At a meeting in September 1939, the differences among Gandhi, Bose, and Nehru broke into the open. Gandhi was horrified by the bloodshed unleashed by the Nazis and wanted to cooperate with aspects of the war effort. Bose asserted that both Germany and the United Kingdom were fighting for imperial stakes; he saw the war as amoral and urged that the Congress use it as an opportunity to wrest freedom. Nehru detested fascism—but he also felt that Indians had no compelling reason to participate in a war that would free others while leaving them colonized. His view prevailed, in that the Indian National Congress asked the United Kingdom to clarify the ends to which the war would be fought. “If the war is to defend the status quo, imperialist possessions, colonies, vested interests, and privilege, India can have nothing to do with it. If, however, the issue is democracy and a world order based on democracy, then India is intensely interested in it,” the Congress announced. “A free democratic India will gladly associate herself with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.”15

  In October, after consulting with the War Cabinet in London, Viceroy Linlithgow described British war aims as “laying the foundation of a better international system which will mean that war is not to be the inevitable lot of each succeeding generation.” He did not mention democracy. After the war, he added, the 1935 act could be modified to incorporate progress toward the ultimate goal of dominion status—but only if the concerns of India’s many minorities could be met. A dominion (such as Australia or Canada) was a self-ruling entity linked commercially and militarily with the United Kingdom, and in 1929 Viceroy Irwin had announced that His Majesty’s Government desired such a status for India. Linlithgow’s response now indicated to the nationalists that the British did not intend to fulfill this promise in the near future, if ever. “It became clear to us that they did not want us as friends and colleagues but as a slave people to do their bidding,” asserted Nehru.16

  In protest, on October 23, 1939, the Congress Party ordered its politicians to resign all the positions to which they had been elected. The Muslim League, which was headed by the lawyer Mohammad Ali Jinnah, celebrated the end of the Congress ministries with a “day of deliverance and thanksgiving.” Jinnah also promised the Muslim League’s support for the war effort—provided that the British recognized it as the only organization that spoke for India’s Muslims.17

  For decades the sixty-two-year-old Jinnah had played a leading role in the Indian National Congress. He had departed in 1920 because he disliked Gandhi’s religiosity. Jinnah had since come to regard the Congress as a Hindu organization, because of the preponderance of Hindus in its leadership, which in his estimation made it insensitive to the concerns of Muslims. In the elections of 1937, however, the Muslim League had won only 4.8 percent of the Muslim vote, largely because some overwhelmingly Muslim regions, such as the North West Frontier Province, had returned Congress politicians. Subsequently, a triumphant Nehru had thwarted Jinnah’s effort to get politicians from the Muslim League appointed as ministers in two provinces where the League had done relatively well. Indians would pay dearly for the resulting rift. The dual humiliation, at the polls and at Nehru’s hands, had convinced Jinnah that the Muslim League could not coexist with the Congress; in an effort to boost the League’s popularity, he began to appeal to Islamic nationalism.18

  In February 1940 the marquess of Zetland, who was then the secretary of state for India, suggested to the War Cabinet that the cooperation of the Congress with the war effort be secured by an offer of dominion status at war’s end. Churchill, then first Lord of the Admiralty and a vigorous presence on the War Cabinet, opposed the idea. He recommended instead a “firm course” that would keep the colony “quiet for the duration of the war.” Nor did he “share the anxiety to encourage and promote unity among Hindu and Moslem communities”: disharmony would be more conducive to retaining the British Raj. According to the minutes of the War Cabinet meetings, Churchill warned that if amity among Indians were somehow to be achieved, its “immediate result would be that the united communities would join in showing us the door. He regarded the Hindu-Moslem feud as the bulwark of British rule in India.” Churchill’s chain of reasoning hinged on the fact that the Indian National Congress, though it was secular in its principles, was nevertheless composed mainly of Hindus. If the Congress failed to agree to share power with the Muslim League, the British could claim that their relinquishing India was tantamount to abandoning a vulnerable Muslim minority to Hindu majority rule.19

  Churchill had developed this argument during a prolonged campaign he had conducted in the early 1930s against granting partial self-government to Indians. In a 1931 speech, he had described a religious riot in India in graphic terms: “women and children were butchered in circumstances of bestial barbarity, their mutilated violated bodies strewing the streets for days.” He had used the conflict to argue that only the British could keep the fanatics of India from one another’s throats. By 1937 he had turned that argument on its head, stating in a letter to Viceroy Linlithgow that unity among Indians of different faiths was “fundamentally injurious to British interests.”20

  As Churchill explained it, the United Kingdom’s task in India, an expansive land that comprised several feuding groups, was similar to its role in Europe: “to preserve the balance between these great masses, and thus maintain our own control for our advantage and their salvation.” Therefore, Churchill continued, “I am not at all attracted by the prospect of one united India, which will show us the door.” That the Government of India might incline toward promoting harmony between Hindus and Muslims was “to my mind distressing and repugnant in the last degree.” Instead, Churchill hoped that the Muslims of the northwest would combine into a front to combat the “anti-British tendencies of the Congress.” Strife between Hindus and Muslims would bolster the rationale that British rule over India, which Lord Randolph Churchill had described as a calming sheet of oil over turbulent waters, was as necessary as it had always been.21

  Although Winston Churchill was not yet prime minister, his views on India were so vehement that they prevailed: the War Cabinet turned down Zetland’s proposal. When in March 1940 the Muslim League introduced a fresh demand—a separate nation for Muslims, to be named Pakistan, or Land of the Pure—Churchill hailed “the awakening of a new spirit of self-reliance and self-assertiveness on the part of the different communities, of which the Moslem League’s resolution was a sign.” As the war dragged on, and financial and political circumstances indicated that the United Kingdom could not control India for long after it was over, Churchill would conclude that partitioning the colony to create Pakistan provided the best chance of retaining British influence in South Asia.22

  LEOPOLD AMERY HAD his own, and if anything more carefully considered, ideas on the future of the British Empire. He believed that it had to be modernized so that it could continue to benefit the United Kingdom. Force could not forever hold the colonies, he maintained: loyalty to the Crown was necessary, and it could be bought only by economic solidarity. He saw the colonies not as possessions to be grasped in a fist but as extensions of England to be linked by handshakes. Amery was a leading advocate of Imperial Preference, a proposal by (the then late) statesman Joseph Chamberlain, who had envisioned a system of mutually helpful tariffs that would foster trade within the British Empire and fend off competition from the United States and Germany. As for India, Amery believed that it would sooner or la
ter have to take its place in the imperial scheme as a dominion. But if Indians were to relinquish their stated goal of full independence and instead opt to remain within the empire as a dominion, their emancipation would have to be achieved without acrimony.

  Accordingly, Amery suggested to Linlithgow that he probe Gandhi’s views about the prospect of Indians designing their own constitution, while offering a guarantee of dominion status within a year after a successful resolution of the war. The Congress would also get greater representation on the viceroy’s executive council. In return, the party would resume governing in the provinces and—most important—cooperate with the war effort. Linlithgow reported to Amery that Gandhi was responsive.

  The initiative ran headfirst into an immovable roadblock: “Winston’s passionately instinctive objection to anything that means giving self-government to India,” as the secretary of state for India recounted in his diary. Churchill charged that matters so disruptive should not have been brought up “at a time when all our thoughts should be devoted to the defence of the Island and to the victory of our cause.”23

  Amery argued that it was essential to gain the support of at least the moderate Indians. “A feeling was abroad that we were relying on the continued absence of agreement between the two main communities to free us from the performance of our pledges,” he had stated in his presentation to the War Cabinet. (He had yet to realize that this was indeed the prime minister’s strategy.) Unless the British government acted to dispel this view, Amery continued, increasing resentment of colonial authorities and escalating hostility between the Congress and the Muslim League could ultimately lead to civil war. Should worse come to worst, he wrote to Churchill, “we could not hold India, even in wartime, for another year, certainly not for another five years.” In the end—Amery warned with remarkable prescience—“a partition of India, like the partition of Ireland and just as fruitful of future trouble, may be the only immediate solution.”24