This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  August 1917 was a low point in Britain’s efforts in the Great War, a war in which she needed Indian troops. Whatever the reason for the declaration, in 1931 here was the theme to the independence debate. Not that dominion status had been abandoned. Three years earlier, at a conference at Lucknow, it was clear that many in India would settle for dominion status or to have the same standing us other dominions. And in 1929 the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, declared that the goal of the political debate was for India to indeed become a dominion. So presumably the way forward seemed defined. Of course, it wasn’t because Irwin, in yet another example of ‘what the minister really means’ instruction, was forced later to say that having a goal didn’t mean it would be reached.

  I have never sought to delude Indian opinion into the belief that a definition of purpose, however plainly stated, would of itself be the enunciation of a phrase, provide a solution for the problems which have to be solved before that purpose is fully realized. The assertion of a goal, however precise in terms, is of a necessity a different thing from the goal’s attainment. No sensible traveller would feel that the clear definition of his destination was the same thing as the completion of his journey; but it is an assurance of direction.

  The mood in India, now in the psychological grip of Gandhi, was not much inclined to diplomatic obfuscation. The British wanted rid of Gandhi. They said no political progress could be made until his movement was stopped. Also, India was witnessing the battle between the Hindu-led politicians against the Muslim League; the princes were uncertain of their future powers and clearly the sense of nationalism, the sense of moral justice and the sense of expectation could not be set aside by speeches without promises. That London India Conference scared the British imperialist Establishment. A member of it, Brendan Bracken, would later be Winston Churchill’s propagandist. So when he wrote to the newspaper baron, Lord William ‘Max’ Beaverbrook, Bracken was reflecting the views of Churchill:

  8, Lord North Street, 14th January 1931

  Dear Lord Beaverbrook,

  It may seem odd that one of the smallest of political tyros should attempt to persuade a master of politics to interest himself in a great public affair. But the memory of the agreeable lunch you gave me not long ago encourages me to write to you about the India Conference. This wretched government, with the aid of the Liberals and some eminent Tories, is about to commit us to one of the most fatal decisions in all our history, and there is practically no opposition to their policy. Disagreeing as I did, with much of your Empire Free Trade policy, I could not but admire all the force and resources which you put into your campaign, and I believe that if those great talents were devoted to combating defeatism, it would still be possible to preserve the essentials of British rule in India.

  This was not a Left versus Right affair in British politics. Viceroy Lord Irwin had been right. It should not be assumed that ambition meant all was settled. But both Irwin and Ramsay MacDonald, in the chair of that meeting, were also mindful of an earlier letter MacDonald had received from the Muslim leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), who would be the first leader of Pakistan. Jinnah believed that declarations of aims and possibilities were declarations of intent. Equally, it would be naive if we didn’t recognize that whatever the innocent or mischievous interpretation, the gap between self-government and independence was constitutionally enormous. Jinnah’s letter to MacDonald seemed to span that gap in one paragraph: ‘I must emphasize that India expects the translation and fulfilment of these declarations. There never was a more momentous or graver issue in the history of the two nations than the present one on which hangs the fate of nearly one-fifth of the population of the world.’

  Certainly the Tories wanted to slow down the pace of discussion. Gandhi was insisting that Congress would speak for everyone including the princes. That was hardly a good start on the long road to agreement. Lord Peel, speaking for the Tories, showed that to his mind the Indians had better understand there was hard travelling ahead. To him the statement of the goal of independence was not the same thing as the purpose of the 1931 conference:

  I wish to state here that . . . while we are united on the goal, we may differ as to the pace or rapidity with which we may obtain that goal . . . in many ways Conservative feeling has been deeply moved by recent events in India; it has been deeply disturbed by the great non-co-operation movement. Conservatives have never believed that non-cooperation on a large scale could be non-violent. They have never believed that the experiments already tried in India some years ago with unfortunate results could be tried again in India with more fortunate results . . . we are told that independence and those declarations of independence by the Congress [of India] were due to frustrated ambition, frustrated desire for further self-government. I am not going for a moment into the psychology of those declarations. I will only say that declarations of that sort of independence and separation from the empire have been made. I regret that they have been made, but they have had some definite influence on Conservative opinion in this country.

  Generally, the Indians were not much impressed with Conservative opinion even if some Indian delegates straddled the line between British and Indian views without losing respect of either. One of them was Ranjisinghi Vibhaji Jadeja, the Maharaja of Nawanagar. He is still remembered at Lord’s as one of the finest cricketers ever. He was also a thoughtful reformer in his own region. When Ranji – as he was known – rose to speak, he was heard with almost universal reverence.

  I have been educated in this country and have spent many years of my life here. England is almost as much my cultural and spiritual home as India; its great institutions and its political life have been to me, a perennial source of refreshment. From her I have imbibed much that is ennobling and invigorating. Mr President, my hopes centre in the perpetuation of the British connection which in my belief is a guarantee of the advancement of my country and of her future greatness . . . one thing is certain – if those who have come to this conference go back to India without the Parliament of Britain making it clear that the minimum constitutional demands of India will be conceded, not only will this conference have been held in vain, but I am much afraid that such a fiasco would strengthen beyond measure the extremist party in India.

  The 1931 round table was the first of three. The third, in 1933, mattered most – although Gandhi never would accept dominion status. There is an illusion that Gandhi brought about the independence of India and the end of the British Raj. He did not. To say that he did is like saying Nelson Mandela brought about the end of apartheid in South Africa. What can be said is that, like Mandela, Gandhi became the symbol of change. Gandhi did not even achieve what he set out to do. There was no peaceful change at the end of British rule. There was no return to a national identity in 1947 – whatever that could ever have meant in a sub-continent of perhaps 400 million people with different religions and castes along with fourteen languages and as many as 200 dialects. And his policy of satyagraha (peaceful opposition) may have perplexed the British but it did not drive them out. It did not make India ungovernable as was its aim. In fact, there is not much evidence that even his own people saw its long-term political value. India became independent because of a series of political events that had started in the nineteenth century, because of the completely changed political mood and feasibility of maintaining old ways after the Great War, and because of political and strategic thinking coupled with the advances in communications, including worldwide radio and talking newsreels in the 1930s. What we don’t know is whether independence – often chaotic and ruthlessly violent – may have taken a different course if there had not been a Second World War.

  Change came because of the emergence of the Congress of India as a political party that grew to represent millions more than it had imagined it might. Change also came because of the pressures of the Muslim League and, initially at least, the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah – but not later. It came because the First World War changed economies and political
realities in India, the rest of the Empire and London. Furthermore, the image of the British Raj was visibly changing. For example, restructuring of the India Civil and Political Services and reforms that had begun prior to the war meant that more and more Indians were in jobs previously reserved for Europeans. By 1919 Indian ministers ran much of India’s provincial government and, within ten years, certainly 40 per cent of the Civil Service was Indian. All this was unthinkable in Curzon’s time as Viceroy at the start of the century when he dismissed the India National Congress as the chattering and, worse, intellectual middle classes. Thirty years later, Congress represented the broadest cross-section of Hindu society – with the chattering intellectuals at the top. Moreover, it had done so by using the imperial system of being well organized at district level.

  Yet not all was simple. There was the gulf between those Indians who wanted self-government, maybe not full independence, but self-government in everything other than defence and foreign policy and the Viceregal administration. There was, too, a distance between viceroys and London politicians. The viceroys, men like Lord Irwin and Lord Reading (Rufus Isaacs, 1860–1935), recognized that change would come anyway so it was better to have it on easier terms. Consequently, between the wars, the British were forced to change their approach to imperial rule because Curzon’s chattering intellectuals were being heard. The British were willing to recognize that India could one day be a dominion – with all the freedoms that suggested – a privilege so far reserved for kith and kin, that is, the white colonies. With the British government on the one side and Gandhi and the Indian National Congress on the other, most sensed (some, like Churchill, reluctantly) some sort of freedom. So came the 1935 India Act. The Act meant more self-government and a pathway to dominion status. But Gandhi didn’t want India to be a dominion. He wanted the British out altogether.

  I regard the status of India as unique. After all we represent a fifth of the human race. I do not think therefore, that a political status which might suit other Dominions of the British Commonwealth would necessarily suit us. You must remember that India has been a subject nation for a long time. If Great Britain approaches the question of the future relations between our peoples in a spirit of friendship with no reservations, she will not find India behind-hand in coming to meet her proffered hand. We would be quite ready, once our right to independence has been recognized to enter into an alliance or partnership on equal terms which would place the relations of Great Britain and India on a satisfactory basis.

  Gandhi and the Congress represented only a part of Indian opinion, nominally that of the Hindus. There was also the Muslim League and, of course, the princes who still ‘ruled’ much of India. Inevitably, Hindus and Muslims never agreed safeguards for the Muslims in a revised constitution. As for the princes, they certainly wanted better than they had been offered. In the November 1931 London conference, Gandhi said Congress had the right to represent all India, even the princes. The British were determined that India should not become another Ireland, but sectarianism remained. In March 1930 at the All Indian Muslim Conference the president, Muhammad Iqbal, had no doubts of the intentions of the Hindu-led Congress: ‘The Congress leaders claim that they are the sole representatives of the people of India. The Round Table Conference made it abundantly clear that they were not. They know that the British people and the rest of the world realize the importance of Communal Settlement in India.’

  Jinnah, who was once more emerging as a central figure, immediately rejected the idea of a federal India and an increasing Hindu majority in any Parliament. Gandhi, unsmiling, reflected on truth and that Hindus were expected to believe in ahimsa, that all living creatures were sacred and no harm should be done to any – including Muslims:

  Tolerance may imply a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one’s own, whereas ahimsa teaches us to entertain the same respect for the religious faiths of others as we accord to our own, thus admitting the imperfection of the latter. This admission will be readily made by a seeker of Truth who follows the law of Love. If we had attained the full vision of Truth, we would no longer be mere seekers, but would have become one with God, for Truth is God. But being only seekers, we prosecute our quest, and are conscious of our imperfection.

  The Muslim League had few moments of faith in ahimsa as practised in public. Considering what followed in 1947, then as painful as it all was supposed to be to Gandhi, the real world of Muslim versus Hindu in India ruled the hearts and the minds of the country’s people and not their theology. As for the British, still uncertain after the mutiny half-a-century earlier, they could handle old-fashioned radicals leading mob violence, but a softly spoken, unrelenting guru was much harder. Yet, as Gandhi – more influenced by John Ruskin than John of the Cross – would point out, none of this should have been alien to British thinking. Was not the whole British political ethic and the strength of that nation’s peoples built on Christianity? To Gandhi, his spinning wheel was, for India’s starving millions, the symbol of salvation. He believed that he, Gandhi, was that symbol.

  The only other person apart from Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to survive in the public imagination outside India was Muhammad Ali Jinnah – the man who became President of Pakistan. He was a Muslim from a merchant’s family of Karachi. Like Gandhi, Jinnah went to London to train as a lawyer. Unlike Gandhi he returned to India and stayed. Interestingly, his mentor was the campaigner of the Indian National Congress, G. K. Gokhale, an activist long before both Gandhi and Jinnah. While Gandhi was still in Africa, it was Jinnah who led the Indian National Congress delegation to London to lobby British MPs contemplating the Council of India Bill. It was Jinnah who first advocated an India of absolute unity. He understood nationalism as a dangerous concept, as well as one that had moral might on its side. It was he who brought the All India Congress and the Muslim League together. It was Jinnah who negotiated in 1916 the Lucknow Agreement, which parcelled up the numbers of reserve seats for Muslims on councils. Until the end of 1918, the British needed to know exactly what Jinnah was thinking. After that, he was not so important. Most certainly, the rise of Gandhi had much to do with his decline. For example, in 1927, when the Simon Commission looked at the possibilities of constitutional reform in India, Jinnah once more attempted to bring the Muslim League and the India National Congress together. He failed. He did not have control over provincial Muslim opinion. Jinnah resigned and he left India to practise law in London. He did return in 1935, when he saw new opportunities through the elections that would follow that year’s Government of India Act, but he still argued with Gandhi on a crucial point: Jinnah believed that to maintain multiracial unity, then India should have self-government beneath an umbrella of British constitutional rule. Gandhi was unmoved. He wanted absolute independence.

  Although he remained in Indian politics, Jinnah, who rarely got on with others, was never again a formidable figure until shortly before independence. He had no big political base. The Muslim League had not much more than a fifth of the seats at the 1937 elections. Yet it took the Second World War for the British to realize they had to build up faith in Jinnah as a leader. This was neither a constitutional nor political act of morality. Jinnah had influence with over 50 per cent of the Muslim-based Indian army. That was Britain’s main concern. India and the whole Empire were again to be called to the colours – the British colours – as the world once more went to war. The Empire rallied to the Union flag and, arguably, it gained strength from this bloody conflict. In fact, the Second World War revived something that had lain dormant for a decade or more – imperialism. Of course, the 1931 Statute of Westminster should have made clear to all the dominions (but not the Crown colonies) that they had the option of war or not. Ireland for example, understood its position – it declared its neutrality. In Australia, Bob Menzies (1894–1978), usually called Pig Iron Bob, the most loyal subject of any monarch, immediately declared that Australia was in the war. His view was, he said, a constitutional one and a de
claration of war by Britain was enough legality. As he told Australians on 3 September 1939, there was ‘unity in the Empire ranks – One King, One Flag, One Cause’.

  The New Zealand Prime Minister M. J. Savage (1872–1940) asked the Governor-General for a formal declaration of war before saying that New Zealand had signed on. ‘Where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand,’ he said.

  J. B. M. Hertzog (1866–1942) in South Africa was not so sure. He did not like the British but his deputy Jan Smuts (1870–1950) did. It went to a Parliamentary vote. Smuts won that vote but sixty of the 145 members voted not to go to war. Smuts then became Prime Minister, not because Hertzog’s refusal to go to war had been beaten, but because the Governor-General would not allow him to put the case before the people in a General Election. That was true imperial power, a power that would not have been exercised in peacetime.

  We should not lump the rest of the British Empire in Africa in with South Africa. Sierra Leone raised war funds for Britain ‘in grateful recognition of the great benefits which Sierra Leone has received during the past 135 years under the British flag’. Maybe as many as 200,000 Africans were conscripted, but not into military service. They were sent as miners and labourers to dig for the other form of victory, the natural resources needed to manufacture weapons and military systems and to feed those who would use them. Remember, this was a world war. So when Malaya fell to the Japanese, alternative sources of rubber had to be found. Nigerians provided them. By the end of the war, according to the Colonial Office, 374,000 Africans had been in the war – of those 7,000 died – not all at the front. The Colonial Office said that blacks were not to be sent to Britain for enlistment. But what happened when the Canadians enlisted West Indians? And as the war went on, the greater was the need for manpower from all over the Empire. The RAF may have recruited West Indians, thousands of them, but there was clearly a bias against coloured members of the colonies. This had long existed and showed itself in what we would now find as bizarre circumstances. Papers were written questioning what would happen if a white nurse had to attend a black wounded soldier? What would happen if a black medical orderly had to attend a white officer, or worse, the wounded wife of a white officer? These were social issues.