Other Ranks European
Other Ranks Asiatic
Other Ranks Coloured
ATS [Auxiliary Territorial Service – i.e. women]51
2
Friendly Relations: India and the Liquidation of Empire, 1945–7
In 1945, the gravediggers of empire commenced work. No government before or after 1945 ever took a conscious decision to dissolve the empire, but equally none was prepared to embark on an alternative course, its preservation come what may. The ministers, diplomats, soldiers and civil servants who found themselves responsible for devising and carrying out the policies of imperial disengagement did not imagine that they were parties to a funeral. Rather, they saw themselves as midwives, facilitating the births of new nations which were emerging from the imperial womb. The conventional, bipartisan wisdom which held sway for the next twenty-five years insisted the infant states would grow up within the extended family of the new, multi-racial Commonwealth, whose members shared a maternal affection for Britain, its democratic system and traditional respect for individual freedom. Never was an empire dismantled with such a sense of hope for the future.
There were circumstances in which Britain was willing to forgo an orderly retreat from empire and dig its heels in, but they were exceptional. Britain was engaged in the Cold War, and so no colony could be allowed to pass under Communist control after independence. So, while committed to future Malayan self-determination, Britain was prepared in 1948 to fight an extended campaign (euphemistically called an ‘emergency’ to avoid charges of colonial oppression) against local Communist guerrillas. Nor could the government allow a colony to dissolve into chaos, and for this reason operations were undertaken against the Mau Mau in Kenya between 1952 and 1954; another ‘emergency’.
None of Britain’s rearguard colonial wars matched the ferocity and length of those waged by the French in Indo-China and Algeria, and the Portuguese in Angola and Moçambique. British politicians needed to look no further than events in North America in the 1770s or, more pertinently, in southern Ireland after 1918 to identify the pitfalls that lay in wait for those who wanted to cling to empire at any cost. The Irish campaign also illustrated the fact there was a point beyond which the public was unwilling to tolerate armed coercion. This was understandable since a constant theme of modern imperial propaganda had been the goodwill which existed between the empire’s rulers and its subjects.
Furthermore, for the first time in its history, the entire British people was directly involved in the defence of the empire. Between 1947 and 1960, its outposts and trouble spots were manned and policed by peacetime conscripts, national servicemen. Professional fighting men played their part, but the casualty rolls of imperial conflicts now included sons and sweethearts who were not under arms by choice.
The public was also made more intimately aware of imperial campaigns and the issues behind them through the novelty of the television set, which was rapidly entering homes from 1950 onwards. The government quickly appreciated that, carefully handled, the medium could be manipulated to show colonial conflicts in a favourable light. At the end of 1957, the ITV Christmas Day show ‘Christmas in Cyprus’ concentrated on the festivities of soldiers, including national servicemen, who were there dealing with another ‘emergency’. The script was vetted by the army and Colonial Office, and both warmly endorsed ‘natural unrehearsed shots of soldiers assisting Cypriot civilians etc.; particularly women and children in the streets’. The programme opened on a positive note with the announcement, ‘Cyprus is part of the British Commonwealth,’ and continued with the assertion that British troops were only there to help its people.1 Those viewers whose wits had not been dulled by seasonal indulgence may have wondered, if this was so, why were Cypriots shooting at soldiers? Others no doubt settled down and watched troops giving a party for Cypriot children.
‘Emergencies’ of the sort experienced in Cyprus were relatively rare. The British empire did not dissolve like the French, Portuguese, and for that matter the Russian, in tears and blood. In India and the colonies an alternative way was devised, which involved an orderly and cordial withdrawal, and the assumption of power by a government which had been elected. At its best, from Britain’s standpoint, this arrangement was accomplished with a minimum of fuss, and wherever possible the retention of strategic bases, behind-the-scenes political influence and commercial advantages. What had to be avoided at all costs was a helter-skelter retreat which left behind a political vacuum, or worse, chaos.
Mastering the arcane diplomatic art of colonial disengagement took time, and to begin with its practitioners were moving in the dark and learning as they went. With little else to guide them, they turned, in British fashion, to the past and adopted the old empire-builders’ rule, which was to find someone with legal authority, such as a chief or rajah, and do business with him. Now, the empire’s demolition men had to cultivate and work in harness with the new power-brokers, local politicians. The leaders of various parties and national movements were assumed to speak for the majority of the people. Whether or not they did, these tribunes found themselves treated as spokesmen for nations and the eventual successors to the imperial administration. There were certain rituals; at some stage local political leaders would find themselves in collision with the colonial authorities and were consequently locked up in prison. In time, and with their nationalist credentials enhanced by their detention, they were discharged to take their places at their gaolers’ conference tables. This pattern had been established during the 1930s and 1940s when Indian Congress leaders, including Gandhi, were incarcerated: Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Dr Hastings Banda followed, in the Gold Coast, Kenya and Nyasaland respectively.
On the one hand, those responsible for surrendering power wanted above all to deliver it to someone who could exercise it effectively and preserve order. On the other, Britain was publicly pledged to confer on its colonies parliamentary government and a legal system designed to protect individual freedoms. This transfer of institutions had been easily undertaken in the white dominions, for their inhabitants were already steeped in British political tradition. But in India and the colonies there was a very different political culture. Organised political activity in the Western manner had begun very recently (the Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885, the African in 1912) and, from its beginnings, had revolved around a single issue: the termination of foreign rule. This overriding objective determined the evolution of political life and its domination by tightly-organised parties, which had to be big enough to engage a powerful and equally monolithic government. Circumstances had, therefore, discouraged a diversity of parties or the growth of two or three of more or less equal popular appeal as had occurred in Britain and the dominions. The one-party state had its genesis in the history of Indian and colonial struggles for independence.
Imperial demography hindered decolonisation. No one concerned with drawing the empire’s frontiers had ever imagined that he was setting the boundaries for a future self-governing independent state. Antipathetic racial, tribal and religious groups had often been corralled together willy-nilly. When the depth of ethnic, tribal and sectarian antagonism became apparent, it was argued that they could be contained by a firm, even-handed imperial administration backed by police and soldiers. So it was that in India, Ceylon, Burma and elsewhere Britain became the protector of various minorities who were shielded from the ill-will of their neighbours. Old prejudices were not, however, eliminated by the fear of imperial punishment; they remained, as it were, frozen. The makers of new governments had to find ways to provide for the continued safety of vulnerable minorities even if this meant the dilution of the democratic ideal.
None of these hurdles along the path towards colonial self-determination was insurmountable, given time and the forebearance of everyone involved. Neither was readily available. Once decolonisation was underway, it gathered a momentum of its own which made it impossible for the assortment of proconsuls, civil servants and constitutiona
l lawyers who devised new governments to pause. Impatient local politicians and their followers interpreted delays as evidence of cold feet, and so procrastination, whatever its cause, could easily provoke the kind of popular disturbances which Britain was desperate to avoid. Disposing of an empire was hard and dispiriting work; Attlee publicly described Mountbatten’s labours in India as truly heroic. Not everyone concurred; Harold Nicolson noted in his diary: ‘.… it is curious that we should regard as a hero the man who liquidates the Empire which other heroes such as Clive, Warren Hastings and Napier won for us. Very odd indeed.’2
At the time (June 1947) Indian independence was a few weeks off, and its achievement was being hailed as a triumph. A simultaneous and less well-known essay in imperial disengagement was being undertaken in Burma, and served as a perfect example of what could go wrong. His reluctant service as a policeman in Burma had convinced Orwell of the evils of colonialism, which was understandable since British rule was disliked by many sections of Burmese society. Political and racial divisions and the brittleness of imperial loyalties were exposed when the Japanese invaded in 1942. The Burmese inclined towards their conquerors while the inland hill tribes, the Karens and the Kachins, supported Britain, which had protected them from their lowland neighbours.
The most prominent Burmese nationalist, Thakin Aung San, the general-secretary of Our Burma League, had defected to Japan in 1940, returned, and was installed by his patrons as head of the Burma National Army. In August 1943, Japan declared Burma independent, but Aung San, a consummate opportunist, abandoned his old friends and threw himself and his followers behind the British in March 1945, when it was clear that they would expel the Japanese.
There was no clear blueprint for a post-war Burma beyond the promise that it would eventually achieve independence within the Commonwealth. The reinstated governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, proposed a six- or seven-year period of reconstruction and the British government set aside £84 million for the task. Ultimate authority lay with Mountbatten as commander-in-chief of SEAC, and he suspected Dorman-Smith and his staff were Blimps who would hold up independence.3 He preferred to reach an accord with the man who seemed to have popular support, Aung San. This was unavoidable expediency, for Mountbatten could not spare white troops to police Burma, and was chary about testing the obedience of his Indian soldiers in a showdown with Burmese nationalists.
Mountbatten’s instinct appeared sound at first. Aung San’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League gained an overwhelming majority in the April 1946 election, but the result was deceptive. The polls had been boycotted by three other parties, and the Karens refused to take the twenty-four seats allocated to them as a minority, choosing instead to press for a separate state. Even though the country was on the verge of fragmentation, Mountbatten pressed on in the belief that the Burmese would have to settle their own problems. Through backstairs string-pulling, he engineered Dorman-Smith’s dismissal in August.4 What followed was exactly the anarchy which cautious men had feared: in July 1947 Aung San and six other ministers were shot dead by a gang of political rivals who, in Al Capone style, burst into the cabinet room with sub-machine guns, and there was a widespread upsurge in dacoity. Notwithstanding these indications of a breakdown in order, full independence was attained in January 1948.
Within twelve months Burma had declared itself a republic and left the Commonwealth, and there were rebellions by Communist and Karen separatists. Whether or not these events were an indictment of British rule in Burma, they were an inauspicious prelude to the dissolution of the empire.
* * *
India’s progress to self-government was a compelling drama with a convoluted plot that unfolded at two levels. On the upper, British and Indian statesmen, politicians, lawyers and administrators sat in rooms in Delhi and, when it became too stifling, Simla, and endeavoured to construct an apparatus of government that would satisfy the whole of India. They were participants in a race against time for, on the lower level, and in the cities, towns and countryside, hundreds of thousands of Indians were beginning to turn against and kill each other. As the violence spread and the casualties multiplied, onlookers feared the onset of a civil war which the principal actors were powerless to stop.
The chief British actor was Attlee, who towards the end of his life believed that he would be best remembered for what he had done to facilitate the transfer of power in India. He saw it as a moral duty, to which he and his party had long been pledged, and, for he was a pragmatist, an advantage to Britain. The Treasury would no longer have to dispense money to maintain a British garrison in the subcontinent and, if Britain got the terms it desired, commerce with India would continue to flourish. Attlee also appreciated that a peaceful exchange of power and a stable India would add to British prestige and serve as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. He and his chiefs of staff also wanted India within the Commonwealth, and if possible as an ally which would continue to host British bases. Attlee’s mandate to Mountbatten, delivered in February 1947, instructed the Viceroy to secure ‘the closest and most friendly relations between India and the UK. A feature of this relationship should be a military treaty.’5 By this time, Attlee had conceded that the subcontinent would be split between India and Pakistan, which he had not wanted, for it was not in Britain’s interests. A divided India was a weakened India, and the western segment of its most vulnerable portion, Pakistan, faced Afghanistan and beyond it Russia. In terms of the Cold War, the partition of India was a setback.
Mountbatten, whom Attlee had chosen to accelerate and superintend the final handing over of power, was the last in a sequence of officials and ministers sent to negotiate with the Indian leadership. His predecessor as viceroy had been Field-Marshal Wavell who, faced with mounting disorder during 1946, despaired, and was ultimately removed by Attlee for his pessimism. This had owed much to the failure of Attlee’s three-man cabinet mission, which had arrived in India at the end of March 1946 with instructions to arrange a constitution which would keep India intact and offend as few of its people as possible. Cripps, the mission’s head, was a left-wing idealist in tune with Indian aspirations, who knew what to expect from his last series of negotiations in 1942 and, according to Bevin, was too pro-Congress. Lord Pethick (‘Pathetic’)-Lawrence was a frail old-Etonian Labour veteran of seventy-four, who had also been chosen for his experience of Indian affairs. The third member of the mission, A.V. Alexander was a Co-op-sponsored MP with a good record in office, and, like many working-class Labour ministers, was a bit of a sentimental imperialist. This was not surprising, for he and others of his generation, like Bevin, had grown to manhood when jingoism was rampant.
Opposite the cabinet mission were the figures whom Wavell called ‘the great tribunes of the Indian people’, Nehru and the Congress leadership. Their aim was to replace the raj by Congress, and they spoke and acted as if it was the mirror of the whole Indian nation, which, according to Gandhi, was indivisible. There was also Dr Jinnah, who thought that it was not, and spoke for the subcontinent’s 92 million Muslims. Wavell disliked Jinnah, whom he believed a megalomaniac; suspected Gandhi of malevolence towards the British, but respected Nehru as a truly ‘great man’.6
While the architects of India’s future deliberated, the people became increasingly restless. During the winter of 1945–6, the government’s decision to prosecute a handful of prominent former INA men for treason, and in some instances war crimes, was bitterly opposed by Congress. In September 1945 Congress had resolved that the thousands of INA soldiers could be ‘of the greatest service in the heavy work of building up a new and free India’.7 In the next few months they were lionised as heroes by Congress and those imprisoned or awaiting trial received the aura of martyrdom. In January 1946, an outraged Hindustan Times alleged that twenty-five INA prisoners had been bayoneted for singing the Congress anthem ‘Jai Hind’ (Long Live India), but an official investigation revealed that they had merely been ‘prodded’ in the buttocks.8 These men’s case had been take
n up by Gandhi, whose attitude towards the ex-INA men was characteristically ambivalent. ‘Though I can have nothing in common with any defence by force of arms,’ he wrote, ‘I am never blind to the valour of patriotism often displayed by persons in arms, as seems to be the case here.’9 He did not say whether his definition of patriotism embraced the two million Indians who had fought for rather than against Britain.
As matters stood at the beginning of 1946, Indian security rested on the Indian army and the British garrison. Among the latter were many men who were unenthusiastic about defending the raj and anxious to get home. During the summer of 1945 army censors uncovered many complaints about an ‘absence of purpose’ in the letters of soldiers serving in Asia, and those in India believed that a shorter spell of overseas duty and swift demobilisation were ‘inalienable rights’.10 Just over a year later morale in India was drooping and complaints about slow demobilisation were rising.11 Disaffection was greatest and most vocal among RAF personnel in India; during 1946 there were mutinous demonstrations at a dozen bases.12 This was disturbing, since the commander-in-chief in India, Auchinleck, had considered resurrecting the precedents of 1919 and 1942 and using aircraft if popular disorders got out of hand.13
Of far greater concern was the erosion of the morale of the Indian servicemen. This was spectacularly demonstrated by the four-day mutiny by 7,000 ratings of the Royal Indian Navy (a quarter of its strength) at the end of February 1946. The trouble began aboard the frigate Talwar, whose commanding officer, Commander F.W. King frequently addressed his men as ‘black buggers’, ‘coolie bastards’ and ‘jungli Indians’. Given the tension in India, such loutish provocation was bound to provoke a violent backlash and an incident involving King triggered a mutiny which swiftly spread to other RIN ships in Bombay. Using their wireless transmitters, the Bombay mutineers alerted the crews of vessels in Calcutta and Madras who joined the revolt.14 Congress and Muslim League flags were hoisted over the Bombay flotilla and attempts to suppress the mutiny led to serious rioting on shore. The restoration of order by British and Mahratha troops left 223 dead and over 1,000 wounded.15
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 67
