Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  The prime minister would not be placated. On July 25, 1940, he attacked Amery so furiously in the War Cabinet that one member, Sir Alexander Cadogan, walked out in embarrassment. The next day Amery went to 10 Downing Street to meet Churchill, who “said he would sooner give up political life at once, or rather go out into the wilderness and fight, than to admit a revolution which meant the end of the Imperial Crown in India,” Amery wrote in his diary. It was “hopeless to try and point out to him that what I was suggesting was well within the four corners of pledges and statements made again and again and could hardly be so revolutionary if Zetland at the India Office had proposed it months ago.” The prime minister demanded that Amery show him all the telegrams he had sent to Linlithgow—in which he had freely expressed himself about Churchill—and perused them carefully, showing signs of agitation. “I am afraid he will read and re-read the telegrams and get more and more angry as he does so and work himself up into a high mood of virtuous indignation,” Amery sighed.25

  His Majesty’s Government could not accept just any constitution drafted by a group of Indians, the prime minister ultimately informed the viceroy. “We should have to know beforehand what this body was, and feel assured that it truly represented the broad masses of the leading Indian communities, including, of course, not only Hindoos and Moslems, but the Princes, the Depressed Classes, the Sikhs, the Anglo-Indians and others.” (The so-called Depressed Classes, whom Churchill also referred to as Untouchables, were people of tribal origins or lower castes. Anglo-Indians were whites resident in India.) Nor could the War Cabinet tie the hands of a postwar British Parliament by promising dominion status: “under our free, democratic system,” Churchill asserted, it was impossible to guarantee the attitude of a future House of Commons toward India.26

  The prime minister’s refusal to consider any move toward the colony’s emancipation thwarted the possibility of meeting the wartime needs of the United Kingdom by the willing cooperation of Indian nationalists—and his determination to instead secure their compliance by divide and rule would disastrously deepen communal hostilities. “The whole basis of our policy, as you have laid it down yourself, is that it is Indian divisions and not our refusal to surrender authority that is holding back India’s march towards the ‘declared goal’,” Amery wrote to the prime minister in April 1941. “On that ground I can continue to hold my own.”27

  THAT WINSTON CHURCHILL was for even an instant prepared to relinquish the post of prime minister, to which he had aspired his entire life, speaks to the depth of his attachment to India. A decade earlier, it had even induced Churchill to break with the Tory Party on its decision to permit limited self-government in the colony. “I have always said that the key to Winston is to realise that he is Mid Victorian, steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern point of view,” Amery had written in 1929, after the two had had a long discussion on contemporary affairs. “It is only his verbal exuberance and abounding vitality that conceal this elementary fact about him.”28

  At the time, Lord Irwin’s promise of dominion status for India had prompted Churchill to launch a forceful campaign to bolster his government’s commitment to the Raj. “Dominion status can certainly not be attained while India is a prey to fierce racial and religious dissensions and when the withdrawal of British protection would mean the immediate resumption of mediæval wars,” he had warned in an article in the Daily Mail. Should His Majesty’s Government make any concessions at all, the nationalists would only be emboldened to ask for more. “The truth is that Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat’s-meat.” In 1935, when despite his furious five-year campaign the new constitution for India had passed into law, Churchill denounced it as “a monstrous monument of sham built by the pygmies”—the latter including the leaders of the Tory Party. A full third of the population of England “would have to go down, out, or under, if we ceased to be a great Empire,” he warned in an oblique, if exaggerated, reference to India’s importance for the British economy.29

  Churchill’s image of India as the fountainhead of British prestige, prosperity, and power derived in part from that of his own father. Lord Randolph had viewed the Taj Mahal by moonlight, “an unequalled sight,” and bagged a tiger from the back of an elephant, “certainly the acme of sport.” In 1885 and 1886 he had served as secretary of state for India, in which capacity he had ordered the invasion of upper Burma. Introducing his budget for India before the House of Commons, Lord Randolph had urged parliamentarians to take a more energetic interest in the colony, “that most truly bright and precious gem in the crown of the Queen, the possession of which, more than that of all your colonial dominions, has raised in power, in resource, in wealth, and in authority this small island home of ours far above the level of the majority of nations and of States—has placed it on an equality with, perhaps even in a position of superiority over, every other empire either of ancient or modern times.” When his father died in 1895, the twenty-year-old Winston had resolved to “pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.” As a cavalryman in India, Churchill had further pledged to “devote my life” to the protection of “this great Empire of ours.”30

  Winston Churchill had been bequeathed an imperial heritage simply by being born, in 1874, at Blenheim Palace. Featuring grand vistas, giant portraits of ancestors, and gory scenes of battle frozen into stone, the palace was Queen Anne’s reward to John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, for achieving a glorious victory in Bavaria in 1704. But Winston’s upbringing was as parsimonious of warmth as his heritage was opulent and intimidating. At the age of seven he was sent to boarding school, where he became a paradox to his teachers, devouring novels meant for readers far older than he was but remaining resolutely at the bottom of his form in virtually every academic subject. “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn,” Churchill explained. At Harrow, an elite institution that trained upper-class youths to become leading citizens of the empire, Winston, judged unable to learn Latin and Greek, had to sit through more English grammar than anyone else. “Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Early Life. He would wield the power of language with immense facility and force.31

  At the military academy Sandhurst, Winston thrilled to the idea of battle and wondered if he would ever get to apply in combat all the martial strategy he was absorbing. “It did seem such a pity that it all had to be make-believe, and that the age of wars between civilized nations had come to an end forever,” he wrote in his memoir in the late 1920s, reminiscing about a time when war had still been glamorous. The battles that had bloodied Europe for centuries seemed past; instead, the continent’s various powers were completing the conquest and colonization of Asia and Africa. “Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples” such as Afghans and Zulus to shoot at, Churchill remembered thinking as a cadet. In between practicing cavalry charges, the would-be officers would sit around hoping for at least an uprising so that “we might have India to reconquer.” In such an event, “we should all get our commissions so much earlier and march about the plains of India and win medals and distinction, and perhaps rise to very high command like Clive when quite young!”32

  Churchill traveled to India in 1896 as an officer of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, a cavalry regiment. After two days and a glittering banquet in Bombay, he had formed a “highly favourable opinion” of the colony. He would write that he dropped off to sleep that second night with “the keenest realization of the great work which England was doing in India and of her high mission to rule these primitive but agreeable races for their welfare and our own.”33

  Churchill’s cantonment in Bangalore was spacious, and the abundance of servants—one of whom would shave him at dawn while he lay half-as
leep in bed—made military life luxurious. He found India sensual, exotic, romantic: “Snipe (and snakes) abound in the marshes; brilliant butterflies dance in the sunshine, and nautch-girls by the light of the moon.” Between games of polo, the young man devoured books that his father had favored. “I revelled in his Essays”—he wrote of Macaulay’s stirring histories of Clive, Hastings, and other conquerors. Churchill also learned about nature’s hierarchy from Charles Darwin and about the perils of human fecundity from Reverend Thomas Malthus. And, as an act of filial piety and in preparation for a future career in politics, he read through every parliamentary debate in which his father had taken part.34

  Even as he made up for the higher education he had missed, Churchill read only those works that reinforced his perspective on the world. He took straight to heart every sentiment that appealed, and was rarely forced to consider both sides of an argument. Churchill acknowledged as much. “I therefore adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe,” he wrote, “while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.” This habit of thinking was evident to his contemporaries. An acquaintance complained in 1921: “He does not want to hear your views. He does not want to disturb the beautiful clarity of his thought by the tiresome reminders of the other side.” Throughout his life, on India and myriad other topics, Churchill would cling to certain convictions with the tenacity of a bulldog, the figure that would long be associated with him. Only “some lucky phrase, some form of words, some vivid image,” as his friend Violet Asquith put it, could loosen its jaws.35

  In 1897, a two-thousand-mile train journey took Churchill to the foothills of the Himalayas. “Those large leather-lined Indian railway carriages, deeply-shuttered and blinded from the blistering sun and kept fairly cool by a circular wheel of wet straw which one turned from time to time, were well adapted to the local conditions,” he would recount three decades later. “I spent five days in a dark padded moving cell, reading mostly by lamplight or by some jealously admitted ray of glare.” Perhaps because he was so absorbed in his reading, Churchill did not describe the landscapes he traversed or the famine raging at the time, described as the worst of the century (although that appellation would pass to the famine that began in 1899). Instead, the young man’s upbringing, the tomes he perused, and the skirmishes to which he was headed would combine to frame his ideas about India. Malthus, Darwin, Macaulay, and pride in paternal inheritance would fuse into a comprehension of human destiny that would nowadays be called social Darwinism.36

  Churchill stopped for a night at a military camp where he had a friend. Fellow officers inspired him with “noble sentiments” by singing:37 Great White Mother, far across the sea,

  Ruler of the Empire may ever she be.

  Long may she reign, glorious and free,

  In the Great White Motherland.

  Churchill was going to the North West Frontier Province, British India’s border with Afghanistan. “From the level plain of the valleys the hills rise abruptly. Their steep and rugged slopes are thickly strewn with great rocks, and covered with coarse, rank grass,” he wrote in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which described expeditions of the Indian Army against Pakhtun farmers. “The rice fields along both banks of the stream display a broad, winding strip of vivid green.” If the young man looked up from his books, that was because this stark paradise—with its “splendid butterflies, whose wings of blue and green change colour in the light, like shot silk”—was a setting for strife.38

  British strategists had ordered an advance to the north, so as to claim mountain passes by which Russian forces might threaten the borders of India. Several tribes made their homes on this route, however, and they resisted the incursions on their territory. Writing of the Pakhtun tribesman, Churchill declared: “Not because he is degraded, not because we covet his valleys, but because his actions interfere with the safety of our Empire, he must be crushed.” He was at the front line as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, but he took enthusiastic part in skirmishes: “there is no reputation I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation of personal courage,” he wrote in a letter home. The twenty-three-year-old had also surmised that his blow-by-blow accounts of the empire’s battles would give him the visibility necessary to establish a career in politics.39

  Churchill would always carry with him certain lessons he learned in the frontier wars. He could be magnanimous in victory: after the fighting ended in the tribes’ appeal for a truce, he pronounced the Pakhtuns to be “a brave and warlike race.” While the conflict raged, however, his hostility was absolute. “These tribesmen are among the most miserable and brutal creatures of the earth,” he had opined about Pakhtuns just a week earlier. Insofar as “these valleys are purged from the pernicious vermin that infest them, so will the happiness of humanity be increased.” He recounted in violent detail how the British commanding general, Sir Bindon Blood, ordered reprisals after an enemy attack on a military camp: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.” Churchill offered a defense of such scorched earth tactics in Malakand, arguing that “it is only an unphilosophic mind that will hold it legitimate to take a man’s life and illegitimate to destroy his property.” Economic warfare was destined to become a key weapon in his arsenal of military tactics.40

  In a sense, Churchill found his fortune in India: Malakand became a spectacular publishing success. “I had never been praised before,” he would recall; now, even the Prince of Wales wrote to congratulate him. Having conquered many of his own deficiencies in India, Churchill soon left for other fields of battle. In South Africa, he helped save a trainload of soldiers from a Boer ambush, got captured by the enemy, and managed to escape. That adventure made him a household name, while the royalties accumulating from Malakand allowed him to support himself during his preparations to enter public life. At age twenty-five, in September 1900, he was elected to the House of Commons.41

  To Winston Churchill the empire, won by the valor of heroes such as General Robert Clive, would always remain “worth the blood of its noblest citizens.” In his autobiography, he exhorted English youths to meet the challenge. “You must take your places in life’s fighting line,” he wrote. “Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities. Raise the glorious flag again, advance them upon the new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown.” The world could not really be harmed by conquest—only renewed. “She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.”42

  IN AUGUST 1940, after Churchill torpedoed Amery’s proposals for granting India dominion status within a year after the war, the viceroy issued a long statement to the effect that a body of suitably representative natives would be permitted to draw up a constitution at some unspecified point following the war. No minority group would be obliged to accept a government of which it disapproved. In effect, His Majesty’s Government was giving the Muslim League the power to determine the nature and pace of political advancement in India. Nehru described the offer as “fantastic and absurd,” and to no one’s surprise the Congress rejected it.43

  Several of the party’s leaders now urged Gandhi to sanction a civil disobedience movement protesting India’s induction into the war. Gandhi refused: the Muslim League had signaled its intention to support the war, so he surmised the danger of clashes between independence-minded Hindus and pro-government Muslims to be high. Instead, and in “fear and trembling” at the horrors he envisaged erupting around him, Gandhi began nominating tried and tested individuals to offer satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, by means of seditious statements. Nehru was arrested on October 31, 1940, after giving three speeches urging the public to refuse to aid the government’s war. It was �
�monstrous,” Nehru declared when he was brought before the court, that hundreds of millions of Indians should be commandeered into a war not of their choosing, and “amazing and significant that this should be done in the name of freedom and self-determination and democracy.” He was sentenced to four years’ rigorous imprisonment. As the circle of those nominated for satyagraha expanded into the villages, the number of people convicted of sedition would rise to 25,000 by the summer of 1941.44

  Gandhi himself remained free—an indication that the government considered this restrained protest to be insignificant. Should he have to be arrested, however, Churchill suspected he might resort to a hunger strike, a political weapon with which the British government had long experience. One standard procedure for thwarting the protestors (called Cat and Mouse) was to release them, only to rearrest them when they resumed eating. Churchill determined that Gandhi would not get this treatment. Amery wrote in his diary on November 21, 1940, that the prime minister was “particularly anxious that I should ask Linlithgow to convey privately to Gandhi that we had no objections to his fasting to death if he wanted to.”45

  Subhas Bose was already in prison, having been arrested in July 1940. After failing to resolve his dispute with Gandhi, he had resigned the presidency of the Indian National Congress and returned to Calcutta, where he had once served as mayor. There he had planned a march on the Holwell Monument, which commemorated the Englishmen who had suffocated to death in 1756 after their imprisonment by nawab Siraj-ud-daula. To many of the city’s white residents, the monument recalled the brutality that had preceded and thereby necessitated the British Raj. To Bose it was “the symbol of our slavery and humiliation,” and he resolved to tear it down.46