Winston Churchill’s Plan for Post-war India
By: Madhusree Mukerjee
Vol XLV No.32 August 07, 2010
Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945, has compared the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill with Adolf Hitler in his manuscript The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister. This article dwells on the circumstances of this remark by Amery. It finds that Churchill’s idea of redesigning Indian society by terminating the babu class and moneylenders and his policy towards Bengal famine and the War Cabinet meetings provoked Amery to make such an explosive comment.
As the victorious end of this glorious struggle for human freedom draws near, the time is coming for a policy in relation to India more worthy of our true selves. We have had enough… of shameful pledges about Indian self-government, and of sickening surrenders to babu agitation. If we went even further two years ago in an open invitation to Indians to unite and kick us out of India that was only because we were in a hole. That peril is over and obviously a new situation has arisen of which we are fully entitled to take advantage.
The above is the opening paragraph of a three-page typewritten manuscript, dated August 1944 and entitled The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister. It is to be found among the papers of Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945. The manuscript is appended by the initials WSC, and appears at first glance to have been written by Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill at a time when the second world war was coming to a bloody but triumphant end.
Two years earlier, in the spring of 1942, the shockingly rapid advance of Japanese forces onto the Indian border had created political pressures that had induced Churchill and Amery into a desperate measure: they had sent socialist politician Sir Stafford Cripps to India with an offer of dominion status after the war, in return for the cooperation of the Indian National Congress with the war effort. According to the 1944 document, however, Churchill hoped to rescind the Cripps offer – the “open invitation to Indians to unite and kick us out of India” – and instead to announce a new policy on the colony:
No more nonsense about self-government; down with all (brown) landlords and profit-making industrialists, collectivise agriculture on Russian lines and touch up the untouchables.
Churchill’s New Dawn Vision
The scheme would commence with removing those Englishmen – including the then viceroy, Lord Archibald Wavell – who, according to this paper,
would not only appear to have taken our pledges seriously, but to be imbued with a miserable sneaking sympathy for what are called Indian aspirations, not to speak of an inveterate and scandalous propensity to defend Indian interests as against those of their own country, and a readiness to see British workers sweat and toil for generations in order to swell even further the distended paunches of Hindu moneylenders.
The pledges would include the repeated promises of self-government for India made by the British government. The numerous babus “who infest the government offices” would also have to be disposed of, the paper continued, and replaced by a new force of English re-educators who would uphold “our historic right to govern India in accordance with our own ideas and interests”.
The regeneration of India would involve uplifting the untouchable, suppressing child marriage, limiting population, and getting rid of cows. Most importantly, it would require the imposition of a radically new administrative structure. Every five villages would require “one English instructor in the new way of life”, as well as “one English head policeman with five Indian subordinates drawn from the loyal martial races”. In total, the colony would require 1,60,000 instructors, 1,60,000 English police officers and 8,00,000 Indian policemen. Holding this system in place would also require the army and air force to be expanded, “at any rate until India has become accustomed to the new regime”. Any criticism in the British parliament of the “new dawn over India” would be banned. “It will also be necessary, following an excellent Russian precedent, to forbid any but trusted officials to leave India or to allow any visitors from outside except under the closest supervision by an official Intourist Agency.”1
Did Winston Churchill really envision this extraordinary reconfiguration of Indian society? The short answer is “no” and the long answer is “yes”. A finely pencilled notation reveals the paper’s immediate author: “A skit by LSA after a harangue by WSC in Cabinet – only slightly exaggerated”. The last two words are underlined. Amery had penned the paper, but he did not invent the ideas it contained. He merely caricatured the prime minister’s ramblings in the War Cabinet – no doubt to vent his anger at Churchill’s devastating colonial policies, for which the British and Indian public and press were blaming the secretary of state for India; and perhaps also to explain to shocked colleagues, why during the War Cabinet meeting of
4 August 1944, Amery had compared Winston Churchill, the beloved war leader, to Adolf Hitler.2
War Cabinet Meetings
On that summer day, the War Cabinet had been discussing a response that Wavell had drafted to a missive from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In an overture to the viceroy, Gandhi had offered to suspend the Quit India movement (which had commenced in August 1942, following the Congress rejection of the Cripps offer) and to cooperate with the war effort in exchange for an immediate declaration of independence. The viceroy had drafted a polite reply turning Gandhi down, but offering an olive branch: if Hindus, Muslims, and the main Indian minorities agreed on a constitution, they could form a transitional government, under the tutelage of the existing one, until the war was over.3
The prime minister was vehemently opposed to Indian emancipation, however, and moreover, bore immense personal animosity towards Gandhi. When the old man had been released from British custody three months earlier, in May 1944 – because he appeared to be at risk of death from a coronary or cerebral thrombosis – Churchill had instructed Wavell that under no circumstances should he negotiate with Gandhi, “a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fibre, largely in the hands of native vested interests”.4Accordingly, when Wavell’s draft response to Gandhi had come up before the War Cabinet for the first time, “the real storm broke”, Amery wrote in his diary. The viceroy should not be interacting with“ a traitor who ought to be put back in prison”, raged the prime minister. “As for Wavell he ought never to have been appointed”. The tirade had lasted for a full hour. A committee had rewritten Wavell’s response so that it bristled with hostile legalese, but the War Cabinet had sent it back for further revision.
At the next War Cabinet meeting on India, on 4 August 1944, Churchill inserted into the new draft response to Gandhi a statement of British responsibilities towards untouchables in a land ruled by caste Hindus. Amery pointed out that this was irrelevant to the issues that Gandhi had raised – and provoked a furious response from Churchill, “describing how after the war he was going to go back on all the shameful story of the last twenty years of surrender”. Instead of honouring repeated promises of emancipation for India, Churchill continued, he would strengthen British rule and simultaneously
carry out a great regeneration of India based on extinguishing landlords and oppressive industrialists and uplift the peasant and untouchable, probably by collectivisation on Russian lines. It might be necessary to get rid of wretched sentimentalists like Wavell and most of the present English officials in India, who were more Indian than the Indians, and send out new men.
Amery’s Hitler Remark
According to Amery’s diary, Churchill even attacked the patriotism of the Secretary of State for India on the grounds that he supported the interests of “Indian moneylenders” over those of Englishmen. “Naturally I lost patience”, continued Amery in his diary, “and couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s which annoyed him no little. I am by no means sure whether on this subject of India he is really quite sane.”5
Amery made the Hitler remark in the heat of argument, but clearly he stood
by it. For he left much out of his diaries – notably, any hint of his Jewish heritage, a secret uncovered in 2000 by historian William D Rubinstein. So the retention of this explosive comment can be no accident. Given that Chaim Weizmann, the future premier of Israel, had recently told Amery about a “monstrous German blackmailing offer to release a million Jews in return for ten thousand lorries and other equipment, failing which bargain they proposed to exterminate them”, he understood as well as anyone could in those times the implications of his comparison.6 Amery may have been provoked by the reference to moneylenders – a hint that Churchill saw upper class Indians through the same lens as anti-Semites might perceive Jews. “All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to… the Jew of the dark ages”, Thomas Babington Macaulay had written of the Bengali, who, in the view of this 19th century historian, compressed into his diminutive form every loathsome characteristic that he perceived in the Hindu: “as usurers, as money-changers, as sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them”. The Bengali babu, another writer had joked in 1911, was “something of an Irishman, something of an Italian, something of a Jew: if one can conceive of an Irishman who would run away from a fight instead of into it, an Italian without a sense of beauty and a Jew who would not risk five pounds on the chance of making five hundred.”7
Amery may have had a further cause for his Hitler comment: exactly a year earlier, on 4 August 1943, the War Cabinet had made its first, and most crucial, decision to deny famine relief to Bengalis. Amery was undoubtedly aware of this anniversary, and the memory of what had transpired at that fateful War Cabinet meeting may have fuelled a simmering anger that burst forth upon Churchill’s tirade. In July 1943, the Government of India had informed the War Cabinet of outbreak of famine in Bengal, and requested emergency shipments of 5,00,000 tons of wheat by year-end. Half of that quantity would supply the army, while the other half would support the war effort by feeding urban and industrial populations; if any of the imported grain happened to be left over, it would be used for famine relief.
Outbreak of Famine
At the War Cabinet meeting of 4 August 1943, Amery had propounded the urgent Indian need for food “in as strong terms as I could”, according to his diary – but had failed to get the War Cabinet to schedule even a single shipment of wheat for India. The Secretary of State for War, Sir Percy James Grigg, who believed that the famine had been created by Bengali babus in order to make profits from speculation, had baselessly contradicted the Government of India and the then viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Grigg asserted that wheat would not relieve the Bengal famine – apparently in the mistaken belief, expressed in descriptions of the Bengal famine by more than one British historian, that Bengalis would not or could not eat wheat. (In truth, the War Cabinet wanted to conserve wheat, which was available in Australia, for the feeding of Europeans, if and when they were liberated.) Instead of scheduling relief for Bengal, the War Cabinet had dispatched 50,000 tons of wheat to Ceylon to await instructions as to the final destination, while around 1,00,000 tons of barley – which consignments were close to useless because they would have negligible effect on food prices – were to be ordered for India from Iraq.8
Churchill did say that if the situation in India got worse, Amery could bring it up again; but the next day, 5 August 1943, he left for a conference in Quebec. The following week a committee disbursed the shipping in the Indian Ocean for the next month. In September, 10 vessels would be required to load in Australia with wheat flour, and two with other foodstuffs, but none of these consignments would be going to India. In October, nine or 10 vessels would be needed to load in Australia with wheat and other food, but again none would be destined for India. Around 75,000 tons of Australian wheat would be transported to Ceylon and west Asia each month, to supply the war effort, and a further 1,70,000 tons would go to a supply centre in the Mediterranean region – to be stockpiled for future consumption by the civilians of southern Europe, whom Churchill hoped to liberate. The few ships travelling to India would be filled with war-related cargo. As for the Iraqi barley promised for India, negotiations on price, being the province of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Food, were incomplete when the War Cabinet again discussed the famine on 24 September 1943.
Later that year, Amery was able to ensure that the 50,000 tons of wheat intended for Ceylon eventually went on to India, and that a further 30,000 tons were ordered for the colony. The first of these consignments probably arrived in November. The timing is significant, because the greater the delay, the more the number of lives lost. The quantities matter too: as a result of the War Cabinet’s priorities, the Government of India received a mere 16% of the wheat that it had requested – far from enough to meet the requirements of the Indian army, let alone that of a famine-stricken populace. As a result, the army continued to use domestic supplies that could otherwise have been used to relieve famine: it consumed 1,15,000 tons of rice in 1943, twice the quantity it had used the previous year, because of a concurrent shortage in the supply of wheat.9
From the beginning of the war, India had exported grain for the war effort; the net quantity of wheat and rice exported in the fiscal year 1942-43 was 3,60,000 tons. Rice exports from India had come to a halt only in July 1943. But when the colony suffered from famine – in no small part because of the scarcity and inflation resulting from such extractions of supplies – shiploads of Australian wheat would pass it by, to be stored for future consumption in Europe. The starvation of Bengalis was of little consequence, Amery quoted Churchill as saying, because the people were of negligible value to the war effort and in any case they were “breeding like rabbits”.10
Around July or August 1943, the non-availability of grain had forced government-run relief centres in Bengal to reduce the rations provided to famine victims to about four ounces per person per day. That came to 400 calories, at the low end of the scale at which, at much the same time, inmates at the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald were being fed. The Bengal famine had drawn to an end in December 1943, when the province harvested its own winter rice crop. It killed 1.5 million people by the official estimate alone, and possibly twice as much by other accounts.11
It is in this context that Amery’s comparison of Churchill’s attitudes with those of Hitler must be viewed. “In the occupied territories on principle only those people are to be supplied with an adequate amount of food who work for us”, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, had stated of the Slav countries that Germany had conquered (Poland, Czechoslovakia and tracts of the Soviet Union). Further,
Even if one wanted to feed all the other inhabitants, one could not do it in the newly-occupied eastern areas. It is, therefore, wrong to funnel off food supplies for this purpose, if it is done at the expense of the army and necessitates increased supplies from home.
As the Third Reich tightened its grip, the withdrawal of its colonies’ products and resources would result in the deaths, from starvation and disease, of tens of millions of ordinary Slavs, noted a Nazi policy paper formulated in 1941.12 Notably, after attending one of the War Cabinet debates on sending famine relief to India, Wavell noted in his diary that Churchill wanted to “feed only those [Indians] actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways”.13 According to Amery, the prime minister felt that feeding Bengalis, who were not making much of a contribution to the war effort, was less important than feeding Greeks, who were. Such views towards Indian non-combatants are difficult to distinguish from the Nazi attitude towards ordinary Slavs, who were described as “superfluous eaters”. Amery could not have known the specifics of the Nazi scheme for exploiting the colonies, called the Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East). But he had read Mein Kampf in the original German and had studied Hitler’s speeches, which made no secret of the Führer’s dreams of restoring prosperity to Germany by extending its hegemony towards the east. Amery had even had a long conversation with Hitler in 1935, and noted in his autobiography that the German leader had a good grasp of economics. Amery was in any case aware that the Nazis were withdrawing resources from occupied territories (such as Greece), and leaving the natives to starve – just as Churchill had done in India.
Redesigning Indian Society
Nevertheless, the immediate provocation for Amery’s Hitler remark was not famine relief but Churchill’s scheme for the redesigning Indian society. Whereas the prime minister held ordinary Indians to be expendable (and no worse) his attitude towards the Indian upper class was one of active hostility. In particular, he was convinced that native merchants and moneylenders had caused the famine (Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945) by stockpiling grain, which belief had exacerbated his enmity. Although much about his plan for India remains vague, Churchill clearly believed that a major makeover of native society, involving the termination of the babu class and its replacement by a British ruling elite, was necessary in order to extend British rule over India for “a few more generations” (as he had written to Viceroy Linlithgow in 1937). Churchill’s ideas for India’s future bear a passing resemblance to what is now known of Nazi plans for rendering the Slav regions into permanent slave territories by means of intellectual decapitation. In the Nazi plan, every Jew, as well as every member of the Slav intellectual and upper classes – people who, in Hitler’s view, were likely to foment rebellions – were to be exterminated and replaced by a German ruling class. What makes Hitler’s legacy particularly horrific is that this plan was not merely theoretical: he did, in fact, largely implement the first part.14
Churchill’s ideas, as recorded by Amery, suggest also the influence of Stalin. Churchill met the dictator several times during the course of the war. He came
to admire Stalin’s decisiveness and ruthlessness – as evinced by the implementation of a scorched earth order against those Soviet citizens whose homes and fields lay in the path of the Nazis, which action had helped turn the tide against the invaders. In the early 1930s, Stalin had created in Soviet Union a collectivised society ruled by a class of party elites – in part by eliminating the kulaks, or rural moneylenders (although in practice all better-off peasants were targeted). At a meeting in 1942, Churchill had questioned Stalin about this collectivisation scheme, which, along with appropriations of grain by the state, had led to the Ukrainian famine in which about 10 million people died.15
In subsequent conversations, Churchill would return to the prospect of collectivising Indian society as well, at the expense of usurers and others – broadly, the babus, or educated Hindu males, who comprised almost the entire leadership of the Congress Party. According to Amery, in April 1945, Churchill spoke of “abolishing Indian landlords and moneylenders, instituting a Soviet system, etc”. Since Churchill detested communism, his fixation with this project speaks to his hatred of upper class Indians. The British imperial imagination cast the babus of India in a role similar to that in which the Nazis cast the Jews and the Slavic upper class, and the Soviets cast the kulaks and Ukrainian upper class – as enemies of the state.16The British people, who by and large were weary of imperialism, would no doubt have viewed with disfavour such measures as collectivisation and large-scale imprisonment (or even extermination, judging by the language in which Amery recorded Churchill’s diatribe of 4 August 1944) undertaken in their name – especially after having fought a war to defend freedom. According to the Amery paper, ordinary Britons would not be permitted to know. Wartime restrictions were keeping from them many details of Churchill’s India policy, including his refusal to relieve the Bengal famine, and the prime minister evidently hoped to extend such protections to the post-war period by introducing Soviet-style controls: hence the “Intourist” bureau.
As it happens, Churchill and the conservatives decisively lost the British elections of 1945, so that he could not even begin to put into practice his ideas for the post-war regeneration of India.
Notes
1 Amery Papers, AMEL 1/6/34.
2 Barnes and Nicholson, 995.
3 Mansergh, Transfer IV, 1100, 1136-8.
4 CHAR 20/165/43, 27 May 1944.
5 Barnes and Nicholson, The Empire at Bay, 992-993; Mansergh, Transfer IV, 1152-4.
6 Barnes and Nicholson, 986.
7 Joseph V Denney, Macaulay’s Essay on Warren Hastings (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1907), 36; Quoted in Chakravarty, The Raj Syndrome, 127.
8 Mansergh, Transfer IV, 157, 163; Barnes and Nicholson, 933-934.
9 MT 59/631, “Note of a Meeting Held to Discuss Cross Trade Programme Requirements”, 11 August 1943.
10 Barnes and Nicholson, 950.
11 Woodhead, Famine Inquiry Commission, 109-110; Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines, 102; Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, 271.
12 Steven R Welch, “Our India”.
13 Moon, ed., Wavell, 19.
14 Welch, Nazi Plans for the East, in Adler, et al, Genocide: History and Fictions, 35-37.
15 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 23, 301.
16 Barnes and Nicholson, 1039.
Benis worthy.
