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Did Churchill have anything to say when Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948? —J.M., Rye, N.Y.
We thoroughly checked Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges” of material for our upcoming document volume of the official biography, The Opposition Years (1945-1951), and the online Churchill Archives. We found no comment public or private by Churchill on Gandhi’s death.
Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill (New York: Bantam, 2008, 588) is definitive, and perhaps suggests how Churchill viewed things then:
“There was one public man, however, who did not publish a tribute. Neither then or later did Winston Churchill ever express any regret at the passing of his longtime rival for India and Empire. For Churchill, Gandhi’s death was just one more killing in the slaughter that had been going on since 1946. ‘An awful tragedy has already occurred,’ he told the House of Commons. ‘At least 400,000 men and women have slaughtered each other in the Punjab alone.’ This was more, he pointed out, than all the losses of the British Empire in World War II.”
(Modern estimates put the losses during the “Transfer of Power” in India in 1947 at 750,000, the majority occurring in the Punjab.)
On 589 Arthur Herman footnotes: “An angry Labour MP rose to point out, correctly, that millions had died during the 1943 famine under Churchill’s watch. Churchill replied, also correctly, that under British rule India’s population rose by 100 million and that there was a difference between failing to prevent food shortages and deliberate murder.”
Featured Image: Raj Ghat: Memorial marking the cremation place of Mohandas Gandhi, New Delhi. (Photo: Humayunn N.A. Peerzaada, Creative Commons).
Further Reading
The Churchill Project, “Churchill on India” (2015)
The Churchill Project, “Did Churchill Cause the Bengal Famine?” (2015)
Dr. Larry Arnn, “Churchill’s Greatness: The Gandhi Factor” (2000):
I have searched in Hansard but cannot locate Churchill’s assertion that there was “a difference between failing to prevent food shortages and deliberate murder” so perhaps it is a paraphrase. I would like to know the reaction to it in Parliament — such legal niceties would anyway have been entirely irrelevant to the starving victims. One can only assume that the principle of criminal negligence was poorly developed at the time. There is plenty of evidence that Churchill (romantically attached as he was to the glorious empire) had an outdated and sketchy idea of what life was actually like in the sub-continent, where out of sight was out of mind. Many of the ruling class did not care to think too deeply about the humanity of the peoples they had conquered, at least at the level of the oppressed individual — it sufficed that British values represented the pinnacle of contemporary civilisation, and thus it was ethical to expand the influence (particularly of the educated upper class) of such a superior people wherever that could be achieved, with colonials lucky to have us in charge. Pre-WW2, Churchill paid qualified compliments to Hitler, who shared the view that it is in God’s design that superior guile and strength should win out. In the faltering of the liberal voice in the world today, and the rise of strident right wing nationalism in European politics, we see evidence that these ideas have not gone away.