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Kishan Rana on Churchill and India: A Misunderstood Relationship
- By ANDREAS KOUREAS
- | May 15, 2023
- Category: Books
Kishan S. Rana, Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal? London: Routledge Publishing, 2022, 214 pages, $154.84, paperback $52.95, Kindle $50.30.
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Currently the most controversial aspect of Winston Churchill’s life is his relationship with India. False accusations of genocide, imperial hatred and invented conspiracies are frequently propagated. The most common misconceptions are no better misrepresented than in Churchill and India, by Kishan R. Rana, a former Indian ambassador.
Ambassador Rana covers three main subjects: Churchill’s views on race, the 1943 Bengal Famine, and WSC’s role in the 1947 partition of British India. Uniquely, he manages to draw the wrong conclusions from each of them. The book’s ridiculous price—not atypical for academic publishers—may do more than anything to prevent people from reading it. Which, given the contents, may not altogether be a bad thing.
Churchill and Race
Rana claims that Churchill was “profoundly racist, even in an age when some degree of racial prejudice was the norm” (6). Such prejudice, he adds, was at the centre of Churchill’s supposed attitude toward India and Indians. A more considered view of is that of Andrew Roberts:
One author who had a powerful effect on [Churchill], both for good and ill, was Charles Darwin. Like so many of his contemporaries, Churchill extended the implication of the ideas behind natural selection and the survival of the fittest in Nature into the human sphere too, and came to believe that different races evolved at different speeds in the same way that animals and plants had over the millennia.1
Churchill himself, on his first visit to India, wrote 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.”2 Roberts sees in this a crucial distinction:
Where [Churchill] fundamentally differed from other neo-Darwinians, especially the Fascist ones, is that he believed that the stronger and more ‘advanced’ races—in which he included the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews—had a profound moral responsibility towards what he saw as the weaker and less advanced ones.”3
That is a far cry from the Hitlerian attitude that “inferior races” should be enslaved and systematically murdered. We also need to consider time and circumstance. Placing Churchill in context, for example, the U.S. Civil Rights Act did not pass until 1964, when he was close to 90.
Toward Indian self-government
Churchill wanted power in India to devolve carefully. He opposed federal Home Rule “until the provinces have proved that they can govern themselves well.”4 If successful, he said, further devolution would take place “with sureness and safety.”5 For him, the end goal was a self-governing dominion, but he considered that the process probably wouldn’t happen in his lifetime.6
Churchill saw British governance as a foundational part of India’s socio-economic progress. If challenged too early, “the whole efficiency of the services, defensive, administrative, medical, hygienic, judicial; railway, irrigation, public works and famine prevention, upon which the Indian masses depend for their culture and progress, will perish with it.”7
Moreover, he feared and mistrusted the Hindu caste system. The Brahmin upper caste, he believed, would subjugate the Dalits (“Untouchables”) and provoke violence between Hindus and Muslims. For him, all of those were British subjects, and it was the Empire’s duty to prevent such calamities.8 This admitted paternalism formed the crux of Churchill’s opposition to the 1935 Government of India Act. There is no question that his view was condescending. But it is not “the extravagant, unreasoning hostility to India” that Ambassador Rana describes (5).
Birla, Gandhi and the Indian Army
Hyperbolised accusations of Churchill’s racism fill this book. One example is Churchill’s relationship with Indian industrialist, G.D Birla. In August 1935, just after passage of the India Act, Birla lunched at Chartwell. To Gandhi, Birla reported it was “one of my most pleasant experiences.” While finding Churchill ill-informed over India, Birla though him a “remarkable man.”9
Despite Churchill’s opposition to the India Act, he harboured no resentment, being hospitable and welcoming. He gave Birla a message for Gandhi: he would be “delighted if the Reforms are a success. I have all along felt that there are 50 Indias. But you have got the things now; make it a success and I will advocate your getting much more.”10 Rana ignores this friendly interaction, professing that Churchill met only grudgingly with Indian interlocutors (54).
Clearly Churchill had by then gracefully accepted defeat over the India Act. Quoting Lord Salisbury, he said Britons had a duty to, “accept a political defeat cordially, and to lend their best endeavours to secure the success or to neutralise the evil, of the principles to which they have been forced to succumb.”11 For Rana to depict Churchill as more racist even than the norms of his time (5) is a gross distortion.
Next Rana accuses Churchill of contempt for the Indian Army (166). This too is false, as demonstrated on multiple occasions. WSC wrote in his war memoirs: “The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine forever in the annals of war…. The response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.”12 Rana ignores such quotations, pretending that Churchill never fully recognised the contribution of Indian fighting men (127).
Bengal Famine
Perhaps Rana resorts to such hyperbole because he accepts the simplistic, ahistorical narrative that British rule in India was just “relentless colonial exploitation”—that Churchill ignored the root of British imperialism. What was that? Why, stealing wealth, of course (159). The British Empire was far more complex. It encompassed both good and bad. Eminent economists and historians, like Tirthankar Roy and Latika Chaudhary, have greatly contributed to understanding the realities of British India’s economy.13
In October 1942, a cyclone wiped out much of the rice crop in Bengal and Orissa. The following famine of 1943-44 took up to three million lives.14 Rana asserts that both Churchill and his administration hold part of the blame for this tragedy. He claims that the War Cabinet did not treat the famine as urgent until October 1943 (124).
This is false. The news of the famine’s severity reached the War Cabinet in August. Upon hearing this, Churchill’s administration agreed to send 100,000 tons of barley from Iraq and 50,000 tons of wheat from Australia.15 Leopold Amery, Secretary of State for India, informed Archibald Wavell, soon to be Viceroy of India, explaining that he “may come back to the Cabinet if that fails to help the situation.”16
The Japan factor
From August 1943 to December 1944, just under a million tons of grain would be shipped to India to alleviate the famine.17 Not all shipments got through: Beginning April 1942, Japan sent its navy into the Bay of Bengal.18 From submarines to battlecruisers and aircraft carriers, it posed a dangerous threat to merchant shipping. A top secret map circulated to Churchill in March 1944, demonstrated the proximity of Japan’s fleet.
The estimated area penetrated by the “Japanese battleship/carrier raiding force” ranged from the south coast of Burma to near the Maldives.19 Despite this, Rana makes the ahistorical accusation that Churchill refused to compromise military shipping to transport food to India, mentioning Australia and Canada (124). The truth is starkly different.
On 4 November 1943, Churchill thanked Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King for offering 100,000 tons of wheat to India. However, given the logistical issues, Churchill argued that the wheat should be sent from Australia. Wheat from Eastern Canada “would take at least two months to reach India whereas it could be carried from Australia in 3 to 4 weeks.”20
Wheat couldn’t be sent from the Canadian Pacific Coast because Allied shipping was “already proving inadequate to fulfil our existing high priority requirements for aeroplane manufacture in the United Kingdom, and quantities of nitrate from Chile to the Middle East, which we are under obligation to supply to the Egyptian Government in return for foodstuffs for our Forces and for export to neighbouring territories, including Ceylon.”21
Frustrations of war
In December 1941, Churchill suffered from what was most likely a heart attack.22 His heart would remain weak throughout the war and he would have three episodes of pneumonia.23
The stress of war, and in this writer’s opinion his poor health, resulted in Churchill often making outlandish statements whilst angry. Interestingly, the worst remarks are recorded only in Amery’s diaries (together with numerous waspish, racist epithets by Amery himself.)
For example, Churchill accused Indians of breeding like rabbits in a Famine meeting. Rana references this (124), but omits that WSC immediately after asked a colleague his opinion on what could be done to relieve the famine. Quoted in full, it shows that Churchill did care, but was overwhelmed and frustrated.
Another instance is when Churchill said that he hated Indians and their “beastly religion,” mentioned in the Rana foreword (xii). Contextually, this was after the Quit India movement refused to compromise over immediate independence, whilst Japan was invading the subcontinent. Can we not forgive a man, in uncertain health at the centre of a world war, for blurting a few stupid remarks? Judged in the round, Churchill clearly did not hate Indians as a people.
The contexts behind these quotations are in Amery’s diaries. It appears Rana has not bothered to read them, since he also accuses Amery of lacking a sense of urgency and remorse over the famine. In fact, the diaries express a high degree of both.24
Churchill and Partition, 1947
Rana’s assessment on Churchill and Partition is illogical and borders on the conspiratorial. He claims that Churchill and Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah had corresponded in the 1930s, but the Churchill Archives Centre destroyed the evidence (90). This, he says, was the basis of a secret pact between the two, Pakistan being Jinnah’s reward for aiding supporting Britain in the war. Neither statement is supported by evidence.
We know that Churchill’s wartime premiership saw the beginning of negotiations for India’s independence. Churchill was partly worried about violence erupting between Hindus and Muslims25—one of his reasons for opposing the India Act. Churchill didn’t wish to rush independence, hence his many arguments with Amery. He was however clear that after victory over the Axis powers, independence would be granted. This included the option of leaving the Commonwealth, though Churchill naturally hoped that would not happen.26
Rana completely misunderstands this slowness, writing that it was the reason to why the Attlee administration decided on a rapid exit, fuelling the partition and costing millions of lives in the subsequent upheaval (139).
Such an argument is without foundation. The Attlee government was from the outset keen to leave India as soon as possible, regardless of the political situation.27 Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, was given a deadline of 30 June 1948. Nevertheless he arbitrarily moved it up to August 1947, preventing a better resolution of border questions. Why this happened is not part of this review. But it certainly had nothing to do with Churchill, who was out of power.
As Leader of the Opposition, Churchill repeatedly voiced his concerns about partition. On 12 December 1946 he spoke of the need for “agreement between the Indian races, religions, parties and forces.” He deplored “the ruthless logic to quit India regardless of what may happen there.”28 Later, in his war memoirs, Churchill would call the Attlee administration’s policy of a swift exit “a violently factional view.”29
Endnotes
1 Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 43.
2 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), My Early Life (London, Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 118.
3 Roberts, Walking with Destiny, 43.
4 WSC to Sir Michael O’Dwyer (Indian Civil Service officer), 1 March 1934, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 12, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 732.
5 WSC, Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 30 January 1931, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), V: 4970.
6 Ibid., 4983.
7 WSC, Royal Albert Hall, 18 March 1931, in Complete Speeches, V: 5006-07.
8 Ibid., 5008.
9 Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 12, Wilderness Years, 1243-45.
10 Ibid.
11 Richard M. Langworth, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What He Actually Did and Said (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2017, 103.
12 Zareer Masani, “Churchill and the Genocide Myth: Last Word on the Bengal Famine,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2021, accessed 10 March 2023.
13 See for example Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy & Anand V. Swamy, A New Economic History of Colonial India (London: Routledge, 2016).
14 Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Viking, 2018, 786. Andreas Koureas, “Winston Churchill Isn’t to Blame for The Bengal Famine,” The Spectator, 21 January 2023, accessed 10 March 2023.
15 Leopold Amery and Archibald Wavell, Private Correspondence, Churchill College Cambridge. AMEL 2/3/13.
16 Ibid.
17 C.B.A. Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War (London: HMSO, 1955), 356.
Note: the Famine Enquiry places Indian grain imports at 370,000 tons in 1943 and 700,000 tons in 1944; 58,000 tons of grain were shipped to India in spring 1943. Once the famine’s severity was known in August, shipping accelerated exponentially. The War Transport Ministry places imports slightly lower at roughly 303,000 tons in 1943 and 639,000 tons in 1944. This discrepancy is possibly due to different times set by British and Indian authorities on shipping arrivals.
18 Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1989), 314.
19 Chartwell Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, CHAR 20/188B/164.
20 Chartwell Papers, CHAR 20/123/52.
21 Ibid.
22 Allister Vale & John Scadding. Winston Churchill’s Illnesses 1886-1965: Courage, Resilience and Determination. (Barnsley, S. Yorks.: Frontline Books, 2020), 57-73.
23 Ibid., 116, 135.
24 Amery-Wavell Correspondence, AMEL 7/37, 7/38.
25 Chartwell Papers, CHAR 9/191A-B.
26 Ibid.
27 Zareer Masani, “Partition Wasn’t Inevitable.” The Spectator, 15 August 2022.
28 WSC, House of Commons, 12 December 1946, in Complete Speeches, VII: 7410-17.
29 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War and an Epilogue on the Years 1945 to 1957 (London, Cassell, 1959) 967.
The author
Andreas Koureas is an aspiring economist and historian, currently studying Political Economy at King’s College London. His main research focus is on Winston Churchill and the British Empire. He has written for The Spectator and is writing a future article on the Bengal Famine in a peer-reviewed journal later this year.
Excellent sir
Marxist economist Utsa Patnaik blame keynes for creating famine. She claims that keynes wanted profitable inflation in India. His indirect tax policy created Bengal famine. Is it truth? What is actually truth?