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“Fighting Retreat” by Walter Reid: Did Churchill Really Hate India?
- By ZAREER MASANI
- | February 26, 2024
- Category: Books
Walter Reid, Fighting Retreat: Churchill and India (London: Hurst, 2024), 344 pages, $32.95. This review first appeared in Open, and is reprinted by kind permission of Open and the author. Open is an English-language weekly published in New Delhi.
Walter Reid is the very model of a successful, non-academic gentleman-historian, with a string of historical books to his name. His last was a reassessment of Neville Chamberlain. Fighting Retreat is very much the converse of his Chamberlain book, a vitriolic attack on the reputation of Chamberlain’s political nemesis, Winston Churchill. It is based mostly on Churchill’s alleged hatred of India in general and its Hindu community in particular.
Unlike traditional Indian demonology, Reid refrains from blaming Churchill for the Bengal Famine. He quite sensibly dismisses Madhusree Mukerjee’s diatribe (Churchill’s Secret War) and points instead to Amartya Sen’s more judicious assessments. Nor does he belittle Churchill’s major role in resisting the Nazi menace and leading Britain’s war effort. But he ferociously singles out Churchill’s India policies, holding him responsible for everything from failed constitutional progress to the cataclysm of Partition.
This is a line of argument that plays well in chauvinist Indian discourse. But does it offer original insights into either Churchill’s politics or his impact on Indian affairs? And does the evidence really support this book’s extreme conclusions?
Churchill on India
Churchill’s racial views, the product of his Victorian youth, were undoubtedly widely shared by his contemporaries, both British and Indian. This was a time when few upper-caste Hindus would have dined with a Dalit, and many would even have shunned a passing “Untouchable” shadow.
Though far less extreme, most Britons of Churchill’s generation regarded British parliamentary democracy as the acme of political evolution: Britain’s gift to both continental Europe and its own empire.
In addition to such cultural assumptions, Churchill, Reid acknowledges, had both a deeply mischievous desire to shock and a preference for extreme, dialectical argumentation. The result was frequent outbursts, designed to provoke a response rather than to be taken seriously.
These were often targeted at his pompous childhood friend, Leo Amery, later his Secretary of State for India, whom Churchill had delighted in teasing since their Harrow school days. Reid mostly excuses such behaviour. But he does not allow Churchill the same latitude when it comes to his less savoury comments on India.
A particular example, often cited, is Churchill’s remark that India’s Hindus were a “beastly people with a beastly religion.” What Reid doesn’t tell you is that such exclamations were made at the height of the Second World War. Churchill was furious with Gandhi’s Congress Party for stabbing Britain in the back (as he saw it) with the Quit India agitation.
Ethical and theistic influences
Politics aside, Churchill, like most Britons of his generation, instinctively preferred the monotheistic religion of Indian Muslims, with its shared Biblical roots. Unlike earlier Orientalists fascinated by the Hindu classical heritage, the new, Victorian tone had been set by that hugely influential imperial policymaker Lord Macaulay. It condemned noisy, garish, unscientific Hindu idolatry and the casteism that relegated Hindu masses to permanent poverty and oppression.
Churchill certainly shared these sentiments. They were amplified by his belief in the loyalty of the so-called martial races, mainly Muslim and Sikh, who had come to the rescue of British rule during the 1857 Mutiny, led by Brahmin Hindus from the Bengal Army. By 1929, troops from the Punjab made up as much as 62% of the British Indian Army.
Reid fails to explain how Churchill’s faith in these so-called martial races fused with his equally deep-rooted sympathy for the underdog to create a very genuine concern for India’s Muslim minority. Was this so different from his unquestioned sympathy for Nazi Germany’s persecuted Jews?
As opposed to what he considered an upper-caste, Hindu-dominated Congress claiming to represent all India, Churchill numbered what he considered the true majority of Indians, made up of Muslims, Dalits and the autonomous populations of the princely states.
Churchill’s “hatred”
This is all well-travelled ground. What’s new are the sweeping claims that Churchill nursed an active hatred of India, unlike other British colonies to whom he was more sympathetic. Such hatred, we are told here, tainted all his India policies. They poisoned all efforts at constitutional advance and indirectly caused even the trauma of Partition. These are very sweeping charges that Reid conspicuously fails to substantiate. His evidence relies mostly on Churchill-hating secondary sources.
Covering as he does Churchill’s earlier, youthful role as Secretary for War at the time of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, Reid warmly applauds Churchill’s historic speech condemning Butcher Dyer and the “un-British monstrosity” of the massacre. But his book fails to explain how this very genuine sympathy turned into what it later labels Churchill’s “malign, deceitful and hypocritical attempts…to thwart India’s entirely reasonable political aspirations.”
Reid agrees that this was certainly not the result of political opportunism. Quite the contrary, since Churchill’s hostility to constitutional change in India consigned him to the Tory backbenches throughout the crucial 1930s and made him, Reid gleefully claims, “an object of derision” for the majority of British MPs. What this fails to address is the conundrum of how Churchill, stuck in the political wilderness, was able to poison India’s progress.
The India Act
Churchill vociferously opposed the important Government of India Act of 1935 from the Tory backbenches. But he failed to prevent its passage by large majorities or to secure even a single, minor amendment to it. And yet this book claims, again with no evidence, that Churchill, in league with the nefarious Manchester cotton industry, somehow delayed the Act and thwarted its application.
Reid largely ignores the 1935 Act’s hugely enlightened and lasting constitutional strides, which made it the basis of the constitution independent India adopted in 1950. The Act established a democracy very similar to that of Britain’s in the 1860s. It enfranchised 30 million Indian men and women, including all taxpayers and matriculates, a huge electorate numbering one-sixth of British India’s adult population. It introduced full provincial autonomy, with elected ministries responsible to elected legislatures.
Elections held in 1937 resulted in Congress ministries taking office in six provinces. This was envisaged as a stepping-stone to a responsible federal government at the Centre, once Congress, the Muslim League and the princes agreed on its makeup. This federal Centre came with the promise of Dominion Status, which attracted much Indian public support.
Reid is disingenuous in suggesting that “no one really knew” what Dominion Status meant. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 had just defined it very clearly. It meant, in effect, full independence, with responsible government and even the right to secede from the British Empire. And it was this very promise of independence to which Churchill was so allergic.
Majoritarian politics
Churchill’s aversion to independence for India was based only partly on his emotional attachment to Empire. He also feared that India’s loss would reduce Britain to the status of a second-rate power. He equally believed that a majoritarian democracy for India, unlike the other “white” dominions, would inevitably threaten minority rights.
Congress, led by upper-caste Hindu politicians like Gandhi and the Nehrus, would ride roughshod over 150 million Muslims and Dalits. The result, he believed, with some prophetic foresight, would be virtual civil war. Partition and discrimination against India’s Muslim minority would result. (Today Muslims, some 18% of India’s population, are confined to a mere 2% of its Parliament.)
Arguably, what had stymied constitutional advance in India, unlike the “white” dominions, was not the reluctance of British governments, eager to exit since the turn of the century. It was the real dilemma of whom to hand over to in a subcontinent even more varied and diverse than Europe. Fears in London of upper-caste Hindu domination were shared not only by Jinnah and the Muslim League, but also by Babasaheb Ambedkar, now appropriated by Hindu communalists and ignored by this book.
At the 1930-32 Round Table Conferences, Ambedkar’s demand for separate electorates for Dalits echoed that of the Muslim League. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award granted such separate representation. That in turn provoked Gandhi’s “fast unto death.” Threatened by backlash should Gandhi die, Ambedkar gave up separate electorates, in return for reserved quotas.
The row over the Communal Award epitomised Congress’ insistence on its right to speak for all Indians. But for Churchill it was an alarming exercise in the emotional blackmail so characteristic of Gandhi. Majoritarian politics, Churchill believed, would fracture India’s fragile unity, for him the greatest achievement of British rule.
Ineffective but toxic?
This book adopts the usual anti-imperial tropes about how Britain looted the subcontinent of its wealth, which it then poured into an evil, triangular nexus that financed both the slave trade and the Industrial Revolution. No sign here of more nuanced assessments by serious economic historians like Tirthankar Roy about how huge inward flows of British capital, technology and skills modernised the Indian economy, while British naval and military power gave India unprecedented internal peace, external security and major trading advantages.
Whether one takes Reid’s view or Roy’s, there is little doubt about Churchill’s strongly held belief in the benevolence of the British Empire. What remains hugely implausible is the idea that Churchill, consigned to ineffective opposition, somehow managed to poison India’s future.
Reid contends that Churchill cynically fuelled Muslim separatism by a Machiavellian rhetoric of divide and rule. But such accusations greatly underestimate the agency of Indian politicians. After all, it was Nehru’s arrogance in refusing a coalition with the Muslim League in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) in 1937 that triggered the Pakistan demand.
It was not Churchill but the outbreak of World War II that triggered the resignation of Congress ministries two years later, in futile protest at not being consulted about India’s entry.
The Cripps Mission
Based on this book, one is hard pressed to understand why Churchill as prime minister presided over a serious attempt in 1942 to secure the return of Congress Party provincial governments, with a broadly based national coalition government at the Centre. Called the Cripps Offer, it was a charm offensive famously led by the Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps. A personal friend of Nehru’s, Cripps also appealed to Gandhi as a fellow vegetarian.
Reid accuses Churchill of somehow “frustrating” the Cripps Mission, sent by his own government. Yet he offers no evidence of this. Churchill was clearly humouring American demands, echoed by his Labour coalition colleagues, to make concessions to Indian nationalism. So he may have been relieved when Congress leaders rejected the Cripps offer; but he did nothing to engineer this. Churchill represented unanimity on India in his War Cabinet, including Labour members and his pro-reform India Secretary Leo Amery. All agreed that the height of a world war was not an appropriate moment to make major Indian constitutional changes.
The real barriers to progress
The promise of Dominion status, meaning effective independence after the war, remained on the table. It required only that Congress, the Muslim League and the Princes agree on power-sharing at a federal Centre. To blame Churchill for the internal divisions that obstructed such a coalition obfuscates reality. It hugely exaggerates his very remote impact and misses the role of the Indian politicians involved.
A power-sharing deal between Nehru and Jinnah would have made nonsense of Churchill’s fears. Instead, India’s fragile imperial unity fell apart under majoritarian strains. That gave Churchill the dubious distinction of being proved right
That final fracture took place, not on Churchill’s watch, but under the Labour government that took over in 1945. Even Prime Minister Attlee’s much closer ties with Nehru failed to overcome Congress insistence on centralised, majority rule.
Reid completely ignores the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan. It embodied a loose federation of strong, unpartitioned, autonomous provinces, with minority weightage and a power-sharing, federal Centre. Churchill, then leader of the opposition, was in no way responsible for the failure of the Plan. Accepted by Jinnah and the Muslim League, it was torpedoed by Nehru’s demand for a socialist, unitary state.
Apart from its occasional insights, this book sadly fails to convey Churchill’s romantic fascination with India, his genuine admiration for what he saw as the civilising benefits of British rule, or his deep pessimism about it all falling apart under democratic pressures. Andrew Roberts’s monumental biography remains the most scholarly and balanced guide to this and other Churchillian paradoxes.
The author
Dr. Masani is an Oxford historian and broadcaster and author of Indira Gandhi: A Biography and Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist. His personal memoir, And All is Said, is an intimate portrait of his parents, the charismatic politician Minoo Masani and his gifted wife Shakuntala.
Also by Zareer Masani
“Judging the British Empire by Its Aims and Intentions,” 2023.
“Churchill and the Genocide Myth: Last Word on the Bengal Famine,” 2021.
Related reviews
Andrew Roberts, “This Attack on Churchill is Appalling—and Nonsensical,” 2023.
Tirthankar Roy: “Inglorious Empire: Some of the Truth, Part of the Time,” 2020.
Arthur Herman: “Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine Would Have Been Worse,” 2017.