Gandhi & Churchill (8 page)

On February 22 Randolph reached Benares, India’s holiest city. He took a boat down the Ganges and could observe the other gulf between the Raj and India’s masses: the religious one. Along the riverbanks thousands were bathing as “part of their religion,” he wrote, as they had done since time immemorial. “The water is very dirty, but they lap it up in quantities, as it is very ‘holy.’” Then he saw the
ghats
with burning funeral pyres set along the bank, where the Hindu dead were cremated, the darkly burning fires sending thick clouds of smoke heavenward as relatives wept and prayed. “There were five bodies burning, each on its little pile of faggots,” he told his mother; “the whole sight was most curious, and I am going again this morning to have another look.”
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On the whole, he found his experience in India sobering. On his way back to Bombay, he wrote a melancholy letter to General Frederick Roberts, whom he had met in Hyderabad. “After a century or so of rule you have so little convinced (not the bulk of people) but the leaders of the people of its excellence and merits,” he warned, “that any great reverse from the Russians would leave you powerless.”
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Less than a week later, on March 20, 1885, he was on a steamship headed back to London.

By now he knew there was a growing political crisis at home. Irish Fenians had set off a bomb in the House of Commons on January 24; Khartoum had fallen to the armies of the Madhi, and Gordon had been killed on February 21. On board ship Randolph had time to reflect on all he had heard and seen. He thought about “how incredibly strong and at the same time incredibly slender, our position in India is.” An all-powerful government cut off from the people it ruled; a Western-educated native elite that felt slighted and betrayed; a British community bristling with prejudice and fear; above all, a country that after a century of British rule was still a world apart, with its ancient religious rituals and darkly burning funeral pyres fading into the night. At the end, he might have agreed with the reflection H. G. Wells published a few years later on the British in India.

“We are there like a man who has fallen off a ladder onto the back of an elephant,” Wells wrote. “[He] doesn’t know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens, there he remains.”
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Randolph would slowly realize that his job was to see that nothing did happen and that the embarrassment and danger of dismounting were put off as long as possible. By the time he finally took office as secretary of state for India on June 11, 1885, Randolph was set on a course that would take him from would-be reformer to hard-line reactionary.

The India Office was in King Charles Street, in the heart of Whitehall. Built in 1867, with an exterior by Gilbert Scott and a magnificent three-story inner courtyard of neoclassical marble columns and tiled friezes, it oversaw the London end of what Winston Churchill would call “the magnificent organization of the government of India,” from the Indian Army to taxes and famine relief, all in close coordination with the viceroy.
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It was also maintained at the expense of the Indian taxpayer, since every salary, every expense account, every official trip, and every retirement pension came from revenues paid by the subjects of the Raj.

Upstairs was the Council Chamber, paneled with mahogany and lined with gold leaf; its magnificent gilt marble fireplace depicted Britannia receiving the riches of the East. In this room sat by royal appointment the Council of India, made up of retired soldiers and civil servants who had served in the Raj and who approved whatever decisions the secretary of state wanted to make. Most were elderly. The first time the thirty-six-year-old Randolph sat down with them, he compared it to being “an Eton boy presiding at a meeting of the Masters.”
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Randolph learned to treat the council with respect, but he intended to run the India Office as he and no one else saw fit.

This was relatively easy. India was different from other parts of the empire. As secretary he was responsible only to his prime minister, not to Parliament. Not a single parliamentary committee oversaw his work or his dealings with the viceroy in Calcutta.
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This suited Randolph. From the start he reacted badly to any perceived interference, even from the queen.
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In general, he was free to do as he liked, and under the influence of men like Lepel Griffin, “the hammer of the babus,” and General Frederick Roberts, his earlier doubts about the Raj were swept away, or at least swept under the rug. Under Randolph Churchill, the India Office position on India hardened and crystallized. The British would rule and the Indians would obey, and things were to stay that way—not just because the British were so good at ruling, but because Indians were so bad at everything else.

Roberts set the tone. He had actually been born in Cawnpore in 1832 and as a young ensign helped to put down the Mutiny. His memoirs,
Forty-one Years in India, from Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief,
conjured up the image of a primitive country where the vast bulk of the population is illiterate, ninety-nine out of one hundred persons have no sense of civic association, and “the various races and religious sects possess no bond of national union.” Under these conditions, Roberts said, forcing British-style constitutional reforms “on a community which is not prepared for them, does not want them, and cannot understand them” could only lead to chaos or even a replay of the Great Mutiny.

“The best government for India will be the intelligent and benevolent despotism which at present rules the country,” Roberts concluded. The best thing politicians in London could do was ignore “the utterances of self-appointed agitators who pose as the mouth-pieces of an oppressed population” and listen to the officials on the spot, who “have a deeper insight into, and a greater sympathy with, the feelings and prejudices of Asiatics.”

This is what Randolph proceeded to do. He learned to dismiss educated Indians as “a deadly legacy” from woolly-headed reformers of the past, who “cannot be anything else than opposition in quiet times, rebels in times of troubles.”
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On taking office, he had promised to launch a parliamentary inquiry into the Indian government, but there was never any chance that Indians themselves would be part of it—or that it would challenge the prevailing view from Calcutta. Faced by financial difficulties, Randolph did not hesitate to raise the Indians’ taxes; he raided the Famine Insurance Fund to help pay for general expenses. He shut down any plans to make it easier for natives to enter the Indian Civil Service. In short, the “benevolent despotism” of Churchill’s regime marked the end of any hope of major reform in India for nearly two decades.

Randolph may have rejected reform, but he was drawn to the other, more glamorous aspect of the Raj: the Great Game. It raised his energies to a fever pitch. He gave speeches about the impending advance of “the countless hosts of Russia upon the North-West Frontier of India,” and began an expansion of the Indian Army by thirty thousand men—yet another excuse to raise Indians’ taxes. He badgered the viceroy to contemplate a march on Kandahar, and Lord Salisbury to work with the Germans on an anti-Russian strategy in Persia, since German engineers were hoping to build a railway connecting Baghdad to Constantinople. He even proposed that the India Office take over all diplomatic dealings with Persia and China, and he envisaged Calcutta becoming under his guidance “the center of Asiatic politics,” a great cynosure of British influence spreading from one end of the Eastern Hemisphere to the other.
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Salisbury soon wearied of Randolph’s megalomaniacal schemes, and all came to nothing. All, that is, except Burma.

That kingdom to the east was already closely linked to India. Lower Burma, a lush triangle of jungle and rice fields surrounding the mouth of the Irawaddy River along with a strip of coastline on the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal, had been annexed in 1826 and was administered from Calcutta. But Upper Burma had remained independent. Local British teak and cotton merchants worried that its king might work out an exclusive deal with the French, who were pressing in westward from Indo-China. In fact, in January 1883 King Theebaw signed a commercial agreement with France. British merchants assumed that the withdrawal of their own privileges would follow.

So the Rangoon Chamber of Commerce and its lobbyists in Parliament went into high gear, pushing for annexation of Upper Burma. Gladstone and Viceroy Lord Ripon had ignored them, but when the Tories came in, their new secretary of state for India paid more attention. Churchill soon worked himself into a state of alarm about French ambitions in the East, about dark (and largely untrue) accounts of Theebaw the “ignorant, arrogant, drunken boy king,” surrounded by a band of greedy and savage sycophants, and the dangers to India from the ever-menacing Russians if the British “lost” Burma.
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Lord Randolph also understood the political benefits of launching a preemptive war there, and how “a government never fails to derive a certain amount of benefit from a successful military operation,” as he told Viceroy Dufferin. He too would benefit, by becoming the Man Who Added Burma to the British Empire.

And so although neither the prime minister nor the viceroy had any plans or even desire to invade Burma, Randolph took matters in his own hands. His ultimatum to Theebaw, demanding that he withdraw his treaty with the French, reached the Burmese capital, Mandalay, on October 30, 1885. However, Randolph had effectively declared war a week earlier in a speech in Birmingham, and British and Indian troops were already headed for Rangoon. On December 1 the British entered Mandalay. That year Lord Randolph celebrated the New Year, as he always did, at his friends the Fitzpatricks’ house in Dublin. As the clock struck twelve, Randolph raised his glass and announced to the assembled guests that Burma was now officially annexed to the British Crown: “a New Year’s gift to the Empress and all her subjects.”
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But it was too late to save him or his government. The voters had gone to the polls more than a month earlier, on November 24 and 25, 1885, and handed Salisbury and the Tories a resounding defeat. The Liberals were back, and Randolph Churchill’s brief but hectic tenure as secretary of state for India was over. The next time he was back in office, it would be as chancellor of the exchequer. He would never grace the halls of the India Office, or worry about Indian policy, again.

But in his five short months Randolph had left a mark on Indian affairs that would last more than a lifetime. His blocking of any serious reform of the governance of India had offended a large portion of India’s educated elite. And instead of producing the short sharp victory that he had envisaged, the war in Burma turned into a protracted ulcer. The Burmese were among the hardiest warriors in the world; they launched an effective insurgency against the British that would drag on for three years, tie up 35,000 British and Indian troops, and cost ten times as much as the war’s original estimate, to the fury of India’s taxpayers. Educated Indians already felt betrayed by the man they had championed during his visit as “a liberal in all but name.” His war with Burma was the final straw.

Thus in late December 1885, just as the guerrilla war was breaking out in the jungles of Burma, a group of well-to do Bombay businessmen and landlords from Bengal met to form a new organization, the Indian National Congress. Almost all were Western-educated, with Parsis and high-caste Hindu Brahmins predominating. Although a few sported turbans, almost all wore Western suits and ties. Some were even white, including the Congress’s moving spirit, Allan Octavian Hume, a distinguished former civil servant and veteran of the Great Mutiny. The Congress’s goals, at least initially, were loyalist and respectful; in the words of one historian, “they were cautious moderate men who were confident in the ultimate fairness of the British people.”
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Viceroy Dufferin even welcomed the Congress as a useful safety valve for grievances and resentment.

But the founding of the Congress opened a new era for India, and a new kind of political movement in the subcontinent. For the next three decades it remained a tiny detached elite, what Randolph Churchill would dismiss as a gathering of “Bengalee baboos”—until a thin bespectacled man dressed in peasant clothes revealed its unexpected strength.

Defeated and out of office, Randolph Churchill was asked what he would do next. He said, “I shall lead the Opposition for five years. Then I shall be Prime Minister for five years. Then I shall die.”
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Only the last prediction would come true. For already Lord Randolph could feel the hand of the dread disease that he had kept hidden from his family but that was slowly sapping his physical and mental powers—even his sanity. Doctors diagnosed it then and later as syphilis (although modern medical authorities diagnose it as a brain tumor). As he left the India Office, his illness was entering its final horrible stage.