Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (92 page)

The decision to make the bomb, and the brilliant success with which it was developed and deployed, undoubtedly kept Britain in the top club for another thirty years. It was the first British A-bomb test off Monte Bello Island in October 1952 which led the Americans to resume the atomic partnership. The first British H-bomb test at Christmas Island in May 1957 formalized this partnership by persuading Congress to amend the 1946 McMahon Act: the bilateral agreements of 1955 and 1958 could not have been obtained without a British nuclear capability. Once in the club, Britain was able to play a leading part in the test-ban negotiations of 1958–63 and the process which produced the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. In 1960, in a famous phrase, Aneurin Bevan defended the British bomb to his Labour Party colleagues on the grounds that, without it, a British Foreign Secretary would ‘go naked into the council chambers of the world’. But this was a misformulation. Without it, Britain would not have been a party to these and other negotiations in the
first place: for, like other gentlemen’s clubs, the nuclear one does not admit nudes into its council chamber. In 1962 the Anglo—US Nassau agreement gave Britain title to sixty-four modern nuclear launching-platforms as opposed to 1,038 for the USA and about 265 for Soviet Russia. By 1977 the relative figures were America 11,330, Russia 3,826 and Britain 192: it was this fall in the British ratio which excluded her from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
(SALT
), even though at that time the British ‘deterrent’ could destroy all the major industrial and population centres in Soviet Russia and inflict 20 million casualties.
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In 1945–6, then, it became an axiom of British policy to engage, in conjunction with the Americans, in collective security arrangements to contain Soviet expansion, and to contribute towards them a British nuclear force. Through all the changes of mood and government, that consistent thread ran through British policy right into the 1980s. But it was the only stable element. All else was confusion and irresolution. There was a failure of vision; a collapse of will. In the late summer of 1945 the British Empire and Commonwealth seemed to have returned to the meridian of 1919. British power was stretched over nearly a third of the globe. In addition to legitimate possessions, Britain administered the Italian empire in North and East Africa, many former French colonies and many liberated territories in Europe and Asia, including the glittering empires of Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. No nation had ever carried such wide-ranged responsibilities. Twenty-five years later, everything had gone. History had never before witnessed a transformation of such extent and rapidity.

It was often to be said, as the disintegration took place, that the collapse of the Empire was foreshadowed by the fall of Singapore early in 1941. But that is not true. There was no ignominy in 1941. Though there was a failure of leadership in the defence of the city, there was no shame in the campaign as a whole. The British in Malaya were not guilty of
hubris
in despising the Japanese. On the contrary they predicted accurately what would happen unless the garrison was reinforced and, above all, re-armed. Instead the decision was taken to save Russia. As it was, 200,000 well-equipped and very experienced Japanese troops, with an overwhelming superiority in sea- and air-power, were held at bay for seventy days by elements of only three and a half divisions of Commonwealth fighting troops. In any event, the image of Asiatic victory was wholly erased by the magnitude of Japanese defeat. Britain surrendered at Singapore with 91,000 men. When General Itagaki handed his sword to Admiral Mountbatten in 1945 he had 656,000 men in the Singapore command. Elsewhere the British received the capitulation of more than a
million. More than 3,175,000 Japanese men at arms came in from the cold, the greatest defeat any Asian or non-white nation has ever undergone. In every department, Western (i.e., white) technology and organization had proved not marginally but overwhelmingly superior. It was not only a characteristic but the very archetypal colonial-style victory of fire-power over muscle-power.
¹⁴

Nor was there any physical evidence of a collapse of loyalty towards the British empire among the subject peoples. Quite the contrary. The intense efforts made by the Japanese to establish an ‘Indian National Army’ and an independent regime were a total failure. A ‘government’ was established in October 1942 under Chandra Bose, which declared war on Britain and set up its capital in Rangoon. The
INA
disintegrated immediately it went into action against the Indian Army. The Japanese were never able to persuade or force more than 30,000 Indians, civil and military, to serve against Britain. Many thousands of Indian pows preferred torture and death to changing allegiance: for instance, of the 200 officers and men of the 2/15 Punjabs captured at Kuching, virtually all were murdered by April 1945, some being beaten to death, others beheaded or bayoneted. Opposition to the war by part of India’s ‘political nation’ had no effect on the ‘military nation’. Whereas 1,457,000 Indians served in the army in 1914–18, during the Second World War the number passed the 2,500,000 mark: Indians awarded Victoria Crosses rose from eleven to thirty-one.
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Who spoke for India? The ‘political nation’? The ‘military nation’? Could anyone speak for India? In 1945 India was over 400 million people: 250 million Hindus, 90 million Muslims, 6 million Sikhs, millions of sectarians, Buddhists, Christians; 500 independent princes and maharajahs; .23 main languages, 200 dialects; 3,000 castes, with 60 million ‘untouchables’ at the bottom of the heap; 80 per cent of the nation lived in 500,000 villages, most of them inaccessible even by surfaced road. Yet for all practical purposes the decision had been taken in 1917, under the Montagu reforms, to begin the process of handing power over this vast and disparate nation not to its traditional or its religious or racial or economic or military leaders – or all combined – but to a tiny élite who had acquired the ideology and the techniques and, above all, the vernacular of Western politics. The decision had been confirmed by the reaction to Amritsar. That indicated the British Raj was no longer determined to enforce the rule of law at all costs. The 1935 Act set the process of abdication in motion. The British establishment, whatever public noises it might make, knew exactly what was happening. As Baldwin’s
eminence grise
, J.C.C.Davidson, reported to him:

The fact is that the British government, the Viceroy and to a certain extent the states have been bounced by Gandhi into believing that a few half-baked, semi-educated urban agitators represent the views of 365 million hard-working and comparatively contented cultivators. It seems to me that the elephant has been stampeded by the flea.
¹⁶

India illustrates the process whereby the full-time professional politician inherited the earth in the twentieth century. Reforms created an alien system of representation. A class of men, mainly lawyers, organized themselves to manipulate it. In due course the governing power was handed over to them. The dialogue was entirely between the old and the new élite
s.
The ordinary people did not come into the play, except as a gigantic walk-on crowd in the background. The process was to be repeated all over Asia and Africa. The forms of the Westminster, Paris or Washington model were preserved. The substance was only tenuously present; or absent entirely. Lenin’s Bolsheviks of 1917, Mao’s
CCP
cadres of 1949 and the Congressmen of India came to power by different routes. But they had this in common. All three new ruling groups were men who had never engaged in any other occupation except politics and had devoted their lives to the exploitation of a flexible concept called ‘democracy’.

Lenin had asserted his mandate to rule by the methods of a caudillo; Mao by those of a war-lord. Gandhi and Nehru stepped into a vacuum created by the collapse of the will to rule. The 1935 Act had made the Raj unworkable, except by permanent repression. In 1942, partly under pressure from Roosevelt, Churchill agreed to a declaration giving India self-government after the war. On 28 July he lunched with George vi, whose diary records: ‘He amazed me by saying that his colleagues & both, or all 3, parties in Parlt. were quite prepared to give up India to the Indians after the war.’
¹⁷
This proved to be completely accurate. The arguments in 1945–7 were entirely about the manner and timing, not the fact, of Britain’s departure. The actual Indian Independence bill, which became law 18 July 1947, was passed by both Houses of Parliament without a division and against a background of almost complete public indifference.

Indeed, had Britain not abdicated, quickly and wearily, it is difficult to see quite how Indian independence could have been secured. Gandhi was not a liberator but a political exotic, who could have flourished only in the protected environment provided by British liberalism. He was a year older than Lenin, with whom he shared a quasi-religious approach to politics, though in sheer crankiness he had much more in common with Hitler, his junior by twenty years. In his local language, Gujarati, Gandhi means ‘grocer’, and
both he and his mother, from whom he inherited chronic constipation, were obsessed by the bodily functions and the ingress and egress of food. This preoccupation was intensified when he went to London and moved in vegetarian circles. We know more about the intimacies of his life than that of any other human being in history. He lived in public in his
ashram
or religious camp, attended by a numerous entourage of devoted women, most of them willing to describe his ways in the most minute detail. By the mid-1970s more than four hundred biographies of him were in existence, and the English edition of his utterances, compiled by fifty researchers and thirty clerks of the Indian Information Ministry, which set up a special department for this purpose, will fill eighty volumes averaging 550 pages each.
¹⁸

Gandhi’s first question, on rising, to the women who waited on him every morning was ‘Did you have a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?’ One of his favourite books was
Constipation and Our Civilization
,
which he constantly reread. He was convinced that evil sprang from dirt and unsuitable food. So although he ate heartily – ‘He was one of the hungriest men I have ever known’, a disciple said – his food was carefully chosen and prepared. A mixture of bicarbonate of soda, honey and lemon-juice was his drink, and all his vegetarian dishes were assisted by munching quantities of crushed garlic, a bowl of which stood by his plate (he had no sense of smell, a useful attribute in India).
¹⁹
In middle age, Gandhi turned against his wife and children, indeed against sex itself. He thought women were better than men because he assumed they did not enjoy sex. He carried out his so-called
Brahmacharya
experiments of sleeping with naked girls solely for warmth. His only seminal emission in his middle and later years was in his sleep in 1936, when he was aged 66: it disturbed him a great deal.
²⁰

Gandhi’s eccentricities appealed to a nation which venerates sacral oddity. But his teachings had no relevance to India’s problems or aspirations. Hand-weaving made no sense in a country whose chief industry was the mass-production of textiles. His food policy would have led to mass starvation. In fact Gandhi’s own
ashram
,
with his own very expensive ‘simple’ tastes and innumerable ‘secretaries’ and handmaidens, had to be heavily subsidized by three merchant princes. As one of his circle observed: it costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhiji living in poverty.’
²¹
About the Gandhi phenomenon there was always a strong aroma of twentieth-century humbug. His methods could only work in an ultra-liberal empire, it was not so much that the British treated him forbearingly’, George Orwell wrote,

as that he was always able to command publicity …. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion but to bring a mass-movement into being …. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment?
²²

All Gandhi’s career demonstrated was the unrepressive nature of British rule and its willingness to abdicate. And Gandhi was expensive in human life as well as money. The events of 1920–1 indicated that though he could bring a mass-movement into existence, he could not control it. Yet he continued to play the sorcerer’s apprentice, while the casualty bill mounted into hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and the risks of a gigantic sectarian and racial explosion accumulated. This blindness to the law of probability in a bitterly divided sub-continent made nonsense of Gandhi’s professions that he would not take life in any circumstances.

There was a similar element of egregious frivolity in Jawaharlal Nehru. He was a brahmin, from a priestly caste which had in modern times (characteristically) turned to law and politics. He was an only son, a mother’s boy, brought up by governesses and theosophists, then as an expatriate at Harrow, where he was known as Joe, and Cambridge. As a young man he led a fashionable life in London and the spas, on £800 a year. He was easily bored. He allowed his father, a hard-working Allahabad lawyer, to pick a wife for him, another Kashmiri brahmin. But he never (like Lenin) showed the smallest desire to take a job to support his family. As his father complained:

Have you had any time to attend to the poor cows … reduced to the position of cows by nothing short of culpable negligence on your part and mine – I mean your mother, your wife, your child and your sisters? … I do not think that a man who is capable of starving his own children can be much good to the nation.
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