The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (70 page)

The Japanese entry into the war in December 1941, their capture of Singapore in February 1942, and the subsequent swift advance through Burma the following month brought the war to India’s borders by April. Burma, which had been officially separated from India in 1935, had its own nationalist movement, which was quick to throw in its lot with the Japanese. Military intelligence reported droves of Burmese peasants, policemen and students coming forward to assist the invaders. ‘No difficulty was experienced in obtaining volunteers to join willingly without payment in order to free their country.’
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Even before the Japanese army had exposed the fragility of Britain’s power in Asia, Linlithgow was full of pessimism. Late in January, he had written candidly and bleakly to the cabinet:

India and Burma have no natural association with the Empire, from which they are alien by race, history and religion, and for which as such neither of them have any natural affection, and both are in the Empire because they are conquered countries which had been brought there by force, kept there by our controls, and which hitherto it has suited to remain under our protection.
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For these reasons, the army’s intelligence department kept a close surveillance over Indian troops and examined their letters for traces of dissatisfaction, restlessness and political agitation. Sixty per cent of the Indian officers serving in Malaya during 1941–2 had strong nationalist sympathies and looked forward to an independent India at the end of the war. And yet they were continually reminded of their separateness from the empire when they were refused entry into the clubs of that most starchy and conceited of all British colonial societies, the Malayan planter and business community. One Indian officer remarked that he and his brothers-in-arms ‘have been sent all the way from India to defend these ——Europeans’ and he was damned if he was going to ‘lift a little finger to do it if and when the time came.’
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A Celanese artilleryman, hanged for mutiny in 1942, said at his trial that his anti-British feelings had first come to the surface after he had suffered racial insults in Malaya.

Somehow brown men had to be persuaded to die for a white man’s empire. One way in which this could be done was by breaking the deadlock over India’s future, and in March 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps, a left-wing Labour minister with lofty principles, was sent to India to reach an accord with Congress. He failed, despite United States intervention, largely because neither he nor the war cabinet could accept Congress’s demands for immediate participation in all areas of government, particularly defence.

It was now Gandhi’s turn to seize the initiative. At the end of April he wrote that if Britain immediately withdrew from India, the Japanese would not attack. India’s enemy was British, not Japanese imperialism, and United States military assistance then pouring into India would mean ‘American rule added to British’.
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He had never seen the Japanese as liberators, but he imagined that if their army invaded India they could be overcome by satyagraha!
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The British certainly could, he believed, and in July he called upon his followers to mobilise for a massive ‘Quit India’ campaign.

Even though Congress was disunited over the new campaign, it could not have come at a worse time for the British. Preparations were in hand for the defence of the North-West Frontier against a possible German advance from the Caspian, and there was a recrudescence of unrest in this area, led by Mirza Ali Khan (the Faqir of Ipi), an old-style messianic Muslim holy man who had been directing Pathan resistance for the past seven years. On the North-East Frontier a Japanese attack was expected, which might be combined with a seaborne invasion of south-eastern India or Ceylon. In the light of the breakdown of talks between the government and Congress, the Joint Planning Staff in Delhi placed little faith in the Indian will to resist.
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Nevertheless, those responsible for the wartime defence of India had taken into account the likelihood of internal unrest and had made careful provisions for it, including a violent confrontation with Congress.
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Moreover, the emergency law which had empowered the Viceroy to declare war also gave him the means to take whatever measures were needed to safeguard India’s war effort.

The ‘Quit India’ campaign was launched during the second week of August and took the form of a mass effort to paralyse the country, with systematic attempts to sever rail and telegraph communications. The areas worst affected were Madras, Bihar and the United Provinces, where rail links between Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay were imperilled, and British servicemen were attacked and murdered by rioters. The Muslim League, which had been solid in its support for the war, stood aloof. Hindu students filled out many of the mobs, which were egged on by local Congress politicians. The government was ready for the emergency and acted with the utmost rigour: Gandhi and hundreds of Congress leaders were arrested and interned; the press was censored; fifty-seven brigades of Indian and British troops were diverted from training camps to support the police; urban mobs were fired upon and, at Lithlingow’s orders, aircraft were permitted to strafe rioters tearing up railway lines.
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In Bombay, demonstrators were beaten with a rattan cane, a punishment which, Leo Amery told the Commons, had a ‘high deterrent value … to the hooligan type of offender’.
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As in all previous political disorders, the temporary breakdown of order on the streets gave badmashes and petty criminals the chance to make mischief and plunder.

Order was restored within six weeks. At the beginning of September, the official and therefore lowest estimate of deaths was 300. Despite fears that the unrest was a cover for pro-Japanese fifth columnists, there was no evidence of collusion between Congress and Japan. Once again, the raj had emerged from a prolonged period of civil disturbance as strong as ever, although those within and outside India could be excused for believing that its underlying authority rested on armed force. Gandhi and Congress had been temporarily discredited by the ‘Quit India’ upheavals, particularly in the United States which, during the first six months of 1942, had been applying pressure to Britain to come to a solid agreement with Congress.

The raj had survived the strains of three years of war, and for the next two, India would remain a safe base for Allied forces in south-east Asia. No constitutional settlement had yet been reached which satisfied Indian nationalists and their rulers. By the end of 1942 it was clear that when such an arrangement was finally thrashed out, the final word would rest with the Indians and not their masters. Indian politics no longer revolved around the question of how long the raj would last, but how it was to be dismantled and what would replace it.

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For the Benefit of Everyone: Concepts of Empire, 1919–39

The First World War had dealt a mortal blow to jingoism, although its death throes continued for a further forty or so years. The belligerent patriotism of pre-1914 Britain, which had been stirred to fever pitch during the war, had a hollow ring after 1918, when a stunned nation contemplated the mass slaughter, and asked whether it had been really worthwhile. Britain had emerged victorious, but its people shrank from having to face, let alone engage in, another European war. The experience of the Western Front and the new public mood made it impossible to resuscitate the late-Victorian and Edwardian jingoistic imperialism, which had shouted defiance at the world and urged men and women to sacrifice themselves for the empire. This strident brand of patriotism had certainly intoxicated the public in the years before the war and, some argued, had done much to make war acceptable and its losses bearable.

Not only was the old imperialism discredited and out of fashion, but its champions were revealed to have had feet of clay. The wartime strategic and tactical decisions taken by those imperial warriors who held high command came under critical scrutiny, and were found wanting. Haig, who had sincerely imagined himself destined by God to save the British empire in its time of extreme peril, was toppled from his pedestal. Yesterday’s heroes and prophets became today’s figures of ridicule. In his
Eminent Victorians
(1918), Lytton Strachey poked fun at, among others, Gordon of Khartoum. Collectively and in unflattering form, the living old guard of empire were embodied in the stout figure of Colonel Blimp, a walrus-moustached retired officer with diehard Tory views, created in 1934 by the Australian cartoonist, David Low.

There were plenty of Blimps around between the wars, and they had much to say about such matters as holding on to India but, wisely, the Conservative party distanced itself from them and their opinions. The Conservatives no longer chose to beat the imperial drum, preferring instead to court the electorate through policies of low taxation, the extension of earlier welfare legislation, and home-ownership.
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The mixture worked; the Conservatives were in power throughout most of this period, and dominated the Lloyd George coalition and the 1931–5 national government. On the whole, imperial issues were pushed into the background by more pressing matters such as the economy and the quest for international security. When they were the subject for debate, party leaders went to considerable lengths to secure a crossbench consensus. All parties were consulted on the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals for India; Stanley Baldwin concurred with MacDonald’s Indian policy despite backbench Conservative growls; and the 1935 Government of India Act received all-party support.

Many Conservatives were infuriated by these developments. In February 1931, Churchill expressed outrage at the sight of ‘Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a faqir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’ This and subsequent protests against the extension of self-government in India struck a chord with many Conservatives, and up to sixty MPs were willing to back Churchill in his campaign to reverse official policy. His efforts were to no avail, but they were reminders that, then and later, there was a vociferous minority on the right of the Conservative party for whom the empire was impartible and could somehow be maintained indefinitely.

History could not support this view of empire. It had always been protean, undergoing frequent alterations in its composition and purpose. Public perceptions of the empire also changed. Addressing the Commons during a debate on the colonies in 1938, Ernest Evans, a Liberal MP, contrasted the popular view of the empire in his youth with that of the present day. Born in 1885, his boyhood had been a time ‘when the idea of Empire in the minds of the people was associated with the spirit and practice of flag-waving’. Now, the temper of the country was very different: there was a deeper knowledge of the empire, regret for some of the exploits of the past, and a sincere desire to develop the colonies for the benefit of everyone.
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This selfless view of Britain’s duty towards its subjects was not new. It owed much to those late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelical and liberal idealists, who had believed that it was Britain’s mission to uplift, morally and physically, ignorant and backward races. To some extent, this vision of an essentially benevolent empire had been lost sight of during the aggressive expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, when empire-building had been a competitive activity in which economic and strategic advantages were the prizes. And yet, even when the jingoes roared the loudest, imperialism had not shed its moral principles. They continued to flourish, although their application was confined to the white dominions which enjoyed the freedoms of the mother country and, ultimately, achieved home rule.

The post-war world was more receptive to this traditional concept of empire as an agency for regeneration and progress. Unselfish, paternalist imperialism had been revived by the League of Nations when it introduced the mandate system in 1920. Britain received former German East Africa, renamed Tanganyika, the Cameroons, Iraq, and Palestine, while New Zealand and Australia shared Germany’s Pacific colonies. Each nation solemnly promised to devote itself to ‘the well being and development of colonial races’ that had been placed under its charge. How these aims were being fulfilled throughout the empire was explained by William Ormsby-Gore, the Colonial Secretary, in a BBC broadcast in May 1937. His department was responsible for forty crown colonies and mandated territories with a combined population of 55 million. Their future depended upon their people mastering what he called ‘the art and practice of civilised administration’ through instruction and example. In time, ‘a native Civil Service completely and finally responsible for administration’ would emerge and step into the shoes of its British predecessor. This was both inevitable and welcome for, as Orsmby-Gore concluded, ‘even the best and most enlightened external rule is in the long run no satisfactory substitute for self-government in accordance with the traditions and local characteristics of one’s own people.’
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The quality of British colonial administration was the source of justifiable pride. ‘The peoples of the colonies are not merely content to be His Majesty’s subjects,’ boasted Malcolm MacDonald, Colonial Secretary from 1938 to 1940, ‘they are positively happy to be his Majesty’s subjects.’
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This was how they appeared in the popular press. In April 1939, readers of
Picture Post
saw photographs of keen Indian schoolboys clustered round a blackboard in an open-air school. A month later the magazine showed pictures of chiefs from the Cameroons being taught how to govern justly, alongside a text that contrasted the humane enlightenment of the present British administration with that of Germany, which had ruled the colony before 1916.
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