Madhusree Mukerjee (1961-) Churchill's Secret War (2010)
The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
To those who fell so that I could be born free
Chapter One. Empire at War
“In my view England is now beginning a new period of struggle and fighting for its life,” Winston Churchill wrote in 1933, “and the crux of it will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of commercial rights.”
...Of the colony’s prewar budget, a third went toward defense, and that fraction had increased to two-fifths by 1939.
...In 1935, after a prolonged civil disobedience movement in India, a coalition government in London had granted limited powers of self-rule to the colony. Many members of the Labour Party were sympathetic to Indian aspirations, and even some Tory politicians held that Britain could not forever oppose some measure of self-government in the colony. But an earlier viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, had explained to Amery that Indians could probably be appeased, by “some façade which will leave the essential mechanism of power still in our hands.” Accordingly, by 1935 London’s socialists and conservatives had hammered out a compromise: a franchise of around 30 million voters would elect Indian ministers to run the provinces and send a few representatives to the viceroy’s executive council in New Delhi.
...At a meeting in September 1939, the differences among Gandhi, Bose, and Nehru broke into the open. Gandhi was horrified by the bloodshed unleashed by the Nazis and wanted to cooperate with aspects of the war effort. Bose asserted that both Germany and the United Kingdom were fighting for imperial stakes; he saw the war as amoral and urged that the Congress use it as an opportunity to wrest freedom. Nehru detested fascism-but he also felt that Indians had no compelling reason to participate in a war that would free others while leaving them colonized. His view prevailed, in that the Indian National Congress asked the United Kingdom to clarify the ends to which the war would be fought. “If the war is to defend the status quo, imperialist possessions, colonies, vested interests, and privilege, India can have nothing to do with it. If, however, the issue is democracy and a world order based on democracy, then India is intensely interested in it,” the Congress announced. “A free democratic India will gladly associate herself with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.”
...According to the minutes of the War Cabinet meetings, Churchill warned that if amity among Indians were somehow to be achieved, its “immediate result would be that the united communities would join in showing us the door. He regarded the Hindu-Moslem feud as the bulwark of British rule in India.” Churchill’s chain of reasoning hinged on the fact that the Indian National Congress, though it was secular in its principles, was nevertheless composed mainly of Hindus. If the Congress failed to agree to share power with the Muslim League, the British could claim that their relinquishing India was tantamount to abandoning a vulnerable Muslim minority to Hindu majority rule.
...As Churchill explained it, the United Kingdom’s task in India, an expansive land that comprised several feuding groups, was similar to its role in Europe: “to preserve the balance between these great masses, and thus maintain our own control for our advantage and their salvation.” Therefore, Churchill continued, “I am not at all attracted by the prospect of one united India, which will show us the door.” That the Government of India might incline toward promoting harmony between Hindus and Muslims was “to my mind distressing and repugnant in the last degree.”