Statements
about Churchill made by his contemporaries occasionally get misinterpreted. These
days, race is a hot-button topic, and assessments of Churchill’s alleged
‘racism’ by those who knew him attract attention in the media and online. Probably the most
famous example is a comment that Churchill’s Secretary of State for India,
Leopold Amery, made about Churchill’s attitude to Indians. The story goes that
Amery was so appalled and disgusted by Churchill’s racialist views that he said
that Churchill was no different from Hitler.
Detractors cite
this story frequently:
His attitude to Indians, always
hostile, took on even more intemperate form leading the Conservative secretary
of state for India, Leo Amery, to remark: “on the subject of India, Winston is
not quite sane… I don’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
Leopold Amery, Churchill's own
Secretary of State for India, likened his boss's understanding of India's
problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. Amery vented in his
private diaries, writing "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite
sane" and that he didn't "see much difference between [Churchill's]
outlook and Hitler's."
Churchill was a bounder, a serial failure, terrible at small talk, deluded, depressive, drunken, deficient in judgement, and systematically racist enough to be compared by his Secretary of State for India to Adolf Hitler....Leo Amery, Churchill’s previously mentioned Secretary of State who was so appalled by his views that he compared him to Hitler...
This remark
is often assumed to have been provoked by Churchill’s (allegedly indifferent)
attitude to the Bengal famine. For example:
Churchill’s attitude towards India
did not change when he became Prime Minister. He presided over – and actively
prevented any efforts to alleviate – the catastrophic 1943 Bengal famine, which
killed 3 million Indians. When Churchill’s India Secretary and childhood friend
Leo Amery asked him to do something, Churchill laughed about the prospect of
shrinking a population that bred “like rabbits.” A horrorstruck Amery wrote
that when it came to India, there wasn’t “much difference between [Churchill’s]
outlook and Hitler’s.”
Let’s
examine the evidence.
What Amery Actually Thought of Churchill
The first
thing that should be noted is that Amery and Churchill were friends. They
respected each other. They had known each other since their school days,
covered the Boer War as journalists, and had jointly opposed the appeasement of
Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In spite of their mutual respect, they were on
opposing sides of many political issues over the course of their careers.
Their most
serious disagreement concerned India. During the Second World War Amery and
Churchill had numerous bitter arguments about Indian policy. Despite this, the
two remained on good terms. As Amery’s biographer, Wm. Roger Louis, said:
“[T]he negative aspects must not be
allowed to overshadow the mutual respect. Amery believed that Churchill saved
England in 1940-45 and that no one else could have done it. For his part,
Churchill on Amery’s death in 1955 described him with heart-felt emotion as ‘a
great patriot’” (Louis, ‘In The Name of God Go’, p.179).
If Amery
had truly thought that Churchill was as bad as a murderous tyrant like
Hitler, then how could he respect and admire Churchill? This should make
readers skeptical of the seriousness of the comparison.
Grumpy Old Men
The Cabinet
meeting in which Amery compared Churchill to Hitler took place at 15:00 on the
4th of August 1944. The Bengal Famine, and the related question of
food imports to India, were not discussed at the meeting. Here’s a picture of
the items covered:
These might
seem like an odd list of topics to provoke a resort to a reductio ad Hitlerum
argument. Turning to Amery’s diary, he also doesn’t mention the Bengal Famine
being discussed at this meeting. It wasn’t Churchill’s attitude to the
famine which provoked the Hitler comparison. So, what did?
The only
two matters discussed relating to India were the draft of a response from the
Viceroy to Gandhi’s letter on the 27th of July, and the growth of
India’s sterling balances (essentially Britain’s growing indebtedness to
India). Both of these topics brought out Churchill at his most intemperate. On
the issue of the sterling balances, as early as September 1942, an exasperated
Amery wrote in his diary that ‘I confess I find myself getting very impatient
when he [Churchill] talks really ignorant nonsense’ (quoted in Louis, ‘In
The Name of God Go’, p. 164). Amery also wrote
“Winston…is making a fool of
himself. Winston cannot see beyond such phrases as ‘Are we to incur hundreds of
millions of debt defending India in order to be kicked out by the Indians
afterwards? This may be an ill-contrived world but not so ill contrived as all
that.’” (quoted in Louis, ‘In The Name of God Go’, p.165).
By mid-1943
whenever the sterling balances were brought up there would be a “Winstonian
volcano” in the Cabinet - at one meeting he exploded into a rage for twenty
minutes and continued rumbling on the subject for two hours (Louis, ‘In The
Name of God Go’, p.166).
Regarding
the meeting on the 4th of August 1944, Amery wrote the following in
his diary:
“Winston [let loose] in a state of
great exultation describing how after the war he was going to go back on all
the shameful story of the last twenty years of surrender, how once we had won
the war there was no obligation to honour promises made at a time of
difficulty, and not taken up by Indians, and carry out a great regeneration of
India based on extinguishing landlords and oppressive industrialists and uplift
the peasant and untouchable, probably by collectivization on Russian lines. It
might be necessary to get rid of wretched sentimentalists like Wavell [the
Viceroy] and most of the English officials in India, who were more Indian than
the Indians, and send out new men. What was all my professed patriotism worth
if I did not stand up for my own countrymen against Indian money-lenders?
Naturally I lost patience and couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much
difference between his outlook and Hitler’s which annoyed him no little. I am
by no means sure whether on this subject of India he is really quite sane” (Barnes
& Nicholson, Empire at Bay, pp.992-993).
No mention
of the Bengal Famine. Churchill speaks of uplifting the class most affected by
hunger –landless agricultural labourers, who were mostly low caste or
untouchables. According to Amery, Churchill added that he would ditch
all promises claiming to advance India to self-government; abandon the policy
of laissez-faire and institute greater state intervention in the Indian economy;
neuter the landlords, money-lenders, and “oppressive” industrialists; and probably
sack most of the British officials in India. He also attacked Amery personally
– criticizing his patriotism and accusing him of doing the bidding of - or perhaps
appeasing - Indian money-lenders. Amery admits he was annoyed at
the insults and so retaliated by insulting Churchill back. It is clear from
Amery’s account that the Hitler comparison was borne of frustration on Amery’s
part.
We don’t
know what Churchill said upon being compared to Hitler. Amery says that it
annoyed him "no little" which is probably understating it. News of the
conflagration reached the Viceroy of India, who wrote that Amery received a "first-class rocket" (Moon, Wavell, p.89) from Churchill. Given their
friendship Amery must have known before making the comment how it would have
been received. It is quite likely that Amery’s intention was to wind Churchill
up. As historian Peter Harmsen puts it:
Much has been made in recent writings of
Churchill’s alleged dislike of Indians, but some of it seems based on hyperbole
and a distortion of historical sources. Amery did not make the comparison
with the German dictator in “private”, but to Churchill’s face in a state of
great emotion while the two were involved in a heated argument, and therefore
should probably not be taken at face value (Harmsen, War in the Pacific,
p.181 fn.72).
After the
argument, Amery returned to his office and drafted a satirical document
summarizing Churchill’s future plans for India. A piece of Swiftian satire
clearly written as a way for Amery to let off some steam. Notwithstanding the
fact that Amery wrote on the document that it was a skit, writer Madhusree Mukherjee
took it seriously and used it to argue that Churchill would have implemented a Generalplan Ost in India if he had won the election in 1945. Presumably, she takes
articles she reads in The Onion at face value too.
Killing Congress With Kindness
For all the
vituperation directed at Churchill for his attitude to India, India was rarely
a particularly high priority for him during the war – it was mainly an irritation.
Amery complained about Churchill’s lack of interest in India:
“It really is terrible to think that
in nearly five years, apart from incidental talks about appointments etc he has
never once discussed either the Indian situation generally or this sterling
balance question with me, but has only indulged in wild and indeed scarcely
sane tirades in the Cabinet” (quoted in Louis, ‘In The Name of God Go’, p.175).
If Churchill had a plan to commit genocide you
would have expected Amery to have noticed it and written about it in more
detail than parodying it once. And if Churchill did have a plan for genocide,
why did Amery complain about Churchill engaging in “wild and indeed scarcely
sane tirades” instead of having a thought-through Indian policy?
Churchill
made other statements on what he would like to happen in postwar India. As with
anything, his statements need to be understood in their proper context. While
Madhusree Mukerjee suggests that Churchill was under the influence of Hitler
and Stalin when devising his views on postwar India, his main influence was
much closer to home – the Labour party. In September 1942 Labour politician Stafford
Cripps produced a note on India. As his biographer, Peter Clarke, described it:
[Cripps] crossed Marx with
Machiavelli. [His argument] was to bypass communal conflicts by instigating economic
reforms, thus furthering the interests of the masses against ‘the Indian
millowners, landlords and money lenders, many of whom are the financial backers
of the [Indian National] Congress’. In this way, ‘the struggle in India would
no longer be between Indian and British upon the nationalist basis, but between
the classes in India upon an economic basis’…. The Prime Minister seized on
this aspect of Cripps’s analysis and asked that ‘these points should not be
excluded from any statements that may have to be made on Indian policy’ (Clarke, The Cripps Version, p.351).
The India
Office wasn’t impressed with Cripps’s note, but the idea of splitting the
Indian masses from the Congress seems to have been on Churchill’s mind when he
ranted about uplifting the peasants and abolishing the landlords and
moneylenders on the 4th of August 1944. According to Amery, in a
Cabinet meeting in April 1945 Churchill returned to the same theme: ‘As usual
[Churchill] poured contempt on Wavell [the Viceroy] and talked rubbish about
abolishing landlords and money-lenders’ (Louis, ‘In The Name of God Go’,
p.177).
Given
Churchill’s well-known hostility to communism, it may seem surprising that he
thought socialism might be beneficial for India. It is worth bearing in mind
though that Churchill was perhaps prone to tunnel vision, so he might have been
willing to tolerate more socialism in India than he would under ordinary
circumstances if it advanced the cause of the British Empire. In 1917 Lord
Esher said about Churchill:
He handles great subjects in rhymical language,
and becomes quickly enslaved by his own phrases. He deceives himself into the
belief that he takes broad views, when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively
small aspect of the question (quoted in James, ‘The Politician’, p.70).
However, we
probably shouldn’t take Churchill’s comments that seriously. As the eminent
historian, Sarvepalli Gopal, wrote:
“[Churchill] sought to divert
attention from problems of constitutional change by a vigorous policy of social
reform or the creation of large collectivized farms on the Soviet model to
replace the existing system of fragmented land tenure. It would really pay the
British to take up the cause of the poor peasant, to confiscate the lands of
rich Congressmen and divide them up. But Churchill did not follow up these
ideas and probably did not take them seriously, knowing that, in spite of
him, the British might well, in his own phrase, chatter themselves out of
India. At the time of the Cripps mission he cabled to Mackenzie King in Canada:
‘We have resigned ourselves to fighting our utmost to defend India in order, if
successful, to be turned out.’ Later, just before the detention of Gandhi, he
amazed the King by informing him that his colleagues and both, or all three,
parties in Parliament were quite prepared to give up India to Indians after the
war. Cripps, the press, and American opinion had all contributed to reaching
the conclusion that British rule in India was wrong and had always been wrong
for India and British political parties had already been talked into giving up
India…. Some months later [Churchill] expressed to Amery his conviction that
the Indian army was only waiting to shoot the British in the back. Out of this
effervescing, confused welter of comments and suggestions what emerges is that,
while Churchill would have liked to maintain the Empire in India, or even hold
on to a bit of the country, he was not hopeful of it” (Gopal, ‘Churchill and
India’, p.466; emphasis added).
Churchill was not the only one who thought that
socialism was the future for India. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt also
believed that India required ‘reform from the bottom, somewhat on the Soviet
line’ (FRUS: Tehran, Doc. 358)
Plenty of nationalist Indians would have found much of what Churchill
remarked to be reasonable as far as the economics was concerned. As the economic
historian BR Tomlinson wrote, "Congress radicals had been proposing a strong
attack on private property rights in land since the early 1930s. The
established leaders of the national movement were careful never to commit
themselves to this policy unequivocally, but such ideas had some influence
within the party in the 1930s and 1940s" (Tomlinson, Economy of Modern India,
p.188). After independence Indian planners sought (and received) Soviet advice
on their development strategy (Mehrotra, India and the Soviet Union,
p.11). Some Indian nationalists were far more effusive in their praise of
communism than Churchill ever was. For instance, in 1936 Nehru said:
I am convinced that the only key to the
solution of the world’s problem and of India’s problem lies in socialism…. This
involves vast and revolutionary changes in our political and social structure,
the ending of vested interests in land and industry, as well as the feudal and
autocratic Indian states system. This means the ending of private property,
except in a restricted sense, and the replacement of the present profit system
by a higher ideal of cooperative service. In short, it means a new
civilization, radically different from the present capitalist order. Some
glimpse we can have of this new civilization in the territories of the USSR… If
the future is full of hope it is largely because of Soviet Russia… this new
civilization will spread to other lands and put an end to the wars and
conflicts which capitalism feeds on.
Nehru had
no desire to copy & paste the Soviet system onto India, and he said that
much happened in the USSR which pained him greatly (Gopal, A Biography,
pp.207-208). The fact remains, however, that he found aspects of that regime
praiseworthy, and he never criticized the Soviets to anything like the same
degree that he criticized western transgressions. By Madhusree Mukerjee’s
logic, Nehru and Roosevelt must have secretly desired to commit a class-based genocide
in India.
Conclusion
The truth
is that Amery had great respect for Churchill. He wasn’t morally appalled by
Churchill’s racial views so much as he was frustrated by them. During a heated
argument between the two men, and after a personal attack on his character,
Amery angered Churchill by comparing him to Hitler. Amery would have known that this would annoy Churchill, and he likely made the comparison for
that reason. It ought not to be taken at face value, as an objective assessment
of Churchill’s racial views. For one thing, Hitler isn’t exactly known for his
desire to improve the conditions of the Indian peasantry! The notion that Amery
would think of Churchill as a murderer and a tyrant and still admire him contradicts
the view that Amery was a humane man who supposedly shows how out-of-step
Churchill’s imperialism was back in the 1940s.
Bibliography
Barnes,
John & Nicholson, David (eds.), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery
Diaries, 1929 – 1949 (Hutchinson, 1988)
Clarke,
Peter, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps, 1889 – 1952 (Allen
Lane 2002)
Franklin, William and Gerber, William (eds.), Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943 (USGPO, 1961)
Gopal,
Sarvepalli, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume One, 1889, 1947
(Oxford University Press, 1976)
Gopal,
Sarvepalli, ‘Churchill and India’ in Robert Blame and W.M. Roger Louis, Churchill:
A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (Clarendon Press, 1996),
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Peter, War in the Pacific: Volume 2: Formidable Foe – 1942-1943 (Kindle
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Santosh, India and the Soviet Union: Trade and Technology Transfer
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