Winston Churchill as villain

Winston Churchill’s chequered career in politics included famously being British prime minister during the Second World War. He stood up to Adolf Hitler’s Nazism, inspired his people with defiant speeches never to surrender, before convincing the United States to come to Britain’s aid to win the testing confrontation — not just in Europe, but also on India’s Myanmar border against the Japanese and Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army. Yet, while he is widely revered in Britain, he is probably equally reviled in India.

Tariq Ali, a British Pakistani conspicuous for his communist convictions, clearly falls into the category of his critics as expounded in his most recent book  Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes. While Churchill worshippers are likely to detest his views, the critique is broadly correct in its thrust, though a little inflationary on details.  

A chapter entitled “The Indian Cauldron” highlights his alleged crimes against India. Churchill, an arch imperialist, was consistently resistant to devolution of powers in India. He was, therefore, unsurprisingly opposed to the 1935 Government of India Act, which paved the way for provincial elections in 1936-37 and brought the Indian National Congress to power in eight of the 11 provinces.

In 1942, Churchill despatched Sir Stafford Cripps of the Labour party in the war-time national coalition government in Britain to India to, as Mr Ali puts it, “meet with [Jawaharlal] Nehru, [Mahatma] Gandhi and other leaders and plead with them to help Britain,” which found itself on a sticky wicket at that juncture in World War II. Cripps offered a quid pro quo of conditional dominion status in lieu of Congress’ cooperation.

“After Cripps returned empty-handed, Churchill pinned his hopes for a stable Indian army (heavily deployed overseas theatres in addition to within the country) largely on [Mohammad Ali] Jinnah and Sikandar Hyat Khan [the author’s maternal grandfather], the leader of the unionist Party and elected Premier of the Punjab,” Mr Ali writes. He cites the oft-quoted remark by the British prime minister after Cripps’ failed mission about Hindus being “beastly people with a beastly religion”.

The book also illustrates Churchill’s friend and secretary of state for India in the war cabinet Leo Amery’s assessment that, “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane… I don’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

Not unexpectedly, Mr Ali highlights Churchill’s role in respect of the Bengal famine as unpardonable. “Of all the charges laid against Churchill in relation to India, one of the most damning is the accusation that he was responsible for the Bengal famine,” he writes,

“Churchill’s callousness is not in doubt: Malthusian remarks such as “Indians breed like rabbits” (similar statements are often made about Irish Catholics) were criminally negligent. What was also criminal, once it had become clear what was going on in Bengal, was the refusal to declare a state of emergency in the province, immediately reverse the policies that starved the people of food, and send in rice and flour from other parts of the country.” Mr Ali relies on the works of academics Janam Mukherjee and Madhusree Mukerjee for his elucidation of the story.  

Reputed historians tend to concur that up to three million died of hunger because of the denial of food supplies during the Bengal famine. Mr Ali, however, refers to the closing caption in Satyajit Ray’s 1973 film Ashani Sanket, which says: “Over five million people in Bengal starved or died in epidemics because of the man-made famine in 1943.” This is not a contradiction; but obviously a more incriminating interpretation of the circumstances.

Andrew Roberts, one of Churchill’s numerous biographers, thinks Mr Ali’s expressions on the famine, among other topics tackled by him, “are under-researched and misleading”.

“War Crimes in Kenya” is another chapter. Here the writer traces: “Political resistance to the British had grown in the 1950s and the people who created the Mau Mau were no longer prepared to tolerate the degree of violence inflicted on their people. In response, [governor of Kenya Evelyn] Baring, with Churchill’s backing, created a network of prison camps much, much worse than anything Churchill had himself witnessed during the Boer War in South Africa. Prisoners’ descriptions of how they were treated read like slave diaries. ‘It was hell on Earth’ said one survivor.”

Mr Ali claims: “What happened in Kenya was a set of systematic crimes.” Mr Roberts’ view is: “Ali has swallowed the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins’s writing on the Mau Mau uprising, whose mortality figures were wildly out because of the way she used census data.”    

Mr Ali concludes: “Churchill’s genetic racism never disappeared, trickling down homewards as labour shortages necessitated the import of colonial workers from the West Indies and South Asia.” In 1955, Harold Macmillan, then defence minister in Churchill’s Conservative party government, later to be prime minister, is attributed to have noted in his diary: “PM thinks ‘Keep England White’ a good slogan.’

Mr Ali’s occasional colourful language might thrill a section of readers; but he sometimes trivialises his otherwise competitive position on a number of issues.