Mary Soames, Churchill's daughter, tells us that her father greatly enjoyed reading Niradh Chaudhuri's 'Autobiography of an unknown Indian'. If, ethnographically speaking, the precursor of Chaudhuri's text was Macaulay's slighting remarks about the Bengali, then, from the political point of view, the following speech given by Churchill, in March 1931, on 'England's duty in India', is the precursor to Niradh's oeuvre.
I think it hard that the burden of holding and organising this immense meeting should be thrown upon the Indian Empire Society.
It was founded the previous year by Michael O'Dwyer, the Governor of the Punjab at the time of the Jallianwallah Massacre. He would be assassinated by a Sikh in 1940. I suppose, he thought he was safe enough in England. It was officials still serving in India who would pay with their blood for the obduracy of 'old India hands' back in Blighty.
I suppose, for Niradh, whose book was published after Churchill was reconciled to Nehru, the burden of berating India for its beastliness and loudly lamenting England's lost honour, had fallen squarely upon his own frail shoulders. If a previous generation of Bengalis had scolded Britain for holding India, it fell to him to scold it for loosing that hold.
One would have thought that if there was one cause in the world which the Conservative party would have hastened to defend, it would be the cause of the British Empire in India.
Why? That Empire was the creation of Whigs, not Tories- men like Hastings & Cornwallis & Wellesley (who did turn Tory later) & Bentinck. I suppose you could say it was Disraeli who turned Queen Victoria into the Empress of India but that was the gaudy, Oriental, aspect of that scribbling Jew.
Desmond Jerrold rather shrewdly remarked that, at a time when Churchill was a Liberal, 'Toryism, as the creed of the governing classes, had no intellectual aspirations. It was interested not in principles but in the conduct of affairs, and if politics were increasingly for the people, affairs were still for the privileged. “Power,” as John Adams said, “always follows property,” and the attack on property had not yet begun. Enthusiastic schoolboys outside the charmed circle were thus left with grandiloquent liberal principles as the only possible focus for their political enthusiasms.'
Churchill's grandiloquence, thus, was Whig, not Tory. Indeed, it was puerile or 'babu'. Baldwin was the truer Tory in that he preferred to quietly take over the conduct of affairs rather than raise a hue and cry over matters of principle.
One would have expected that the whole force of the Conservative party machine would have been employed for months past in building up a robust, educated opinion throughout the country, and in rallying all its strongest forces to guard our vital interests.
What was vital was that India get rid of dyarchy, which wasn't working, and move to Provincial Autonomy which is what the Tories delivered with the 1935 Act.
What the Tory party, under Baldwin, was trying to do was to shake off its image as stupid and behind the times. The way to do this was to cosy up to, and appear to help, the 'progressive' Left-Liberals while actually giving them just enough rope to hang themselves. At that point the Tories could regain power by appearing to share the same goals but to be better able to reach them through pragmatic negotiation and a superior savoir faire. Indeed, we may say that the Butskellite consensus of the Fifties and early Sixties was based on just such a 'bait and switch' tactic. What was fatal to the Tory cause was anything which suggested that its leadership was living in the past and was out of touch with a greatly altered post-war Social landscape.
Unhappily all that influence, and it is an enormous influence, has been cast the other way. The Conservative leaders have decided that we are to work with the Socialists, and that we must make our action conform with theirs.
No. The Tories, very cleverly, had drawn the fangs of Labour and would soon see it a divided and politically inert rump.
We therefore have against us at the present time the official machinery of all the three great parties in the State. We meet under a ban. Every Member of Parliament or Peer who comes here must face the displeasure of the party Whips.
Worse than displeasure was ridicule. I suppose Baldwin gained by being seen as a sensible man- he confessed he wished he could give up politics to breed pigs- by contrast to the bombastic Winston.
Mr. Baldwin has declared that the three-party collusion must continue. And in support of that decision he has appealed to all those sentiments of personal loyalty and partisan feeling which a leader can command. Is it not wonderful in these circumstances, with all this against us, that a few of us should manage to get together here in this hall to-night? [Editor’s Note: An allusion to the great numbers who filled the building.]
Churchill was in the wilderness and had to take his friends where he could find them. People felt he wasn't quite sane on the issue of India. True, his father had been Secretary of State back in 1885. But that was a long time ago.
Our fight is hard. It will also be long.
This was a fight which was over before it began. The Tories had a plan for India. Labour did not. Gandhi did not. But Zetland & Lothian did. They prevailed.
We must not expect early success. The forces marshalled against us are too strong. But win or lose, we must do our duty. If the British people are to lose their Indian Empire, they shall do so with their eyes open, and not be led blindfold into a trap.
British people are a bit stupid. Some villain puts a blindfold on them and they say 'Wow, night has fallen real early today'. Then the villain says 'follow my voice. I assure you, no trap has been dug for you.' The British people, being wholly without guile, willingly comply. They fall into a trap. On this occasion, with respect to India, Winston has a cunning plan to foil villainous Socialists. That plan is to keep your eyes open. Don't let yourself be blindfolded. Don't walk into a trap even if evil Leftists assure you there is no trap.
No doubt, members of the Indian Empire Society were very grateful to receive such sage advise from a seasoned statesman.
Already in our campaign we have had a measure of success. The movement and awakening of opinion in the Conservative party have already caused concern to our leaders. They feel they have to reckon with resolute forces in the party, and far beyond it, who will not be easily quelled.
They were wholly inconsequential. India needed to become self-governing and self-garrisoning. Presumably this would involve some sort of Federal Structure. With any luck, the Indians might sort this out for themselves.
Already they have rejected the plan of sending a three-party delegation out to India for which Lord Irwin pleaded so earnestly.
The Simon Commission had not been welcomed by the Indians. Indeed, it had served to reunite them. The first Round Table Conference had ended a couple of months before. Wisely, Gandhi had refused to attend. But wisdom could have only an evanescent hold on the maha-crackpot.
For the moment, therefore, we have a breathing space. The Socialist and subversive enemy have been thrown into disarray by the breakdown of their scheme to entice the Conservatives out to India.
Where they would have been gang-raped and forced into prostitution.
They are arranging their forces for a renewed attack. Mr. Gandhi, their supreme hope, is to come to London, as soon as they can persuade him to come, and here in the centre of the Empire he will discuss with British ministers and politicians the best means for breaking it up. But by that time we shall be ready too. We shall not be taken by surprise, as the country was during the Round Table Conference. We are not entirely defenceless or without means of expression.
Sadly, Winston had already doomed the Empire by taking a shilling off Income Tax instead of spending it on the Navy.
We have behind us the growing strength of Conservative opinion.
Which is that the arrow of time had gone in the wrong direction for quite long enough. It must make a U turn and take us back to somewhere nice like the golden age of Lord Palmerston.
We have the prospect at no great distance of a Conservative victory. Nothing will turn us from our path, or discourage us from our efforts; and by the time Mr. Gandhi has arrived here to receive the surrender of our Indian Empire, the Conservative party will not be so ready to have its name taken in vain.
Winston was vainly appealing to a party which had turned its back upon him. He was an old Free Trader. Manchester would make a deal with Bombay. Imperial Preference would prevail.
What spectacle could be more sorrowful than that of this powerful country casting away with both hands, and up till now almost by general acquiescence, the great inheritance which centuries have gathered?
What would be more sorrowful, or more sordid, than screaming hysterically and soiling yourself because the arrow of time isn't taking you back to the age of Lord Palmerston?
What spectacle could be more strange, more monstrous in its perversity, than to see the Viceroy and the high officials and agents of the Crown in India labouring with all their influence and authority to unite and weave together into a confederacy all the forces adverse and hostile to our rule in India?
Your interest in a place may be better secured by not ruling it. Equally ruling a place which doesn't want to be ruled by you may be fatal to your vital interests. Such was the situation of the British in relation to India. Churchill's suggestion was that Britain should scream loudly and soil itself. How else are we to reverse the arrow of time?
One after another our friends and the elements on which we ought to rely in India are chilled, baffled and dismissed, and finally even encouraged to band themselves together with those who wish to drive us out of the country.
Also Socialists are beating and raping them incessantly. They vainly appeal to Churchill to intervene but he merely screams and soils himself while putting all the blame on the arrow of time.
It is a hideous act of self-mutilation, astounding to every nation in the world. The princes, the Europeans, the Moslems, the Depressed classes, the Anglo-Indians – none of them know what to do nor where to turn in the face of their apparent desertion by Great Britain.
Because Socialists are holding them down while Brahmins sodomize them incessantly. It is the duty of every true-blue Tory to scream hysterically and soil herself to protest the failure of the arrow of Time to reverse course.
Can you wonder that they try in desperation to make what terms are possible with the triumphant Brahmin oligarchy?
They are now offering to suck off the Brahmins so as to safeguard their anal cherries.
I am against this surrender to Gandhi. I am against these conversations and agreements between Lord Irwin and Mr. Gandhi. Gandhi stands for the expulsion of Britain from India. Gandhi stands for the permanent exclusion of British trade from India. Gandhi stands for the substitution of Brahmin domination for British rule in India.
Gandhi was a Bania. That is the third caste in the Hindu hierarchy.
You will never be able to come to terms with Gandhi.
But he will make a hash of things, surrender unilaterally and meekly go off to jail.
You have only to read his latest declarations, and compare them with the safeguards for which we are assured the official Conservatives will fight to the end, to see how utterly impossible agreement is.
Which suggests that Gandhi is more frightened of British departure than any European, Muslim or 'depressed class' person.
But let me tell you this. If at the sacrifice of every British interest and of all the necessary safeguards and means of preserving peace and progress in India, you come to terms with Gandhi, Gandhi would at that self-same moment cease to count any more in the Indian situation.
Only if some patriot put a bullet in his brain. Otherwise the mahacrackpot would have been a bigger nuisance to an Indian Premier than he had been to any British Viceroy.
Already Nehru, his young rival
acolyte
in the Indian Congress, is preparing to supersede him the moment that he has squeezed his last drop from the British lemon.
No. Nehru had no power. Churchill could protest against the Mody-Lee agreement. Nehru had to keep mum.
In running after Gandhi and trying to build on Gandhi, in imagining that Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Mr. Gandhi and Lord Irwin are going to bestow peace and progress upon India, we should be committing ourselves to a crazy dream, with a terrible awakening.
Irwin- the Holy Fox- ran circles around Gandhi.
No! Come back from these perilous paths while time and strength remain. Study the report of your own statutory commission headed by Sir John Simon and signed unanimously by the representatives of all the three parties in the State. Let us take that as our starting-point for any extensions we may make of self-government in India.
Such, already, was the case. What remained to be seen whether it would be imposed unilaterally or amended and then accepted by the main parties invited to the Conference.
It is very wrong that the vast majority of Conservative electors throughout the country, and the vast majority of all those who are acquainted with and have practical experience of India, and of that enormous mass of patriotic people not attached to any party, should have these vital questions settled over their heads by an agreement or an understanding between the two front benches in the House of Commons, and have their future settled as if they were a lot of sheep.
Yet that is precisely how the Government of the country had been conducted for the last century.
We are told that three-party unity must be preserved at all costs. What does that mean?
That there was a Government of National Unity saying 'lets be united as a nation'. What's so difficult to understand about that?
Up to the present it has only meant one thing, namely, that the Conservative party has had to toe the Socialist line, and has been dragged at the Socialist tail.
With good reason, many in the Labour party felt the opposite was the case.
Here are these Socialists, maintained in office only on sufferance or by intrigue, expecting all other parties to serve them, and to dance to their tune. We are here to-night to say ‘No, that shall not be.’ We have a right to our own convictions; we are entitled to act in accordance with them. We will certainly make our faith apparent by every means in our power, and in every quarter of the land.
Churchill certainly made a fool of himself.
I repudiate the calumny which our opponents level at us that we have no policy for India but repression and force.
We don't need any policy for India. The Socialists are lying to you about Indians wanting independence. The truth is, they are loudly demanding more British boots to lick.
Do not be deceived by these untruths. Do not be disquieted by exaggerations of the difficulty of maintaining order in India which are spread about for interested motives by the Socialist ministers and their allies. In the whole of the disturbances of the last year -.except on the frontier – scarcely a British soldier has been required. Very few people have been killed or severely wounded in the rioting. But how did the most of them get hurt? They got hurt not by the Indian police, but in religious fights between Moslems and Hindus.
Such had been the case when Irwin took office. That's why he had wanted Gandhi to re-enter politics. Hindu-Muslim riots could get out of hand. Calcutta might go up in smoke.
The great body of expert opinion which is represented upon the Indian Empire Society
the forerunner of the Monster Raving Loony Party.
will support me when I say that a calm, capable, determined Viceroy properly supported from home could maintain peace and tranquillity in India year after year with a tenth of the repressive measures which Lord Irwin in his misguided benevolence has been compelled to employ.
Also, a calm, capable, determined Prime Minister like myself would be easily able to abolish death and taxes and disease of any type.
Neither is it true that we have no constructive policy. We take our stand upon views almost universally accepted until a few months ago. We believe that the next forward step is the development of Indian responsibility in the provincial governments of India.
Provincial Autonomy granted by the Tory 1935 Act.
Efforts should be made to make them more truly representative of the real needs of the people. Indians should be given ample opportunities to try their hand at giving capable government in the provinces; and meanwhile the central Imperial executive, which is the sole guarantee of impartiality between races, creeds and classes, should preserve its sovereign power intact, and allow no derogation from its responsibility to Parliament. Is that Diehardism?’ That is the message of the Simon report, unanimously signed by the representatives of the three parties. That is the purport of the alternative scheme submitted a few months ago by the Viceroy himself.
That was in fact the upshot. Why pretend that Baldwin and Zetland and Lothian and Irwin were all traitors or that they had been beguiled by the Socialists?
After all, it opens immediately an immense and fertile field for Indian self-government. The provinces of India are great states and separate nations comparable in magnitude and in numbers with the leading powers of Europe. The responsible government of territories and populations as large as Germany, France, Poland, Italy or Spain is not a task unworthy of Indian capacity for self-government, so far as it has yet been displayed. It is a task the successful discharge of which would certainly not conflict with the ultimate creation of a federal system. On the contrary it is the indispensable preliminary without which no federation, desirable or undesirable, is possible. Why, the very word ‘federal’ signifies a foedus or treaty made between hitherto sovereign or autonomous states.
Empires contain previously sovereign or autonomous territories.
All federations have arisen thus.
If the constituent states consent. That was the problem in India. First the Buddhists in Burma and then the Muslims, where they were the majority, went their own way.
In the United States of America
there was a Civil War
, in Canada,
Newfoundland stayed out till 1949.
in Australia, in South Africa,
there was the Boer War
in every case the units have first been created. Why should these unpractised, unproved, unrepresentative, self-chosen groups of Indian politicians disdain the immense possibilities offered within the limits of the Statutory Commission’s report, and demand an immediate setting up of a United States of India, with themselves in control, and the British army at their orders?
The answer is that the Indian National Congress was claiming to already be India's parliament. Gandhi was its leader. He went one step further by claiming that he was himself a Muslim, a Dalit, a woman and anything else you cared to name. The demand that the Brits hand over the Army to Gandhi before leaving was explained by the latter, in 1939, as a consequence of the non-violent nature of the Congressman, who was Hindu. The Muslims and the Punjabis (regardless of creed) and maybe also the Gurkhas would gang up and establish their dominion over the Hindu. True, the power of the Ahimsa fairy might protect the anal cherries of the Dalit, but it wouldn't be able to do very much more. Hence, the Brits must not slyly fuck off without giving Congress the British Indian Army to hold the Muslim and the Punjabi at bay.
Before a Federal system for India could be set up there must be first the self-governing constituent provinces; and secondly, far greater, more real, more representative contact between the Indian political classes and the vast proletariat they aspire to rule.
No Federal system was set up. There was partition and the successor states were unitary unless a second partition took place.
Even Europe cannot achieve such a united organisation. But what would be said of a scheme which handed the federal government of the United States of Europe over to political classes proportionately no larger than the inhabitants of Portugal, and no more representative of the needs and passions of a mighty continent than the inhabitants of a single city like Rome?
What could be said of a United States of Europe ruled over by a foreign company which had been nationalized by a foreign country?
Such are the follies we are forced to expose. We therefore resist upon the highest experience and authority the viewy hysterical megalomania of the Round Table Conference.
It was Churchill who sounded hysterical. His Tory colleagues were playing the long game and would prevail. He would be left to howl in the wilderness till war with Germany became inevitable.
Why is it that the principles of Government and lessons of history which we have learnt in our experience with the great self-governing dominions, which we have learnt in Canada, in South Africa and in Ireland,
Ireland was partitioned. There was a Civil War. Da Valera would soon come to power in Ireland. Churchill's meddling in Irish affairs had bitter fruit.
apply only in a limited degree to India? It is because the problem of Indian government is primarily a technical one. In India far more than in any other community in the world moral, political and economic considerations are outweighed by the importance of technical and administrative apparatus.
That apparatus was thin on the ground. This was a night-watchman state- nothing more.
Here you have nearly three hundred and fifty millions of people, lifted to a civilisation and to a level of peace, order, sanitation and progress far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves or could maintain.
There was some truth to that. After independence, the countries there became less able to feed or defend themselves. Minority protection was a thing of the past.
This wonderful fact is due to the guidance and authority of a few thousands of British officials responsible to Parliament who have for generations presided over the development of India.
Stagnation.
If that authority is injured or destroyed, the whole efficiency of the services, defensive, administrative, medical, hygienic, judicial; railway, irrigation, public works and famine prevention, upon which the Indian masses depend for their culture and progress, will perish with it.
Churchill was Prime Minister when a Muslim League administration in Bengal presided over a big famine.
India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.
For many Indians there was nowhere to fall to because they had not risen.
The question at stake is not therefore the gratification of the political aspirations towards self-government of a small number of intellectuals. It is, on the contrary, the practical, technical task of maintaining the peace and life of India by artificial means upon a much higher standard than would otherwise be possible. To let the Indian people fall, as they would, to the level of China, would be a desertion of duty on the part of Great Britain.
That duty was military. Churchill was one among many Chancellors who refused to raise taxes to maintain British naval supremacy. Without it Singapore was bound to fall as were Malaya and Burma. Without American aid, Assam and Bengal would have been the next dominoes.
But that is not all. To abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins
as opposed to Britishers
would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence. It would shame for ever those who bore its guilt. These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism, and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians, are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty millions of their own fellow countrymen whom they call ‘untouchable’, and whom they have by thousands of years of oppression actually taught to accept this sad position.
Japan had untouchables but no Brahmins. Bali had Brahmins but no untouchables. The question was why, if untouchability was repugnant to the British, they had not abolished it? Indeed, they had reinforced it by things like ending Mahar recruitment into the British Indian Army.
They will not eat with these sixty millions,
Churchill never sat down to dinner save in company with the chap who scrubbed his chamber pot.
nor drink with them, nor treat them as human beings. They consider themselves contaminated even by their approach. And then in a moment they turn round and begin chopping logic with John Stuart Mill, or pleading the rights of man with Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Rather like the Tory who poses as a Democrat.
While any community, social or religious, endorses such practices and asserts itself resolved to keep sixty millions of fellow countrymen perpetually and eternally in a state of sub-human bondage, we cannot recognise their claim to the title-deeds of democracy.
Congress was demanding universal adult suffrage. This was granted to Ceylon in 1931. There was an untouchable community in Ceylon.
Still less can we hand over to their unfettered sway those helpless millions they despise.
Either the British ruled India, in which case this is what they had already done and would keep doing, or Britain didn't rule India and thus had no responsibilities or duties towards the 'depressed' classes.
Side by side with this Brahmin theocracy and the immense Hindu population – angelic and untouchable castes alike – there dwell in India seventy millions of Moslems, a race of far greater physical vigour and fierceness, armed with a religion which lends itself only too readily to war and conquest.
This was the reason Gandhi and Tagore didn't want the Brits to leave. Sadly, it was the Sikhs who would lose most from Independence.
While the Hindu elaborates his argument, the Moslem sharpens his sword. Between these two races and creeds, containing as they do so many gifted and charming beings in all the glory of youth, there is no intermarriage.
Motilal Nehru's daughter married a Muslim. Gandhi broke up the marriage and thus saved Nehru's political future.
The gulf is impassable. If you took the antagonisms of France and Germany, and the antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants, and compounded them and multiplied them ten-fold, you would not equal the division which separates these two races intermingled by scores of millions in the cities and plains of India.
So, Partition and ethnic cleansing was inevitable.
But over both of them the impartial rule of Britain has hitherto lifted its appeasing sceptre.
Such that even where there was no religious animosity- as between Nehru and Jinnah- a bitter political animosity had taken root.
Until the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms began to raise the question of local sovereignty and domination, they had got used to dwelling side by side in comparative toleration.
It was the partition of Bengal in 1905 which gave currency to the 'communal' problem.
But step by step, as it is believed we are going to clear out or be thrust out of India, so this tremendous rivalry and hatred of races springs into life again. It is becoming more acute every day. Were we to wash our hands of all responsibility and divest ourselves of all our powers, as our sentimentalists desire, ferocious civil wars would speedily break out between the Moslems and the Hindus. No one who knows India will dispute this.
Ethnic cleansing might occur. But bullets are costly. Let the bloodletting be done with crude agricultural implements.
But that is not the end. The Brahmins know well that they cannot defend themselves against the Moslems.
The Chitpavan Brahmins knew no such thing.
The Hindus do not possess among their many virtues that of being a fighting race.
There are plenty such amongst them. Churchill knew very little about India. Still, he was on the same page as Gandhi in this matter.
The whole south of India is peopled with races deserving all earnest solicitude and regard, but incapable of self-defence.
South Indian sepoys enabled the Brits to prevail over the French. Stringer Lawrence laid the foundation for the British Indian army using South Indian troops.
It is in the north alone that the fighting races dwell. Bengal, for instance, does not send from her forty-five million inhabitants any soldiers to the native army.
Half the Bengalis were Muslim.
The Punjab is a place where fighting races dwell|, on the other hand, and the Pathans, together with the Ghurkas and the Sikhs, who are entirely exceptional sects of Hindus, all dwelling in the north, furnish three-quarters of the entire army in the time of peace, and furnished more than three-quarters of it in time of war.
Garhwal had plenty of Brahmins and Rajputs who went into the army.
There can be no doubt therefore that the departure of the British from India, which Mr. Gandhi advocates, and which Mr. Nehru demands, would be followed first by a struggle in the North
in which Sikhs and Hindus would be allies. They would prevail in non-Muslim majority areas. I suppose there would be some exchange of population and uncertainty as to where the boundary would be fixed.
and thereafter by a reconquest of the South by the North,
there would be no need for any such thing. The question was how big a role would the Marathas play in this.
and of the Hindus by the Moslems.
This was Gandhi's contention. But Muslims didn't believe him. They knew the martial castes included Rajputs and Bhumihars and Marathas and Coorgis and Nairs and so forth.
This danger has not escaped the crafty foresight of the Brahmins. It is for that reason that they wish to have the control of a British army, or failing that, a white army of janissaries officered, as Mr. Gandhi has suggested, by Germans or other Europeans.
Gandhi was foolish to make any such suggestion. It put the wind up all non-Congress politicians. What was to prevent Gandhi & Co cancelling all the concessions they had made the moment they had bayonets at their command? The Princes too feared for their future. Gandhi had ensured that the Second Round Table Conference would be an abject failure. He would return to India only to be jailed. Congress would be banned. The threat of confiscation of property would tame the passions of his financial backers. The Tories would dictate the pace and scope of reform. The aim would be to render the Hindu majority a numerical minority in the Assemblies. Sadly, Zetland miscalculated. When Congress gave in and took part in the 1937 elections it was able to win majorities and form Governments in Hindu majority states. Then Gandhi & Co miscalculated once again and resigned office after the declaration or War. Since the administration proceeded smoothly enough without them, they had no card to play. A renewed non-cooperation campaign would just mean returning to jail to sulk.
They wish to have an effective foreign army, or foreign-organised army, in order to preserve their dominance over the Moslems and their tyranny over their own untouchables.
Churchill is admitting that Britain had been providing that foreign-organised army to the very Brahmins he hated so much. No doubt, some Socialist had tricked Robert Clive and Warren Hastings into performing this service to the cunning Brahmins 150 years ago. Indeed, Winston's daddy- as Secretary of State for India- was probably tricked by Karl Marx into increasing the burden on the untouchables to the great glee of the Brahmins.
There, is the open plot of which we are in danger of becoming the dupes, and the luckless millions of Indians the victims.
If Brahmins were oppressing Dalits, it was because Clive and Hastings and even Winston's daddy had become the dupes of sly Socialistic Brahmins like that Kali Ma'aaks fellow.
It is our duty to guard those millions from that fate.
Tories had not been able to guard British women, dupes of sly Brahmin Socialists, from the fate worse than death which was the right to vote in elections. The party must not repeat that mistake in India.
Let me just direct your attention once more upon these untouchables, fifty or sixty millions of them, that is to say more than the whole population of the British Isles; all living their lives in acceptance of the validity of the awful curse pronounced upon them by the Brahmins.
Only because the enforcement of that curse was done by duped Britishers like Clive, Hastings and Randolph Churchill.
A multitude as big as a nation, men, women and children deprived of hope and of the status of humanity. Their plight is worse than that of slaves, because they have been taught to consent not only to a physical but to a psychic servitude and prostration.
Ambedkar would take up this theme and run with it. Sadly, his pal Mandal, who joined hands with the Muslim League had to run away from Pakistan.
I have asked myself whether if Christ came again into this world, it would not be to the untouchables of India that he would first go, to give them the tidings that not only are all men equal in the sight of God, but that for the weak and poor and downtrodden a double blessing is reserved.
There were plenty of untouchable Christians. Their double blessing was to be looked down on by both the Hindu and the Christian Brahmin.
Certainly the success of Christianity and missionary enterprise has been greater among the untouchables than among any other class of the Indian population.
It was greatest in the tribal areas of the North East.
The very act of accepting Christianity by one of these poor creatures involves a spiritual liberation from this obsession of being unclean; and the curse falls from their minds as by a miracle. They stand erect, captains of their fate in the broad sunlight of the world. There are also nearly five million Indian Christians in India, a large proportion of whom can read and write, and some of whom have shown themselves exceptionally gifted. It will be a sorry day when the arm of Britain can no longer offer them the protection of an equal law.
The arm of Britain had pushed them down. Ambedkar's father was a soldier. He could not be a soldier because the Brits decided to halt recruitment of untouchables. He went to a Government School. He could not receive instruction in Sanskrit because he was untouchable. It was a Hindu King who sent him abroad for higher studies.
There is a more squalid aspect. Hitherto for generations it has been the British policy that no white official should have any interest or profit other than his salary and pension out of Indian administration.
That administration was carried out for the longest time by the East India Company. It didn't seek profits at all. It was a philanthropic organization which received donations and which paid no dividends.
All concession-hunters and European adventurers, company-promoters and profit-seekers have been rigorously barred and banned. But now that there is spread through India the belief that we are a broken, bankrupt, played-out power, and that our rule is going to pass away and be transferred in the name of the majority to the Brahmin sect, all sorts of greedy appetites have been excited, and many itching fingers are stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict Empire. I read in the Times newspaper, in the Times mind you, only last week of the crowd of rich Bombay merchants and millionaire millowners, millionaires on sweated labour, who surround Mr. Gandhi, the saint, the lawyer, Lord Irwin’s dear colleague and companion. What are they doing there, these men, and what is he doing in their houses?
They were 'banyans'- i.e. businessman- and Gandhi was a bania by caste. He spoke Gujarati, like the Parsis, and Hindi, like the Marwaris. They had financed him and they would get the deal they wanted with Manchester. Churchill would fulmine futilely against this outcome. Nehru had to keep quiet though in his Autobiography he wrote of the need to get rid of 'Bania politics' and replace it with something more Brahminical- i.e. high minded rather than money-grubbing.
They are making arrangements that the greatest bluff, the greatest humbug and the greatest betrayal shall be followed by the greatest ramp.
No. The Mody-Lees agreement was modest enough. But it shut out Japan.
Nepotism, back-scratching, graft and corruption in every form
i.e. everything History associates with the East India Company's gaining territory
will be the handmaidens of a Brahmin domination.
Hastings was a Whig. Whigs are actually Brahmins. So are Socialists. Wake up, sheeple!
Far rather would I see every Englishman quit the country, every soldier, every civil servant embark at Bombay, than that we should remain clutching on to the control of foreign relations and begging for trading facilities, while all the time we were the mere cloak of dishonour and oppression.
According to Churchill, British rule had merely been such a cloak under which Dalits were subject to soul-murder and Muslims were kept from forcibly converting evil Brahmins to a less horrible religion.
If you were to put these facts, hard, solid indigestible facts, before Mr. Ramsay MacDonald or Mr. Wedgwood Benn, or Sir Herbert Samuel, they would probably reply
that Churchill should lay off the cognac. People thought him barmy.
by pointing to the follies of Lord North in the American revolution, to the achievements of Lord Durham in Canada, or to what has happened in South Africa or in Ireland.
It must be said, the Tories were playing the long game. First they led the Labour party down the garden path while showing them every mark of deference. Then they resolved the Indian question after every appearance of courtesy and consultation with various Indian stakeholders. Still, Zetland miscalculated. He didn't expect Congress to win majorities in Hindu majority provinces. Under the terms of 1935 Act, it was feasible that the Indians could cobble together a Federal Government to which the Viceroy might consider himself answerable. Thankfully, the Indians couldn't cobble together shit.
All the Socialists and some of the Liberals, together with, I am sorry to say, the official Conservatives, have got these arguments on the tip of their tongue.
& Churchill's sham historical scholarship could not rebut them. That's why he was screaming hysterically and soiling himself incessantly on the subject of India. Charitable folk put this down to too much brandy and a lack of fibre in his diet. Less charitable folk thought him a fool- which is not a bad thing to be if you are a Tory- but the sort of fool whom the Welsh wizard could easily make his tool.
It should be noted that Baldwin, whose proudest political boast was that he had reversed the ratio of Etonians to Harrovians in the Cabinet, kept Churchill out of the Cabinet after having made the mistake of appointing him Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924. Keynes's pamphlet 'the economic consequences of Mr. Churchill' was considered the epitaph of Lloyd George's silver-tongued but shallow-witted acolyte. Perhaps unfairly, he received much blame for first the Coal strike and then the manner in which the General Strike was handled. Whatever Baldwin's feelings for a fellow Harrovian, Churchill could not be brought back more particularly because of his stand on India during the coalition government.
They represent all of us and the millions who think with us, and the instructed Anglo-Indian administrators on whose advice we rely, as being mere dullards and reactionaries who have never been able to move with the age, or understand modern ideas.
This was the verdict on Churchill. He didn't understand the higher economics. He still believed in Free Trade because he thought it meant cheap bread. As for the Empire, his belief was that the Fuzzy Wuzzies don't like is a steel bayonet up their arse. Clearly, any talk by chaps in the Cabinet about things which aren't bread or bayonets is evidence of a failure to move with the age which, unknown to the Socialists and College men, is actually retracing its steps to feast its eyes upon the ambrosial whiskers of Lord Palmerston.
We are a sort of inferior race mentally deficient, composed principally of colonels and other undesirables who have fought for Britain.
Or engineered military disasters, like Gallipoli, for Britain and its Colonies
They are the sole possessors and monopolists of the spirit and of the message of our generation. But we do not depend on colonels – though why Conservatives should sneer at an honoured rank in the British army I cannot tell –
It was only in 1934, that Beaverbrook started publishing the Colonel Blimp cartoons by David Low. Churchill tried to prevent the Colonel Blimp film being released during the War.
we depend on facts. We depend on the private soldiers of the British democracy.
Why not just say 'I'm as thick as shit. If you are as thick as shit, I represent you even though I'm as posh as fuck and you are as poor as piss.'?
We place our trust in the loyal heart of Britain. Our faith is founded upon the rock of the wage-earning population of this island which has never yet been appealed to, by duty and chivalry, in vain.
Fine words butter no parsnips- more particularly if the unemployed coal miner can't even afford parsnips.
These great issues which arise from time to time in our history are never decided by the party caucuses. They are decided by the conscience and the spirit of the mass of the British people. It is upon the simple faith and profound unerring instinct of the British people, never yet found wanting in a crisis, that we must put our trust.
Churchill would not put his trust in a Labour government even if the unerring instinct of the British voter was to put it in office.
We are deliberately trying to tell our story to the British masses, to the plain and simple
not to say retarded
folk to whom the fame of the British Empire is ever dear. In assailing the moral duty of Great Britain in India, the Socialist Government and all who aid and abet Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and his Socialist Government,
Stanley Baldwin, this means you!
or make their path smooth, will find they have stumbled upon a sleeping giant who, when he arises, will tread with dauntless steps the path of justice and of honour.
which leads back to the golden age of Lord Palmerston.
Niradh Chaudhuri autobiography confirmed for Churchill his own impression of Imperial Calcutta in 1899, a couple of years after Niradh's birth. The official class there was provincial. The atmosphere was as of Lisbon- the capital of a decaying Empire which, for so stultifyingly self-mummified, would last longer than England's before, at least in places, being reclaimed by the Jungle.
Similarly, the Brits had built nothing in Calcutta that could inspire the native or redeem him from his weaknesses and his vices. Rather, the Imperial race had itself become infected with that social virus which, if it distinguishes Princes amongst Men, does so only to establish a common pariahdom or irritable lassitude of the spirit.
This, to my working class ear, is the atmosphere which Churchill creates in his lucubrations, save when his soldier's eye takes fire from the complex interplay of forces in great wars or political or diplomatic combinations, and he achieves eloquence, even wit, but more importantly pathos and, briefly our hearts are touched. Yet, this is always an accident. When this son of a 'Tory Democrat' who was the son of a Duke, seeks to touch upon issues of vital interest to 'the working man', his loquacity fails him. He ends up with his thumb up his bum. Obviously, this is the fault of evil Brahmins whose great joy in life is to spread the practice of untouchability. Chaudhuri, being a Kayastha and thus harbouring a deep hatred of Brahmins, would, if he had ever listened to a word any body else was saying, have deeply agreed.
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