{"id":64873,"date":"2015-03-04T07:21:21","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T15:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=64873"},"modified":"2015-03-06T07:48:13","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T15:48:13","slug":"who-lost-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=64873","title":{"rendered":"Who Lost India?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

…Lord Morley, though a liberal progressive, did not believe democracy would work in India. But his Under-Secretary, Edwin Montagu, thought differently. <\/p>\n

Montagu was another Jew with oriental longings, though rather
\ndifferent ones: the longing to be loved. He suffered from that corrosive vice of the civilized during the twentieth century, which we shall meet in many forms: guilt. His grandfather had been a goldsmith, his father made millions as a foreign exchange banker, and so earned himself the luxury of philanthropy. Montagu inherited all this and the feeling that he owed something to society. He was a highly emotional man; people used the term ‘girlish’ about his approach to public affairs. Turning down the Ireland secretaryship in 1916, he wrote, ‘I shrink with horror at being responsible for punishment.’ When he died a friend wrote to The Times: ‘He never tired of being sorry for people.’ 128 <\/p>\n

Lloyd George must have had other things on his mind when he gave
\nMontagu India in June 1917. Montagu’s aim was to launch India
\nirretrievably on the way to independence. He at once set about drafting
\na statement of Britain’s post-war intentions. It came before the
\ncabinet on 14 August, at one of the darkest periods of the war. On
\nthe agenda was the rapid disintegration of the entire Russian front,
\nas well as the first really big German air raids on Britain: and the
\nminds of the despairing men round the table were hag-ridden by the
\nfearful losses in the Passchendaele offensive, then ending its second
\nbloody and futile week. Elgar was writing the final bars of his Cello
\nConcerto, his last major work, which conveys better than any words
\nthe unappeasable sadness of those days. Montagu slipped through
\nhis statement of policy which included one irrevocable phrase: ‘the
\ngradual development of free institutions in India with a view to
\nultimate self-government’. 129 But Lord Curzon pricked up his ears.
\nHe was the archetypal imperialist of the silver age, a former viceroy,
\non record as saying: ‘As long as we rule India we are the greatest
\npower in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a
\nthird-rate power.’ 130 He pointed out that, to the men around that
\ntable, the phrase ‘ultimate self-government’ might mean 500 years,
\nbut to excitable Indians it meant a single generation. Confident in the
\nmagic of his diplomatic penmanship, he insisted on changing the
\nstatement to ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions
\nwith a view to the progressive realization of responsible government
\nin India as an integral part of the British Empire’. In fact changing the phrase made no difference: Montagu meant self-government and
\nthat was how it was understood in India. <\/p>\n

Indeed, that November and December, while Lenin was taking
\nover Russia, Montagu went out to India to consult ‘Indian opinion’.
\nIn his subsequent report he wrote: ‘If we speak of “Indian Opinion”
\nwe should be understood as generally referring to the majority of
\nthose who have held or are capable of holding an opinion on the
\nmatter with which we are dealing.’ 131 In other words, he was only
\ninterested in the ‘political nation’, those like Jinnah, Gandhi and Mrs
\nBesant whom he called ‘the real giants of the Indian political world’
\nand who shared his political mode of discourse. Just as Lenin made
\nno effort to consult the Russian peasants in whose name he was now
\nturning a vast nation upside down, so Montagu ignored the 400
\nmillion ordinary Indians, the ‘real nation’, except as the subjects of
\nhis philanthropic experiment. His action, he wrote, in ‘deliberately
\ndisturbing’ what he called the ‘placid, pathetic contentment of the
\nmasses’ would be ‘working for [India’s] highest good’. 132 He got his
\nReport through cabinet on 24 May and 7 June 1918, when the
\nattention of ministers was focused on the frantic efforts to arrest the
\nGerman breakthrough in France, almost to the exclusion of anything
\nelse. So it was published (1918), enacted (1919) and implemented
\n(1921). By creating provincial legislatures, bodies of course elected
\nby and composed of the ‘political nation’, Montagu drove a runaway
\ncoach through the old autocratic chain of command. Thereafter
\nthere seemed no turning back. <\/p>\n

However, it must not be supposed that already, in 1919, the
\nprogressive disintegration of the British Empire was inevitable,
\nindeed foreseeable. There are no inevitabilities in history. 133 That,
\nindeed, will be one of the central themes of this volume. In 1919 the
\nBritish Empire, to most people, appeared to be not only the most
\nextensive but the most solid on earth. Britain was a superpower by
\nany standards. She had by far the largest navy, which included
\nsixty-one battleships, more than the American and French navies put
\ntogether, more than twice the Japanese plus the Italians (the German
\nnavy was now at the bottom of Scapa Flow); plus 120 cruisers and
\n466 destroyers. 134 She also had the world’s largest air force and,
\nsurprisingly in view of her history, the world’s third largest army. <\/p>\n

In theory at least the British Empire had gained immeasurably by
\nthe war. Nor was this accidental. In December 1916, the destruction
\nof the frail Asquith government and the formation of the Lloyd
\nGeorge coalition brought in the ‘Balliol Imperialists’: Lord Curzon
\nand especially Lord Milner and the members of the ‘Kindergarten’ he
\nhad formed in South Africa. The Imperial War Cabinet promptly set
\nup a group under Curzon, with Leo Amery (of the Kindergarten) as
\nsecretary, called the ‘Territorial Desiderata’ committee, whose func-
\ntion was to plan the share of the spoils going not only to Britain but
\nto other units in the empire. At the very time when Montagu was
\nsetting about getting rid of India, this group proved very forceful
\nindeed, and secured most of its objects. General Smuts of South
\nAfrica earmarked South-West Africa for his country, William
\nMassey of New Zealand a huge chunk of the Pacific for the
\nantipodean dominions. Britain received a number of important
\nprizes, including Tanganyika, Palestine and, most important, Jordan
\nand Iraq (including the Kirkuk-Mosul oilfields), which made her the
\nparamount power throughout the Arab Middle East. It is true that,
\nat Wilson’s insistence, these gains were not colonies but League of
\nNations mandates. For the time being, however, this appeared to
\nmake little difference in practice. <\/p>\n

Britain’s spoils, which carried the Empire to its greatest extent –
\nmore than a quarter of the surface of the earth – were also thought to
\nconsolidate it economically and strategically. Smuts, the most
\nimaginative of the silver age imperialists, played a central part in the creation of both the modern British Commonwealth and the League.
\nHe saw the latter, as he saw the Commonwealth, not as an engine of
\nself-determination but as a means whereby the white race could
\ncontinue their civilizing mission throughout the world. To him the
\nacquisition of South- West Africa and Tanganyika was not arbitrary,
\nbut steps in a process, to be finished off by the purchase or
\nabsorption of Portuguese Mozambique, which would eventually
\nproduce what he termed the British African Dominion. This huge
\nterritorial conglomerate, stretching from Windhoek right up to
\nNairobi, and nicely rounded off for strategic purposes, would
\nencompass virtually all Africa’s mineral wealth outside the Congo,
\nand about three-quarters of its best agricultural land, including all
\nthe areas suitable for white settlement. This creation of a great
\ndominion running up the east coast of Africa was itself part of a
\nwider geopolitical plan, of which the establishment of a British
\nparamountcy in the Middle East was the keystone, designed to turn
\nthe entire Indian Ocean into a ‘British Lake’. Its necklace of mutually
\nsupporting naval and air bases, from Suez to Perth, from
\nSimonstown to Singapore, from Mombasa to Aden to Bahrein to
\nTrincomalee to Rangoon, with secure access to the limitless oil
\nsupplies of the Persian Gulf, and the inexhaustible manpower of
\nIndia, would at long last solve those problems of security which had
\nexercised the minds of Chatham and his son, Castlereagh and
\nCanning, Palmerston and Salisbury. That was the great and perm-
\nanent prize which the war had brought Britain and her empire. It
\nall looked tremendously worth while on the map. <\/p>\n

But was there any longer the will in Britain to keep this elaborate
\nstructure functioning, with the efficiency and ruthlessness and above
\nall the conviction it required to hold together? Who was more
\ncharacteristic of the age, Smuts and Milner – or Montagu? It has
\nbeen well observed, ‘Once the British Empire became world-wide,
\nthe sun never set upon its problems.’ 135 When troubles came, not in
\nsingle spies but in battalions, would they be met with fortitude? If
\n1919 marked the point at which the new Thirty Years’ War in
\nEurope switched from Great Power conflict to regional violence,
\nfurther east it witnessed the beginning of what some historians are
\nnow calling ‘the general crisis of Asia’, a period of fundamental
\nupheaval of the kind Europe had experienced in the first half of the
\nseventeenth century. <\/p>\n

In February 1919, while the statesmen were getting down to the
\nred meat of frontier-fixing in Paris, Montagu’s policy of ‘deliberately
\ndisturbing’ the ‘pathetic contentment’ of the Indian masses began to
\nproduce its dubious fruits, when Mahatma Gandhi’s first satyagraha
\n(passive resistance) campaign led to some very active disturbances.
\nOn 10 March there was an anti-British rising in Egypt. On 9 April
\nthe first serious rioting broke out in the Punjab. On 3 May there was
\nwar between British India and Afghanistan insurgents. The next day
\nstudents in Peking staged demonstrations against Japan and her
\nwestern allies, who had just awarded her Chinese Shantung. Later
\nthat month, Kemal Ataturk in Anatolia, and Reza Pahlevi in Persia,
\nshowed the strength of feeling against the West across a huge tract of
\nthe Middle East. In July there was an anti-British rising in Iraq. These events were not directly connected but they all testified to spreading nationalism, all involved British interests and all tested Britain’s power and will to protect them. With the country disarming as fast as it possibly could, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, complained in his diary: ‘ … in no single theatre are we strong enough, not in Ireland, nor England, nor on the Rhine, nor in
\nConstantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopo-
\ntamia, nor Persia, nor India.’ 136 <\/p>\n

India: there was the rub. In 1919 there were only 77,000 British
\ntroops in the entire subcontinent, and Lloyd George thought even
\nthat number ‘appalling’: he needed more men at home to hold down
\nthe coalfields. 137 In India, officers had always been taught to think
\nfast and act quickly with the tiny forces at their disposal. Any
\nhesitation in the face of a mob would lead to mass slaughter. They
\nwould always be backed up even if they made mistakes. 138 As was
\nforeseeable, Montagu’s reforms and Gandhi’s campaign tended to
\nincite everyone, not just the ‘political nation’, to demand their rights. <\/p>\n

There were a great many people in India and very few rights to go
\nround. Muslim, Hindu and Sikh fundamentalists joined in the
\nagitation…<\/p>\n

Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster die-hards, organized a
\nmotion of censure on Montagu, who defended the punishment of
\nDyer in a hysterical speech: ‘Are you going to keep hold of India by
\nterrorism, racial humiliation and subordination and frightfulness, or
\nare you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill,
\nof the people of your Indian Empire?’ Lloyd George’s secretary
\nreported to him that, under noisy interruptions, Montagu ‘became
\nmore racial and Yiddish in screaming tone and gesture’ and many
\nTories ‘could have assaulted him physically they were so angry’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times: …Lord Morley, though a liberal progressive, did not believe democracy would work in India. But his Under-Secretary, Edwin Montagu, thought differently. Montagu was another Jew with oriental longings, though rather different ones: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29647],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-india-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64873"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65098,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64873\/revisions\/65098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}