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: 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
Lloyd George must have had other things on his mind when he gave
Montagu India in June 1917. Montagu’s aim was to launch India
irretrievably on the way to independence. He at once set about drafting
a statement of Britain’s post-war intentions. It came before the
cabinet on 14 August, at one of the darkest periods of the war. On
the agenda was the rapid disintegration of the entire Russian front,
as well as the first really big German air raids on Britain: and the
minds of the despairing men round the table were hag-ridden by the
fearful losses in the Passchendaele offensive, then ending its second
bloody and futile week. Elgar was writing the final bars of his Cello
Concerto, his last major work, which conveys better than any words
the unappeasable sadness of those days. Montagu slipped through
his statement of policy which included one irrevocable phrase: ‘the
gradual development of free institutions in India with a view to
ultimate self-government’. 129 But Lord Curzon pricked up his ears.
He was the archetypal imperialist of the silver age, a former viceroy,
on record as saying: ‘As long as we rule India we are the greatest
power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a
third-rate power.’ 130 He pointed out that, to the men around that
table, the phrase ‘ultimate self-government’ might mean 500 years,
but to excitable Indians it meant a single generation. Confident in the
magic of his diplomatic penmanship, he insisted on changing the
statement to ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions
with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government
in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. In fact changing the phrase made no difference: Montagu meant self-government and
that was how it was understood in India.
Indeed, that November and December, while Lenin was taking
over Russia, Montagu went out to India to consult ‘Indian opinion’.
In his subsequent report he wrote: ‘If we speak of “Indian Opinion”
we should be understood as generally referring to the majority of
those who have held or are capable of holding an opinion on the
matter with which we are dealing.’ 131 In other words, he was only
interested in the ‘political nation’, those like Jinnah, Gandhi and Mrs
Besant whom he called ‘the real giants of the Indian political world’
and who shared his political mode of discourse. Just as Lenin made
no effort to consult the Russian peasants in whose name he was now
turning a vast nation upside down, so Montagu ignored the 400
million ordinary Indians, the ‘real nation’, except as the subjects of
his philanthropic experiment. His action, he wrote, in ‘deliberately
disturbing’ what he called the ‘placid, pathetic contentment of the
masses’ would be ‘working for [India’s] highest good’. 132 He got his
Report through cabinet on 24 May and 7 June 1918, when the
attention of ministers was focused on the frantic efforts to arrest the
German breakthrough in France, almost to the exclusion of anything
else. So it was published (1918), enacted (1919) and implemented
(1921). By creating provincial legislatures, bodies of course elected
by and composed of the ‘political nation’, Montagu drove a runaway
coach through the old autocratic chain of command. Thereafter
there seemed no turning back.
However, it must not be supposed that already, in 1919, the
progressive disintegration of the British Empire was inevitable,
indeed foreseeable. There are no inevitabilities in history. 133 That,
indeed, will be one of the central themes of this volume. In 1919 the
British Empire, to most people, appeared to be not only the most
extensive but the most solid on earth. Britain was a superpower by
any standards. She had by far the largest navy, which included
sixty-one battleships, more than the American and French navies put
together, more than twice the Japanese plus the Italians (the German
navy was now at the bottom of Scapa Flow); plus 120 cruisers and
466 destroyers. 134 She also had the world’s largest air force and,
surprisingly in view of her history, the world’s third largest army.
In theory at least the British Empire had gained immeasurably by
the war. Nor was this accidental. In December 1916, the destruction
of the frail Asquith government and the formation of the Lloyd
George coalition brought in the ‘Balliol Imperialists’: Lord Curzon
and especially Lord Milner and the members of the ‘Kindergarten’ he
had formed in South Africa. The Imperial War Cabinet promptly set
up a group under Curzon, with Leo Amery (of the Kindergarten) as
secretary, called the ‘Territorial Desiderata’ committee, whose func-
tion was to plan the share of the spoils going not only to Britain but
to other units in the empire. At the very time when Montagu was
setting about getting rid of India, this group proved very forceful
indeed, and secured most of its objects. General Smuts of South
Africa earmarked South-West Africa for his country, William
Massey of New Zealand a huge chunk of the Pacific for the
antipodean dominions. Britain received a number of important
prizes, including Tanganyika, Palestine and, most important, Jordan
and Iraq (including the Kirkuk-Mosul oilfields), which made her the
paramount power throughout the Arab Middle East. It is true that,
at Wilson’s insistence, these gains were not colonies but League of
Nations mandates. For the time being, however, this appeared to
make little difference in practice.
Britain’s spoils, which carried the Empire to its greatest extent –
more than a quarter of the surface of the earth – were also thought to
consolidate it economically and strategically. Smuts, the most
imaginative of the silver age imperialists, played a central part in the creation of both the modern British Commonwealth and the League.
He saw the latter, as he saw the Commonwealth, not as an engine of
self-determination but as a means whereby the white race could
continue their civilizing mission throughout the world. To him the
acquisition of South- West Africa and Tanganyika was not arbitrary,
but steps in a process, to be finished off by the purchase or
absorption of Portuguese Mozambique, which would eventually
produce what he termed the British African Dominion. This huge
territorial conglomerate, stretching from Windhoek right up to
Nairobi, and nicely rounded off for strategic purposes, would
encompass virtually all Africa’s mineral wealth outside the Congo,
and about three-quarters of its best agricultural land, including all
the areas suitable for white settlement. This creation of a great
dominion running up the east coast of Africa was itself part of a
wider geopolitical plan, of which the establishment of a British
paramountcy in the Middle East was the keystone, designed to turn
the entire Indian Ocean into a ‘British Lake’. Its necklace of mutually
supporting naval and air bases, from Suez to Perth, from
Simonstown to Singapore, from Mombasa to Aden to Bahrein to
Trincomalee to Rangoon, with secure access to the limitless oil
supplies of the Persian Gulf, and the inexhaustible manpower of
India, would at long last solve those problems of security which had
exercised the minds of Chatham and his son, Castlereagh and
Canning, Palmerston and Salisbury. That was the great and perm-
anent prize which the war had brought Britain and her empire. It
all looked tremendously worth while on the map.
But was there any longer the will in Britain to keep this elaborate
structure functioning, with the efficiency and ruthlessness and above
all the conviction it required to hold together? Who was more
characteristic of the age, Smuts and Milner – or Montagu? It has
been well observed, ‘Once the British Empire became world-wide,
the sun never set upon its problems.’ 135 When troubles came, not in
single spies but in battalions, would they be met with fortitude? If
1919 marked the point at which the new Thirty Years’ War in
Europe switched from Great Power conflict to regional violence,
further east it witnessed the beginning of what some historians are
now calling ‘the general crisis of Asia’, a period of fundamental
upheaval of the kind Europe had experienced in the first half of the
seventeenth century.
In February 1919, while the statesmen were getting down to the
red meat of frontier-fixing in Paris, Montagu’s policy of ‘deliberately
disturbing’ the ‘pathetic contentment’ of the Indian masses began to
produce its dubious fruits, when Mahatma Gandhi’s first satyagraha
(passive resistance) campaign led to some very active disturbances.
On 10 March there was an anti-British rising in Egypt. On 9 April
the first serious rioting broke out in the Punjab. On 3 May there was
war between British India and Afghanistan insurgents. The next day
students in Peking staged demonstrations against Japan and her
western allies, who had just awarded her Chinese Shantung. Later
that month, Kemal Ataturk in Anatolia, and Reza Pahlevi in Persia,
showed the strength of feeling against the West across a huge tract of
the 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
Constantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopo-
tamia, nor Persia, nor India.’ 136
India: there was the rub. In 1919 there were only 77,000 British
troops in the entire subcontinent, and Lloyd George thought even
that number ‘appalling’: he needed more men at home to hold down
the coalfields. 137 In India, officers had always been taught to think
fast and act quickly with the tiny forces at their disposal. Any
hesitation in the face of a mob would lead to mass slaughter. They
would always be backed up even if they made mistakes. 138 As was
foreseeable, Montagu’s reforms and Gandhi’s campaign tended to
incite everyone, not just the ‘political nation’, to demand their rights.
There were a great many people in India and very few rights to go
round. Muslim, Hindu and Sikh fundamentalists joined in the
agitation…
Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster die-hards, organized a
motion of censure on Montagu, who defended the punishment of
Dyer in a hysterical speech: ‘Are you going to keep hold of India by
terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination and frightfulness, or
are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill,
of the people of your Indian Empire?’ Lloyd George’s secretary
reported to him that, under noisy interruptions, Montagu ‘became
more racial and Yiddish in screaming tone and gesture’ and many
Tories ‘could have assaulted him physically they were so angry’.
