Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (9 page)

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 function 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 permanent 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 Mesopotamia, 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. One result was an episode at Amritsar on 9–10 April 1919. There were, in Amritsar in the Punjab, one hundred unarmed constables and seventy-five armed reserves. That should have been enough to keep order. But the police were handled in pusillanimous fashion; some were not used at all – a sign of the times. As a result the mob got out of hand. Two banks were attacked, their managers and an assistant beaten to death, a British electrician and a railway guard murdered, and a woman missionary teacher left for dead. General Dyer, commanding the nearest army brigade, was ordered in, and three days later he opened fire on a mob in a confined space called the Jalianwala Bagh. He had earlier that day toured the whole town with beat of drum to warn that any mob would be fired upon. The same month thirty-six other orders to fire were given in the province. In Dyer’s case the firing lasted ten minutes because the order to cease fire could not be heard in the noise. That was not so unusual either, then or now. On 20 September 1981, again in Amritsar, government of India police opened fire for twenty minutes on a gang of sword-wielding Sikhs.
¹³⁹
The mistake made by Dyer, who was used to frontier fighting, was to let his fifty men load their rifles and issue them with spare magazines. As a result 1,650 rounds were fired and 379 people were killed. Dyer compounded his error
by ordering the flogging of six men and by an instruction that all natives passing the spot where the missionary had been assaulted were to crawl on the ground.
¹⁴⁰

Some people praised Dyer: the Sikhs, for whom Amritsar is the national shrine and who feared it would be sacked by the mob, made him an honorary Sikh. The British Indian authorities returned him to frontier duties (the Third Afghan war broke out the next month) and privately swore never to let him near a mob again. That was the traditional way of dealing with such a case. The Indian nationalists raised an uproar and Montagu ordered an inquiry under a British judge, Lord Hunter. That was the first mistake. When Dyer was questioned by the inquiry in Lahore he was shouted down by continuous Hindustani abuse which the judge failed to control and could not understand, and Dyer said some foolish things. Hunter censured his conduct and as a result Dyer was sacked from the army. This was the second mistake. It infuriated the British community and the army, who felt that Dyer had not been given a proper trial with legal representation. It left the nationalists unappeased because the punishment was too slight for what they regarded as a massacre. The right-wing
Morning Post
collected a public subscription of £26,000 for Dyer. The nationalists responded with a subscription of their own, which bought the Bagh and turned it into a public shrine of race-hatred.

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’. Winston Churchill saved the government from certain defeat by a brilliant speech, which he later came to regret bitterly. He said that Dyer’s use of force was ‘an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire … a monstrous event’. ‘Frightfulness’, he said, using a current code-word meaning German atrocities, ‘is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia…. We have to make it clear, some way or other, that this is not the British way of doing business.’ He made skilful use of Macaulay’s phrase, ‘the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy’.
¹⁴¹
But if all this were true, why was not Dyer on trial for his life? That was what the Indian ‘political nation’ thought. The episode, which might have
been quickly forgotten, was thus turned, by the publicity which the British government afforded it, into a great watershed in Anglo-Indian relations.