With Remembrance Day coming, arguments about whether poppies should be worn are in full flow. Yet there is one issue that never seems to be heard in the annual debate that now marks this solemn occasion: while Britain fought the second world war to defeat Nazi Germany, putting its own existence as a free country at stake, it denied freedom to its colonies.
Winston Churchill made no secret of his belief that “coloured” people had no right to be free. In August 1941, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, he signed with the US president Franklin D Roosevelt the Atlantic charter which asserted “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”. This was hailed as a great war aim of the allies. Yet on his return, Churchill told the House of Commons that this was not “applicable to coloured races in colonial empire” but only to the states and nations of Europe.
Later during the war, Roosevelt raised the question of colonial trusteeship as a prelude to freedom for the colonies, but Churchill responded, “Nothing would be taken away from the British empire without a war.”
What makes the silence on this issue now very surprising is that both before and during the second world war, the question of colonies being denied freedom was often raised. Nobody did it more eloquently than George Orwell.
Just before the start of the war, with much talk of how to fight fascism, Orwell laid into an argument by the American writer Clarence K Streit, who said that the way to do so was for 15 democracies of Europe and the US, which Streit listed, to unite and form a common government. Orwell wrote, “What it smells of, as usual, is hypocrisy and self-righteousness.” Orwell pointed out that countries such as the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands considered their colonies to be dependencies whose resources were available to the “democracies”, but whose “coloured inhabitants” lacked “the right to vote”. Despite, he argued, India containing “more inhabitants than the whole of the ‘15 democracies’ put together”.
Many in the higher reaches of the British government brushed aside the argument that they were being hypocritical. Orwell and others campaigned during the war for India to be put on par with Australia, New Zealand and other white colonies, which had long been given their freedom, but he could not change their mind.
Instead, when Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of the Indian freedom movement pointed out the hypocrisy of the British war aims they were jailed, spending much of the war in British prisons. Gandhi was in jail when he heard that his wife had died.
The British government, who worried about the effect this double standard may have on US opinion, asked propagandist Beverley Nichols to write a book denouncing Gandhi. Before the war, Nichols had made speeches for the Hitler Youth, described Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, as the man to unite the country and prevent war, and even after Dunkirk, impressed by Hitler’s “appeal to reason” speech, felt a peace deal with Nazi Germany could be done.
In Verdict on India, Nichols compared Gandhi to Hitler, writing: “The German Heil Hitler has a striking equivalent in the Indian Gandhiji … The resemblances between Gandhi and Hitler are, of course, legion.” Churchill recommend the book to his wife saying, “It is written with some distinction and a great deal of thought.”
When in 1942 a revolt broke out in India after Gandhi famously called for the British to leave through the Quit India movement, it required all the armed might of the Raj to surpress it, with policemen and soldiers opening fire 369 times, killing about 1,000 Indians and injuring 2,000. The RAF bombed rebel territories six times, the Whipping Act was reintroduced, and collective punishment imposed. In March 1943, General Lockhart wrote that India was now “an occupied and hostile country”.
Indians did fight for the allies, with more than 2.5 million joining the Indian army, the largest volunteer force in history, with 90,000 killed or maimed. But, as the historian Richard Overy writes: “Britain compelled India to pay for its role in the war, forcing the Indian government to run a large annual deficit from an economy that could ill afford the cost, and to accept sharp increases in taxation for the Indian population”, calling it “effectively a form of economic coercion”.
Now, nearly 80 years later, with so much on the war continuing to emerge through books, films, plays and documentaries, surely this is one subject the British should no longer shy away from discussing. If it isn’t talked about, the divide between how people in Britain see the war and how those in the former colonies see it will continue to grow, preventing a full understanding of history. Something that is so necessary.
Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie: Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British
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