3 – Churchill really, really hated Gandhi

“It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”

By the time that Churchill came back to the subject of India, the situation in the subcontinent had drastically changed. Independence from Britain was a major issue, with millions engaging in civil disobedience against the Raj and the colonial authorities. At the centre of it all was Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi had been a lawyer in South Africa and participating in civil rights struggles against the British there, and now found himself as the leader of the resistance.

By the 1930s, Churchill was one of the most well-known figures in British politics and had served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Secretary of State for the Colonies and First Lord of the Admirality, essentially the head of the Navy. He found himself increasingly isolated, however, due to his intransigence over the question of Indian independence. He founded the Indian Defence League, to oppose any movement towards giving India Dominion status – as enjoyed by Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and heavily criticised the Round Table Conferences, in which British authorities met with Indian leaders (including Gandhi) to discuss reforms of the Raj.

“Churchill was very much on the far right of British politics over India,” wrote historian John Charmley, author of several books about Churchill. Contrary to the popular notion that Churchill’s more outlandish statements were merely the commonplace opinions of Georgian British aristocrats, Charmley adds “even to most Conservatives, let alone Liberals and Labour, Churchill’s views on India between 1929 and 1939 were quite abhorrent.”

Of course, these opinions, which were far out of line with that which were considered acceptable by the majority of his colleagues, did force many to conclude that Churchill had a lack of judgement regarding many of the major political figures of his time. “People sometimes question why on Earth did people not listen to Churchill’s warnings about Hitler in the late 1930s,” reiterated John Charmley in an interview with the BBC in 2015, “to which the short answer is that he’d used exactly the same language about Gandhi in the early 1930s.”

The historian wasn’t wrong. “The truth is that Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed,” Churchill said in a speech in 1930. In another speech, in 1920, he stated: “He ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.”

Moreover, many considered him profoundly anti-democratic and out of touch. His view seemed to refer back to the “Golden Age” of the Raj into which he had been born, which no concessions whatsoever to the fact that the majority of people in said Raj had been dead set against it. Churchill’s credibility was destroyed by the issue of Indian independence and, as we will touch on later, a few other incidents which had led many to severely question his judgement.

Nevertheless, he would rise again. When he did, however, the Indians would again suffer at his hands. Right in the middle of the war, he would preside over one of the worst excesses of the whole period of the British Empire – the Bengal Famine.