Indias tortuous road to freedom - the American pressure

on Churchill to cede independence

by Rupen Ghosh on Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 7:56am
While Winston Churchill, the arch imperialists implacable, furious,
remorseless and almost hysterical opposition to ceding
independence to India, bordering on paranoia, is well known, so is
his boastful, withering, contemptuous and dismissive prognosis of
India descending into chaos, anarchy, unprecedented violence
and disintegration soon after the British lost India who can, after
all, forget the famous or infamous phrase I have not become
the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of
the British empire - not enough credit is given to the inexorable
pressure from the Americans and the President Franklin
Roosevelt, in particular, on Britain to let India go off its grip. The
Americans considered European overseas empires to be what a
leading historian referred to as iniquitous relics of a discredited
colonial past. The editor of the American magazine Foreign
Affairs wrote in 1941 that India had become a touchstone of the
Anglo-American alliance. There was a strong tide of admiration for
Gandhi as a man of peace, keeping in perspective Americas own
fight against the British colonialists and its anti-imperial feelings
and distaste for the old gun-boat style European exploitation and
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depredations of colonies. By 1944, Roosevelt strongly believed in

the American policy of eventual freedom and self-governance to
India. He was worried that the Indian resistance against the
Japanese would falter unless Britain made some firm offer of a
new constitutional arrangement. Roosevelt reflected the strong
American consensus that Churchill and the British were
responsible for the discontent in India, because of their
unwillingness to concede the right of self-government to the
Indians.
The clash over India between the British and American positions
began with the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which included a joint
declaration calling for the right of all peoples to choose the form
of government under which they live and the restoration of selfgovernment for those who had been deprived of it. President
Roosevelt obliged United Winston Churchill to accept a set of
post-war goals known as the Atlantic Charter, which would pledge
self-government for all and a determination to seek a world free
of want and fear. Churchill subsequently clarified that in his view
the charter applied only to countries occupied by the Axis forces,
not to British colonies. Fortunately for India, even Roosevelts
political opponents like Wendell Willkie, who had unsuccessfully
contested against Roosevelt in the presidential elections, issued a
stirring statement calling on his compatriots to guarantee the
freedom of colonies, especially India, after the war. It is well
known that President Roosevelt, who was all for self-governance
to India, had been repeatedly, and furiously, rebuffed by the
bullying tactics of Churchill each time he raised the question of
Indian independence. But Willkies intervention now pushed
Roosevelt to clarify that the Atlantic Charter indeed applied to all
peoples, and that irked Churchill like never before, and his dream
of ruling the jewel-in-the-crown forever and for the sun never to
set on the British Empire, was finally in tatters.
Importantly for the cause of India's march to freedom, in the Quit
India resolution of August 1942, Jawaharlal Nehru echoed
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Roosevelts call, speaking of a world federation that would

ensure the freedom of its constituent nations, the prevention and
exploitation of one nation over another, the protection of national
minorities, the advancement of all backward areas and peoples,
and the pooling of the worlds resources for the common good of
all.
In February 1945, at the Yalta conference, Roosevelt continued to
establish a framework for the U.N., in which the colonized nations
would be finally freed and would achieve full independence.
Churchill refused to subject the U.K. to such a world order. He
would not tolerate forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering
fingers into the lifes existence of the British Empire, Churchill
protested - Never, never, never! Unfortunately for the colonised
peoples everywhere, Roosevelt died that April in 1945. The last
days of the British Empire were heaping untold catastrophes
on India with a terrible famine raging in Bengal, which by all
evidence was manmade and the culpability of the then British
government and, Churchill in particular, was established beyond
doubt. It is deeply tragic and unfortunate that Churchill got away
with the crime of loss of lives of three and half million
innocent people, mostly rural poor, in the horrendous Bengal
Famine of 1943. Of course, Churchill could not be charged for
genocide and mass-slaughter that Hitler perpetrated in Germany
and elsewhere in Europe against the Jews and other ethnic
minorities.
But events were moving fast and the closing years of the Second
World War saw unprecedented turmoil and upheaval grip India
too. The forays of the INA, though destined to failure knowing its
limited resources and outreach, to an extent delivered a blow to
the British power in India, from which it found difficult to recover.
This coupled with the mutiny of Naval Ratings in what was then
Bombay in 1946 made it clear that India could not be subjugated
much longer, without bringing in the British Army and not the
British Indian Army, whose loyalty could not be taken for granted
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any longer. The magnitude of post war reconstruction after

the devastation and loss of millions of lives setting off a climate of
intense gloom and misery, despite Britain emerging victorious
(and what a pyrrhic victory it was!) and the imminent bankruptcy
convinced the British that keeping India for long would be a huge
burden which they could illhardly afford. Moreover, the US was
applying continuous pressure to liberate India and other colonies,
though the skeptics doubted whether it was born out of any
genuine love for seeing the subjugated colonised people free or
for realizing the fact that economic imperialism was turning out to
be a much more potent weapon and that the old-styled European
colonialists were refusing to see the writing on the wall. With
Britain on the verge of insolvency and misery heaped on people
with shortages and queues lengthening and discontent among
people at its peak and the gloom all the more magnified with the
grossly subordinate status in the world economic and political
order - the US and the Soviet Union had established by the forties
to be the two emerging superpowers who would dominate the
world for the next half century or so - and as some
contemptuously remarked of the UK having become the 49th
state of the American Union, it was no longer possible to continue
to live under the illusion of the past imperial glory, which was
evident to all to be fading by the day. It, therefore, belatedly
dawned on the British that no amount of brute military power
would prove to be enough to subdue the national movement that
which Gandhiji had spearheaded.
Undoubtedly at that crucial juncture, it helped Indias cause in
immense measure that the Labour under Clement Attlee had
come to power defeating the Tories in what the Britons, after two
world wars in thirty years, had got fed up with death and
destruction on an unprecedented scale and wanted to see the
back of warmongering and old imperialists in the garb of
conservatives. And they had started believing in Labours vision of
the future that had been spelled out in the celebrated Beveridge
Report of 1942: free national health care, social security pensions
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and guaranteed full employment the vision of a cradle-to-grave

welfare state.
Indias freedom and tryst with destiny was round the corner and
the dream of a free India, unshackled by the colonial bondages
was in the realm of possibility, but not before the subcontinent
was torn apart by the deeply tragic events of the partition and the
gruesome violence, mayhem and carnage that followed, causing
death and destruction and displacement of millions of people, the
likes of which the world had very rarely witnessed.seen. Our hour
of freedom and aspiration to self-governance turned out for the
hapless millions to be an hour of despair and distress, gloom and
agony and tragedy and heartbreaks, drowned in the blood of the
innocents. As we salute our freedom fighters thatthat made the
supreme sacrifice for the motherland, we also need to spare our
thoughts and bow in silence to the memory of all those countless
innocents who paid with their lives and suffered grievously even
as the new dawn of freedom gave millions of Indians hopes for a
brighter tomorrow. It is for these unfortunate victims we should
mourn as much as we mourn for the martyrs to the cause of
freedom.