My answer to ''winston churchill''

[I-G]

Not to sound unbecoming,what about the much touted inclusiveness of Indian culture.was the inclusiveness voluntary and welcoming or was it rather a tactical retreat,an act of self preservation fostered by a changed political landscape.

What is Indian about the Semitic faiths ?

This might even be interesting for an unbiased observation.

All religions are universal and Semitic faiths are part of India ..

 

[hit&run]

Yes, Churchill was proved right. And Indians didnt stop him and his successors from doing it.

yes sir you are right, but its never late to realize and act for those who are able to occupies a space. History repeats itself is inevitable entity or truth for India ?

just off the topic [can any one tell how long it will take for India to improve its record of winning cricket matches if from now they are going to win all matches with Australia ]


Today (news) Pakistan is urging India to move on from 26/11 cause its history now. there are many respectable members in this forum even from different nationalities; should India move on, and release Pakistan off the hook?

 

[F-14]

as for the 26/11 i say we tare pakistan apart nothing more nothing less

 

[kuku]

With time everything changes, an Indian will not fit the stereotypical description of one if he grows up in say Hawaii, he will have different views of the world. Genetics do not contribute that much to it.

Similarly different persons growing up in India at different times 1300s, 1500s, 1700s, 1900, and finally 2000s will have different views on everything under the sun, Major parts of India are very similar and the India we live in is becoming more and more integrated with every passing year.

Now we have stable governance, a stable nation, and must make sure that it remains so, everything else will fit into place.

 

[vish]

Is India” is as much a country as the Equator??

i will appreciate if you could answer me, i will post some more information for discussion whether India is is as much a country as the equator.

The point of thread is that India was always a nation with its own unique culture, geography/boundaries and population of different religions and kingdoms(regions) within one kingdom with a very strong understanding of 'Bhartiyata'( indianess).
i have seen many Indians surrendering to a teasing propaganda that we were always divided and cursed; not to be united.
This is not true. However i must tell you that this thread is all about the history of India.
Regards.

Hope you get the hint... Churchill who? Come again?

 

[S.A.T.A]

Churchill was English,Christian and European and to him these expression were mutually exclusive and had no bearing upon one another and remember merely 10 years before he made that famous remark upon India,Ireland,the seemingly quintessential part of great Britain and United Kingdom ,broke free after 700 years of English rule.

It was almost easy for Churchill to wonder How could the people of United province and Madras presidency claim any kinship of nationhood,when their differences were seemingly far greater than that of between the English and the Irish.

The subtlety of modern nationhood clearly dodged the Old bulldog,how could an empire become a nation.

 

[hit&run]

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Present time

 

[johnee]

The subtlety of modern nationhood clearly dodged the Old bulldog,how could an empire become a nation.

SATA,
I would say that unity of Indians pre-dates phenomenon of modern nationhood. I would say that though there existed different empires within India at different times, there was always a notion of India(as an entity) that extends from Himalayas to Ocean. Indians are tied together in more ways than one and modern nationhood, though it plays an important role in not the only binding element. Not now nor in past.

 

[hit&run]

Albert Einstein, American Scientist:
"We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made!"

Mark Twain, American Author:
"India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most astrictive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!"
"So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked."

"In religion, India is the only millionaire... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined."

Will Durant, American Historian:
“It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.”

"India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings."

"India is the motherland of our race and Sanskrit is the mother of Indo-European languages. She is the mother of our philosophy, of our mathematics, mother of ideals embodied in Christianity and mother of our democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all." (‘Story of Civilization’)

Henry David Thoreau, American Thinker /Author:
Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.

R.W. Emerson, American Author:
In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.

William James, American Author:
"From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology."

Max Muller, German Scholar:
"If I were to look over the whole world to find out a country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow – in some part a very paradise on earth – I should point to India."

"There is no book in the world that is so thrilling, stirring and inspiring as the Upanishads." (‘Sacred Books of the East’)


Romain Rolland, French Philosopher:
If there is one place on the face of this Earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest day when man began the dream of existence, it is India.

Apollonius Tyanaeus, Ancient Greek Traveler:
"In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing."

Dr Arnold Toynbee, British Historian:
“It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in history, the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way.”


Hu Shih (Former Chinese Ambassador to USA):
"India conquered and dominated China for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across its border." (Bhavan Journal 15.05.1999)


Swami Vivekananda, Indian Philosopher:
"Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another...But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood..... Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist... Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live....!"


Shri Aurovindo:
"India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma."

Sir William Jones, British Orientalist:
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either."

 

[roma]

churchill ....yukkk

 

[ajtr]

Winston Churchill's Plan for Post-war India ​

By: Madhusree Mukerjee
Vol XLV No.32 August 07, 2010

Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945, has compared the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill with Adolf Hitler in his manuscript The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister. This article dwells on the circumstances of this remark by Amery. It finds that Churchill's idea of redesigning Indian society by terminating the babu class and moneylenders and his policy towards Bengal famine and the War Cabinet meetings provoked Amery to make such an explosive comment.


As the victorious end of this glorious struggle for human freedom draws near, the time is coming for a policy in relation to India more worthy of our true selves. We have had enough"¦ of shameful pledges about Indian self- government, and of sickening surrenders to babu agitation. If we went even further two years ago in an open invitation to I ndians to unite and kick us out of India that was only because we were in a hole. That peril is over and obviously a new s ituation has arisen of which we are fully entitled to take advantage.
The above is the opening paragraph of a three-page typewritten manuscript, dated August 1944 and entitled The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Mini ster. It is to be found among the papers of Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945. The manuscript is appended by the initials WSC, and appears at first glance to have been written by Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill at a time when the s econd world war was coming to a bloody but triumphant end.
Two years earlier, in the spring of 1942, the shockingly rapid advance of Japanese forces onto the I ndian border had created political pressures that had induced Churchill and A mery into a desperate measure: they had sent socialist politician Sir Stafford Cripps to India with an offer of dominion status after the war, in return for the cooperation of the Indian National Congress with the war effort. According to the 1944 document, how ever, Churchill hoped to r escind the Cripps offer – the "open invitation to Indians to unite and kick us out of India" – and instead to announce a new policy on the colony:

No more nonsense about self-government; down with all (brown) landlords and profit-making industrialists, collecti vise agriculture on Russian lines and touch up the untouchables.

Churchill's New Dawn Vision
The scheme would commence with removing those Englishmen – including the then viceroy, Lord Archibald Wavell – who, according to this paper,

would not only appear to have taken our pledges seriously, but to be imbued with a miserable sneaking sympathy for what are called Indian aspirations, not to speak of an inveterate and scandalous propensity to defend Indian interests as against those of their own country, and a readiness to see British workers sweat and toil for generations in order to swell even further the distended paunches of Hindu moneylenders.

The pledges would include the repeated promises of self-government for India made by the British government. The numerous babus "who infest the government offices" would also have to be disposed of, the paper continued, and replaced by a new force of English re-educators who would uphold "our historic right to govern India in accordance with our own ideas and interests".
The regeneration of India would i nvolve uplifting the untouchable, suppressing child marriage, limiting population, and getting rid of cows. Most importantly, it would require the imposition of a radically new administrative structure. Every five villages would require "one English instructor in the new way of life", as well as "one English head policeman with five Indian subordinates drawn from the loyal martial races". In total, the colony would require 1,60,000 instructors, 1,60,000 English police officers and 8,00,000 I ndian policemen. Holding this system in place would also require the army and air force to be expanded, "at any rate until I ndia has become accustomed to the new regime". Any criticism in the British parliament of the "new dawn over India" would be banned. "It will also be necessary, following an excellent Russian pre cedent, to forbid any but trusted officials to leave India or to allow any visitors from outside except under the closest supervision by an official Intourist Agency."1
Did Winston Churchill really envision this extraordinary reconfiguration of I ndian society? The short answer is "no" and the long answer is "yes". A finely pencilled notation reveals the paper's immediate author: "A skit by LSA after a harangue by WSC in Cabinet – only slightly exaggerated". The last two words are underlined. Amery had penned the paper, but he did not invent the ideas it contained. He merely caricatured the prime minister's ramblings in the War Cabinet – no doubt to vent his anger at Churchill's devastating colonial policies, for which the British and Indian public and press were blaming the secretary of state for India; and perhaps also to explain to shocked colleagues, why during the War Cabinet meeting of
4 August 1944, Amery had compared W inston Churchill, the beloved war l eader, to Adolf Hitler.2

War Cabinet Meetings

On that summer day, the War Cabinet had been discussing a response that Wavell had drafted to a missive from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In an overture to the viceroy, Gandhi had offered to suspend the Quit India movement (which had commenced in August 1942, following the Congress rejection of the Cripps offer) and to cooperate with the war effort in e xchange for an immediate declaration of independence. The viceroy had drafted a polite reply turning Gandhi down, but o ffer ing an olive branch: if Hindus, M uslims, and the main Indian minorities agreed on a constitution, they could form a transitional government, under the t utelage of the existing one, until the war was over.3
The prime minister was vehemently o pposed to Indian emancipation, however, and moreover, bore immense personal animosity towards Gandhi. When the old man had been released from British custody three months earlier, in May 1944 – because he appeared to be at risk of death from a coronary or cerebral thrombosis – Churchill had instructed Wavell that u nder no circumstances should he negotiate with Gandhi, "a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fibre, largely in the hands of native vested interests".4Accordingly, when Wavell's draft response to Gandhi had come up before the War Cabinet for the first time, "the real storm broke", Amery wrote in his diary. The viceroy should not be interacting with" a traitor who ought to be put back in prison", raged the prime minister. "As for Wavell he ought never to have been appointed". The tirade had lasted for a full hour. A committee had rewritten Wavell's r esponse so that it bristled with hostile l egalese, but the War Cabinet had sent it back for further revision.
At the next War Cabinet meeting on I ndia, on 4 August 1944, Churchill inserted into the new draft response to Gandhi a statement of British responsibilities t owards untouchables in a land ruled by caste Hindus. Amery pointed out that this was irrelevant to the issues that Gandhi had raised – and provoked a furious res ponse from Churchill, "describing how a fter the war he was going to go back on all the shameful story of the last twenty years of surrender". Instead of honouring repeated promises of emancipation for I ndia, Churchill continued, he would strengthen British rule and simultaneously

carry out a great regeneration of India based on extinguishing landlords and oppressive industrialists and uplift the peasant and untouchable, probably by collectivisation on Russian lines. It might be necessary to get rid of wretched sentimentalists like Wavell and most of the present English o fficials in India, who were more Indian than the Indians, and send out new men.

Amery's Hitler Remark

According to Amery's diary, Churchill even attacked the patriotism of the Secretary of State for India on the grounds that he supported the interests of "Indian m oneylenders" over those of Englishmen. "Naturally I lost patience", continued A mery in his diary, "and couldn't help telling him that I didn't see much difference between his outlook and Hitler's which annoyed him no little. I am by no means sure whether on this subject of India he is really quite sane."5
Amery made the Hitler remark in the heat of argument, but clearly he stood
by it. For he left much out of his diaries – notably, any hint of his Jewish heritage, a s ecret uncovered in 2000 by historian William D Rubinstein. So the retention of this explosive comment can be no accident. Given that Chaim Weizmann, the future premier of Israel, had recently told Amery about a "monstrous German blackmailing offer to release a million Jews in return for ten thousand lorries and other equipment, failing which bargain they proposed to exterminate them", he understood as well as anyone could in those times the implications of his comparison.6 Amery may have been provoked by the reference to moneylenders – a hint that Churchill saw upper class Indians through the same lens as anti-Semites might perceive Jews. "All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more f amiliar to this subtle race than to"¦ the Jew of the dark ages", Thomas Babington Macaulay had written of the Bengali, who, in the view of this 19th century historian, compressed into his diminutive form every loathsome characteristic that he perceived in the Hindu: "as usurers, as money-changers, as sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them". The Bengali babu, another writer had joked in 1911, was "something of an Irishman, something of an Italian, something of a Jew: if one can conceive of an Irishman who would run away from a fight instead of into it, an Italian without a sense of beauty and a Jew who would not risk five pounds on the chance of making five hundred."7
Amery may have had a further cause for his Hitler comment: exactly a year earlier, on 4 August 1943, the War Cabinet had made its first, and most crucial, decision to deny famine relief to Bengalis. Amery was undoubtedly aware of this anniversary, and the memory of what had transpired at that fateful War Cabinet meeting may have fuelled a simmering anger that burst forth upon Churchill's tirade. In July 1943, the Government of India had informed the War Cabinet of outbreak of famine in Bengal, and requested emergency shipments of 5,00,000 tons of wheat by year-end. Half of that quantity would supply the army, while the other half would support the war effort by feeding urban and industrial populations; if any of the imported grain happened to be left over, it would be used for famine relief.

Outbreak of Famine

At the War Cabinet meeting of 4 August 1943, Amery had propounded the urgent Indian need for food "in as strong terms as I could", according to his diary – but had failed to get the War Cabinet to schedule even a single shipment of wheat for India. The Secretary of State for War, Sir Percy James Grigg, who believed that the famine had been created by Bengali babus in order to make profits from speculation, had baselessly contradicted the Government of India and the then viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Grigg asserted that wheat would not relieve the Bengal famine – apparently in the mistaken belief, expressed in descriptions of the Bengal famine by more than one British historian, that Bengalis would not or could not eat wheat. (In truth, the War Cabinet wanted to conserve wheat, which was available in Australia, for the feeding of Europeans, if and when they were liberated.) Instead of scheduling relief for Bengal, the War Cabinet had dispatched 50,000 tons of wheat to Ceylon to await instructions as to the final destination, while around 1,00,000 tons of barley – which consignments were close to useless because they would have negligible effect on food prices – were to be ordered for India from Iraq.8
Churchill did say that if the situation in India got worse, Amery could bring it up again; but the next day, 5 August 1943, he left for a conference in Quebec. The following week a committee disbursed the shipping in the Indian Ocean for the next month. In September, 10 vessels would be required to load in Australia with wheat flour, and two with other foodstuffs, but none of these consignments would be g oing to India. In October, nine or 10 vessels would be needed to load in Australia with wheat and other food, but again none would be destined for India. Around 75,000 tons of Australian wheat would be transported to Ceylon and west Asia each month, to supply the war effort, and a further 1,70,000 tons would go to a supply centre in the Mediterranean region – to be stockpiled for future consumption by the civilians of southern Europe, whom Churchill hoped to liberate. The few ships travelling to India would be filled with war-related cargo. As for the Iraqi barley promised for India, negotiations on price, being the province of the United Kingdom's Ministry of Food, were incomplete when the War Cabinet again discussed the famine on 24 September 1943.
Later that year, Amery was able to ensure that the 50,000 tons of wheat intended for Ceylon eventually went on to India, and that a further 30,000 tons were o rdered for the colony. The first of these consignments probably arrived in November. The timing is significant, because the greater the delay, the more the number of lives lost. The quantities matter too: as a result of the War Cabinet's priorities, the Government of India received a mere 16% of the wheat that it had requested – far from enough to meet the requirements of the Indian army, let alone that of a famine- stricken populace. As a result, the army continued to use domestic supplies that could otherwise have been used to r elieve famine: it consumed 1,15,000 tons of rice in 1943, twice the quantity it had used the previous year, because of a concurrent shortage in the supply of wheat.9
From the beginning of the war, India had exported grain for the war effort; the net quantity of wheat and rice exported in the fiscal year 1942-43 was 3,60,000 tons. Rice exports from India had come to a halt only in July 1943. But when the colony s uffered from famine – in no small part because of the scarcity and inflation r esulting from such extractions of supplies – shiploads of Australian wheat would pass it by, to be stored for future consumption in Europe. The starvation of Bengalis was of little consequence, Amery quoted Churchill as saying, because the people were of negligible value to the war effort and in any case they were "breeding like rabbits".10
Around July or August 1943, the non-availability of grain had forced government-run relief centres in Bengal to r educe the rations provided to famine victims to about four ounces per person per day. That came to 400 calories, at the low end of the scale at which, at much the same time, inmates at the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald were being fed. The Bengal famine had drawn to an end in December 1943, when the province h arvested its own winter rice crop. It killed 1.5 million people by the official e stimate alone, and possibly twice as much by other accounts.11
It is in this context that Amery's comparison of Churchill's attitudes with those of Hitler must be viewed. "In the occupied territories on principle only those people are to be supplied with an adequate amount of food who work for us", Hermann Göring, Hitler's designated successor, had stated of the Slav countries that Germany had conquered (Poland, Czechoslovakia and tracts of the Soviet Union). Further,

Even if one wanted to feed all the other inhabitants, one could not do it in the newly-occupied eastern areas. It is, therefore, wrong to funnel off food supplies for this purpose, if it is done at the expense of the army and necessitates increased s upplies from home.

As the Third Reich tightened its grip, the withdrawal of its colonies' products and resources would result in the deaths, from starvation and disease, of tens of millions of ordinary Slavs, noted a Nazi policy paper formulated in 1941.12 Notably, after attending one of the War Cabinet debates on sending famine relief to India, Wavell noted in his diary that Churchill wanted to "feed only those [ Indians] actually fighting or making m unitions or working some particular railways".13 According to Amery, the prime minister felt that feeding Bengalis, who were not making much of a contribution to the war effort, was less important than feeding Greeks, who were. Such views towards Indian non-combatants are difficult to distinguish from the Nazi attitude towards ordinary Slavs, who were d escribed as "superfluous eaters". Amery could not have known the specifics of the Nazi scheme for exploiting the colonies, called the Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East). But he had read Mein Kampf in the original German and had studied Hitler's speeches, which made no secret of the Führer's dreams of restoring prosperity to Germany by extending its hegemony t owards the east. Amery had even had a long conversation with Hitler in 1935, and noted in his autobiography that the G erman leader had a good grasp of economics. Amery was in any case aware that the Nazis were withdrawing resources from occupied territories (such as Greece), and leaving the natives to starve – just as Churchill had done in India.

Redesigning Indian Society
Nevertheless, the immediate provocation for Amery's Hitler remark was not famine relief but Churchill's scheme for the re designing Indian society. Whereas the prime minister held ordinary Indians to be expendable (and no worse) his attitude towards the Indian upper class was one of active hostility. In particular, he was convinced that native merchants and moneylenders had caused the famine (Leopold S Amery, Secretary of State for India from May 1940 to June 1945) by stockpiling grain, which belief had exacerbated his enmity. Although much about his plan for India remains vague, Churchill clearly believed that a major makeover of native s ociety, involving the termination of the babu class and its replacement by a British ruling elite, was necessary in order to e xtend British rule over India for "a few more generations" (as he had written to Viceroy Linlithgow in 1937). Churchill's ideas for India's future bear a passing resemblance to what is now known of Nazi plans for rendering the Slav regions into permanent slave territories by means of intellectual decapitation. In the Nazi plan, every Jew, as well as every member of the Slav intellectual and upper classes – people who, in Hitler's view, were likely to f oment rebellions – were to be exterminated and replaced by a German ruling class. What makes Hitler's legacy particularly horrific is that this plan was not merely theoretical: he did, in fact, largely implement the first part.14
Churchill's ideas, as recorded by Amery, suggest also the influence of Stalin. Churchill met the dictator several times during the course of the war. He came
to admire Stalin's decisiveness and ruthlessness – as evinced by the implementation of a scorched earth order against those S oviet citizens whose homes and fields lay in the path of the Nazis, which action had helped turn the tide against the invaders. In the early 1930s, Stalin had created in Soviet Union a collectivised society ruled by a class of party elites – in part by eliminating the kulaks, or rural moneylenders (although in practice all better-off peasants were targeted). At a meeting in 1942, Churchill had questioned Stalin about this collectivisation scheme, which, along with appropriations of grain by the state, had led to the Ukrainian famine in which about 10 million people died.15
In subsequent conversations, Churchill would return to the prospect of collectivising Indian society as well, at the expense of usurers and others – broadly, the babus, or educated Hindu males, who comprised almost the entire leadership of the Congress Party. According to Amery, in April 1945, Churchill spoke of "abolishing I ndian landlords and moneylenders, instituting a Soviet system, etc". Since Churchill detested communism, his fixation with this project speaks to his hatred of upper class Indians. The British imperial imagination cast the babus of India in a role similar to that in which the Nazis cast the Jews and the Slavic upper class, and the Soviets cast the kulaks and Ukrainian u pper class – as enemies of the state.16The British people, who by and large were weary of imperialism, would no doubt have viewed with disfavour such measures as collectivisation and large-scale imprisonment (or even extermination, judging by the language in which Amery recorded Churchill's diatribe of 4 August 1944) undertaken in their name – especially after having fought a war to defend freedom. According to the Amery paper, ordinary Britons would not be permitted to know. Wartime restrictions were keeping from them many details of Churchill's India policy, including his refusal to relieve the Bengal famine, and the prime minister evidently hoped to extend such protections to the post-war period by introducing Soviet-style controls: hence the "Intourist" bureau.
As it happens, Churchill and the conservatives decisively lost the British elections of 1945, so that he could not even begin to put into practice his ideas for the post-war regeneration of India.

Notes

1 Amery Papers, AMEL 1/6/34.
2 Barnes and Nicholson, 995.
3 Mansergh, Transfer IV, 1100, 1136-8.
4 CHAR 20/165/43, 27 May 1944.
5 Barnes and Nicholson, The Empire at Bay, 992-993; Mansergh, Transfer IV, 1152-4.
6 Barnes and Nicholson, 986.
7 Joseph V Denney, Macaulay's Essay on Warren Hastings (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1907), 36; Quoted in Chakravarty, The Raj Syndrome, 127.
8 Mansergh, Transfer IV, 157, 163; Barnes and N icholson, 933-934.
9 MT 59/631, "Note of a Meeting Held to Discuss Cross Trade Programme Requirements", 11 August 1943.
10 Barnes and Nicholson, 950.
11 Woodhead, Famine Inquiry Commission, 109-110; Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines, 102; Mukerjee, Churchill's Secret War, 271.
12 Steven R Welch, "Our India".
13 Moon, ed., Wavell, 19.
14 Welch, Nazi Plans for the East, in Adler, et al, G enocide: History and Fictions, 35-37.
15 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 23, 301.
16 Barnes and Nicholson, 1039.

 

[ajtr]

The Two Churchills​

Winston Churchill is remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour — but what if he also led the country through her most shameful one? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacy and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's superb, unsettling new history, "Churchill's Empire" — and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

George W. Bush left a big growling bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with Churchill's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire.

Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain's smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately. Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was coloring the map imperial pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood-red. He was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilization.

As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples." In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, an instant of doubt. He realized that the local population was fighting back because of "the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own," just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead that they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a "strong aboriginal propensity to kill."

He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, writing: "We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation." He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three "savages."

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced "the minimum of suffering" possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his "irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men." Later, he boasted of his experiences. "That was before war degenerated," he said. "It was great fun galloping about."

After being elected to Parliament in 1900, he demanded a rolling program of more conquests, based on his belief that "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph." As war secretary and then colonial secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tans on Ireland's Catholics, to burn homes and beat civilians. When the Kurds rebelled against British rule in Iraq, he said: "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes." It "would spread a lively terror." (Strangely, Toye doesn't quote this.)

Of course, it's easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn't everybody in Britain think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye's research is that they really didn't: even at the time, Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that 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." He later added: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

This hatred killed. In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits" and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.
Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill's victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local "kaffirs." When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill's postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called "Britain's gulag" by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

This is a real Churchill, and a dark one — but it is not the only Churchill. He also saw the Nazi threat far ahead of the complacent British establishment, and his extraordinary leadership may have been the decisive factor in vanquishing Hitlerism from Europe. Toye is no Nicholson Baker, the appalling pseudo historian whose recent work "Human Smoke" presented Churchill as no different from Hitler. Toye sees all this, clearly and emphatically.

So how can the two Churchills be reconciled? Was his moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact that he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival? Toye quotes Richard B. Moore, an American civil rights leader, who said that it was "a most rare and fortunate coincidence" that at that moment "the vital interests of the British Empire" coincided "with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind." But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill's life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn't want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, "all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended." Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain's imperial conquests use his own hope-songs of freedom against him.

In the end, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the world's people of color. Toye teases out these ambiguities beautifully. The fact that we now live at a time where a free and independent India is an emerging superpower in the process of eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu "savages" is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest — and a sweet, unsought victory for Churchill at his best.

 

[samarsingh]

Never mind Churchill, he started as the leader of allies at the beginning of war, soon Stalin and Roosevelt showed him and his Kingdom their real place, number 3. He saw the imminent fall of "the" empire and could do nothing about it. He made many more similar comments, all out of frustration

 

[ejazr]

Churchill was vehemently against giving any independance to India precisely because of the Soviet problem that was emerging post WWII.

When lord monbatten met Churchill to discuss the finalisation of India emerging independant, he got very angry and even refused to meet him. Mountbatten was close to Churchill and highly regarded by him for his intellect. Finally when Mounbatten tried to convince him that emerging realities meant that the UK could no longer hold on to India Churchill had famoulsy said that then atleast keep "a part of India under British control".

Mountbatten then explained the Pakistan plan to him which had been devised by Wavell back in '42 and how the NW and NE part of India that are most necessary to maintain British national interests particularly against USSR will be retained with close ties to the UK. And as he mentioned inhis memoirs that "cheered him up a little bit"


Overall, the idea of India is not like France, Germany or Spain. Its more like Europe in the sense that it comprises divese ethnic backgrounds and cultures. The tribals and the people of the plains and the people in the mountains are all different. Some have also right said that present day Afghanistan and Central Asia also belongs to the same Indian sub-continental plate. Mountain hordes are infamous for attacking the usually more advanced plains civilisations. Its also a fact that the mountain hordes also attacked the advanced Arab civilisations in present day Iraq where thousands of muslims were slaughtered, libraries and centrueis of knowledge accumalted were burnt and pillaged by the Mongol tribes with similar consequences in present day Pakistan around the Indus valley plains.

The present day political India is a modern construct, but the historical India is a vast continental land that has always been there and embraced numerousethni and cultural groups and races. It has been referred by the Persians, Arabs and Greeks as Hind in their ancient books with awe and respect.

Eventually the inclusive and give and take nature of the Indian ethos will determine the success of modern India, SAARC and SAARC-C.Asia "bloc"

 

[JBH22]

Churchill was a chutiya first grade one he used to call Indians as beastly people with beastly religion,he defined Gandhi as a Fakir but that loser required 2.8 million indian soldiers to save his butt in North Africa,but what to expect from a rosebeef he was a senile old man living his colonial wet dreams

 

[johnee]

UK is a tiny nation. An accident of history ensured that a mighty and grand India was enslaved by such a weak and tiny country. Indeed, it is a marvel. But that was an aberration. Once, India slipped out of UK's clutches, UK was gradually relegated to the bottom of power hierarchy. As we go into the future, and the power shifts to the east, these Churchills will be forgotten. He was a colonialist and giving any importance to his views is unnecessary.

 

[johnee]

R.W. Emerson, American Author:
In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.

Apollonius Tyanaeus, Ancient Greek Traveler:
"In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing."

Dr Arnold Toynbee, British Historian:
�It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in history, the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way.�


Swami Vivekananda, Indian Philosopher:
"Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another...But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood..... Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist... Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live....!"

Sir William Jones, British Orientalist:
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either."

Hit&run, loved these....thanks. :happy_8: and Vivekananda is really mesmerising...

 

[roma]

he was NO christan , just english and european - not a christian !