19 MARCH 1983, Page 22

Spring books I

The Imperial Tragedy

J. Enoch Powell

Escape from Empire: the Attlee Government and the Indian problem R. J. Moore (OUP £19.50) The ending of the Indian Empire is a tremendous theme, a theme not

disproportionate to the splendour and im- probability of the 200 years of the Raj itself. It is a tragic theme, in the sense that in- dividuals and masses of human beings struggled vainly against immutable laws of political mechanics, which they largely fail- ed to identify. Like all tragic themes, it repeats itself wherever those laws apply, with the same causes, the same forms, the same outcome, the same lessons. It was worthy of a better treatment than the dry- as-dust, academic, conscientious accumula- tion of detail, which an Australian resear- cher has heaped together, and from which the reader is left to disengage for himself the broad lines of events and the great prin- ciples in operation.

To relinquish rule over a homogeneous population, self-identified as a national en- tity, is plain sailing. In doing so there is but one law to be observed upon pain of humiliation. It is the law that power is in- divisible. Until all power is relinquished, none is relinquished: independence is not to be doled out in doses. That law did, indeed, apply to the ending of the Raj. It was at work in the precipitate haste of the con- cluding phase. But it did not lie at the heart of the agony.

The inhabitants of the Indian sub- continent were not only not homogeneous politically or in any other respect, they were divided from one another by deeper an- tagonisms than from their departing rulers.

Where this condition obtains, the relin- quishment of rule is the prelude to civil war, a civil war to be fought out until a new balance of power is ascertained, unless - unless the departing power can effect a partition neat enough to produce sufficient-

ly homogeneous successor states, sus- tainable from the word go. Such was not the case in India. Especially in the Punjab

and in Bengal, but not only there, Muslim and Hindu populations had lived together inextricably so long as autocratic rule rendered their antagonism politically irrele- vant. The political map of India, whether the provinces or the princely states, had not been drawn by history or by the British with a view to creating democratically self- governable units or sub-units.

In addition, two of the actors in the tragedy were blinded by their own infatua-

tions and saw the Raj, native states and all, as a natural unity. The Hindus, the numerical majority represented primarily by Congress, identified the whole sub- continent as their homeland, Hind, destin- • ed to be one of the greatest and most powerful nations upon earth, as it would be one of the most populous. The British no less, who imagined that by their rule and civilisation they had forged a new unity out of diversity, hated the idea of breaking up again what they had so beneficently made. Consequently partition, the only outcome rationally to be expected, was excluded at the outset by the British and by the majori- ty; and both of them for year after year employed themselves on constructing houses of cards of Indian unity, which the Raj could tiptoe away and leave behind.

Ironically, it was Britain's — equally in- fatuated — perception of its own self- interest which, when the I 1th hour had already struck, made partition thinkable, practicable and therefore a reality. The plot of the drama was constructed thus. Britain was convinced that for reasons of imperial and world-wide defence, a unitary India, aligned militarily with Britain, was essential, but that alignment would only be possible if unitary India were still within the British Commonwealth. Congress on the other hand was committed to an independent republic and hated the thought of retaining anything reminiscent of empire. This situa- tion the British sought to meet by two devices.

First, they forswore the basis of allegiance which underlay their own law of citizenship, so that an independent republic could nevertheless still be in the Common- wealth. This was the self-abnegation of the British Nationality Act 1948, which was to entail upon the home country the calamity of mass African and Asian immigration, whose consequences we have scarcely yet begun to taste. That is where the part of Nemesis comes into the tragedy. Secondly, the British resorted, as they are apt to do, to double-crossing. They threatened the Congress that if India would not stay in the Commonwealth, Britain would give Com- monwealth status to a Muslim successor state created by partition — and how would Congress like that, with all the military and economic implications?

The twofold device worked: Nehru and the Congress accepted a dual demission of power by the Raj. An incidental conse- quence of the dual principle was that the In- dian states would have to come into one grouping or the other (usually the other) and that the solemn undertakings Britain

had given them that their freedom of action would be preserved at the dissolution of the Raj were thrown out of the window — also a very characteristic procedure of the British when in a tight corner.

There was another sword still to be thrown into the pan of the trembling scales. The mixed provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, the latter triply mixed with the Sikhs as well, had to be partitioned. The vast carnage in the Punjab and Delhi in August 1947 and the war in Kashmir since then were the consequences, arguably in- evitable. In Mr Moore's book those events are touched with a light hand — just a few sentences, including a bald reference to half a million Indians massacred. Of course, it is bad form to refer to these matters, in case anyone should be so tactless as to think or say that it was a high price to pay for ending the Indian Empire or might be tempted to recall it when the remoter reverberations of that event claim still more hecatombs, as they have just been doing in Assam. We are not supposed to notice.

Such in brief is the plan and elevation of the tragic edifice of which the materials are quarried and piled up in Mr Moore's book but which for all his industry he did not build. Its architecture is classic, that is to say, indefinitely repeatable.

There are traces here and there that from the minds of those British politicians and officials who toiled away at ending the Rai echoes of Ireland were not absent. And n0 wonder. There also the all-or-nothing nature of the demission of power had ha to be laboriously learnt by experience- There also the inevitability of partitioning a population not politically homogeneous was perceived at a disastrously late stage and is still imperfectly admitted. There also the problem of the geographical 11.1" terpenetration of political incompatibles can be studied, albeit on a smaller scale.

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There also, finally, the deviousness 01 British statecraft, always ready in the ser: vice of supposed defence and international interests to engage in duping those to whorl' Britain's honour is committed, has been at, work behind the scenes. In whole pages Mr Moore's book 'all-Ireland state' could be substituted for 'all-India dominion' and leave the sense intact. Fortunately, the analogy with Ireland, however instructive and sorrowful, is lin; perfect. From empire in India Britain he to 'escape' sooner or later. Within the

United Kingdom the imperative is the other way round. Whatever and whoever can be

represented in the parliament of the United Kingdom has dissolved in a comm °s medium the differences and antag0n1sm. which would be irreconcilable outside dial' framework. Empire, indeed, and not on Indian empire but American empire ar1°.. Australasian empire too, was ultimately irle compatible with the spirit and the princip.id of Parliament. The incompatibility w?"!_. not cease until they had withdrawn

the bounds of this Kingdom, which is the" birthplace and their home.