The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (81 page)

In the provincial arena, the Indian politicians were bound to rely heavily upon the expertise and advice of the ICS men. They were also bound to observe the constitutional rules that the governors would enforce. The governor could dismiss ministers, dissolve the assemblies and call fresh elections. He could also insist on attending cabinet meetings.
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Where party competition was fierce, party organisation fragile or factionalism rife, these were formidable powers – the reason why Congress tried but failed to secure a promise not to use them. They were deployed with the aim of weaning Congress leaders in the provinces away from their deference to the Congress ‘high command’ and encouraging ‘local’ initiative.
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After 1935, of course, British and ICS power was concentrated at the centre, in the government of India. There, the Viceroy and his ICS staff exercised almost unchecked authority, and would continue to do so long after (and if) the federal assembly came into existence. Indeed, the Viceroy, not London, now held most of the reserved powers that were meant to slide slowly into the hands of responsible federal ministers. His control of the budget was almost absolute. More to the point, the centre had grabbed the lion's share of the most buoyant revenue sources, leaving the rind to the provinces: the rigid, costly and inflammatory land revenue.
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Financially, at least, the centre was stronger than ever, and provincial politicians would need its goodwill. But, if all else failed politically, the Viceroy's ultimate weapon was his command of armed force, the police and the army. Here, too, it seemed, the British had little to fear. Apart from the British contingent (the 50,000 or more men from the British army at home), the Indian army appeared almost untouched by two decades of politics. Its British officer corps (around 20 British officers in each of the army's 120 regiments
¹⁷⁴
) was scheduled for ‘Indianisation’ at the pace of the snail, and Indian applications for officer training (in contrast with the ICS) slumped badly in the 1930s.
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The army's colonial structure, with its heavy reliance on ‘martial races’ and hill peoples, expressly excluded most of the elements that might have been drawn to the Congress. An army mutiny designed to bring Gandhi to power was absurdly improbable.

All this would have counted for less had the British in India faced a united nationalist movement that could grant or withhold its cooperation at will. But the reverse was the case. Since the glory days of the first non-cooperation movement in 1920–2, unity had collapsed. Although Muslims themselves were far from united (and some remained loyal to Congress), their provincial leaders were deeply opposed to the Congress desire for a strong central state which they saw as the instrument of the Hindu majority. In the Muslim majority provinces of Bengal, Sind and Punjab (the North West Frontier Province was a special case), they were determined to hold on to the widest autonomy, and to cling to the privilege of separate electorates. When Congress staged its second civil disobedience campaign in 1930–1, the Muslims took no part.
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The Congress itself was prey to divisions. The moderate non-Gandhian wing, led by Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal's father, would have settled for ‘Dominion Status’ within the Empire, parliamentary-style government at the Indian centre and an end to separate electorates.
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But their chances were wrecked by Muslim opposition, the Gandhians’ impatience and the tactics of the British. When civil disobedience was suspended (by the Gandhi–Irwin pact), Gandhi went as the Congress’ sole representative to the (second) Round Table Conference convened by the British in late 1931 to consider the federal scheme. But Gandhi gained little. Civil disobedience had been noisy, but was a political failure. The Round Table Conference (attended by Muslims, Sikhs, Princes, untouchables and Eurasians, among others) belied his grand claim that the Congress alone represented India. The new constitution was drawn up in London while the stuttering attempt to restart civil disobedience was crushed by a vigilant Viceroy. When the India Act was passed, Congress faced a dilemma. Would it boycott the reforms that Jawaharlal Nehru called ‘a charter of slavery’? Would it fight the elections, now to be fought on a far larger franchise including millions of women? Would it take office in the provinces where its supporters won a majority? Would it risk being trapped in the constitutional labyrinth the British had constructed around it?

Loud voices were raised against any compromise. Nehru (elected Congress president 1936–8) fiercely opposed the acceptance of office. The Congress should not share responsibility with ‘the apparatus of imperialism’, he told its meeting at Lucknow in April 1936.
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If it did so, the ‘narrowest provincialism [will] rear its ugly head’.
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But, the following year, the vote went against him. This was partly because of the hunger for power after long years in the wilderness. But it was also inspired by the scale of the victory in the provincial elections. Congress had won a clear majority of seats in five of the eleven provinces and was the largest party in a sixth (Bombay). It had crushed the ICS hopes that provincially based parties would attract the voters’ support. Its success was a tribute to organisational strength,
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and its appeal to the peasants as the scourge of the landlords. The landlord party in the United Provinces (to the dismay of the governor) was roundly defeated. But what would Congress leaders do once in office? They proclaimed the intention of using their powers to smash the new constitution. But the British clung to the hope that, once its local leaders were engaged with ‘the great mass of provincial interests’, this would quickly slacken the grip of Congress’ ‘central organisation’.
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The early pattern of politics seemed inconclusive. The cohesion of the Congress was certainly strained and its inclusive appeal began to fray at the edges. Provincial leaders resented ‘supervision’ by the ‘high command's’ triumvirate.
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Faced with peasant unrest in Bihar and labour unrest in Bombay, Congress ministers applied repression with vigour.
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The Congress Socialist party had been formed in 1934. Nehru himself proclaimed the virtues of socialism and admired Stalin's Russia. But Sardar Patel, Gandhi's ‘enforcer’, dismissed socialism as ‘nonsense,’
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and other voices were raised against Nehru's ‘destructive and subversive’ doctrine.
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The ‘high command’ intervened in provincial affairs to defend Indian businessmen against radical or leftist opinion in Congress.
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Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru's main rival as the radical voice of the Congress, pressed for more recognition of regional and cultural autonomy (reflecting the Bengali Hindu dilemma) and urged Congress support for a federal republic, not a unitary state.
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The Congress old guard engineered his removal. Amid so much division, it was perhaps hardly surprising that Nehru should have thought ‘the sooner we are out of office the better’.
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But, despite all the strain, the Congress did not fragment. Its three-man committee, with Gandhi behind them, imposed a tight central rein. There were also clear signs that the growing strength of the Congress would deter the Princely states from agreeing to join the federal system, and that federation itself might remain a dead letter.

But in the last year of peace it was too early to tell. The Congress had eluded the trap that the British had set. Whether it could stage an early advance to the All-India centre and expel the British from India in the foreseeable future was far more uncertain. The strict central control that the high command had maintained had saved the Congress from splits. But its veto on coalitions and monolithic authority had further antagonised both Muslims and Princes. For the moment at least, in the trial of strength, stalemate had set in, the prelude perhaps to a new round of adjustments. But, before that could happen, an external crisis of colossal intensity transformed the whole pattern of Indian politics.

Holding the centre

Despite their travails in India and East Asia, the growing tension in Europe and the sense of economic and financial strain after 1930, there was little to show that the British had abandoned their claim to be a world power. Nowhere, perhaps, was this clearer than in the Middle East, the cross-roads of Eurasia and of what Mackinder had called the ‘world-island’. Across a vast arc of territories, including the Sudan, Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf statelets, the Hadramaut and Aden (the ‘southern gates of Arabia’), British influence
circa
1930 was fiercely exerted through a wide range of regimes: a condominium, a crown colony, three mandates, several protectorates, and a ‘veiled occupation’ in Egypt, while Aden remained an outpost of Bombay until 1937.

To the casual eye, such administrative chaos had an improvised look, as if the British presence was temporary (‘temporary’ had been the notorious adjective applied to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882). In fact, in the inter-war years, far from becoming redundant, the Middle East countries assumed growing imperial value for two different reasons. One was the steady rise in their output of oil, mainly from Anglo-Persian's concession in Southwest Iran and its port-refinery at Abadan, but with the promise of new fields in Iraq and the Gulf. Although Middle East oil supplied only 5 per cent of world product as late as 1939, it reduced British dependence on American oil and was conveniently close to the imperial ‘trunk route’ to Suez and India. The second reason was strategy. The old threat from Russia was dormant, but the risk of a clash with Japan was much more immediate. That meant the rapid despatch of a naval task force from Europe to defend British interests in the Asia-Pacific from the Singapore base. Hence the vital importance of the Suez Canal as the wind-pipe of Empire was notched up still further. Nor was it only a matter of sea-power. The value of air routes to bind the Empire together, and of air-power as a means of internal control and external defence, were well understood. Half of Britain's air strength stationed overseas was in Egypt, Palestine and Iraq. Cairo had already become the hub of air transport, through which flights to Africa, India and the Pacific had to pass. With other bases and airports in Palestine and Iraq and along the Arab coast of the Gulf, the British had constructed an air route to India to which they attached great importance.
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‘The Gulf is becoming’, wrote a
Times
correspondent breathlessly, ‘the Suez Canal of the air, an essential channel of communication with India, Singapore and Australia.’
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Since the early 1920s, the British had preferred to make their regional presence as unobtrusive as possible, for financial as much as for political reasons. They had come to terms with the two main state-builders, Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Pahlavi Shah in Iran. Having installed Feisal in Iraq as the strong-man who would hold its disparate parts together with his ‘Sharifian’ followers (the Sunni elite who formed the administrative caste and the officer corps), they were keen to exchange their Mandatory role for a treaty of alliance that gave Iraq independence – a change carried through between 1930 and 1932. With the air bases they wanted, and with Iraqi dependence on British support against the ‘old enemy’ Turkey (not to mention Iran), there was no conflict of interest between their imperial system and the ruling group in Baghdad.
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London also looked kindly on the state-making ambitions of Ibn Saud in what became Saudi Arabia, and forced its Hashemite clients in Trans-Jordan and Iraq not to encourage his tribal opponents.
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Thus the British
imperium
was intended to function by indirect means, through a form of hegemonic diplomacy, not old-fashioned rule. As the only great power in the region (for the French offered no challenge), they would be arbiters of its conflicts and quarrels, patrons – or not – of its rulers’ ambitions, regulating the affairs of the region in its best interests and their own.

The heart and centre of British regional influence was, as it had been since 1882, to be found in Egypt. Egypt had the largest population of any Arab country, and the region's most developed economy. Cairo's Al-Azhar mosque was the greatest centre of learning in the Islamic world. With the Suez Canal, the port of Alexandria, its airports and railways, its agrarian resources and its large pool of labour, Egypt was a uniquely valuable asset to Britain's defence system: the ‘swing door’, as one minister put it, between East and West. Having rejected the prospect of direct control at the end of the War, the British would have liked to enshrine their special position in the form of a treaty. But, as they insisted that the terms should include the right to maintain troops there, to require Egyptian conformity with British foreign policy, to be the sole guardian of foreign interests and persons, and to keep effective control of the ‘Anglo-Egyptian’ Sudan (Egypt's great colony), no Egyptian politician who valued his name and his health could be persuaded to sign. After several abortive attempts, the British had all but decided by late 1934 that further effort was futile.
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Their situation in Cairo was not so uncomfortable. Despite official insistence that the British Residency played no part in Egyptian political life, successive high commissioners interfered with a will. It was widely assumed that no Egyptian prime minister could survive their displeasure. Since 1930, in fact, the British had simplified matters by allowing the king to repress the Wafd, the main popular party, and rule by decree through his nominee minister. Their rationale was straightforward. If the British disowned him, said a Foreign Office official, the king's position would be precarious if not untenable.
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When the High Commissioner Lampson went to bully King Fuad (r.1917–36) on an occasion in 1935, he told him that failure to comply would raise ‘issues of the gravest kind…including…his continued capacity to rule and the whole future of his dynasty’.
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‘J’accepte’, said King Fuad. Since the Qasr el-Nil barracks, where the British garrison was stationed, was ten minutes’ drive from the king's Abdin Palace (and ten minutes’ drive from the Wafd party headquarters), and since the British had removed his predecessor but one, Fuad's discretion was wise.