India at Yalta, 1945, Tehran, 1943 and WWII!

I read Diana Preston's "Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World" sometime ago.

Reading it I realized, FDR cared for India's independence although he was so unwell at Yalta.

Some examples from the book:

"...Roosevelt deliberately set out to woo Stalin, whom he saw as the leader of an emerging superpower. One means by which he hoped to win Stalin’s trust was by distancing himself from Churchill, the leader of an empire in decline, much to the latter’s dismay. Pleased with the opportunity it gave him to engineer separate meetings with Stalin, Roosevelt acquiesced in Stalin’s proposal that he should stay in the Soviet Legation in Teheran so he would be safer from Nazi agents. At their private meetings he emphasized disagreements with Churchill on issues such as India, the role of France and the date of the cross-Channel invasion...."

"...Churchill’s fellow anti-appeaser but reluctant wartime Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, could never convince Churchill to conciliate the Indian Congress Party leader Jawaharlal Nehru with offers of post-war concessions. Nehru had since the mid-1930s often condemned Hitler and vigorously criticized Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and if treated differently might well have been prepared to give some support to British war aims. Amery complained that Churchill had a ‘Hitler-like attitude towards India’ and was ‘shouting’ about India and claiming its then 500 million inhabitants were ‘breeding like rabbits’. On one occasion Amery questioned whether ‘on this subject of India he [Churchill] is really quite sane – there is no relation between his manner, physical and intellectual, on this theme and the equability and dominant good sense he displays on issues directly affecting the conduct of the war.’..."

"... Perhaps partly because of his generally hostile attitude, Churchill had been slow to realize the seriousness of the 1940s Bengal famine in which more than 1 million people died. The press in America as well as in Britain and India castigated the feeble relief attempts by the British government and also by local Indian authorities. Nevertheless, it took considerable pressure, including a threat to resign by the British viceroy in India Lord Wavell, as well as from Leo Amery and Parliament to overturn the government’s ‘scandalous’ inaction. Finally convinced, in April 1944 Churchill wrote to Roosevelt asking to borrow American merchant ships to import wheat to India from Australia. A million tons would be required ‘to hold the situation, and so meet the needs of the United States and British and Indian troops and of the civil population’. Roosevelt would not assist for fear of damaging the transport of supplies to American forces in the Pacific. However, the increased efforts of the authorities began to ameliorate the worst effects of the famine and by the time of Yalta the topic had dropped from public attention. Despite both the independence struggle and the Bengal famine, the British authorities in India had by 1945 raised from the subcontinent the largest all-volunteer army in history, increasing its size from 189,000 in 1939 to some 2.5 million...."

"...Churchill’s almost hysterical opposition to any suggestion of Indian independence was well known to both Roosevelt and Stalin. Roosevelt himself at Teheran discussed Churchill’s stance privately with Stalin, who agreed that the empire was a sore spot for Churchill. In Washington over the New Year of 1941/2, Roosevelt suggested that Churchill promise India independence and propose a timescale for achieving it as the US had for the Philippines. Churchill responded that he would resign before he would ‘yield an inch of the territory that was under the British flag’. On the fringes of the Casablanca Conference, after jocularly offering to hand Gandhi over to the United States – ‘He’s awfully cheap to keep, now that’s he’s on hunger strike’ – Churchill continued:

There are always earnest spinsters in Pennsylvania, Utah, Edinburgh or Dublin persistently writing letters and signing petitions and ardently giving their advice . . . urging that India be given back to the Indians and South Africa back to the Zulus or Boers, but as long as I am called by His Majesty the King to be his First Minister, I shall not assist at the dismemberment of the British Empire...."

 

 

Churchill’s daughter Sarah, Roosevelt’s daughter Anna and Harriman’s daughter Kathleen at Yalta where they were known as ‘The Little Three’.