During the
Churchill war ministry Amery was
Secretary of State for India despite the fact that Churchill and Amery had long disagreed on the fate of India. Amery was disappointed not to be made a member of the small War Cabinet, but he was determined to do all he could in the position he was offered. He was continually frustrated by Churchill's intransigence, and in his memoirs, he recorded that Churchill knew "as much of the Indian problem as
George III did of the American colonies". Though committed to the British Empire, Amery thought Churchill's views towards India were unrealistic. Amery was the only India Secretary to have been born in India and he was fluent in Sanskrit, giving him a closer commitment to India than previous India Secretaries. In the autumn of 1941 as war with Japan loomed, the Governor of Burma,
Reginald Dorman-Smith, had agreed that the Burmese prime minister,
U Saw, should go to London to discuss with Amery and Churchill Dominion status for Burma. Amery was less than enthusiastic about meeting U Saw. Churchill had no interest in Dominion status for Burma and agreed to see U Saw only once with the rest of the talks to be handled by Amery. U Saw duly arrived in London in October 1941 for a series of inconclusive meetings with Amery, where he was told that the issue of Burmese independence was complex. On the morning of 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the British Empire with Hong Kong and Malaya being bombed and invaded that day. U Saw who was in Lisbon on his way home to Burma stopped by at the Japanese embassy to offer his support for Burma joining the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As the British had broken the Japanese codes, Amery was well aware of what U Saw had done. Amery sent a message to Dorman-Smith ordering that U Saw was to be arrested immediately upon his return to Burma for his "treacherous act". On 2 February 1942, Amery told the cabinet that the recent British defeats in Asia had shattered the prestige of the
British Raj at a time when Britain needed the support of the Indians the most, and that the government would have to change its policy and engage with Indian public opinion to win their support for the war. Later in February 1942, the Chinese leader
Chiang Kai-shek and his charismatic English-speaking wife
Soong Mei-ling visited India on a well received visit, offering the message that the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere was a sham and warning starkly that the when Japan invaded India the Imperial Japanese Army would treat the Indian people just as badly as it had treated the Chinese, repeating atrocities such as the
Rape of Nanking. Chiang urged the British to promise India independence after the war, but also urged Indians to support the British war effort, saying that British rule was preferable to Japanese rule. The favourable reception of Chiang's visit to India seemed to offer a way forward to win the war in Asia. In March 1942, the cabinet dispatched
Stafford Cripps, a prominent left-wing politician (currently expelled from the Labour Party), on a mission to India to offer Dominion status for India after the war in exchange for Indian support for the British war effort, but with the additional condition that Britain would concede the demand of
Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League for a separate nation for Indian Muslims to be called Pakistan. Cripps landed in India on 22 March 1942. Upon hearing of the Cripps mission, the Viceroy of India,
Lord Linlithgow, asked Amery "Why?" Amery assured Linlithgow that the purpose of the Cripps mission was to "help" him rule India by ending the opposition of the Congress Party to the Raj. The American President
Franklin D. Roosevelt had made it clear to Churchill that he believed that Britain should grant independence to India, and as the United Kingdom as
Lend-Lease meant that Britain was being economically subsidised by the United States from 1941. It was difficult for Churchill to reject Roosevelt's advice outright, much as he wanted to. Amery seemed to regard the Cripps mission as only useful for its effect on American public opinion as he wrote to Linlithgow in March 1942 that American public opinion would be impressed by "us sending out someone who has always been an extreme Left-Winger and in close touch with Nehru". Amery believed that the Cripps would fail as the British offer of independence for India was also tied to a partition of India, a condition that both he and Churchill knew would be rejected by
Mohandas Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru of the Congress Party who wanted independence without partition. There was a split within the Congress Party between Gandhi who took an absolute pacifistic position of opposing all wars on principle
versus Nehru who took a more anti-fascist position and often suggested that he was prepared to support Britain provided independence was promised for India. In one speech, Nehru had declared: "Hitler and Japan must go to hell! I shall fight them to the end and this is my policy. I shall also fight Mr. Subhas Bose and his party along with Japan if he comes to India." During his talks with Cripps, Nehru was quite willing to accept Cripps' offer of Congress Party support for the war in exchange for Dominion status after the war, saying it was imperative that the Axis powers be defeated, and that Japan would be a far worse colonial master for India than Britain. The Cripps-Nehru talks broke down on the Pakistan question as Nehru was unwilling to accept the partition of India, and told Cripps that this part of his offer was unacceptable. Gandhi argued that the offer of independence tied to Pakistan as well as independence for the Princely States would lead to the "Balkanisation of India", and Nehru agreed with him. Churchill argued to Roosevelt that Indian Muslims made up the majority of the Indian Army and that India had 100 million Muslims, making it the most populous Muslim community in the world, and Britain could not afford to anger Jinnah of the Muslim League who wanted independence with partition. On 6 April 1942, the Cripps mission entered in failure as Gandhi and Nehru rejected Cripps's offer of independence after the war in exchange for support for the British war effort; as a dejected Cripps prepared to return to London, the Japanese bombed Calcutta for the first time. The Congress Party was deeply distrustful of the British and were angry about Amery having apparently given the Muslim League the right to create Pakistan as part of the deal. For their part, Amery along with other British officials, believed that Gandhi was extremely naïve in thinking that peaceful "soul force" would be all that would be needed to stop the Japanese invasion, then apparently imminent. Despite the loss of Burma, Amery was corresponding with Dorman-Smith in August 1942 about not only how best to restore British rule in Burma after Japan was defeated, but also plans to annexe Thailand on the account of Thailand joining the war on the Axis side. In August 1942, Gandhi and Nehru launched the
Quit India Movement protests, starting the largest demonstrations yet against the Raj, demanding that the British grant India independence immediately. Linlithgow in a report to Amery called the Quit India movement "the most serious [uprising] since
that of 1857". Officially, 1,028 Indians were killed during the protests, but the number may have actually as high as 25,000. Linlithgow also complained that the protests were being well covered by the American media and wrote to Amery asking him "to arrest at least for a time this flow of well meaning sentimentalists". Despite the massive demonstrations along with associated sabotage, Churchill insisted that most Indians were still loyal to the Raj as Churchill believed the Muslims, Sikhs and Christian communities of India along with untouchable caste and all of the Indians living in the
Princely States were all loyal and by his estimate 300 million of the 400 million Indians wanted the British to stay. Churchill tended to conflate volunteers for the Indian Army with support for the Raj, and he assumed that because the Indian Army were still meeting its recruiting targets that this reflected widespread public support for the Raj. Most of the Indians volunteering for the Indian Army in 1942 were Muslims, and notably the Indian Army had difficulty recruiting Hindus, the most numerous of India's many religious groups. Unlike the Congress Party, the Muslim League had declared its support for the war, and Jinnah and the other Muslim leaders encouraged Indian Muslims to enlist in the Indian Army. Churchill expressed much anger at the Quit India movement, and Amery complained about Churchill's "Nazi-like" attitude towards Indians, especially Hindus, along with a belief that Churchill was wrong in believing that 300 million Indians supported the Raj. As too many Indians were taking part in the Quit India protests, it was impossible to jail all of them, leading the Raj to resort to corporal punishment with Indians being flogged for protesting. After newspaper accounts of "dreadfulness" about the floggings, Amery assured the House of Commons that the police were not flogging people with
Cat o' nine tails whips, but instead with "light rattan canes" to "deter hooligans". Amery did not mention that being flogged with "light rattan canes" was immensely painful but he argued that mass floggings were necessary as there were far more "hooligans" taking part in the Quit India protests than were prisons for them. Much to Amery's relief, the Indian Army, which was called out as an aid to civil power as the police forces were overwhelmed by the Quit India protests, stayed loyal to the Raj. Amery reported to the cabinet on 24 August 1942 that "the soldiers regard Congress as contemptible politicians". Amery stated that within the Indian Army the general feeling was that the prime danger facing India was a Japanese invasion, and most of the Indian soldiers felt that the timing of the Quit India movement was very wrong. As a result of the uprising, the Congress Party was banned while the Muslim League which was opposed to Quit India remained legal. In December 1942, Linlithgow reported to Amery of a "disastrous deterioration of supplies" and that a famine was imminent in the Bengal province. In January 1943, Amery reported to the cabinet that food shortages were becoming a major problem in India. Before 1942, 15% of the rice consumed in India had come from Burma, and the Japanese conquest of Burma had cut India off from the Burmese rice crop. Adding to the shortages were a series of cyclones that devastated the rice crop in Bengal province in the autumn of 1942, and by December 1942 children and old people in Bengal were starving to death as it was reported to London that India was short of one million tons of rice that were necessary to feed its people. When Linlithgow decided to retire as Viceroy in 1943, Amery recommended to Churchill that he appoint either the Foreign Secretary
Anthony Eden or the Deputy Prime Minister
Clement Attlee as the next Viceroy. Churchill refused on the grounds that he needed both Eden and Attlee in the cabinet. On 8 June 1943, Amery nominated himself as the next Viceroy, writing in a memo to the prime minister of: "...the very special difficulties which a new Viceroy will have to handle. The whole situation in India today depends upon the Viceroy's ability from the onset to manage and impose his personality upon a Council composed mainly of Indians, men of individual ability and goodwill, but easily ratted or turned sour by hesitant or clumsy handling. They are like an Indian elephant, who with a good mahout, will face a charging tiger; if the mahout is stupid, or loses his nerve for a second, nothing can stop the beast from stampeding in terror...a stampede that may wreck the whole fabric of government in India". Amery concluded that since the "very best men" such as Eden and Attlee could not be spared to serve as Viceroy, "as a last resort, I have already offered you myself". Churchill instead chose Field Marshal
Archibald Wavell as the next Viceroy in the hope that Wavell would pursue a repressive policy towards Indian demands for independence. Contrary to Churchill's hopes, Wavell proved far more willing than Linlithgow to negotiate with the Indians as Wavell sought a political solution instead of the military solution that Churchill had hoped for. Amery tended to support Wavell's efforts to reach a political solution and consistently spoke in defence of Wavell in cabinet meetings. To replace Wavell who been promoted to Viceroy of India, Churchill wanted to appoint Air Chief Marshal Sir
Sholto Douglas as the new Supreme Commander of South-East Asia Command, a choice vetoed by Roosevelt on the account of Douglas's anti-Americanism. Likewise Admiral
Andrew Cunningham declined the offer and at Amery's suggestion, Churchill appointed Admiral
Louis Mountbatten as the Southeast Asia Supreme Commander. In July 1943, the Raj reported that a famine had broken out in Bengal province and that it would necessary to ship 5,000,000 tons of grain from Australia to feed the starving people of Bengal. Amery wrote in his diary that at a cabinet meeting on 4 August 1943 he made the case for the grain shipments "in as strong terms as I could", but was overruled by the cabinet. The War Secretary,
James Grigg, stated that there was more than enough grain in India to feed the Bengalis and that the famine had been caused by Indian merchants hoarding grain to speculate on higher prices, leading him to conclude that this was an Indian problem that the Indians could solve on their own. On 5 August 1943, Churchill promised Amery that if the famine continued to worsen, the matter would be discussed at the next cabinet meeting. The same time, Churchill left for the
First Quebec Conference with President Roosevelt, and no more cabinet meetings were held in the absence of the prime minister. During the famine, both Wavell and Amery consistently fought for food to be sent to Bengal. In the autumn of 1943, following further lobbying by Amery, the cabinet agreed that 50,000 tons of Australian wheat would go to Bengal with the first shipment arriving in November 1943. Amery opposed holding an inquiry for the
1943 Bengal famine, fearing that the political consequences could be "disastrous". In 1944, the
Famine Inquiry Commission was held against his advice. The report by the inquiry ruled that Bengal famine was "avoidable" and was due to "mismanagement" by both the Raj and the Bengal government. Unlike Churchill who had a marked dislike of Gandhi and the Congress Party and favoured Jinnah and the Muslim League, Amery had a strong dislike of Jinnah, to whom he referred as "the future emperor of Pakistan", charging that Jinnah was championing the idea of partition of India because creating Pakistan was the only way he ever hope to attain power, as the Muslim League as suggested by its name represented only Muslims, and thus could not hope to win an Indian general election. Amery wrote that the concept of Pakistan was "essentially a negation" that would cause a bloodbath if the idea of partition of India was actually executed. Likewise, Amery was opposed to Churchill's offer of Dominion status for India being tied to Dominion status for the all 565
Princely States, which he called "princestan" and thought was unrealistic as most of the princely states were extremely small, being enclaves the size of a municipal borough. In 1944, the British cabinet learned of an unusual offer from the
Reichsfūhrer SS,
Heinrich Himmler, that he was willing to suspend the
deportation of the Jews of Hungary to the
Auschwitz death camp in exchange for 10,000 lorries for the Wehrmacht to be used on the Eastern Front. This was an obvious attempt to break up the "Big Three" alliance of the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom. Amery told the Zionist leader
Chaim Weizmann about the "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". Amery expressed much sympathy writing that both he and Cripps were in favour of keeping the commitments made by the latter in 1942 while Churchill was not. In May 1944, Wavell ordered the release of Gandhi who had been imprisoned since August 1942 on the grounds that if the Mahatma were to die in prison, it would set off massive riots. Wavell reported to Amery that Gandhi and Jinnah were not planning to meet anytime soon and he expected no resolution in the "deadlock" between the Congress Party and the Muslim League. Wavell added that both Gandhi and Jinnah were "intransigents" and neither had any willingness to compromise. Amery in his reply to Wavell stated that the Allies were finally advancing in Italy and that "we might be on the outskirts of Rome in a few days". Amery further noted that many of the soldiers in the British Eighth Army that was marching north in Italy were
Indian, and he hoped that the Indian newspapers were giving sufficient publicity to the achievements of the Indian "tiger soldiers' in Italy, which he wanted to be seen as a model of Anglo-Indian cooperation in a common cause. In July 1944, Wavell reported to Amery that Gandhi might be willing to compromise by accepting the idea of Pakistan, but only with borders that would be so unfavourable that Pakistan would not be economically viable as Pakistan's only ports under Gandhi's plan would be
Karachi and Dacca (modern
Dhaka). Wavell added: "One can hardly blame Jinnah for thinking twice before swallowing this whole". Wavell along with other senior civil servants of the Raj warned that to attempt to partition the Punjab would cause a bloodbath as the Sikh and Muslim communities of the Punjab would tear each other apart, and it would be better to keep India together by making concessions to the Indian Muslim minority. To further complicate matters, many Sikhs were unhappy about having to choose between Muslim majority Pakistan vs. Hindu majority India, and wanted the Punjab to be independent, a demand rejected by both Jinnah and Gandhi. Wavell reported to Amery that Gandhi was utterly incapable of understanding Jinnah's fears that the Muslim minority would be oppressed in Hindu majority India, and he was not willing to make any compromises that might persuade Jinnah to drop his demand for Pakistan. Wavell himself favoured a compromise to avoid partition by making independent India into a federation with a weak central government and strong provincial governments, which he hoped might persuade Jinnah that the Indian Muslims would not be oppressed. Amery himself advanced a similar plan thought he felt Wavell's efforts along these lines were too crude and blunt reflecting his background as a soldier and that he as a politician he was better suited for this task. Amery became increasing frustrated with what he regarded as Churchill's obstinate and unrealistic views on India. He felt that it was impossible for a liberal democratic state to repress the demands for independence from the better part of 400 million people without betraying its values, and that the best that could done in India was to make a deal with the moderate Indian nationalists for support for the British war effort in exchange for Dominion status after the war. Amery often wrote in his diary that Churchill's belief that no political solution was possible nor desirable and that the Indians could simply be repressed into being docile subjects of the Raj was as impractical as it was amoral. On 4 August 1944, Wavell reported that Gandhi had offered to end the Quit India protests and to support the British war effort in exchange for an immediate grant of Dominion status for India with no partition. Wavell rejected Gandhi's offer, but himself offered to form a transitional government with a cabinet headed by Indians that would be granted Dominion status after the war in exchange for the Congress Party supporting the war effort. In the cabinet, Amery supported Wavell's offer, saying it was the best way to end the disorders in India and bring the majority of the Indians over to supporting the war; Churchill by contrast was completely opposed and expressed much regret that he ever appointed Wavell as Viceroy. Churchill told the cabinet that Wavell should never negotiate at with Gandhi, a man whom Churchill called "a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fibre, largely in the hands of native vested interest". Churchill stated that Wavell was a disgrace as he was willing to talk to Gandhi, whom Churchill stated was "a traitor who ought to be put back into prison!" Amery wrote in his diary on 4 August 1944 that Churchill had attacked his patriotism and claimed that he supported the interests of "Indian moneylenders over Englishmen" in India. Amery concluded in his diary: "Naturally, I lost patience, and I 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 certain whatever on the subject of India he is totally sane". The next day, Churchill drafted a reply to Gandhi's offer that demanded radical changes to the status of the
untouchables as a condition, which Amery criticised as negotiating in bad faith, noting that Churchill had never been much interested in improving the conditions of the untouchables before, and his demand about the untouchables was a
wedge issue intended to divide the higher caste Hindus from the untouchables. Churchill told him that he planned "after the war he was going to go back on all the shameful story of the last twenty years of surrender". Churchill told Amery that he envisioned India as a British colony forever, that he would never grant independence to India under any conditions and that he planned to "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 officials in India, who were more Indian than the Indians, and send out new men". Amery's differing outlook towards India tended to push him towards the margins as he and Churchill had very different visions of the future of India. In a satire of Churchill's views, Amery wrote a mock memo entitled "The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister", where pretending to be Churchill Amery wrote: "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 Indians 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 situation has arisen of which we are fully entitled to take advantage". Continuing on his theme, Amery as Churchill wrote about Wavell that he was a man who: "...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". Amery continued his satire by writing that the Raj should aim at the destruction of the Hindu caste system and making the untouchables the equal of the other castes, which might generate resistance, leading him to write that "it will also be necessary, following an excellent Russian precedent, 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." Amery as Churchill concluded that India would require a regime of martial law permanently to put an end to Indian demands for independence which would require a force of 1,600,000 British police officers and 8,000,000 Indian police officers along with the entire Indian Army and most of the British Army. Amery intended his memo to be a parody meant to show how impractical Churchill's views were as the immense number of policemen and soldiers that would be needed to enforce permanent martial law in India would seriously strain the British budget at a time when Britain was financially dependent on the United States. The suggestion of the "excellent Russian precedent" was meant to show that Churchill would have to use methods similar to Joseph Stalin's in the Soviet Union to achieve his vision of India as a permanent British colony. Amery's support for Indian independence was not based on any sense of sympathy for Indian nationalism, but rather as the best way of securing British influence in South Asia as he believed that India as a Dominion would be rather like other Dominions such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand who generally followed Britain's lead. As late as 1947 in a letter to Churchill just after Attlee announced the end of the Raj Amery expressed the viewpoint that "we can only hope, that somehow or other, the Britannic orbit will remain a reality in this parlous world even if, to assume the worst, Indian politicians are unwise enough to break the formal link". ==Last years==