Institute of Chinese Studies

B-371, 3rd Floor

Chittaranjan Park, Kalkaji

New Delhi 110019 

website: http://www.icsin.org

E-mail: info@icsin.org

Tel: +91-11-40564823

This is the first among a couple of thousand books to examine the full panorama of Winston Churchill’s India connections, which divide into four phases that are explored in the book. It starts with the 3 years as a cavalry subaltern (1896-99), a formative phase when he planned his political career. In 1929, when his Tory Party was in opposition, he rebelled against its position on gradual self-rule in India, starting with provincial devolution. His 6-year futile struggle against the India Act of 1935 isolated him from his own party colleagues, leaving him in the political wilderness in 1929-39. The outbreak of WWII brought him back into the Cabinet and he served as Prime Minister from Feb 1940 to August 1945. Churchill engaged in aberrant actions, including gross lies about the Indian National Movement’s intentions, plus several threats to resign over India policy. By early 1942, it was clear that the British Empire was at an end. Ostrich-like, Churchill was in denial, even while scheming with Jinnah on a Muslim homeland. Placing the entire leadership of the National Movement in prison and isolation, from August 1942 to mid-1945, he did nothing to prepare for that end phase, and the inevitable Partition. This was his supreme folly. Churchill bears responsibility for doing nothing to counter the mismanagement in British India during the Great Indian Famine of 1942-44, and his extended refusal to provides ships to bring food grains that Australia and Canada were willing to donate. Willful mismanagement, indifference to mass starvation in East India, and gross failure to plan the end of Empire, these are the serious charges that stand against Churchill. They are a major failure, a gross black spot, in what is otherwise a
great life of remarkable achievement.