Arthur Herman, author of Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, delivered the final 2007-2008 Bradley Lecture on June 2. Edited excerpts follow. A video of the lecture is available at www.aei.org/event1694/.

Arthur Herman

At the end of World War II, the overwhelming question for the British was what to do about India. There were basically two schools of thought. One school--that of Winston Churchill--said keep it. As Churchill himself said, "India is the crown jewel of the British empire." However, the majority of Britons had accepted that it was time to give up India. Even before World War I, successive British governments had taken steps to allow for a transfer of power.
This impulse accelerated over the course of World War II and grew until finally it became a major issue. The person who was responsible for this growing sense that it was time to give up India was Mohandas Gandhi.

Gandhi is not the father of the Indian independence movement. Nor is he the father of mass civil disobedience. His contribution was not the techniques of civil disobedience, but understanding their larger significance. Their effect was not just to push the British out, but to bring the Indians in and bring them together.

Gandhi was very careful to couch his anti-British stance in terms the British themselves would understand and sympathize with--namely, that this was a question about rights; that the British had no mandate to tell Indians what to do; that the rights the British upheld as part of their own constitution, as part of their history, were being systematically denied to Indians.

The more that keeping order in the subcontinent required certain kinds of drastic actions--police actions, breaking up riots and demonstrations, throwing Gandhi into prison on a regular basis--the more it had a wearing effect on the British public, until the British became ashamed of themselves and of their empire in India. They saw a face of themselves they did not recognize. Gandhi showed them that face, and this was one of the key reasons why the decision was made once the war was over that Britain must give up rule in India.

It is important to keep in mind that in 1945, Churchill no longer had anything to say about this. In July of that year, he had been thrown out as prime minister. I think what led to Churchill's defeat, even in the midst of the war, was an awareness that by reelecting Churchill, the British would go back to a prewar, imperial past.

The tasks became how to withdraw from India while still maintaining law and order and how to work out the political element so the Indians could govern themselves without the British. The first task was left in the hands of Viceroy Archibald Wavell. He developed a plan for a staged, gradual British withdrawal from India--first by withdrawing from the least violent areas, then by moving British troops and police into areas that were bound to be volatile as a result of the coming independence. Once law and order had been established there, then he would begin the process of complete withdrawal.

The Wavell plan, however, failed to meet the mood in London. The new Labour government wanted Britain out of India, and those who fought the hardest to get Britain out of India were the least concerned with what would happen to India once the withdrawal was done. As a result, three crucial errors were made in British policy. First, they rejected the Wavell plan. Second, they decided to set a date for the transfer of power to assure the Indians that the British were really leaving. Third, they appointed as the last viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten.
In March 1947, Mountbatten arrived in India to find the country already in chaos.

Circumstances were made worse by his decision to speed up the timetable. That crucial period of adjustment from direct British rule into some other constitutional arrangement shrank to a point at which it was impossible to carry out.

In the final assessment, should the British have left India? Yes, absolutely. In that sense Gandhi was right; Churchill was wrong. Should India have been given dominion status earlier than 1945? Yes. Should the British have stayed on until there was some final political reconciliation instead of setting a date and timetable and getting out? Yes, clearly. In that sense, Gandhi was wrong, and Churchill was right.

Setting a timetable, a date certain for withdrawal, was an essential step in the transfer of power. But in avoiding the calculus of moral irresponsibility--that because we have no business being there, or our reasons for being there are illegitimate, and therefore we have no legal or moral warrant for taking actions in the situation--the result was not a more enlightened policy, but in effect no policy at all.

It is, of course, a familiar calculus from the American experience in Vietnam in 1975, and it still remains to be seen whether this becomes part of the calculus for dealing with Iraq in 2008.