Published Author, Consultant, Columnist. Alumnus- IIT Roorkee & MS, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA.
Well, clean air and potable water are already being taxed and leaders of very questionable intelligence and rectitude are in the saddle; and that is all over the world: Britain and India included. Churchill was therefore miserably out of sync here and betrayed his bias against all things Indian.
How sane and balanced Churchill was when he made that jarring prophesy? Charles McMoran Wilson, who attended on Winston Churchill from 1940 to 1965 as his personal physician, probably was in the best place to comment on Churchill's mental and physical health. In his view while Churchill was fit and in his elements at the beginning of World War II, over years stress took its toll. By 1944, illness had crept up on him and he was already failing to palliate that with his one-liners. In his diaries, Sir Francis Alan Brooke, Churchill's chief of the Imperial General Staff, observed on March 24, 1944, "He seems quite incapable of concentrating for a few minutes on end, and keeps wandering continuously." It is also said that he was frequently unable to contain his emotions often irritable and short of temper, at other times breaking into tears or becoming extremely maudlin. He also suffered from delusions of grandiosity, believing that only he could prevent a third world war.
Whether delusional or sharp as a whip, I grant it to him that he wasn’t far from truth insofar as the quality of political leadership in India.
However, he didn’t go beyond the superficial. The avowed racist that he was, he couldn’t have bothered to lend any credence to an altogether different India that had always bubbled up from within the quicksand. On one hand, a man like him can be forgiven for not giving a brass farthing to ancient Indian knowledge on mathematics, astronomy and medical science; it would have given him sleepless nights to learn that non-white Indians did all that a millennia or two ago. On the other hand, what baffles is the fact that he couldn’t see that the likes of CV Raman, Ramanujan, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray, PC Mahalanobis, etc. did seminal work in science and mathematics during the Britain’s own asphyxiating reign. I mean not all Indians were donning grass skirts and dancing around the trees with painted faces before Robert Clive happened.
Churchill made a grave mistake in assuming that indomitable Indians would not shine through in spite of the country’s political dispensations.
Even more callous was Churchill’s propensity to grandstand as a benefactor knowing full well that the devastated India of 1944 he abhorred was the product of their own ghastly plunder perpetrated over ninety years. From an India that was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe or Asia, producing textile, metal-works, jewelry, precious stones, pottery, etc. that traded with the rest of the world, they themselves had systematically reduced it to a near wasteland steeped in penury.
In retrospection, Churchill’s wisdom stands nullified by his stubborn belief in the superiority of white race over all other, and his moral compass that condoned atrocities and mass murders for the benefit of British Empire.
Some commentators on Churchill show tremendous understanding on Churchill’s views on race. He was a child of Edwardian age, with a wave of hand, they say as an explanation of his 1937 statement that the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia were not wronged at all because a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race had come in and taken their place. I wonder what mark Churchill should be given if Hitler was ten on a zero-to-ten scale.
For the Indian in me, Winston Churchill was an egotistical and opinionated alcoholic besides being a photo-opportunist in love with himself. On India and Indians, he was more wrong than he was right.
On matters rather mundane too, he was wrong on the gin-vermouth ratio in a martini.
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