From chanakya to modi evolution of india’s foreign policy

The Men Who Ruled India.
For Mason, a
former British Indian civil servant, people like him were akin to Plato’s
ideal philosopher-kings: the guardians who had been brought up and

---

educated so that they would be the ideal rulers. As Mason asserted, India
needed British guardianship just as a child needs parents. 
33
Mason’s books, originally written under the pseudonym Philip Woodruff
while he still served in government, justified the notion of the ‘White Man’s
Burden’.
34
They also made the argument that India would fall apart if the
British were not governing the region. That, for people like Mason, the
British should have continued to govern India is evident from the post-
Partition epigram in his book: ‘To the Peoples of India and Pakistan whose
tranquility was our care, whose division is our failure and whose
continuance in the family of nations to which we belong is our Memorial.’
35
Indian civil servants trained by the British carried some of these
paternalist beliefs into their conduct long after the British left the
subcontinent.
The humane justification for the empire notwithstanding, a majority of
British civil and military officials saw India’s importance in its location and
its strategic importance for British security. Without India, Britain would
only be a small European island nation with a population insufficiently
large to defend and manage an empire extending across the world. The
Indian Empire helped ensure British paramountcy from the Gulf to the
Pacific. The Indian army was Curzon’s cannon fodder to be used from
Africa (Natal, Somaliland, Uganda, Rhodesia, Sudan and Egypt) to the
Middle East (Aden) and Asia (Mauritius, Singapore, Hong Kong and
Tibet).
36
Indian ‘coolies’, clerks and small traders were needed to exploit
the resources in tropical climates where large numbers of British were
unavailable, unwilling or unable to live. India enabled Britain to make up
for its size, population and lack of natural resources.
Control of the seas was critical to Britain’s colonial endeavour. British
leaders as far back as Curzon were influenced by the ideas of Alfred Thayer
Mahan, American naval strategist and historian, who emphasized the
importance of sea power. Thus, in the eyes of the British, their security in

---

India would be ‘materially affected by an adverse change in political
control of the [Persian/Arabian] Gulf’. Secure British presence in India was
also needed to ensure the ‘safety of the great sea route, commercial and
military, to India and the Further East’.
37
 For Curzon and his successors, the
entire sea route from Britain to India had to be construed as Britain’s sphere
of influence. During times of British hostility with Russia, any country or
power in the Persian Gulf allowing Russia the use of its port was to be
regarded by Britain ‘as a deliberate insult, as a wanton rupture of the status
quo and as an international provocation to war’.
38
Indian strategist and historian, K.M. Panikkar argued that it was only
after the incorporation of India that the British could exercise influence over
Asia because they now had ‘a vast storehouse of power and resources and
with a great army and an efficient administrative machinery’.
39
Policies
adopted towards Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, China, Burma and the Arab
Middle East were influenced by security considerations based on the
geopolitical advantages of a base in India.
Advocates of empire in Britain recognized India’s importance to their
global project. For example, Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s obsession
with India reflected the realization that without India, the British Empire
would not survive and Britain would no longer be a global player. Churchill
may have combined his realism with a professed humanitarian impulse. His
father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, served as Secretary of
State for India (1885–86), during which time he asserted, ‘Our rule in India
is, as it were, a sheet of oil spread out over, and keeping free from storms, a
vast and profound ocean of humanity.’
As early as 1931, the younger Churchill wrote that the ‘finest
achievement of our history’ was the ‘rescue of India from ages of
barbarism, tyranny and internecine war, and its slow but ceaseless forward
march to civilization’.
40
For Churchill, a withdrawal of British rule would
either lead to ‘Hindu despotism’ or ‘renewal of those ferocious internal

---

wars’. 
41
 The ‘loss of India’, Churchill argued, would be ‘final and fatal’ for
Britain and would ‘reduce us to the scale of a minor power’.
42
Thus, for
Churchill, India was the ‘most truly bright and precious jewel in the crown
of the King’ whose loss ‘would mark and consummate the downfall of the
British Empire’.
43
When it came to the question of India’s independence, Churchill insisted
that after two centuries the British had rights and interests that they needed
to defend.
44
‘India,’ he claimed in a conversation with a leading Indian
businessman, ‘is a burden to us. We have to maintain an army and for the
sake of India we have to maintain Singapore and Near East strength.’
45
British rule over India, in Churchill’s view, was a favour to India and
Britain was having to incur the additional responsibility of colonizing other
countries and regions to facilitate India’s defence. To Churchill, calls for
India’s independence interfered not only with Britain’s global role but also
with the contribution Britain was making towards India itself.
Most British Indian civil and military officials held views similar to
Churchill’s on India. In a conversation with Churchill during World War II,
General Claude Auchinleck, stated: ‘India is vital to our existence. We
could still hold India without the Middle East, but we cannot hold the
Middle East without India.’ 
46
Auchinleck was commander of British forces
in the western desert at the time and later became commander-in-chief of
the Indian Army and supreme commander of all British Forces in India and
Pakistan.
This view that India and its army were critical to British global policy led
to frequent disagreements between the government in London and the
administration in Delhi. The former sought an army, which could be
deployed globally while the latter preferred to use the force to curb
domestic unrest and maintain its borders. Both the 1938 and 1939
Committees of Imperial Defence argued that India was ‘the most suitable

---

area east of the Mediterranean in which to station reserves for the Middle
and Far East’.
47
The 1939 Committee tried to meet prominent Indian politicians to obtain
their views on military expenditure and role of the military. The Indian
National Congress rebuffed the meeting request whereas the Muslim
League met with the committee. The committee’s report thus stated, ‘If a
Hindu majority came to power, it would drastically change military policy
since defence strategy and expenditure would leave British hands for the
first time.’ 
48
This view that the ‘Hindu’ Congress would be worse for
British interests than the ‘Muslim’ League influenced British views of the
Indian independence struggle and how British officials viewed the future.
Belief in India as the springboard for security of regions to its west and east
had resulted in a British project, beginning in the eighteenth century, to
create closer ties between the Persian Gulf and India. From 1763, civilian
and military officers of the East India Company helped control and
administer the Gulf for the British. From 1824 onwards these officers
reported to the political resident in the region, who was always an officer
from the British Indian services. Hence, India was ‘the base’ for the British
both in times of peace and war and ‘stability’ in the Middle East ‘rested’ on
British rule over an undivided India.
49
The reasoning that India was necessary for Britain, and the Far and Near
East were important for India’s security, permeated the thinking of British
officials at almost all levels. It also affected the foreign policies of both
India and Pakistan after Independence. In his book