First World War: Personnel from the Indian Subcontinent

Lord Morgan Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morgan (Lab)]

My Lords, this debate, admirably launched by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, is very welcome. It enables us to pay proper tribute to the courage and sacrifice of the over 1 million Indian troops who took part in the First World War, as well as enabling us to test the Government’s resolve: how far will they subscribe to what we heard from the Minister, that the commemoration of the war would not be a celebration of militarism but would deal with matters such as the role of women, trade unions and new currents in poetry, and that in the case of Ireland it would focus not only on the Irish troops who volunteered to fight in the war, but also on the fact that it led to the Easter Rising and to the domination of Sinn Fein?

So it should be in India. As we have heard in a series of admirable speeches, Indian troops fought in very large numbers on the western front and in east Africa; enormous numbers fought in Mesopotamia and at the terrible siege of Kut al-Amara. The names of Indian troops are recorded in monuments in at Neuve Chapelle and on the Menin Gate. My own father served with Indian troops in the First World War in Palestine and always spoke with enormous warmth about that experience.

Gandhi encouraged Indians to volunteer for the British Army. At the same time, it is important to say how Gandhi shows how the war changed the perceptions of so many public figures in India. He was not at first the major nationalist in India—that was BG Tilak, who founded the Home Rule League. By the end of the war, Gandhi was convinced that the experiences of India in the war—the sacrifice of Indian troops—had given a new sense of unity and identity to all Indians; as we know, Gandhi worked a great deal with Muslims as well as with Hindus. The war gave the movement for home rule—swaraj—and Gandhi himself a new historical significance. Gandhi therefore illustrates what we should perhaps most fundamentally commemorate about the First World War.

We should note how the war encouraged movements in India to expand and to take up wider horizons. At first, Gandhi himself focused on internal issues within India—famously, the role of the untouchables, which he worked in a dedicated fashion to cope with in his own community. But by the end of the war he was adopting a much wider viewpoint, and challenging what he saw as the harshness of British rule, and how far a war supposedly fought to liberate subject nationalities was in fact reinforcing British control over his country. It is enormously important both for Gandhi and for the Indian nationalist movement that the First World War within India encouraged the famous non-violent strategies with which Gandhi is associated to work against the grain of imperial policy and win support for Indian nationalism outside India. Gandhi did this very conspicuously, if I may say so, within the Labour Party.

The First World War should be commemorated above all because in India, and thereby in a wider world, it was a period of historic change. The legacy of the Indian troops fighting so gallantly, on the western front and elsewhere, was not a stronger commitment of Indians to imperial rule; it marked the beginning of the end for the Raj. It was followed by the Rowlatt Bills against what was called terrorism, and by the terrible massacre at Amritsar. General Dyer was sacked after Amritsar, but Indians were appalled by the sympathy shown by many people in this country for his conduct. It is deeply to the discredit to the House of Lords that at that time it passed a Motion sympathising with and supporting General Dyer.

The legacy of the war appears to be commemorated in the imperial architecture of Lutyens and Baker in New Delhi. But the most prescient observer of these developments was the former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who said that it would be,

“the grandest ruin of them all”.

That, perhaps, is what we should be commemorating.