What does Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson have in common? Very little and a lot.
"Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma's meeting with the viceroy of Indian, 1931, he had notoriously decalred: 'It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay in equal terms with the represnetative of the Emperor-King.' (Gandhi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Ghandi-ism and all what it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times: in fact Churchill's statements appalled most of his contemporaries. Even the positive gloss placed on him today seems inexcusable: 'He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconciable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit in his veranda and ... glory in the possession of India.
"Gandhi 'should not be released on the account of the mere threat of fasting,' Churchill told the Cabinet. 'We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.' He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be 'bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Mahatma] into the dirt.'"
— Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 2017, pp. 132-33
"Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma's meeting with the viceroy of Indian, 1931, he had notoriously decalred: 'It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay in equal terms with the represnetative of the Emperor-King.' (Gandhi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Ghandi-ism and all what it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times: in fact Churchill's statements appalled most of his contemporaries. Even the positive gloss placed on him today seems inexcusable: 'He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconciable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit in his veranda and ... glory in the possession of India.
"Gandhi 'should not be released on the account of the mere threat of fasting,' Churchill told the Cabinet. 'We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.' He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be 'bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Mahatma] into the dirt.'"
— Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 2017, pp. 132-33
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