Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes
Ask Nehru to write me a letter and tell me exactly what he wants me to do for India..
This is another example of how President Roosevelt conducted his own international diplomacy independent of his own State Department. At the time, the U. S. State Department would not have any contact with Nehru who was in and out of British Indian jails for his anti-Colonial agitating. Roosevelt, however was a great admirer of Nehru and the Congress party and the commitment to democracy, freedom of religion, speech and the press and civil rights. Roosevelt and the American military strategic leaders were beginning to worry that China, even with help, would not be able to hold off the Japanese aggression, and India would become a frontier for the Allied war effort. The President realized that Nehru and his Congress Party were pressuring England for independence and extreme Indian nationalists were advocating non-support of the British military effort and strikes and protests to bog down the British army dealing with them instead of fighting the Japanese in Burma and elsewhere. There were a large number of Indian Brigades fighting for the British and if the Indian military volunteers were to be discouraged or boycotted, the allied war effort would suffer. So the President's style was to personally see what he could contribute over and above (and often to the distress of) his agencies established to do the job.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1945, 32nd President of the United States (Democrat, NY), Request of Edgar Snow, a Journalist covering India, when the negotiations were on-going with Nehru's Congress Party, the British Government and the Muslim League which was fighting for partition and an independent Moslem nation., Quoted in Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning, 1959
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Churchill was reported to be so angry and exasperated that his face turned red and he was sputtering. During World War II, Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian Nationalists were leading protests against British control of India. This not only bogged down British soldiers surprising the nationalists rather than fighting in Burma or in other war theaters, but India supplied a huge number of battalions to the British Army the world over and if that manpower dried up, the allied war effort would suffer. The American State Department wanted Churchill to announce that after Japan was defeated, there would be a process toward self-government. This way, they thought, the Indians would redouble their effort to defeat the Japanese and stop the then current protests and strikes. Churchill was strongly opposed to any diminution of the British Empire, but beyond that, he knew India quite well and realized that at any hint of Independence the large Muslim minority in India would insist on autonomy or a partition of the country and use sectarian violence and terror to intimidate the Indian Congress party and the British, but the major victims of the terror—the Hindus and the Sikhs would not remain passive, but would retaliate in kind. President Roosevelt was in the midst of planning the Normandy Landings of the D-Day invasion and did not want to pressure Churchill and the British at this point in time, so the door to independence was not opened during the war and Britain had to deal with the protests throughout. However, when, after the war, the Labor Government, started a process toward Indian independence which resulted in exactly what Churchill predicted. At least 2 million Indians were slaughtered in the internecine terrorist cycles of fear and retaliation motivated terror attacks what were so extensive that the British military could not really control it.
This speech to over 100,000 people galvanized the Indian nationalists They had been asking the British to change the constitution to give India more independence. Churchill was opposed to any policy that would diminish the British Empire, but needed the Indians as men of India served in the British Army in every major theater of WWII. So instead of saying "No" Churchill held out the possibility but at a later time. He argued that it was inopportune to alter the Constitution in the midst of a world war.
India had just recently gained its independence from Britain.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt directed the federal government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his New Deal domestic agenda in response to the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. As a dominant leader of his party, he built the New Deal Coalition, which defined modern liberalism in the United States throughout the middle third of the 20th century. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.
