Leo Amery

Leo Amery was a British Conservative politician who was Secretary of State for India and Burma for most of the Second World War. In Sikh history he is known for a private letter of 20 August 1942 in which he told the Viceroy that Sikh pressure for a state of their own was likely, sooner or later, to give the British trouble.

Wikipedia gives his birth as 22 November 1873 at Gorakhpur in British India and his death as 16 September 1955 in London. It lists him as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1922 to 1924, Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1924 to 1929 and Secretary of State for India and Burma from 13 May 1940 to 26 July 1945, in Winston Churchill's wartime government.

Key moments

• After 28 April 1942: Master Tara Singh wrote to Sir Stafford Cripps thanking him for the words he used for the Sikhs in the House of Commons debate of 28 April 1942, and asked him to convey thanks to Amery as well. The letter says the words of both had gone a long way to remove the misgivings the Cripps proposals created among the Sikhs (Gurmit Singh, Appendix 14).
• 20 August 1942: Amery wrote privately to the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Gurmit Singh prints the letter from the India Office papers and discusses it in his first chapter. Amery wrote that nothing in the Cripps Mission or in his own speeches gave the Sikhs a pledge they could justifiably point to, though they would try. He wrote that the more Pakistan was pressed, the more the Sikhs were likely to press for a degree of autonomy enough to protect them from Muslim domination. He thought advocacy of an independent Sikh state, which the letter calls Sikhdom and Gurmit Singh's first chapter renders as Sikhistan, was bound to give the British trouble, and that a separate Sikhdom was unworkable without extensive transfers of population. He asked whether Linlithgow would have the Reforms Department look into the possibilities with the Punjab Government, in complete secrecy, to avoid raising false expectations among the Sikhs and encouragement to separatist tendencies in provinces such as Madras and Bombay.
• 5 and 7 September 1942: Linlithgow replied that he could see no circumstance in which a Sikh state could be practical politics. Gurmit Singh writes that no such enquiry was undertaken.

What he is remembered for. Gurmit Singh reads the letter as showing that the British knew the Sikhs had a rightful claim to a Sikh state but did not want to create one. The letter shows that Amery expected Sikh autonomy to become a problem and wanted it explored quietly.