Lord Linlithgow

Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, was Viceroy of India during the Cripps Mission and the Quit India year of 1942. In Sikh history he is known for a private letter of September 1942 in which he turned down the idea of even studying a Sikh state.

Wikipedia gives his birth as 24 September 1887 at Hopetoun House, South Queensferry, and his death there on 5 January 1952. It dates his term as Viceroy from 18 April 1936 to 1 October 1943, says he declared India at war in September 1939 without consulting Indian politicians, and says he suppressed the disturbances that followed his disputes with the Congress and arrested Congress leaders. Field Marshal Wavell succeeded him.

Key moments

• 20 August 1942: Leo Amery, the Secretary of State, wrote to him privately asking whether his Reforms Department, with the Punjab Government, might quietly examine the possibilities of a Sikh state.
• 5 and 7 September 1942: he answered in a letter begun on 5 September and finished on 7 September. Gurmit Singh prints it from the India Office papers. Linlithgow wrote that his judgment was that the Sikhs, though a nuisance well worth placating, were a relatively small nuisance, and that he could think of no circumstance in which it would be practical politics to consider any sort of Sikhistan. He wrote that the Hindus had made the mistake of taking Jinnah seriously about Pakistan and so had given substance to a shadow, and that the British should not do the same for a far more preposterous claim. He warned that taking Sikhistan seriously would gravely aggravate communal tension in the Punjab, and that the Sikhs, as the “Communal Award discussions in 1931” had shown (his words; the Award itself was announced in 1932), could occasionally wreck a scheme that the major communities would have accepted.
• 1942: Gurmit Singh writes that no enquiry was made, because the Viceroy felt that one would encourage the demand for a Sikh state that the British did not want to concede.
• 24 November 1942: he wrote to the Governor of the Punjab, Sir Bertrand Glancy, that he had always attached very great importance to the Sikander-Baldev Singh Pact and hoped it would continue to pay a good dividend.

What he is remembered for. In Sikh history he is remembered for this letter, which Gurmit Singh cites as the British answer to the Sikh claim to a homeland in 1942.