Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill (30 November 1874 to 24 January 1965) was Prime Minister of Britain from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. The UK government's own history page calls him the one senior figure who firmly opposed Indian independence. For Punjab and the Sikhs he matters because the plans for India's future between 1942 and 1947, and the Partition that followed, were made by his Cabinet or argued against by him from the Opposition.

His stand on India went back before the war. Wikipedia's account of the Government of India Act 1935 says he conducted a campaign against Indian self-government from 1929 onwards, and that when the Act passed he called it in the Commons "a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies".

Key moments

• March 1942: his War Cabinet sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India with an offer of dominion status after the war, a constituent assembly, and a right for provinces to stay out of the union. Congress and the Muslim League rejected it, and the Shiromani Akali Dal rejected it too. The historian Shyam Ratna Gupta argues, from papers released in 1970, that the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and the Secretary of State, Leo Amery, privately worked against the mission.
• August 1942: after the mission failed Congress launched the Quit India movement, and the British jailed its leaders for the rest of the war.
• 1943: the Bengal famine killed up to three million people. A 2019 study in Geophysical Research Letters, led by Vimal Mishra, found no drought behind it and called it a policy failure. The International Churchill Society's magazine, defending him, says the main causes were the loss of Burma to Japan, a 1942 cyclone and wartime shipping priorities, but it concedes that he opposed diverting ships and food to India and that some of his remarks to Amery were angry. It reports, citing the historian Arthur Herman, that he said Indians would "breed like rabbits". Historians disagree about how much of the blame is his.
• 6 March 1947: from the Opposition benches he opposed the Labour Government's decision to set a date for withdrawal. He called the fourteen-month deadline "fatal to any orderly transference of power", asked whether the new Viceroy's mission was "Operation Scuttle", and warned that the time would be "used in preparation for civil war".

The Punjab Boundary Commission submitted its reports on 13 August 1947, and by the end of that month the two new dominion governments had taken over the forces on each side of the new line, as the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records.

What he is remembered for: in India, as the leading opponent of independence among British leaders, and in the debate over the Bengal famine, as a figure whose responsibility historians dispute.