From an Indian perspective, Clement Attlee appears as much a great historical personality than Winston Churchill. At the end of the Second World War, Attlee had realised the needs of the times far more deeply and perceptively than self-intoxicated Winston Churchill.

No less than, Dr B.R. Ambedkar had in one of his spontaneous interviews with the BBC in early 1950s had referred to Clement Attlee’s decisions to free India from colonial rule, though to him Attlee’s motives were not immediately clear. He felt that Attlee statesmanship in this context needs to be explored deeper.

If Britons are currently going overboard about Churchill, Churchill in his life-time was obsessed with India. Even when he was out of power, after an election defeat following the end of the Second War, Churchill was still exposing the idea of the British India. He wanted to cling on to the “Indian possessions” come what may.

From that perspective, Churchill was outdated by the time the war ended. Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill as prime minister, was far more updated and in sync with the times, to realise that an honourable exit from India was the only alternative. It was of course otherwise that the exit was clumsy and horrendous given the casualties and killings on the sub-continent.

In hindsight, even if Churchill had a far bigger than life image, as the wartime hero of what the Westerners cleverly called as the defence of the “free world”, Clement Attlee was alive to the requirements of the times.

Churchill’s intuition with India began young. He had spent a part of his early days in India as a journalist writing about various wars on India’s borders and then had wrapped up his tour of India when he met the then viceroy Lord Curzon in the Government House in Calcutta.

In his “finest” days, leading the Allied side in the war against Hitler’s Germany during the Second World War, it was Churchill who had caused the Great Bengal Famine of 1942 by diverting shiploads of grains meant for supplies in Bengal to the Allied Forces in Europe.

Not that the Allied Forces were starving and not having their ration supplies in full, but only as a measure of cushion in case there was a sudden need. The enormity of that “war Crime” has not been taken into account because it was the hapless Indians who had died by their millions.

For India, 1942 was an ignominious hour, even though Churchill was raising his hyperbole about those years being their “finest hour” in a thousand years. It is time that India erects some monument to the memory of those who had fallen to hunger as a result of Churchill’s callous decision to deny the grains ships to Bengal and India in those early years of the war.

The war over, the victorious Allied side tried War Crimes of the Germans, for causing death to Jews and others in concentration camps and in gas chambers. But they never even considered it a crime to cause starvation deaths to millions in India.

In the inter-war period, if there was one anathema for Churchill, it was Gandhi who was exactly the opposite of what Churchill was. Gandhi appeared to him rejecting the central notion of the Empire as a civilising force and he detested that rejection.

Churchill was trained as a soldier in the conservative and traditional bastion of English society. Gandhi on the contrary disapproved use of force and killings as solution.. Gandhi’s politics had appeared to Churchill as effeminate and his practising weaving on the hand driven loom as a female avocation.

Clement Attlee, as a labour leader, was chosen as deputy prime minister by Churchill and competently supported Churchill in many of his efforts. Attlee had a very stable background. He was the son of a relatively established lawyer and therefore had a comfortable background. Attlee had visited India in the 1920s and had seen for himself the freedom movement.

India would have snatched freedom from the British anyway, if it was not hastened by Attlee in 1947. Indian historians must make a close examination of the papers relating to transfer of power and see in details the role of Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee during the years before Indian Independence. It is time for a fresh revaluation. (IPA Service)