Free Gandhi & Churchill by Arthur Herman

feelings and prejudices of Asiatics.”
    This is what Randolph proceeded to do. He learned to dismiss educated Indians as “a deadly legacy” from woolly-headed reformers of the past, who “cannot be anything else than opposition in quiet times, rebels in times of troubles.” 19 On taking office, he had promised to launch a parliamentary inquiry into the Indian government, but there was never any chance that Indians themselves would be part of it—or that it would challenge the prevailing view from Calcutta. Faced by financial difficulties, Randolph did not hesitate to raise the Indians’ taxes; he raided the Famine Insurance Fund to help pay for general expenses. He shut down any plans to make it easier for natives to enter the Indian Civil Service. In short, the “benevolent despotism” of Churchill’s regime marked the end of any hope of major reform in India for nearly two decades.
    Randolph may have rejected reform, but he was drawn to the other, more glamorous aspect of the Raj: the Great Game. It raised his energies to a fever pitch. He gave speeches about the impending advance of “the countless hosts of Russia upon the North-West Frontier of India,” and began an expansion of the Indian Army by thirty thousand men—yet another excuse to raise Indians’ taxes. He badgered the viceroy to contemplate a march on Kandahar, and Lord Salisbury to work with the Germans on an anti-Russian strategy in Persia, since German engineers were hoping to build a railway connecting Baghdad to Constantinople. He even proposed that the India Office take over all diplomatic dealings with Persia and China, and he envisaged Calcutta becoming under his guidance “the center of Asiatic politics,” a great cynosure of British influence spreading from one end of the Eastern Hemisphere to the other. 20 Salisbury soon wearied of Randolph’s megalomaniacal schemes, and all came to nothing. All, that is, except Burma.
    That kingdom to the east was already closely linked to India. Lower Burma, a lush triangle of jungle and rice fields surrounding the mouth of the Irawaddy River along with a strip of coastline on the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal, had been annexed in 1826 and was administered from Calcutta. But Upper Burma had remained independent. Local British teak and cotton merchants worried that its king might work out an exclusive deal with the French, who were pressing in westward from Indo-China. In fact, in January 1883 King Theebaw signed a commercial agreement with France. British merchants assumed that the withdrawal of their own privileges would follow.
    So the Rangoon Chamber of Commerce and its lobbyists in Parliament went into high gear, pushing for annexation of Upper Burma. Gladstone and Viceroy Lord Ripon had ignored them, but when the Tories came in, their new secretary of state for India paid more attention. Churchill soon worked himself into a state of alarm about French ambitions in the East, about dark (and largely untrue) accounts of Theebaw the “ignorant, arrogant, drunken boy king,” surrounded by a band of greedy and savage sycophants, and the dangers to India from the ever-menacing Russians if the British “lost” Burma. 21
    Lord Randolph also understood the political benefits of launching a preemptive war there, and how “a government never fails to derive a certain amount of benefit from a successful military operation,” as he told Viceroy Dufferin. He too would benefit, by becoming the Man Who Added Burma to the British Empire.
    And so although neither the prime minister nor the viceroy had any plans or even desire to invade Burma, Randolph took matters in his own hands. His ultimatum to Theebaw, demanding that he withdraw his treaty with the French, reached the Burmese capital, Mandalay, on October 30, 1885. However, Randolph had effectively declared war a week earlier in a speech in Birmingham, and British and Indian troops were already headed for Rangoon. On December 1 the British entered