Free Gandhi & Churchill by Arthur Herman Page A

Mandalay. That year Lord Randolph celebrated the New Year, as he always did, at his friends the Fitzpatricks’ house in Dublin. As the clock struck twelve, Randolph raised his glass and announced to the assembled guests that Burma was now officially annexed to the British Crown: “a New Year’s gift to the Empress and all her subjects.” 22
    But it was too late to save him or his government. The voters had gone to the polls more than a month earlier, on November 24 and 25, 1885, and handed Salisbury and the Tories a resounding defeat. The Liberals were back, and Randolph Churchill’s brief but hectic tenure as secretary of state for India was over. The next time he was back in office, it would be as chancellor of the exchequer. He would never grace the halls of the India Office, or worry about Indian policy, again.
    But in his five short months Randolph had left a mark on Indian affairs that would last more than a lifetime. His blocking of any serious reform of the governance of India had offended a large portion of India’s educated elite. And instead of producing the short sharp victory that he had envisaged, the war in Burma turned into a protracted ulcer. The Burmese were among the hardiest warriors in the world; they launched an effective insurgency against the British that would drag on for three years, tie up 35,000 British and Indian troops, and cost ten times as much as the war’s original estimate, to the fury of India’s taxpayers. Educated Indians already felt betrayed by the man they had championed during his visit as “a liberal in all but name.” His war with Burma was the final straw.
    Thus in late December 1885, just as the guerrilla war was breaking out in the jungles of Burma, a group of well-to do Bombay businessmen and landlords from Bengal met to form a new organization, the Indian National Congress. Almost all were Western-educated, with Parsis and high-caste Hindu Brahmins predominating. Although a few sported turbans, almost all wore Western suits and ties. Some were even white, including the Congress’s moving spirit, Allan Octavian Hume, a distinguished former civil servant and veteran of the Great Mutiny. The Congress’s goals, at least initially, were loyalist and respectful; in the words of one historian, “they were cautious moderate men who were confident in the ultimate fairness of the British people.” 23 Viceroy Dufferin even welcomed the Congress as a useful safety valve for grievances and resentment.
    But the founding of the Congress opened a new era for India, and a new kind of political movement in the subcontinent. For the next three decades it remained a tiny detached elite, what Randolph Churchill would dismiss as a gathering of “Bengalee baboos”—until a thin bespectacled man dressed in peasant clothes revealed its unexpected strength.
     

     
    Defeated and out of office, Randolph Churchill was asked what he would do next. He said, “I shall lead the Opposition for five years. Then I shall be Prime Minister for five years. Then I shall die.” 24
    Only the last prediction would come true. For already Lord Randolph could feel the hand of the dread disease that he had kept hidden from his family but that was slowly sapping his physical and mental powers—even his sanity. Doctors diagnosed it then and later as syphilis (although modern medical authorities diagnose it as a brain tumor). As he left the India Office, his illness was entering its final horrible stage.
    Randolph’s first severe attack, in 1881, had left him partially paralyzed and almost unable to speak; but he had then recovered, remission had set in, and he had seemed fine. Jennie, on the other hand, feared the worst. They had already ceased to sleep together. Her second son, Jack, was born in February 1880. Rumors flew that it was almost certainly not Randolph’s child. 25
    At the India Office, the bouts of mental instability grew worse. They may even have affected his decision to wage his wars on