Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mihir Bose
Started reading
July 29, 2020
Russian historian Yurii Tikhonov on Silver,
happened to the man he left behind in Kabul, Rahmat Khan, that is an even more extraordinary story.
The Spaniard, Juan Pujol Garcia, had 27 names, the most legendary of which was Garbo: he helped the Allies deceive the Germans on where the D-Day landings would take place, thus playing a crucial role in the success of the Allied offensive.
Unlike Garbo, Sorge and Cicero, who essentially operated from one base—Garbo in London, Sorge in Tokyo, Cicero in Istanbul—Silver was constantly shuttling back and forth between Kabul and India.
It is hard to resist the conclusion that Silver’s deception of the Germans certainly prevented an uprising in the tribal areas by the Faqir of Ipi and others. Such an uprising, given how much the Germans were willing to spend, would have forced the British to divert resources from other sectors of the war to protect the back door to India.
At its historic meeting in August, 1917 the British War Cabinet, presided over by Lloyd George, had estimated that it would take 500 years for Indians to learn to rule themselves.
Lord Birkenhead, who was Secretary of State for India in the 1920s, a crucial period that shaped what led to 1947 and the eventual partition of India, had in a book forecasting
what the world would look like in 2030, expressed his firm conviction that even then Britain would have to rule India.
In 1931, when Silver was 23 years old and already active in politics, the British undertook their last full-scale census of India and it emerged that out of a total Indian population of almost 353 million, the number of British citizens was 155,555, less than half a per cent of the population.
In November, 1937 Hitler had told Lord Halifax that his favourite film
was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, a film featuring Gary Cooper and set in the North West Frontier. ‘I like this film,’ the Führer told the British Foreign Secretary, ‘because it depicted a handful of Britons holding a continent in thrall. That is how a superior race must behave and the film is a compulsory viewing for the SS.’
his participation in the Indian freedom movement, and his beloved older brother executed after a botched attempt to assassinate the British Governor of Punjab.
Indian Political Intelligence occupied the unique position of operating from London, a privilege denied to any other imperial or dominion intelligence agency. Its financial resources were supplied ‘from secret service funds appropriated for that purpose from Indian revenues’, which meant that Indian taxpayers paid for their own surveillance.
IPI’s definition of subversive material was surprisingly broad, so that many
unremarkable works of literature could only enter India by being smuggled through French or Portuguese colonial territories.
In some ways India was a sort of training ground for intelligence work in Britain. Silver in India came under the overall control of IPI’s counterpart the Indian Intelligence Bureau, known by its acronym
It was Pilditch who made the unflattering comments on Silver’s looks which we have quoted but was later so impressed by his work that he even tried to claim
that IB had recruited Silver to work as a spy, a palpable falsehood.
The IB files were considered so sensitive that they were destroyed just before the British left India.
The British had allowed the OSS [Office of Strategic Services], the Americans’ wartime secret service that later became the CIA, to operate in India, but one American OSS officer observed: ‘We had been warned in Delhi that the British were past masters at intrigue and had planted spies in all American agencies to piece
To keep a check on what the Chinese were doing the government of India set up a ‘Chinese intelligence wing’, headed by a man who had been a medical missionary in Sinkiang in the 1930s. This unit intercepted mail between the United States and China.
Garbo in London, Cicero in Istanbul, Sorge in Tokyo or any other spy of the war.
This was during the Great Bengal famine. Famines were hardly unknown in India, and during British rule there had been many. But this one, in the summer of 1943, was the worst in twentieth-century south Asia history.
With Japan at the gates of India, the British feared a Japanese invasion and instituted a scorched earth policy in Bengal where boats, the primary form of transport in a land crisscrossed with rivers, were destroyed. There was also a ‘rice denial’ policy, which involved throwing thousands of tons of rice into the rivers and soldiers being ordered to set fire to stacks of rice.
Winston, after a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war, asked Leathers [Lord Frederick Leathers, Minister of War Transport] for his view.
At that very moment people were dying in their hundreds on the streets of Calcutta and were so desperate for food that they begged not so much for rice, but fana, the water in which it was cooked and which has some nutritional value.
Liddell’s view of the famine does not sound very different to how a Nazi might have reacted to Jewish suffering.
England and India when one reflects that the per capita income in England is something over £80 and in India about £7. It is quite common for an Indian coolie’s legs to be thinner than the average Englishman’s arms. And there is nothing racial in this, for well-fed members of the same race are of normal physique; it is due to simple starvation. This is the system we all live on and which we denounce when there seems to be no danger of it being altered.
Commons that he was not going to preside over the dissolution of the Empire. That was not a British war goal. Australia said its White Australia policy was sacrosanct, and De Gaulle, leading the free French, summed up the view of many in France that at the end of the war France would resume,
The highest ranking Indian officer, and that towards the end of the war, was Kodandera Madappa Cariappa, a Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel. It was only after Indian independence that he became the first Indian commander-in-chief.
Some commentators, in order to explain this Silver riddle, have described him as educated. In fact he was not. He was a Matriculate. English was not his first language, he spoke broken English, and he knew no other European tongue. Nor did he have distinguished looks. When, during the war, Major Peter Thorne of the Grenadier Guards first set eyes on Silver he was struck by the fact that he was short and lean.
For a start the name he gave Quaroni, Rahmat Khan, had suggested to the Italian that he was Muslim. He was not.
Silver, whose real name was Bhagat Ram Talwar, always insisted that his upbringing was like no other.
So consider the writings of two great Englishmen, both of whom were Nobel laureates in literature and had first-hand knowledge of the area: Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill.
Kipling admired Muslims, and found the Hindu religion incomprehensible. He contemptuously dismissed the great Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, calling the latter ‘hopeless, aimless diffuse drivel [tempered with puerile obscenity]’,1 books that Silver, like all Hindu children, knew well.
The PM said the Hindus were a foul race ‘protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due’ and he wished Bert Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.
Eventually, the Moslems will become master, because they are warriors, while the Hindus are windbags. Yes, windbags! Oh, of course, when it comes to fine speeches, skilfully balanced resolutions and legalistic castles in the air, the Hindus are real experts! They’re in their element! When it comes to business, when something must be decided on quickly, implemented, executed—here the Hindus say ‘pass’. Here they immediately reveal their internal flabbiness.
‘They have also a degree of curiosity which is a relief habituated to the apathy of the Indian.”
He was born at 10 minutes to midnight on 31 May
1907 in Green Street, off Park Lane in London’s Mayfair, to rich parents who had two other properties, including a large Oxfordshire estate.
A century later the area is dominated by the Taliban and a byword for Muslim jihadists who could never imagine forming such an alliance with the kaffir Hindu. What is also interesting is that, just as his grandfather Jassa Singh had worked with the local ruler, Gurudasmal had no problems engaging with the overall ruler of India, the British.
While India did not see any fighting the influenza epidemic that swept the world after the war killed an estimated 17 million Indians, 5 per cent
of the population. One reason for the high death toll in India was that the war had denuded the country of many doctors and nursing staff.
By 1947, as the British left India after nearly 200 years of rule, only 18 per cent of Indians were literate, and four-fifths of Indians had never seen the inside of a classroom.
such work was at that time to beat up, and, if possible, even
Once I with one of my friends, Ajit Singh, had actually gone out with the intention of murdering the then deputy commissioner of Ferozepur, Mr Harren, at the dead of the
