Back in October 1929, when Lord Irwin had suggested Dominion Status for India, Churchill called the idea ‘criminally mischievous’. He thought it necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ against the granting of self-government to India.26 Over the next two years, Churchill delivered dozens of speeches where he worked up, in most unsober form, forces hostile to the Indian independence movement. Thus, speaking to an audience at the city of London in December 1930, Churchill claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then ‘an army of white janissaries,
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