From “Simon Go Back” to “India is Free”: Clement Attlee’s Remarkable Indian Journey

History often delights in irony. On a rain-soaked morning in February 1928, a young British Labour politician named Clement Attlee stepped ashore in Bombay as a member of the all-British Simon Commission. He was greeted not with applause, but with black flags and the thunderous slogan: “Simon Go Back!” Nineteen years later, as Prime Minister of Britain, the same Attlee would preside over the decision that ended nearly two centuries of British rule in India.Attlee was then a relatively unknown Member of Parliament. His companion Edward Cadogan recalled the hostile atmosphere at Bombay harbour: rain lashed the docks, demonstrators filled the waterfront, and the Commission’s arrival could scarcely have been less welcoming. Cadogan observed that Attlee appeared overwhelmed by the barrage of questions from Indian journalists, his hand reportedly trembling as he tried to light his pipe. Before the voyage, his knowledge of India came largely from books and a brief stay in a Bombay hospital during the First World War.Yet India became his greatest political education.As the Commission travelled across the country, Attlee witnessed an empire under strain. The boycott was nearly total. Public meetings were deserted by Indian political leaders, protests followed the Commission from city to city, and even security fears mounted. In Bombay, the Commissioners learnt that a bomb attack had narrowly failed after it accidentally fell from a railway carriage. The Commission had arrived to recommend constitutional reforms, but it instead encountered a nation that had already made up its mind about self-government.Unlike many of his contemporaries, Attlee absorbed these lessons. By the early 1930s, he had concluded that British rule had become fundamentally alien to Indian aspirations and incapable of delivering the social and economic transformation India required. His experience on the Simon Commission transformed him into the Labour Party’s foremost authority on Indian affairs and one of Westminster’s strongest advocates of self-government.When Attlee entered Downing Street in 1945, Britain was exhausted by the Second World War. Economic weakness, mounting unrest within India, the rise of the Indian National Army, and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny all reinforced what Attlee already believed from his 1928 experience: the Raj could not endure by force alone. Rather than attempting to preserve an increasingly untenable empire, his government announced in February 1947 that power would be transferred to Indian hands, culminating in independence on 15 August 1947.The man who had once arrived as an unwelcome imperial commissioner ultimately became the British Prime Minister who signed the empire’s Indian epitaph. Few political journeys better illustrate how firsthand experience can reshape convictions. Clement Attlee came to India in 1928 to study constitutional reform. He left with an education that, nearly two decades later, helped him grant India its freedom.

-Mrityunjay Sharma The writer is BJP Spokesperson and a bestselling author