Debating Winston Churchill in India is akin to talking to kids about King Herod. The former British Prime Minister and World War II hero was a staunch Imperialist who bitterly opposed Indian independence. He didn’t like Indians and, by the standards of today, would be considered a racist.
But even so what went down at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival is worth recounting. His biographer Andrew Roberts was forced to defend Churchill against extraordinary claims from a fellow panelist, that he permitted police to sexually assault suffragette protesters.
At the event titled “Winston Churchill: Hero or Villain”, Indian author and journalist Shrabani Basu alleged that while suffragettes were marching in Westminster November 1910, Churchill was responsible for nothing less than a horrific sex crime.
“At this time Churchill is the Home Secretary,” Basu said. “He has given instructions to the police that they can batter the women and they can sexually…it’s not instructions, it’s not obviously written down, but they’ve been given the leeway to, you know, assault the women and sexually assault them as well. Hundreds of women march in front of parliament and they are assaulted.
“There are also policemen in civilian clothes in the audience, in the crowds and they batter the women. They put their hands up their thighs, they grope them, they press their breasts and when one woman cried out, the policeman said, ‘Today I’ve been told I can do anything.’ ”
She added: “Churchill, Home Secretary, did not take responsibility and he did not prosecute the police officials because he didn’t want the women coming up and giving their view…speaking as a woman this definitely puts him on the villain scale.”
By this point prestigious historian Roberts—whose books include Hitler and Churchill and Eminent Churchillians and who is an occasional contributor to Heat Street—had heard quite enough.
“Can I just point out that that’s completely untrue?” he said. “[Churchill] at no stage ever okayed the sexual assault of any woman at any stage. There is no evidence to suggest that is true. It would have been a monstrous thing were that to be true but there is no evidence for it. ”
“It’s your word against mine,” Basu responded. And her word, it would seem, against history.
