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British Perceptions of the Russian Threat to India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

M. A. Yapp
M. A. Yapp
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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Extract

Soviet writers have often claimed that there was no Russian threat to India. They have pointed, correctly, to the circumstance that no invasion attempt was ever launched and have stated that those projects which were canvassed were no more than the ideas of hotheaded generals and the like, were never adopted by the Russian Government and cannot be taken seriously. Further, they have pointed to the rejection of approaches made to Russian authorities by discontented Indians who sought Russian assistance in overthrowing British rule in India. Talk of the defence of British India, with its implication that there was a genuine Russian threat to be warded off, they argue, is more than misleading; it was a deception practised by nineteenth-century British rulers of India to disguise expansionist British aims in India and, beyond the Indian frontier, in the Persian Gulf, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkestan, and it is now a device employed by modern British historians to conceal the true nature of British imperialism in India and to blacken the reputation of Russia. They do not accept that British statesmen and military officers could genuinely have believed in the possibility of a Russian invasion of India; and they suppose that British historians are not so incompetent as to think that nineteenth-century Britons did believe that the threat was real.

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Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , October 1987 , pp. 647 - 665
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

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28 Some notice must be taken of the short-lived idea that India could make a contribution to the support of Britain in Europe by military and political operations in Turkestan—the direct counterpart of the Russian threat to India. The possibility surfaced during the first Anglo-Afghan war of 1839–42 and found favour in London but it foundered on the opposition of the Viceroy, Lord Auckland. It was briefly canvassed by the erratic Lord Ellenborough, was revived by Lord Mayo in 1869 and figured prominently in the thoughts of Lord Lytton in 1876–8. The idea was embodied in speculations about direct action by British Indian troops or British encouragement of anti-Russian movements in Turkestan. Such notions made a last fleeting appearance in 1918. Apart from Ellenborough and Lytton, no Viceroy appears to have placed any weight on these ideas and there was very little interest in them in Britain. Beaconsfield's attempt to demonstrate that India could be a force in European politics by his dramatic summoning of Indian troops to Malta in 1878 was a revelation of the weakness of such views because the Malta operation was the direct cause of the counterdemonstration by Russia in the form of a military mission to Kabul, an episode which sparked off the second Anglo-Afghan war.

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37 This is not to imply, of course, that there were not several publicists who had raised the spectre of a Russian invasion in earlier periods, in the manner of Evans; the contention is that their arguments were not central to the strategic debate before the 1880s. For example, an examination of the possibilities of a Russian invasion in 1873 ended in the dismissal of the possibility (Chakravarty, , From Khyber to Oxus, 24–5Google Scholar). Undoubtedly, the Lytton period gave an impulse to military arguments because of the views of the Viceroy and his principal military advisor, George Colley. Although the projected military operations were dismissed by the Indian Army military experts, the discussion inevitably took a military turn in subsequent years and this development was assisted by the introduction of the concept of the scientific frontier. Although the purpose of the scientific frontier was originally to exclude Russian influence, debate about it was quickly transposed, in military hands, into a discussion about how a Russian army might be excluded.

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