Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 17, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Casey: Gandhi’s little-known Australian interlocutor

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Kama Maclean -
Richard Gardiner Casey is well known in Australia as one of its most eminent postwar statesmen. He served as its External Affairs Minister from 1951-60, forging Australia’s foreign policy and later, at the end of his career, as its Governor-General. Little is known, however, about his role as Governor of Bengal from 1944-46. Indeed the announcement of his appointment in January 1944 was unexpected, for no Australian had been appointed to such high office in India.
It was arguably the most difficult time to be appointed as Governor of Bengal: the province was in crisis, deeply unsettled at several levels. After the fall of Burma in 1941, Bengal lay exposed to the frontline of war; in late 1943 Calcutta and its docks were bombed; and many feared a Japanese invasion.
During his time in India, Casey repeatedly projected himself - to Indians and Britons alike — as an Australian; in doing so situating himself as an engaged intermediary in the face of an increasingly febrile, and fractured, nationalist movement facing impending decolonisation. Perhaps the clearest example of this is in his informal meetings with Mahatma Gandhi in late 1945 and early 1946 in which Casey acted as a proxy for Gandhi to communicate to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, flying in the face of protocol.
Gandhi first made contact with Casey in April 1945 through his emissary, Sudhir Ghosh. Gandhi arrived in Calcutta on December 1, 1945, immediately initiating a series of evening meetings with Casey that would last some six weeks. This was, technically, a breach of protocol, for the matters under discussion — especially those dealing with the rapidly impending transfer of power — did not fall under the purview of the Governor of a single province, but under that of the Viceroy. Given this, Casey was curious that the Mahatma had chosen to approach him, and not Wavell directly.
Casey’s willingness to meet with Gandhi and members of the Congress Working Committee was significant, in that it opened the path for a recalibration of the construction of the Congress leaders as ‘rebels’ after their release from prison.
At a more fundamental level, though, Casey maintained that merely meeting with the leaders was productive: the medium was the message. Sudhir Ghosh concluded that “Casey, being an Australian and a politician with a very wide international political experience, was very different from the usual rigid British Governor in India”, and as such was able to inject a fresh, if short-lived, dynamic into preliminary discussions leading into the high politics of decolonisation. — IANS



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