Indian Iraq

carlton_bach

(No, I'm not talking about mad cowboys)

I just read something interesting. During WWI, when the British finally got their act together and fired their incompetent generals, the Indian army operated the Mesopotamian campaign. By 1917, the territory of modern-day Iraq had been secured for the King-Emperor by his suitably colourful Doghra foot, Gurkha rifles and Punjabi lancers (does it show I'm an aficionado of the Raj?) the government in Delhi pondered whether the territory should not be subsumed under Anglo-indian control (a suggestion very quickly quashed by the Foreign Office, who wanted something to give their Arab allies). That would have meant:

- the ICS (Oxbridge graduates with at least three oriental lnguages) run the administration rather than Foreign Office old-boys in concert with dissolute Hashemite kith-and-kin

- the local currency is the Sterling-pegged Indian rupee

- unlimited immigration for Indians, including highly qualified graduates of the various civil-service colleges and a skilled engineering labour force for the oil fields

- No Hashemite 'encirclement' of Saudi-Arabia, hence no need for the king to escape from the British sphere through his deal with Aramco

- quite possibly something resembling common law and Westminster democracy in Baghdad

What do you think Iraq would look like today if it had been run by the Sirkar bandobast rather than the Hashemi clan? And could Saudi Arabia have remained a British client state into the 1950s, on the model of places like Oman or Yemen?
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
One complication that I might mention is the fact that the Iraqis of that time despised the Indian troops. The Hashemites gave the British Mandate some legitimacy (not much, but enough at the time). An Iraq ruled from Delhi might not have been a very stable place. Furthermore, immigrants from India would not have been warmly welcomed.
 

LordKalvan

Leo Caesius said:
One complication that I might mention is the fact that the Iraqis of that time despised the Indian troops. The Hashemites gave the British Mandate some legitimacy (not much, but enough at the time). An Iraq ruled from Delhi might not have been a very stable place. Furthermore, immigrants from India would not have been warmly welcomed.
Click to expand...
All quite true. In particular the bit abt. indian immigrants, and the indian troops lording over arab subjects :eek:
I would also expect that Aramco penetration in Saudi arabia would not be significantly affected by a British Iraq.
 

Norman

What I like about this one is that it is very different. also consider that while the Iraqis might not have liked it, if there had been a deliberate policy of moving hundreds of thousands of Indians into the country, within several years they would have at least been a sizable minority.
 

carlton_bach

Well, if the grand schemes of the Khedives had worked, all of Palestine and most of Syria would have been Egyptian in the 1830s. I'm not sure if it could have saved Egypot from fiscal implosion and the subsequent hostile takeover by France and Britain, but the implications would be interesting in any case.

- Britain is much more closely involved with the Zionist movement at an early stage (they run Jerusalem, after all)

- No Balfour declaration. No point in promising the Zionists something for the future that you could have delivered (or did deliver?) years ago

- Palestine would get a better infrastructure, too, if only because Thomas Cook would offer package trips.

- local Arabs might be a little less hostile to the Jewish settlers because a) settlement does not follow a military defeat, b) Britain does not blatantly break a promise made to its Arab allies and c) I doubt the British colonial administration would condone the kind of heavy-handed tactics employed by both sides if it wasn't so acutely conscious of its broken prmoise.

I also think there might be fewer Zionist settlers if Palestine was open from, say, 1886 onwards. It is always easier to passionately desire something you can't have than something you could get, but at a high cost... :)


But back to Iraq: the locals hated the Indians. Would the Sirkar care? They used Sikh troops in Burma and Malaya, after all. What would the result be? Was anti-Indian sentiment strong enough to render the country ungovernable? After a few years, there would be tangible advantages to the locals, after all, not least the tremendous amount of investment capital sloshing around India after WWI.
Or could this backfire? Might modern irrigation, railways, oil drilling technology, trams and such all be viewed as 'Indian stuff' unworthy of a proper Arab? Could the Shia, Sunni and Kurds be welded into a nation by joint hatred of the Bengali babus?
 
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