Politics & Power Quote by Stafford Cripps

A neat little diplomatic magic trick is happening here: Cripps uses Gandhi as a shield to sell a hard reality - foreign troops staying in India - as if it were a consensual, almost enlightened step. By attributing the idea to Gandhi, he borrows the moral authority of the empire's most famous critic and repackages continued military presence as pragmatic cooperation rather than occupation. The phrasing does the rest of the work. "More recently recognized" quietly suggests evolution, even correction: yesterday's idealism maturing into today's necessity. It's persuasive because it implies resistance is not only outdated but out of step with Gandhi himself.

The list - "British, American and Chinese" - is another tell. Cripps widens the frame from colonial Britain to a wartime coalition, laundering British interests through the legitimacy of allies. India becomes less a nation demanding sovereignty than a strategic theater requiring "efforts". That word is slippery: it sounds like assistance, not force. "Might remain by agreement" performs consent in advance, gesturing toward self-determination while keeping the bayonets in place. The vague "some new Indian Government" is a placeholder, a future body invoked to authorize a decision made in the present.

Context matters: Cripps was the British minister sent in 1942 to secure Indian support for World War II with promises of postwar autonomy. This line reads like damage control for a collapsing imperial script - not conceding power, but renegotiating the terms under which it stays.