War & Peace Quote by Stafford Cripps

Cripps is performing the tightrope act of empire in wartime: promising freedom while asking the colonized to keep waiting. The line is engineered to sound like solidarity with Indian independence, but its muscle memory is managerial. “We ask” implies a polite request; in practice it’s a command dressed up as consultation, aimed at calming a population whose patience Britain had already overdrawn. The phrase “great masses of India” flattens a politically sophisticated movement into a single, manageable body - a classic imperial habit that makes delay feel like a neutral administrative necessity rather than a choice with winners and losers.

The rhetoric hinges on time. “A short time longer” is the oldest colonial IOU: specific enough to feel near, vague enough to be endlessly extendable. Cripps preemptively defends against the obvious charge - that Britain is stalling - by insisting “not because we want to delay,” then immediately supplies the alibi: “hard facts of war.” War becomes a natural force, like weather, washing human agency out of the sentence. Even “the cause of freedom is being fought out” is slippery; it frames Britain as the battlefield’s moral protagonist, while Indian freedom is treated as a downstream consequence, not a present entitlement.

Context matters. In 1942, with Japan advancing and India central to Allied logistics, Cripps arrived to secure Indian cooperation without surrendering real control. The subtext is transactional: help us survive this war now; we’ll revisit your sovereignty later. It’s a promise calibrated to keep India in the fight, not to let India choose its own.