Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎57r] (113/118)

The Pakistani I knew best was my immediate superior, Choudhry Mohammad
Ali, Secretary-General to the Cabinet. He had great ability and
integrity and, I believe, could hold his own with the best civil servants
of any country. I thought his talents admirably suited to his key role
and he was later to crown his career, after bearing an immense burden
for eight years, by becoming Prime Minister in September, 1955 under
the Governor-Generalship of Iskandar Mirza, formerly of the IPS The branch of the British Government of India with responsibility for managing political relations between British-ruled India and its surrounding states, and by extension the Gulf, during the period 1937-47. . From Mohammad
Ali in his office where I regularly reported, and from my sight of
the stream of leading figures passing through it. I came to learn
something of the internal pressures on the Government and of the
external crises over Junagadh, Kashmir and Hyderabad.
In Bengal before I joined the IPS The branch of the British Government of India with responsibility for managing political relations between British-ruled India and its surrounding states, and by extension the Gulf, during the period 1937-47. I had seen a little of top ministers such
as H.S.Suhrawardy and Nazimuddin as well as some senior Indian civil
servants. But only through my work after Independence could I
appreciate directly the ability of the new leaders of peoples we had
in essence ruled by right of conquest. We clothed that nakedness
(admittedly less so perceived before the war) with a cloak of moral and other
claims to superiority and a quasi-religious presumption that we were destined
to take up among supposedly less fortunate races a "white man's burden" of
uplift. The presumption as to colour was particularly crass in the case of
northern India whose peoples so commonly sprang from the same or allied
pale Central Asian stock as our own; and it was not much stressed in ICS
training that, to take only one example of high intelligence, Indians at
the time of our dark ages had been the ingenious progenitors of our
numerals, the crucial conception of zero and essentially the decimal
system. Experience of working with gifted Indians other than our respected
colleagues in the ICS or able lawyers appearing before us in the courts
had no doubt come earlier and more amply than in my case to the relatively