The complete surrender of civil authority into military hands first at Amritsar, and then, under orders from Simla, at Lah.o.r.e and elsewhere, was, as His Majesty"s Government afterwards acknowledged, a disastrous departure from the best traditions of the Indian Civil Service. But, whatever the mistakes committed by the civil authority in the Punjab or by those charged with the administration of martial law in that province, there is above the Punjab the Government of India, and its plea of prolonged ignorance as to the details of the occurrences in the Punjab can hardly hold water. The preoccupations of the Afghan war which followed closely on the Punjab troubles were no doubt absorbing, but had the Viceroy or the Home member or the Commander-in-Chief or one of his responsible advisers proceeded in person, the moment the disorders were over, to Lah.o.r.e or Amritsar, barely more than a night"s journey from Delhi or Simla, is it conceivable that a halt would not have been forthwith called to proceedings which these high officers of state were constrained later on unanimously to deplore and reprobate? And if the Government of India were too slow to move, was there not a Secretary of State who knew, from statements made to him personally by Sir Michael O"Dwyer on his return to England, at least enough to insist upon immediate inquiry on the spot? Mr. Montagu has seldom, it is believed, hesitated to require in the most peremptory terms full information on far more trivial matters. Had prompt action been taken in India, there would never have been any need for the Hunter Committee. As it was, Indian feeling had run tremendously high before its findings were made public. So when the Government of India and the Secretary of State published their belated judgment, the people of India weighed such a tardy measure of justice against the dissent of an important minority in the House of Commons and of the majority of the Lords, the stifling of discussion in the Indian Legislature, which was still more directly interested in the matter, and above all the unprecedented public subscriptions in England and in India for the glorification of General Dyer, whilst the Punjab Government was still haggling over doles to the widows and orphans of Jallianwala--and, having weighed it, found it lamentably wanting, until at last the Duke of Connaught"s moving speech at Delhi for the first time began to redress the balance.
The story of Jallianwala and all that followed in the Punjab scattered to the winds Mr. Gandhi"s threadbare penitence for the horrible violence of Indian mobs, and he poured out henceforth all the vials of his wrath on the violence of the repression, far more unpardonable, he declared, because they were not the outcome of ignorant fanaticism, but of a definite policy adopted by European officers high in rank and responsibility. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that a Government that tolerated or condoned or palliated such things was "Satanic," and that the whole civilisation for which such a Government stood was equally Satanic. For Indians to co-operate with it until it had shown "a complete change of heart" was a deadly sin. To accept any scheme of const.i.tutional reforms as reparation for the wrongs of the Punjab with which the wrongs of Turkey were linked up with an increased fervour of righteous indignation when the terms of the treaty of Sevres became known, was treachery to the soul of India. Thence it was but a step to the organisation of a definite "Non-co-operation" movement to demonstrate the finality of the breach. Mr. Gandhi appealed in the first place to the educated cla.s.ses to set the example to the people. He called upon those on whom the State had conferred honours and t.i.tles to renounce them, upon barristers and pleaders to cease to practise in the law-courts, and upon parents to withdraw their children from the schools and colleges tainted with State control and State doles. If parents would not hearken to him, schoolboys and students were exhorted to shake themselves free of their own accord. To the people he opened up simpler ways of "Non-co-operation" by abstaining from tea and sugar and all articles of consumption and of clothing contaminated by alien hands or alien industry. If all would join in a common effort he promised that India would speedily attain _Swaraj_--the term mentioned was generally a year--and, quit of the railways and telegraphs and all other instruments and symbols of Western economic bondage, return to the felicity and greatness of Vedic times. All this, however, was to be done by "soul force" alone and without violence.
In the course of the only long conversation I had with Mr. Gandhi I tried to obtain from him some picture of what India would be like under _Swaraj_ as he understood it. In a voice as gentle as his whole manner is persuasive, he explained, more in pity than in anger, that India had at last recovered her own soul through the fiery ordeal which Hindus and Mahomedans had undergone in the Punjab, and the perfect act of faith which the _Khilafat_ meant for all Mahomedans, and that, purged of the degrading influences of the West, she would find again that peace which was hers before alien domination divided and exploited her people. As to the form of government and administration which would then obtain in India, he would not go beyond a vague a.s.surance that it would be based on the free will of the people expressed by manhood suffrage for which Indians were already ripe, if called upon to exercise it upon truly Indian lines. When I objected that caste, which was the bed-rock of Hindu social and religious life, was surely a tremendous obstacle to any real democracy, he admitted that the system would have to be restored to its pristine purity and redeemed from some of the abuses that had crept into it. But he upheld the four original castes as laid down in the Vedas, and even their hereditary character, though in practice some born in a lower caste might well rise by their own merits and secure the deference and respect of the highest castes, "such as, for instance, if I may in all modesty quote my own unworthy case, the highest Brahmans spontaneously accord to me to-day, though by birth I am only of a lowly caste." I tried to get on to more solid ground by pointing out that, whatever views one might hold as to his ultimate goal, the methods he was employing in trying to break up the existing schools and colleges and law-courts and to paralyse the machinery of administration was destructive rather than constructive, and that, confident as he might feel of subst.i.tuting better things ultimately for those that he had destroyed, construction must always be a much slower process than destruction; and in the meantime infinite and perhaps irreparable harm would be done. "No," he rejoined--and I think I can convey his words pretty accurately, but not his curious smile as of boundless compa.s.sion for the incurable scepticism of one in outer darkness--"no, I destroy nothing that I cannot at once replace. Let your law-courts with their c.u.mbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her old _Panchayats_, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we will give them simpler structures, open to G.o.d"s air and light, and the learning of our forefathers that will make them free men once more." Not that he would exclude all Western literature--Ruskin, for instance, he would always welcome with both hands--nor Western science so long as it was applied to spiritual and not to materialistic purposes, nor even English teachers, if they would become Indianised and were reborn of the spirit of India. Indeed, what he had looked for, and looked in vain for, in the rulers of India was "a change of hearts" by which they too might be reborn of the spirit of India. He hated no one, for that would be a negation of the great principle of _Ahimsa_, on which he expatiated with immense earnestness.
As I watched the slight ascetic frame and mobile features of the Hindu dreamer in his plain garment of white home-spun, and, beside him, one of his chief Mahomedan allies, Shaukat Ali, with his great burly figure and heavy jowl and somewhat truculent manner and his opulent robes embroidered with the Turkish crescent, I wondered how far Mr. Gandhi had succeeded in converting his Mahomedan friend to the principle of _Ahimsa_. Perhaps Mr. Gandhi guessed what was pa.s.sing in my mind when I asked him how the fundamental antagonism between the Hindu and the Mahomedan outlook upon life was to be permanently overcome even if the common cause held Hindus and Mahomedans together in the struggle for _Swaraj_. He pointed at once to his "brother" Shaukat as a living proof of the "change of hearts" that had already taken place in the two communities. "Has any cloud ever arisen between my brother Shaukat and myself during the months that we have now lived and worked together? Yet he is a staunch Mahomedan and I a devout Hindu. He is a meat-eater and I a vegetarian. He believes in the sword, I condemn all violence. But what do such differences matter between two men in both of whom the heart of India beats in unison?"
I turned thereupon to Mr. Shaukat Ali and asked him whether he would explain to me the application to India under _Swaraj_ of the Mahomedan doctrine that the world is divided into two parts, one the "world of Islam" under Mahomedan rule, and the other "the world of war," in which infidels may rule for a time but will sooner or later be reduced to subjection by the sword of Islam. To which of these worlds would Mahomedans reckon India to belong when she obtained _Swaraj_? Mr.
Shaukat Ali evaded the question by a.s.suring me with much unction that he could not conceive the possibility of the Hindus doing any wrong to Islam, but, if the unthinkable happened, Mahomedans, he quickly added, would know how to redress their wrongs, for they could never renounce their belief in the sword, and it was indeed because Turkey is the sword of Islam that they could not see her perish or the Khalifate depart from her.
I wondered as I withdrew how long the fiery Mahomedan would keep his sword sheathed, did he not feel that his own personality and that of his brother Mahomed Ali would count for very little without the reflected halo with which they were at least temporarily invested by the saintliness of Mr. Gandhi"s own simple and austere life of self-renunciation, so different in every way from their own. For it is to his personality rather than to his teachings that Mr. Gandhi owes his immense influence with the people. It is a very different influence from that of Mr. Tilak, to whom he is sometimes, but quite wrongly, compared.
Mr. Tilak belonged by birth to a powerful Deccani Brahman caste with hereditary traditions of rulership. He was a man of considerable Sanscrit learning whose researches into the ancient lore of Hinduism commanded respectful attention amongst European as well as Indian scholars. Whatever one may think of his politics and of his political methods, he was an astute politician skilled in all the ways of political opportunism. Mr. Gandhi is none of these things. He is not a Brahman, but of the humbler _Bania_ caste; he does not come from the Deccan, but from Gujarat, a much less distinguished part of the Bombay Presidency. He does not claim to be anything but a man of the people. He looks small and fragile and his features are homely. He lives in the simplest native way, eating simple native food which he is said to prepare with his own hands, and dresses in the simplest native clothes from his own spinning-wheel. His private life is unimpeachable--the only point indeed in which Mr. Tilak resembled him. Though he lays no claim to Sanscrit erudition, his speeches are replete with references to Hindu mythology and scripture, but they usually reflect the gentler, and not the more terrific, aspects of Hinduism. He blurts out the truth as he conceives it with as little regard for the feelings or prejudices of his supporters as for those of his opponents. He will tell the most orthodox Brahman audience at Poona that if they want to be the leaders of the nation they must give up their worldly notions of caste ascendancy and their harsh enforcement of "untouchability"; or he will lecture a youthful Bengalee audience, intensely jealous of their own language, upon their shameful ignorance of Hindi, which he believes to be the future language of India and of _Swaraj_. No one could suspect him of having an axe of his own to grind. He is beyond argument, because his conscience tells him he is right and his conscience must be right, and the people believe that he is right, and that his conscience must be right because he is a _Mahatma_, and as such outside and above caste.
His influence over the Indian Mahomedan cannot be so deep-rooted, and the ancient antagonism between them and the Hindus still endures amongst the ma.s.ses on both sides; but it is of some significance that his warm espousal of the grievances which large and perhaps growing numbers of them have been induced to read into the Turkish peace terms, has led some of his most enthusiastic Mahomedan supporters to bestow upon him the designation of _Wali_ or Vicegerent which is sometimes used to connote religious leadership.
No leader has ever dominated any meeting of the old Indian National Congress as absolutely as Mr. Gandhi dominated last Christmas at Nagpur the 20,000 delegates from all parts of India who persisted in calling themselves the Indian National Congress, though between them and the original Congress founders few links have survived, and the chief business of the session was to repudiate the old Congress profession of loyalty to the British connection as the fundamental article of its creed, and to eliminate the reference hitherto retained, with the consent even of the Extremists, to India"s partic.i.p.ation on equal terms with the other members of the Empire in all its rights and responsibilities. The resolution moved and carried at Nagpur stated bluntly that "the object of the Indian National Congress is the attainment of _Swaraj_ by the people of India by all legitimate and peaceful means." Many of the members would have left out the last words which were intended to ease the scruples of the more weak-kneed brethren. But Mr. Jinna, a Mahomedan Extremist from Bombay, whose legal mind in spite of all his bitterness does not blink the cold light of reason, warned his audience that India could not achieve complete independence by violent means without wading through rivers of blood.
Mr. Gandhi himself intimated that India did not "want to end the British connection at all costs unconditionally," but he declared it to be "derogatory to national dignity to think of the permanence of the British connection at any cost, and it was impossible to accept its continuance in the presence of the grievous wrongs done by the British Government and its refusal to acknowledge or redress them." He explained that the resolution of which he was the mover could be accepted equally by "those who believe that by retaining the British connection we can purify ourselves and purify the British people, and those who have no such belief." He concluded on a more minatory note: "The British people will have to beware that if they do not want to do justice, it will be the bounden duty of every Indian to destroy the Empire"--which Mr.
Mahomed Ali, however, with less diplomacy, declared to be already dead and buried.
That the "Non-co-operation" programme was reaffirmed at Nagpur except in regard to the propaganda amongst schoolboys as differentiated from students, and that threats were uttered of extending pa.s.sive resistance to the non-payment of taxes and more especially of the land tax, were not matters to cause much surprise to those who had measured the sharply inclined plane down which "Non-co-operation" was moving. But one hardly sees how Mr. Gandhi can reconcile the racial hatred which was the key-note of all the proceedings with his favourite doctrine of _Ahimsa_.
He has, however, himself, on one occasion, openly referred to a time when legions of Indians may be ready to leap to the sword for _Swaraj_, and though his appeal is to an inner moral force which he declares to be unconquerable, he does not always disguise from himself or from his followers the bloodshed which the exercise of that moral force may involve. In an article in support of the "Non-co-operation" movement in his organ _Young India_ the following pregnant pa.s.sage occurs:
For me, I say with Cardinal Newman: "I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me." The movement is essentially religious. The business of every G.o.d-fearing man is to dissociate himself from evil in total disregard of consequences. He must have faith in a good deed producing only a good result; that, in my opinion, is the Ghita doctrine of work without attachment. G.o.d does not permit man to peep into the future. He follows truth, although the following of it may endanger life. He knows that it is better to die in the way of G.o.d than to live in the way of Satan.
Therefore, whoever is satisfied that this Government represents the activity of Satan has no choice left to him but to dissociate himself from it.
Are there any limits to the disastrous lengths to which a people may not be carried away by one who combines to such ends and in such fashion religious and political leadership?
CHAPTER X
SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE ELECTIONS
On probably the last of seventeen visits to India spread over some forty years, I landed after three years" absence in Bombay early in November 1920, on the eve of the first elections for the new popular a.s.semblies created by the Act of 1919.
Munic.i.p.al elections there had been in India for a long time past, and elections for the Councils since 1909, but on a very restricted franchise or by indirect processes. To provide a real measure of popular representation, and even to secure the usefulness of the reforms as a means of political education for the Indian people, the franchise was now placed on as broad a basis as possible, whilst in mapping out the const.i.tuencies the principle of separate representation for particular races and creeds and special interests had to be taken into account. The territorial basis prevailed largely, and rural and urban const.i.tuencies corresponded roughly to county and borough const.i.tuencies in this country, but besides the "general const.i.tuencies" for all qualified electors indiscriminately, "special const.i.tuencies" had to be created wherever required for "community" representation, whether of Mahomedans, or, in the Punjab, of Sikhs, or, in Madras, of non-Brahmans, or, in the large cities, of Europeans and of Eurasians, besides still more specialised const.i.tuencies for the representation of land-holders, universities, commerce, and industries. There was no female suffrage, and no plural vote. No elector could vote both in a "general const.i.tuency" and in a "special" one. The qualifications laid down for the franchise were of a very modest character. Illiteracy was no bar, as to have made it so in a country where barely 10 per cent of the adult males attain to the slender standard of literacy adopted for census purposes would have reduced the electorate to very insignificant proportions, and many Indians who cannot read or write have often quite as shrewd a knowledge of affairs as those who can. The franchise varied in slight details from province to province, but generally speaking was based on a property qualification measured by payment of land revenue or of income-tax or of munic.i.p.al rates. Military service counted as a special qualification. Under these regulations about 6,200,000 electors were registered, or nearly 2-3/4 per cent of the total population throughout India under direct British administration, excluding the areas to which the Act of 1919 was not to apply.
The regulations, however, merely supplied the rough framework; the task of compiling the lists of qualified electors devolved upon the Government officers and special election commissions appointed _ad hoc_ throughout the country, and to the much-abused Civil Service mainly belongs the credit of having made it possible to hold the elections within less than a year of the pa.s.sing of the Act. In the Bombay Presidency, for instance, where I had my first opportunity of seeing the new electoral system at work, the electoral rolls finally included some 550,000 electors out of a population of about 20,000,000 of widely different races and creeds, speaking three absolutely different languages. Even more laborious than the compiling of voters" lists was the task of explaining to the vast majority of voters what the vote meant, why they ought to use it, and how they had to record it. At many polling stations ballot-boxes were provided of different colours or showing different symbols--a horse, a flag, a cart, a lion, etc.--adopted by candidates to enable the voter who could not read their names to drop his ballot ticket into the right box without asking questions apt to jeopardise the secrecy of the ballot.
Many voters instinctively distrusted the privilege suddenly thrust on them, and scented in it some trap laid by Government, perhaps for extracting fresh taxation, or worse. Many more remained wholly indifferent and saw no reason for putting themselves to the slightest trouble in a matter with which they could not see that they had any personal concern. Except in large centres, the candidates themselves often did very little to disarm distrust or to combat indifference.
There was little or no electioneering of the kind with which we are familiar; and when once "Non-co-operation" led to the withdrawal of Extremist candidates, there was generally no serious line of political cleavage between the others, who, especially in the rural districts, where their neighbours already knew all about them, were content to rely on their local influence and personal reputation to carry them through.
The battle, in fact, was not fought out chiefly at the polls. It was waged very fiercely in the press and on the platform between those who were bent on paralysing the reforms as the malevolent conception of a "Satanic" Government and those who were determined to bring them to fruition, not indeed in blind support of Government, but as a means of exercising const.i.tutional pressure on the Government. Mr. Gandhi certainly succeeded not only in dissuading his immediate followers but in frightening a good many respectable citizens who have no heart for militant politics from coming forward as candidates. Could he have made "Non-co-operation" universally effective, there would have been no candidates and no nominations, no elections and no councils. But in this he failed, as some of the more worldly Extremists foresaw who obeyed him in this matter with reluctance. In the Bombay Presidency, Gokhale, though dead, had a large share in the victory of the old principles for which he had stood when there had been little will to co-operate on the part either of Government or of the majority of Western-educated Indians. For none fought the battle of the Moderates more steadfastly and faced the rowdiness of the "Non-co-operationists" more fearlessly than Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, who had succeeded him as the head of his "Servants of India" Society, and Professor Paranjpe, who had long been closely a.s.sociated with him in educational work at the Ferguson College in Poona. Enough Moderates were found to stick to their colours in practically every const.i.tuency, and they secured their seats, in the absence of Extremist nominations, without contest, or after submitting their not very acute political differences to the arbitrament of the polls.
Nowhere had the Extremists developed their plan of campaign on more comprehensive lines than in those great United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, which with their huge and dense population of over forty-eight millions under one provincial government form the largest and in some respects the most important administrative unit in British India. It was within the area which it now covers that the Mutiny broke out and, with the exception of Delhi itself, was mainly confined and fought out. The bitter memories of that period have not yet wholly vanished. It contains a larger proportion than any other province of historic cities--Agra, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Muttra, Jhansi, Benares, Allahabad, some of them still the nerve centres of Hinduism and of Islam. The Mahomedans form only a minority of about one-sixth of the population, but their influence must not be measured merely by numbers, for one of the distinctive features of the United Provinces is the survival of a great landed aristocracy in which the Mahomedans are largely represented.
Nowhere else, indeed, is the land still held in such an overwhelming proportion by great landlords, or the rights of the humble tillers of the soil more precarious.
The Extremists were quick to exploit the various fields of agitation which those peculiar conditions provide. They even launched the forces of "Non-co-operation" against the two Indian universities only founded within the last few years, in deference to the demands of the Indians themselves, on frankly denominational lines, in derogation of the very principle of undenominational education that we had upheld in all other Indian universities. It is one of the many strange anomalies of Gandhiism that it should have elected to concentrate its wrecking policy on the very universities in which Islam and Hinduism respectively have been conceded a closer preserve than anywhere else for the training of Indian youths in the spirit of the two great national religions of India. The joint efforts of the Hindu saint and of his chief Mahomedan henchmen, the brothers Ali, failed to take either the Hindu or the Mahomedan stronghold by storm. Mr. Gandhi, indeed, showed some reluctance to press his attack upon the Hindu university at Benares with anything like the same vigour with which he backed up Mahomed and Shaukat Ali"s raid on the Mahomedan university at Aligurh, and from so marked a contrast many Mahomedans might have been expected to draw very obvious conclusions.
More insidious, and perhaps more dangerous, was the organised attempt of the Extremists to get hold of the agricultural ma.s.ses through the widespread discontent, by no means of recent date, due to the peculiar conditions of land tenure in these provinces. In an essentially agricultural country such as India still is, and must probably always remain, agrarian questions are amongst the most difficult and complicated with which British rule has had to deal. For they present themselves in the different provinces in forms as diverse as the past history and local conditions of each province, long before it was brought under British administration, had combined to make them. Whereas in the Bombay Presidency, for instance, land is chiefly held by small landlords and peasant proprietors, it was held in Agra and Oudh before they became British by a great landed aristocracy whose rights, like all established rights, it was a principle of British policy to respect, and the _talukdars_ of Oudh and the _zemindars_ of Agra stood for the most part very loyally by the British _Raj_ during the Mutiny, and have continued to stand by Government in many difficult if not equally critical moments since then.
The relationships, varying almost _ad infinitum_ between landlords and tenants and sub-tenants, have created marked differences which still exist very widely in the two divisions of the United Provinces. In Agra, about half the tenants possess at least occupancy rights, but only a very small percentage in Oudh enjoy even that measure of protection.
There have been successive endeavours to improve the position of the tillers of the soil by benevolent legislation. But worse even than the precarious nature of the tenures are the many forms of arbitrary exaction to which bad landlords can subject their peasants without any definite breach of the law. Often landlords who want to build a new house or send a son to England or buy a new motor simply levy an extra anna in the rupee on their rent-rolls which the wretched tenants dare not refuse to pay. As in many other matters, the ancient inst.i.tution of caste, which is still the corner-stone of the whole Indian social structure, introduces yet another disturbing factor. For tenants and sub-tenants who belong to the depressed castes are exposed to much harsher treatment at the hands of their superior landlords than those who are privileged to belong to less down-trodden castes. Even the best landlords who show some real consideration for their people are actuated rather by a natural kindliness of disposition than by any conscious sense of duty or recognition of the special responsibilities that attach to their high position. Government has for some time past realised the necessity of dealing with these questions on broader lines, but when the reforms scheme first took substance, legislation was, not unreasonably, postponed until the new Councils met, though the subject is not one of those transferred under the Act to Indian ministers.
Agrarian questions, moreover, are very intimately connected with the larger question of land revenue, in regard to which there are signs of a considerable change in the att.i.tude of the politically-minded cla.s.ses, or at least of the Moderate section. For a long time the lawyer element, always very strong in the Indian National Congress, was not particularly keen to see it take up agrarian questions which would have probably estranged a good many fat clients, and some, though perhaps fewer, political supporters, amongst the land-owning cla.s.ses. The old Congress platform was, moreover, drawn up by and for the _intelligentsia_ of the towns, who had little in common with the great rural population of India; and in so far as it professed to champion also the agricultural interests of the country, it preferred to concentrate its attacks on the general system of Indian land revenue and to press for its revision on the lines of the "permanent settlement" in Bengal--not so much perhaps on account of any intrinsic merits of that "settlement," as because it was identified with the province which was then regarded as in the van of Indian political progress and enlightenment. The "permanent settlement" in Bengal, effected more than a century and a quarter ago by Lord Cornwallis under a complete misapprehension, as was afterwards realised, of the position of the Bengalee _zemindars_, determined once and for all the proportion of land revenue which Government was ent.i.tled to collect in the province, instead of leaving it, as in other parts of India it is still left, to be varied from time to time after periodical inquiry into the constantly varying yield and value of the land. The result in Bengal has been highly satisfactory from the point of view of the large land-owners whose property has appreciated enormously with the general growth of prosperity during a long period, unprecedented in its earlier annals, of internal and external peace. It has been less satisfactory to the tenants with inferior and infinitely subdivided interests who have shared very little in the increased wealth of their superior landlords, and nowhere else has sub-infeudation been carried to such extravagant lengths. But for the State, above all, the results have been singularly unfortunate, as it has debarred itself from taking toll of the unearned increment that has been constantly accruing to the _zemindars_.
So long as the National Congress saw little or no hope of securing the transfer of any substantial share in the governance of the country to Indian shoulders, it could afford to indulge in wholesale criticism of Government finance and to propose sweeping changes without stopping to consider ways and means or to weigh the ultimate effects upon the revenue of the State, and it was easy for it to court popularity by inveighing against the land tax and advocating the extension of the "permanent settlement" to the whole of India as a sovereign panacea. But sober Indian politicians have begun to look farther ahead and to reckon with the costs of the many popular reforms which Indian Ministers will be expected to carry through in the new Councils. Mr. Gandhi and his followers, who are determined if possible to wreck them, are deterred by no such considerations, and the non-payment of the land tax, which must remain the backbone of Indian revenue, already figures in their programme of "Non-co-operation," of which the avowed object is to paralyse Government and render British rule impossible without any resort to the methods of violence they profess to deprecate. It can hardly fail to prove a fairly popular cry, for there is no more unpalatable form of co-operation with Government all the world over than the payment of taxes, and the Extremists combine this part of their propaganda with more specialised efforts to capture the confidence of the particular cla.s.ses amongst the peasantry who have rent and tenure grievances by warmly espousing their cause against the landlords and inciting them to organised resistance. They not only stimulate thereby a general feeling of unrest and discontent, but they actually carry the war to the very doors of the great land-owning cla.s.s which has. .h.i.therto been least accessible to revolutionary influences.
This was one of the special features of the "Non-co-operation" campaign in the United Provinces, and Mr. Gandhi himself arrived on the scene to lend it the full weight of his personal influence on the very eve of the elections. How extraordinary is the influence of his mesmeric personality and style of oratory I realised when I drove out on the day of the elections into a district outside Allahabad where he had himself addressed on the previous afternoon a vast crowd of twenty thousand peasants. It was about noon, and only a few creaking bullock-carts and "the footfall mute of the slow camel"--neither of them suggestive of a hotly contested election--disturbed the drowsy peace which even in the coolest season of the year in Upper India falls on the open country when the sun pours down out of the cloudless sky. Here at a roadside shrine a group of brightly dressed village women were trying to attract the attention of a favourite G.o.d by ringing the little temple bell. There some brown-skinned youngsters were driving their flock of goats and sheep into the leafy shelter of the trees. But the fields, now bare of crops, were lifeless, and the scattered hamlets mostly fast asleep.
About fifteen miles out we reached the big village of Soraon--almost a small township--in which there seemed equally little to suggest that this was the red-letter day in the history of modern India that was to initiate her people into the great art of self-government. Still the small court-house, we found, had been swept and garnished for use as a polling station. Two small groups of people stood listlessly outside the building, the candidates" agents on the one side of the entrance, and on the other the _patwaris_--the village scribes who keep the official land records--brought in from the different villages to attest the signatures and thumbmarks of the voters. Inside, the presiding officer with his a.s.sistants sat at his table with the freshly printed electoral roll in front of him and the voting paper to be handed to each voter as he pa.s.sed into the inner sanctuary in which the ballot-boxes awaited him.
But voters there were none. From eight in the morning till past twelve not a single voter had presented himself out of over 1200 a.s.signed to this polling station, nor did a single one present himself in the course of the whole day.
Nowhere else, however, was the boycott so effective, and throughout the province a full third of the qualified electors recorded their votes--not a bad percentage under such novel conditions and in the face of such a determined effort to wreck the elections. The land-owning cla.s.s secured the representation to which its hereditary influence unquestionably ent.i.tles it, but it has held so much aloof from modern education that with some notable exceptions it contributes numbers rather than capacity to the Council. With forty-four members belonging to the legal profession out of a total of one hundred members this Provincial Council, like most others, is doubtless somewhat overstocked with lawyers. But upon no other profession has Mr. Gandhi urged more strongly the duty of "Non-co-operation," and that, after having been for years conspicuous for political disaffection, it should have rallied so generally in support of the reforms shows how great is the change they have wrought amongst the Western-educated cla.s.ses. Nowhere in the United Provinces was the electoral battle so fierce as in the town of Jhansi, where Mr. Chintamani, once the irreconcilable editor of the Allahabad _Leader_, came out at the head of a large poll, though in order to defeat him the "Non-co-operationists" sacrificed their principles and put up and supported with their own votes an obscure candidate by whose election they hoped to bring the new Council into contempt.
The outstanding feature of the elections in Bengal was the striking evidence afforded of a return to political sanity in a province which, a dozen years ago, was the chief political storm-centre in India. Many of the same leaders who, formerly, at least dallied with lawlessness during the violent agitation that followed the Part.i.tion of Bengal now came forward openly as champions of const.i.tutional progress on the lines of the new reforms and as candidates for the new Councils. They knew what all their own attempts to make a _Swadeshi_ boycott really effective by developing "national" industries and subst.i.tuting "national" products and "national" trade agencies for foreign ones had ended in. They remembered the failure of the "national" schools and colleges which were to have supplanted Government schools and colleges. They realised that a dangerous propaganda which had involved hundreds of immature youths in a network of criminal conspiracies had tended to the subversion of every principle of authority, at the expense of the parent at least as much as of good government and public peace. When the famous p.r.o.nouncement of August 20, 1917, opened up for India the prospect of ultimate self-government within the Empire, and the recommendations of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report finally took shape in a new Government of India Act, there was found a solid body of public opinion in Bengal which had been taught by actual and very costly experience not to throw away the substance for the shadow. The most influential perhaps amongst the Extremists during the Anti-Part.i.tion campaign was Mr. Arabindo Ghose, who, like Mr. Gandhi, had studied in England and with great distinction. Though, unlike Mr. Gandhi, he never indulged in wholesale denunciations of Western civilisation, his newspaper, the _Yugantar_, was a daily trumpet-call to revolt against British rule, and he himself narrowly escaped conviction on a charge of bomb-making. Yet as far back as 1910, from his place of retirement in Pondicherry, he issued after the Morley-Minto reforms had been promulgated a significant message to his fellow-countrymen advising them to accept partial _Swaraj_ as a means to ensure complete _Swaraj_, and amongst the literature that helped to defeat "Non-co-operation" in Bengal, one of the most striking pamphlets was one ent.i.tled "Gandhi or Arabindo?" in which a very fervent disciple and collaborator of the latter in the most fiery days of the _Yugantar_ argued with great force the case for co-operation with Government against "Non-co-operation" as now preached by Mr. Gandhi.
Only less remarkable has been the conversion of many other old Bengalee leaders, including the veteran Sir Surendranath Banerjee, who never, however, went quite to the same lengths of extremism.
During the electoral campaign Mr. Gandhi could still find large audiences, not all consisting of excitable students, to acclaim him or to listen open-mouthed to his ceaseless flow of eloquence. But the electors went to the polls and voted for the candidates against whom he and his followers had fulminated, and, in the rural districts especially, election meetings often refused to listen to any elaborate political dissertations, and wanted only to hear what the candidates were prepared to do for elementary education, sanitation, schools, roads, etc. So the Bengal elections too resulted in the return, often by relatively large bodies of voters, of members pledged and competent to co-operate with Government. The _Khilafat_ agitation, accompanied in Bengal as everywhere else by aggressive religious intimidation, affected the polling in some of the Mahomedan const.i.tuencies. But during the Anti-Part.i.tion campaign Mahomedans and Hindus had been in opposite camps, whereas Mr. Gandhi was now making a strong and to some extent successful bid for Mahomedan support by endorsing the Mahomedan grievance. So the Mahomedan change of front merely emphasised "Non-co-operation"s" defeat in Bengal.
Equally hopeful were the signs of a better understanding and of the revival of a spirit of friendly co-operation between Indians and Englishmen in Calcutta, hitherto regarded, not quite without reason, as a stronghold of reactionary European conservatism, especially amongst the non-official community. It can hardly be denied that, except where official relations brought them into contact--and not always there--Europeans and Indians have lived too much in separate water-tight compartments until each has ceased to see anything but the beam in the other"s eye. In Calcutta they have been far more rarely drawn together in commercial and industrial co-operation, and they have rubbed up less frequently against each other in healthy compet.i.tion than, for instance, in Bombay. It is one of the most promising features of the new reforms that the Europeans, who have hitherto taken very little interest in anything that was not directly connected with their own business or their own amus.e.m.e.nts, have been at last roused to play the part which it is their duty as well as their right to play in the political life of the country, and the men who have been returned to sit in the new Councils as the representatives of the European community seem to realise fully, the importance of the task that is before them in giving a practical example of what the helpful co-operation of Europeans with Indians can do to promote the healthy political life of the country.
In social service there is an equally large field of co-operation of which Calcutta has also provided an interesting ill.u.s.tration. In no other city in India are University students, of whom there are nearly as many--some 26,000--at the one university of Calcutta as in all the universities of Great Britain put together, thrown so much on their own resources without any guidance or control. The bulk of them may never come in contact even with European professors, let alone with the European community in general. What opportunities have they of forming any opinion for themselves of what our civilisation stands for, except possibly through the medium of cheap cinemas in which its worst and most vulgar features are thrust before them? Bengalee youths are extraordinarily quick to respond to the best European influence when it has once established contact with them. Some teachers do secure a strong personal hold upon them, most of all in the missionary and other hostels where they live under the same roof with them, take part in their games as well as in their studies, and encourage them to express their own opinions freely and fearlessly. There relations of mutual friendship and confidence grow up and endure. In this respect the Y.M.C.A., in which Indian Christians act in close co-operation with broad-minded Englishmen, has done admirable work, and none better and with more definite and immediate results than when Government turned to them for a.s.sistance last year in the difficult situation created by the royal amnesty which required the immediate liberation of nearly a thousand young Bengalees who, having been more or less concerned in conspiracies and dacoities during the troublous years before the war, had been interned after its outbreak under administrative orders. In many cases they had broken with their families, who were not inclined to take them back. Many had no means of earning a livelihood. To let them loose upon the world without any provision for them would have been to drive them to desperation. The Y.M.C.A. stepped into the breach. They were given the use of an internment camp which German war _detenus_ had vacated, and with the help of Mr. B.C. Chatterjee, who was well known to that particular cla.s.s of Indians for having constantly appeared as counsel for the defendants in the innumerable political prosecutions of the preceding decade, and had himself formed an Indian Committee for a similar purpose, they induced a large number of these young fellows to come to them. They were at first rather distrustful, but Mr.
Chatterjee"s political past and the warm-hearted sympathy of Mr. Rahu, an Indian Y.M.C.A. worker who was placed in charge of the hostel, soon disarmed their suspicions. They learnt to appraise at their real value the malicious rumours set afoot to prejudice them against their new friends, and began to respond cordially to a generous treatment, physical and moral, which was so unlike all that they had heard about Western methods. They were given food and lodging, newspapers, magazines, and books, and, when necessary, medical advice and care. They had opportunities of learning a trade and securing employment as well as facilities for indoor and outdoor recreation, and carefully planned social gatherings helped to restore their self-respect and confidence.
To their credit be it said, their conduct was unexceptionable, and not a single complaint was received with regard to any of those who thus found a new start in life. One could well credit the a.s.surance that they were all as much opposed to any reversion to "Non-co-operation" as Sir Surendranath Banerjee himself.
Much must always depend upon the example set by those in authority not only as administrators but as the natural leaders of both European and Indian society. Lord Ronaldshay, whose appointment as Governor of Bengal was not at first very well received by the politically minded Indians in Calcutta, has succeeded by patient effort in convincing them that they have a genuine as well as a candid friend in him, and even his social popularity is due not merely to the generosity of his hospitality but to the keen interest he takes, amongst other things, in the renascence of Indian art in which Bengal has taken the lead. There is amongst Europeans in India a good deal of Philistine contempt for all Indian forms of culture, and Indians are surprised and grateful when Governors like Lord Ronaldshay, and his predecessor, Lord Carmichael, frankly acknowledge that whilst Indian painting and Indian music are ruled by other canons than those of the West, they pursue none the less high ideals along different paths. What Indians look for too often in vain from Europeans is any hearty attempt either to understand them or to make them understand us. The influence which Lord Ronaldshay had acquired by such forms of co-operation with the Indian mind stood him and the Bengal Provincial Council in good stead when he had on one occasion to appeal to it to reconsider its hasty refusal of a grant in which it would have been impossible for Government to acquiesce, lest he should be driven to override it by the exercise of the statutory powers vested in him. He gave it to be understood that, if they became frequent, such conflicts of opinion between him and the Council would put an end to his usefulness either to the Government or to the Presidency, and he would feel justified in demanding his release from responsibilities he would no longer be able satisfactorily to discharge.
The Council was wise enough to take the hint and not to risk losing a Governor who had done so much to earn the confidence of Bengal, and by correcting an error of judgment, due chiefly to inexperience, it confirmed the victory which had been won over "Non-co-operation" at the polls.
Even in the storm-tossed Punjab the new Provincial Council made a better start than might have been expected from the temper of Lah.o.r.e and the other large centres still brooding over the bitter memories of 1919. In the Punjab and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, formerly itself part of the Punjab--but excluded from the operation of the new Government of India Act and therefore lying outside this survey--the _Khilafat_ agitation has gone deeper than probably in any other part of India amongst large and very backward Mahomedan populations. Yet upon the Punjab itself so cruel a lesson has not been lost as that taught to thousands of unfortunate Mahomedan peasants in the Frontier Province who were persuaded to give up their lands and trek into Afghanistan to seek the blessings of Mahomedan rule, and came back starved and plundered from their ill-starred exodus undertaken for the sake of Islam. In Lah.o.r.e and in the other chief urban const.i.tuencies "Non-co-operation," with its usual methods of combined persuasion and intimidation, was so far successful that not 5 per cent of the electors went to the poll. In some of the Mahomedan rural const.i.tuencies the attendances at the polls were, on the other hand, fairly large, especially in those where the influence of old conservative families was still paramount. Altogether the Punjab Provincial Council is perhaps less representative of the whole electorate than in any other province in India. Some official ingenuity had been displayed in grouping remote towns together without any regard for geography, in order to prevent townsmen undesirably addicted to advanced political views from standing as candidates for the rural const.i.tuencies in which many of the smaller towns would otherwise have been naturally merged. This was a last effort based on the old belief that the population of the Punjab could be divided into goats and sheep, the goats being the "disloyal" townsmen and the sheep being the "loyal" peasantry. There may have been substance in that belief before 1919, but how little there is in it now has been shown by the large majority who, in an a.s.sembly in which it is just the rural const.i.tuencies that are most effectively represented, pa.s.sed a Resolution for the remission of the fine imposed on Amritsar to punish the disorders in that city, already amply punished, they considered, at Jallianwala. The presence in the new Government of Mr. Harkishen Lal, himself condemned two years ago under martial law to transportation for life and treated for months as a common criminal, has done more than anything else perhaps to restore public confidence. He was elected to the Council, not by political firebrands, but by a sober const.i.tuency specially const.i.tuted to represent the Punjab Industries, and in courageously choosing him to be one of his new Ministers, the Governor, Sir Edward MacLagan, gave a striking demonstration, of which the effect has not been confined to the Punjab, of the profound change that has been wrought in the att.i.tude of the official world towards the politically minded cla.s.ses.
An appalling incident last spring showed how quick the fierce races of Northern India are to burst into violent feuds amongst themselves for which no responsibility can be imputed to their alien rulers. The Sikhs, though less numerous than the Hindus and the Mahomedans, form an extremely influential community in the Punjab, which was the cradle and always has been the stronghold of their religion, and was only a century ago the seat of their political and military power. Not many years ago, however, Sikhism, which began in Moghul times as a revolt against the social and religious trammels of Hinduism as well as against Mahomedan domination, seemed to be tending steadily towards resorption into the Hindu system. Its temples, most of them richly endowed, had pa.s.sed out of the control of the community, to whom they in theory belonged, into the possession of lukewarm Mahunts, or inc.u.mbents, many of them half Hinduised and most of them more concerned with the temporal advantages than with the religious duties of their office. Even in the days of the militant Sikh Confederacy under Ranjit Singh, upon whom religion sat rather lightly, there was a growing trend towards laxity of belief and practice, which continued to spread after the British annexation of the Punjab had broken the political power of the Sikhs. Strange to say, the old customs of pure Sikhism survived nowhere so immune from decay as in the Sikh regiments of our Indian Army. But with the growth of Indian Nationalism, which often manifested itself at first in a revival of local and racial patriotism, there arose amongst the Sikhs a vigorous reform movement which aimed at rebuilding their nationhood on the solid foundations of the faith originally preached by their ten Gurus, or religious teachers, and the strict observance of the peculiar customs that were the badge of their faith. The first important step was the opening of the Khalsa College for Sikhs at Amritsar in 1892, which did not, however, fulfil its real purpose until it was gradually emanc.i.p.ated from Government control. A religious Diwan, or a.s.sembly, was const.i.tuted at Lah.o.r.e, to which local bodies were affiliated, with the object of preaching purity of religion and promoting the abolition of caste distinctions and other Hindu influences that had crept back into Sikhism.
In its essence a puritan movement, there was unquestionably a nationalist side to it which tended to render it suspect in the eyes of many Punjab officials, and these suspicions were heightened by the _Gadr_ conspiracy fomented in the second year of the war by a number of Sikhs, who returned from Canada bitterly estranged from British rule by the anti-Asiatic policy of the Dominion and still more by the fiery eloquence of Indian revolutionaries in German pay. But against the disloyalty of a small section must be weighed the loyal war services of the vast majority of Sikhs, and the Punjab Government proudly boasted at the time that there were 80,000 Sikhs serving in the army, a proportion far higher than in the case of any other community. It was doubtless partly in recognition of such war services that in the reforms scheme they were given the benefit of "community" representation in the new Councils on the same lines as the Mahomedans. But with a tenacious memory of the language used years ago by Lord Minto in reply to Mahomedan representations, they still complain that the historical importance and actual influence of their community have not received nearly as full a measure of consideration. Unfortunately, bitterness was revived by the large number of Sikhs amongst General Dyer"s victims at Jallianwala, most of them, according to the Sikh version, innocent country-folk, who had come into Amritsar on that day because it happened to be a Sikh religious holiday, and had merely strayed into the Bagh out of harmless and ignorant curiosity.
The puritan movement struck a dangerous course when it addressed itself to the recovery of the Sikh shrines which it held to have pa.s.sed into the possession of unorthodox and corrupt Mahunts, faithless both to their religious and temporal trust. Considerable success was achieved by the exercise, it was affirmed, of mere moral pressure, though not perhaps always without a display or threat of material pressure behind it in the event of moral pressure proving inadequate. Amongst others, the inc.u.mbent of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the most sacred of all Sikh shrines, was constrained to make a public confession of his wrongdoings and resign his office into the hands of a Reformers"
Committee. Next to Amritsar in wealth and sanct.i.ty came Nankhanda Saheb with a Mahunt to whom the Reformers imputed all kinds of enormities. A great popular demonstration against him had been organised for March 5, and some 150 Sikhs had gone out to make arrangements for sheltering and feeding several thousands in the immediate vicinity of the shrine. The Mahunt had already scented danger and he clearly believed in taking the offensive. He collected some fifty Pathan cut-throats as a Praetorian guard for the temple, and also, for a purpose which was soon to transpire, a very large store of petrol. When the advance party of reformers entered the shrine to perform their morning devotions the gates were closed upon them and over 100 were butchered, and their corpses so effectively soaked in oil and burned that when the District Commissioner and a detachment of troops arrived post-haste on the scene, the victims could scarcely be counted except by the number of charred skulls.
There was a universal thrill of horror and fury, and pa.s.sions rose so high that Government found itself suddenly confronted with a situation which at once put to a severe test the capacity of the new regime to deal with emergencies endangering law and order. That Indian Ministers now shared in the responsibility of government, and that there was a popular a.s.sembly to undertake legislation for composing the differences between the conflicting sections of the Sikh community, helped at least as much to avert still graver troubles as the object-lesson which the Nankhanda Saheb tragedy afforded to thoughtful Punjabees of all creeds.
The ma.s.sacre carried out by a mere handful of Pathans was a grim reminder of the dangers to which the Punjab would be the first to be exposed if the hasty severance of the British connection for which Mr.
Gandhi is clamouring were to leave it defenceless against the flood of lawless savagery that would at once pour down, as so often before in Indian history, from the wild fastnesses of the North-West Frontier.
CHAPTER XI
CROSS CURRENTS IN SOUTHERN INDIA