they say, "to bear our share of the military burdens of the Empire as equal partners in it, and"--as some at any rate add--"we recognise that in view of our geographical position, which lays us almost alone amongst the Dominions open to the dangers of invasion on our land frontiers, we require a larger army for our own defence. But even taking that into account, as well as our inability at present to make any contribution in kind to the naval defence of the Empire, can we be expected to submit to military expenditure absorbing almost half our revenues? Can you point to a single Dominion that is asked to make an annual sacrifice comparable to that? Are we not at least ent.i.tled to claim that the Indian tax-payer"s money should not be spent merely on the maintenance of British garrisons that are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and of an Indian army that is so const.i.tuted as to lack all the essentials of a national army, but should go to the building up of an army really worthy to take its place on equal terms when India attains to self-government with the other armies of a commonwealth of free nations?"
The racial issue dominates in a far graver form the whole question of the status and treatment of Indians in the Dominions and Crown Colonies.
For there it enters a much larger field which extends far beyond India.
In India so far, in speaking of the racial issue, Indians and Europeans alike have hitherto had in mind chiefly the relations between the ruling and the subject race. When the rulers all belong to one race and come from a far distant country not to settle permanently but chiefly to maintain, each one in his own sphere and during his appointed time, the continuity of rulership over millions of subjects of another and very different race with a different civilisation, an additional element of discord is introduced into their relations. But since Great Britain achieved dominion over India the main issue between rulers and ruled has been how far on the one hand British rulers should devolve on to their Indian subjects a share in the government and administration of the country, and how far on the other hand their Indian subjects could hasten such devolution by various forms of pressure. Whatever part any purely racial antagonism may have played in the controversy, the British rulers of India have at least since 1833, and still more since the Queen"s Proclamation in 1858, debarred themselves from basing on racial differences their refusal or reluctance to meet the growing aspirations of their Indian subjects. They have been content to plead the political immaturity of the Indian people and the lack of individual qualifications amongst all but a few Indians, and even these disabilities they had deliberately undertaken and expressed their anxiety to remove by the introduction of Western education. Neither colour nor descent, it was specifically declared, were to const.i.tute any barrier. It is quite otherwise with the question of the right of Indians to immigrate into other parts of the Empire, and of the measure of rights they are to enjoy as settlers there. It brings us face to face with the racial issue pure and simple and in its widest aspects. There is an open and declared conflict between the claims of the Dominions to exclude or to restrict the rights of Indian settlers on grounds of colour and descent for the avowed purpose of maintaining the paramount ascendancy of one race over another, and the claims put forward by Indians as British subjects to have access to all parts of the Empire and to possess the same rights as other British subjects already enjoy there. Some of the arguments employed to justify the att.i.tude of the Dominions allege inferior social standards of Indian life, but behind them and quite undisguised is the supreme argument that Indians belong to a coloured race and, in consequence, have no interests or rights that can possibly prevail against those of a superior white race.
The magnitude of the issue and the resentment which it has caused in India are, it is true, out of all proportion to the actual number of Indians who have immigrated into other parts of the Empire. The Indians are not a migratory people. Mostly engaged in agriculture, they cling, as peasants are apt to do all over the world, to their own bit of land and familiar surroundings. It is difficult even to induce them to move from one part of India to another, and, intensely conservative in their habits and outlook, with no horizon wider than their own village, they generally prefer, even under the stress of economic pressure, the ills they know of. But that does not affect the issue raised in the most acute and naked form in some of the States now forming the South African Union. To Mr. Gandhi"s experiences and struggles in Natal and the Transvaal can be traced back, as I have already shown, a great deal of the bitterness which has now led him to denounce British rule as "Satanic." It is only about fifty years ago that Indians began to go across to South Africa, when the Government of Natal with the consent and a.s.sistance of the Government of India sought to engage Indians to work as indentured labourers on sugar and tea plantations. In 1911, the year of the last census, the number of Indians in the Union was about 150,000, and, immigration having been since then checked and finally stopped, they cannot have increased by more than 10 per cent during the last decade. Of the total in 1911, 133,000 were in Natal, 11,000 in the Transvaal, and 7000 in the Cape, with barely 100 in the Orange Free State. The proportion of Indians to the total European population of the Union, which was then about 1,400,000, was therefore only just over one to ten. But they had not remained merely indentured labourers as at the beginning. When their labour contracts expired many settled in the country, acquiring small plots of land as their own or becoming petty traders, artisans, etc., and, being frugal and hard-working and of a higher type than the Kaffir and other natives, they throve as a whole.
The white population, who had found them at first very useful, began to see in them either dangerous compet.i.tors or an undesirable element calculated to complicate the social problems in a country in which the European formed anyhow but a small minority face to face with 6,000,000 natives. Both the old Boer Government in the Transvaal and the Colonial Government of Natal set to work to curtail by legislative enactments and local regulations the rights which Indians had been at first allowed to enjoy, and to a.s.similate their treatment to that of the lowest and most backward natives. The Indians were systematically subjected to the disabilities and indignities against which Mr. Gandhi for the first time led them to organise a violent agitation and finally to offer pa.s.sive resistance.
The agreement arrived at between General s.m.u.ts and Mr. Gandhi in 1914 was in the nature of a compromise which gave the Indians some relief without conceding the principle of equal rights, and it only brought the long struggle to a temporary close. The old sore was reopened with the Asiatics" Trading and Land Act of 1919, which, the Indians contend, wantonly violated both the terms and the spirit of the 1914 settlement and which Europeans have declared to be "necessary in the interests of a white population." The chief grievances of the Indians are the denial of representation and franchise (except in Cape Colony), their segregation within appointed areas, and the curtailment of their "inherent right to trade." Some Europeans would fain deny that colour prejudice affects their view of the problem, which they regard as essentially eugenic and economic. As far as the mixture of races is concerned the European"s objections to it should be readily understood by the Indians, whose own caste laws are as rigidly directed as any in the world against the drawbacks of miscegenation. The European, however, has legislated not to prevent mixed marriages but to arrest the general depression of the standards of life--low wages, a lower standard of skill in skilled trades, and low housing conditions which, he alleges, have resulted from the unrestricted influx of a large coloured population into the towns--and he uses the term "coloured" to include the Indians. With regard to the restrictions of trade licences he deduces the necessity for them from the economic effects of unrestricted compet.i.tion which has led, he declares, to the bankruptcy of European firms, to their displacement in the same premises by Indians, and to the depreciation of European property. But, the Indian replies, if Indians have thriven in South Africa in the past it is because they work harder and live more frugally, and if they flourish more especially as traders it is because Europeans, finding it to their interest to trade with them, have been their best customers. Apart from the material ruin which South African legislation has brought upon many Indians, what they most deeply resent is unquestionably its specifically racial character. They may suffer fewer personal disabilities as to travelling on railways and in tram-cars and walking on street pavements than they did a few years ago, when very special precautions had to be taken to prevent such a distinguished Indian as Mr. Gokhale being exposed to them during his visit to South Africa. But they still suffer, they complain, under the supreme indignity of racial discrimination with which South African legislation is openly stamped. Repatriation could only take place slowly even if the cost of compensation, which no fair-minded European could then reasonably deny, were not in itself an almost insurmountable obstacle. From the merely practical point of view the question therefore is now reduced to the discovery of a _modus vivendi_ for the Indian community now in South Africa, and it would be very near a solution if legislation to secure the economic and eugenic standards on which the Afrikander lays so much stress were so framed as to apply to the whole population, even should it in practice bear more heavily on the Indian than on the European, if the former less frequently rose to the required standards. A similar solution would remove the sense of grievance arising out of the denial of the franchise in Natal and the Transvaal, of which the injustice seems to Indians to be merely heightened by the fact that it has been given to them in Cape Colony, where they form a much smaller minority. But there is no sign that the temper of the South African Union, in which British and Dutch are united on no issue more firmly than on this one, will abate its claim to treat the Indians within its borders as an inferior race that has no rights to be weighed against the interests, real or a.s.sumed, of the superior white race.
The Government of India has never questioned the reality of Indian grievances in South Africa. In 1903, shortly after the Boer war, Lord Curzon strongly urged the British Government to enforce their redress in the Transvaal whilst it was still governed as a Crown Colony. At the end of 1913, when the struggle was most acute, Lord Hardinge expressed his sympathy with a frankness and warmth which fluttered Ministerial dovecots both at home and in the Union. Since then Indian troops have fought during the war side by side with South African troops, and the representatives of India have sat in the War and Peace Councils of the Empire side by side with Ministers of the South African Union. So long as South African legislation bears the impress of racial discrimination the Government of India is bound to maintain its opposition to it, and the more fully it voices Indian opinion under the new const.i.tution, the more emphatic its opposition must be.
In other Dominions the Indian question is much less acute, as there has never been anything like the same amount of Indian immigration, and it is now practically stopped. But it must be remembered that it was the return to India of a large number of Sikhs who were refused permission to land in British Columbia that was the signal for grave disorders in the Punjab in the second year of the war. And not so long ago the Aga Khan, as well known in London as in India, had to give up visiting Australia in view of the many humiliating formalities to which as an Asiatic he would have been subjected before being allowed to land there.
It is surely not beyond the resources of statesmanship to devise at least a scheme by which Indians of good repute who wish to travel for purposes of business or study, or for the mere satisfaction of a legitimate curiosity to see other parts of the Empire, should be free to do so without any restraints on the score of race. The att.i.tude of the other Dominions seems certainly to be at present far less uncompromising than that of the South African Union, and one may look forward with some confidence to an agreement by which the rights of Indians already settled in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada will obtain sufficient recognition to satisfy Indian self-respect.
The Indian question is not, however, confined to the Dominions. It is unfortunately in some of the Crown Colonies that it has recently a.s.sumed an even more serious aspect than in South Africa, inasmuch as in the Crown Colonies the British Government is directly responsible for the treatment of Indians, whilst only indirectly in a Dominion, where the primary responsibility rests with the Dominion Government. The question of Indian indentured labour in Fiji, British Guiana, and some other smaller colonies is of lesser importance, though Indians have been deeply moved by stories of ill-treatment inflicted upon them by European planters, and indenture itself is held nowadays to connote a state almost of servitude incompatible with Indian national self-respect.
There the Government of India has a remedy in its own hands. It can stop, and is stopping, the export of Indian labour to those colonies.
Far graver is the situation that has only recently been created for Indians in the Crown Colony of East Africa, known since the war as Kenia. Indians were settled in that part of Africa even before British authority was ever established there, and Mr. Churchill, now Secretary of State for the Colonies, himself admitted some years ago, after his travels in that part of the world, that without the Indians the country would never have reached its present stage of development and prosperity. Whilst if in the case of a self-governing Dominion the British Government can at least urge, as an excuse for its acquiescence in the disabilities imposed upon Indians, that it cannot override the const.i.tutionally expressed will of the Dominion people, it can plead no such excuse where a Crown Colony is concerned over which its authority is absolute and final. This is indeed the point on which the Government of India laid stress last winter in a long and closely reasoned despatch elaborating the view already formally enunciated by the Viceroy that in a Crown Colony Indians have a const.i.tutional right to equality of status with all other British subjects. That right has, it is contended, been violated in Kenia in regard more especially to the three major questions of franchise, segregation, and land ownership. At the very moment when, in India, elected a.s.semblies have been created under a new const.i.tution on the broadest possible franchise, the Legislative Council of Kenia, with a population of 35,000 Indians and only 11,000 Europeans, is so const.i.tuted that it has only two Indian members out of fourteen, whilst of the remaining twelve, eleven are European and one represents the very backward Arab community. Land ownership in the uplands has been reserved exclusively for Europeans on the plea that the climate of the lowlands to which the Indians are relegated is more suitable for them than for Europeans. Yet the climatic argument is itself disregarded when, even in the lowlands, racial segregation is enforced in areas reserved there too for Europeans alone. The representations of the Government of India have commanded the attention they deserve, and the Colonial Office has sent out instructions to the Kenia authorities to suspend all segregation measures. The whole question will, one may hope, be reopened and settled on a new basis of justice for Indians. The British settlers will surely themselves recognise, on further consideration, that their interests cannot be allowed to override the far larger obligations of Great Britain to the people of India.
The question of the treatment of Indians in the Crown Colonies is one that has to be settled between the British Government and the Government of India, and it could not therefore come before the Imperial Cabinet--or Conference--recently attended by the Prime Ministers of all the Dominions a.s.sembled in London. But in regard to that question in the Dominions, Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, one of India"s representatives, laid down in their presence firmly and plainly the principle on which all Indians are at one:
There is no conviction more strongly in our minds than this, that a full enjoyment of citizenship within the British Empire applies not only to the United Kingdom but to every self-governing Dominion within its compa.s.s. We have already agreed to a subtraction from the integrity of the rights by the compromise of 1918 to which my predecessor, Lord Sinha, was a party--that each Dominion and each self-governing part of the Empire should be free to regulate the composition of its population by suitable immigration laws. On that compromise there is no intention whatever to go back, but we plead on behalf of those who are already fully domiciled in the various self-governing Dominions according to the laws under which those Dominions are governed--to these peoples there is no reason whatever to deny the full rights of citizenship--it is for them that we plead, where they are lawfully settled, that they must be admitted into the general body of citizenship, and no deduction must be made from the rights that other British subjects enjoy.
In commending the matter to his audience for earnest consideration and satisfactory settlement, Mr. Srinivasa Sastri spoke with the added authority of his position as a member of the Indian Legislature and one of the ablest leaders of the Moderate party. "It is," he said, "of the most urgent and pressing importance that we should be able to carry back a message of hope and of good cheer." He will have to report to the Legislature on his mission when he returns to India, and no part of his report will be looked for with more anxiety or more closely scrutinised.
Indians have already demonstrated their willingness to recognise accomplished facts and to accept in practice any reasonable settlement which does not strike fatally at the principle laid down by Mr.
Srinivasa Sastri, not only on behalf of his fellow-countrymen, but in the name of the Government of India, which here again has acted as a national Indian Government. South Africa, it may be, will nevertheless persist in subordinating to a narrow conception of her own interests the higher interests of Imperial unity, which, if it ever ceased to include India, would a.s.suredly be a much poorer thing. It is all the more essential that if India"s faith in the Empire is not to be, perhaps irretrievably, shaken, South Africa should remain, in her refusal to honour the pledge of partnership given to India on behalf of the whole Empire, a solitary exception amongst the self-governing Dominions, and that the United Kingdom, whose responsibility to India is most directly involved, should insist that the pledge be redeemed to the full in the Crown Colonies which are under the immediate and direct control of the Imperial Government.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] August 1921.
CHAPTER XV
THE INCLINED PLANE OF GANDHIISM
Those who have persistently derided the "Non-co-operation" movement and announced its imminent collapse have been scarcely less wide of the mark than Mr. Gandhi himself when he began to predict that it would bring _Swaraj_ to India by a date, not always quite the same, but always less than a year distant. The original programme of "Non-co-operation" has. .h.i.therto failed egregiously. Only very few lawyers have abandoned their practice in "Satanic" law-courts at his behest, still fewer Indians have surrendered the distinctions conferred on them by Government. A mischievous ferment has been introduced once more into Indian schools and colleges. Some youths have foolishly wrecked their own future, or seen it wrecked for them, by attempts to boycott and obstruct the examinations on which their career so often depends. But neither have Mr. Gandhi and his followers destroyed the schools and colleges against which they have waged war, nor created in anything more than embryo, and in extremely few places, the "national" schools and colleges that were to take their place. Even Rabindranath Tagore, whose poetic imagination was at first fired by Mr. Gandhi"s appeal to renounce the t.i.tle of knighthood awarded to him in recognition of his literary genius, has had enough practical experience of education, as he himself has conceived and carried it into execution on his own quite original lines, to be driven at last to admit that Indian youths are asked to bring their patriotic offering of sacrifice, "not to a fuller education, but to non-education." With his craving for metaphysical accuracy of expression, he has even denounced the "no" of "Non-co-operation" as "in its pa.s.sive moral form asceticism, and in its active moral form violence." The conclusion wrung from his reluctant idealism is one at which the large majority of sober-minded Indians arrived long before the poet. They gave effect to it as voters at the elections in defiance of Mr. Gandhi"s boycott, and their representatives gave effect to it in the legislatures which Mr. Gandhi no less vainly boycotted.
Yet in spite of Mr. Gandhi"s repeated failures "Non-co-operation" is not dead. It has a widespread organisation, with committees in every town and emissaries particularly active in the large villages and in many rural districts. It had the enthusiastic support at Nagpur of the large a.s.semblage that still retains the name, but little else, of the old Indian National Congress. It does not lack funds, for Mr. Gandhi professes to have gathered in the crore of rupees which he asked for within the appointed twelvemonth. It controls a large part of the Indian Press, though mostly of the less reputable type, more vituperative and mendacious, in spite of all Indian Press laws, than anything conceived of in this country where there are no Press laws. Mr. Gandhi himself goes on preaching "Non-co-operation" with unabated conviction and unresting energy, the same picture always of physical frailty and unconquerable spirit, travelling all over the country in crowded third-cla.s.s carriages, worshipped by huge crowds that hang on his sainted lips--and pausing only in his feverish campaign to spend a short week at Simla in daily conference with Lord Reading. That the new Viceroy should have thought it advisable almost immediately after his arrival in India to hold such prolonged intercourse with Mr. Gandhi is the best proof that the Mahatma is no mere dreamer whose influence is evanescent, but a power to be reckoned with. The Simla interviews did not seem to have been entirely fruitless when Mr. Gandhi extracted from his chief Mahomedan lieutenants, the brothers Ali, a disavowal, however half-hearted, of any intention to incite to violence in certain speeches delivered by them for which they would otherwise have had to be prosecuted. It looked as if he had made a more effective stand than on other occasions against the importation of violence into "Non-co-operation," and proved the reality of the influence which he is believed to have all along exercised to curb his Mahomedan followers who do not share his disbelief in violence. But Simla only deflected him for a short time from his dangerous course.
In the whole of this strange movement nothing is more mysterious than the hold which Mr. Gandhi has over Mahomedans as well as Hindus, though the wrongs of Turkey, which are ever in his mouth, touch only very remotely the great ma.s.s of Indian Mahomedans, whilst the old antagonism of the two communities is still simmering and bubbling and apt to boil over on the slightest provocation. Collisions are most frequent during religious festivals, especially if they happen to be held by both communities at the same time. The chief stone of offence for Hindus is the sacrifice of cows, the most sacred to them of all animals, without which the Mahomedans consider their great annual festival of _Bakar-Id_ cannot be complete. Mahomedans, on the other hand, to whom musical instruments as an accompaniment to religious worship are abhorrent, are often driven wild when Hindu processions pa.s.s with their bands playing in front of a mosque. Only four years ago, when the compact between the National Congress and the Moslem League was still quite fresh, riots broke out simultaneously during the _Bakar-Id_ over a great part of the Patna district, which were only suppressed after a large tract of some forty miles square had pa.s.sed into the hands of the Hindu mobs, when a considerable military force reached the scenes of turmoil and disorder, for the like of which, according to the Government Resolution, it was necessary to go back over a period of sixty years to the days of the great Mutiny. It would be of little purpose to enumerate many other instances of disorders on a lesser scale that have occurred since then in connection with cow-killing. When staying for a few days last winter in Nellore, a small town in the Madras Presidency, _i.e._ in a part of India noted for its quietude, I had a pertinent ill.u.s.tration of the often trivial but none the less dangerous forms that the persistent animosity between Hindus and Mahomedans can a.s.sume. In Nellore, itself a very sleepy hollow, the Mahomedans are not quite in such a hopelessly small minority as they generally are in Southern India, for they number about 6000 out of 30,000 inhabitants. The few "Non-co-operationists" in the place, Hindu and Mahomedan, professed to have formed a "Reconciliation Committee" to prevent their co-religionists from flying at each other"s throats. Their efforts were not, however, sufficient to relieve the local authorities from the necessity of putting some of the police on special service for the protection of respectable Hindu traders of the same caste as Mr. Gandhi himself in their daily comings and goings through certain quarters of the city against the more unruly of their Mahomedan fellow-citizens. The usual bad feeling had been exacerbated by an affray, already the best part of a year old, when one of the Hindu processions from the four great temples of the city perversely altered its accustomed route and pa.s.sed down the streets leading to the chief mosque with bands defiantly playing, and a party of Mahomedans lying in wait for them rushed out and a.s.saulted them with brick-bats, until they were dispersed by a few rifle-shots from the police. Apart from such major provocation, each side indulges in minor pin-p.r.i.c.ks that keep up a constant irritation. It is an old custom at both Hindu and Mahomedan festivals for youths to dress up as tigers and lions, who add an element of terror to the pageant by roaring to order.
Of late years each community has tried to deny to the other the right to introduce this element of frightfulness into its processions, and these harmless wild beasts have frequently been made to repent of their disguise with bruised bodies and broken heads. In one large village in the Nellore district serious trouble arose over an attempt on the part of the Mahomedans to halt their procession for the purpose of distributing "jaggery" water in close proximity to an enclosure set apart by the Hindus for the nuptials of their G.o.d and G.o.ddess at an annual marriage festival, and the _Taluk_ magistrate had to issue a formal order, enforced by policemen on special duty, forbidding the Mahomedans to place the objectionable pot of water within twenty feet of the wedding enclosure. In all such cases both sides appeal promptly for help to the authorities, and one of the chief and not least wearisome of the British administrator"s tasks is to be for ever on the watch in order if possible to avert, by timely suasion and measures of precaution, the serious trouble that may at any moment arise out of trifles which to the European mind must seem grotesquely insignificant.
Indians themselves admit that it is an even more difficult task for them, as Indian-born officials must almost always belong to one or other of the two communities, and their impartiality be therefore congenitally suspect to one side or the other.
There can be no worthier purpose for either government or public men or private individuals to pursue than a real reconciliation between two great communities estranged, not only by fundamentally different religious beliefs and traditions, but by enduring memories of century-long conflicts and of the very often oppressive domination of Mahomedan rulers over conquered Hindu peoples held down in spite of their numerical superiority by the sheer weight of superior force. There may have been Englishmen who, believing in the shallow maxim _Divide ut imperes_, have relied on that estrangement to fortify British rule; but such has never been the principle of British policy. It has constantly sought, on the contrary, to prevent and suppress as far as possible disorders which, whenever they break out afresh, inevitably revive and quicken the ancient antagonism, and to attenuate it, slowly but steadily, by the exercise of even-handed justice and the pacifying influences of education and the rule of law.
Has the alliance between Mr. Gandhi and the Ali brothers or the fusion between the Congress and League Extremists, Hindu and Mahomedan, proved more effective? How far down has this Hindu and Mahomedan fraternisation really reached that is based above all on common hatred of a "Satanic"
Government? How far has it even temporarily checked the instinctive tendency of the ma.s.ses in both communities to break away from their allies and go for each other rather than for that common enemy against whom "Non-co-operation" bids them combine? Frequent outbreaks continue to reveal from time to time the _ignes cineri suppositos doloso_. They mostly follow the same course. _Khilafat_ agitators terrorise the law-abiding population, extorting subscriptions for _Khilafat_ funds, compelling shopkeepers to close their shops for _Khilafat_ demonstrations, and so forth, until they are driven to appeal to the authorities for protection. Then an attempt is made to arrest some of the ringleaders or to disarm the _Khilafat_ "volunteers," who, when they have no more modern weapons, know how to use their _lathis_ or heavy iron-tipped staves with often deadly effect. Rioting starts on a large scale to the cry of "Religion! Religion!" the small local police force is helpless, and very soon the whole fury of the Mahomedan mob turns against the Hindus, as at Malegaon, in the Bombay Presidency, where they set a Hindu temple on fire and threw into the flames the body of an unfortunate Hindu sub-inspector of police who had been vainly attempting to save a Hindu quarter from arson. Troops are hurried up from the nearest military station, and usually as soon as they appear order is restored with the employment of a minimum amount of force. Numerous arrests are made, and a few of the local firebrands are ultimately prosecuted and convicted. But at "Non-co-operation" headquarters the _Khilafat_ propaganda goes on undisturbed, and all the appearances of Hindu-Mahomedan unity are ostentatiously kept up. Mr. Mahomed Ali preaches to Hindus as well as to Mahomedans that it will be their duty to give the Ameer of Afghanistan every a.s.sistance in their power when he descends with his armies to rescue India from her foreign oppressors. An All-India _Khilafat_ Conference announces that, if the British Government fights openly or secretly against the Turkish Nationalists at Angora, the Indian National Congress will proclaim the Republic of India at its next session, and meanwhile declares it unlawful for any Mahomedan to serve in the Indian army, since a "Satanic" Government may at any moment use it to fight against Mustafa Kemal"s forces at Angora.
It is impossible to believe that on such lines "Non-co-operation" can bring Mahomedans and Hindus permanently together, or can drag the bulk of the sober and conservative Mahomedan community away from its solid moorings, but the effect of such appeals to the turbulent and fanatical elements, more numerous and more easily roused amongst Mahomedans than amongst Hindus, spreads and grows with the impunity conceded to them.
If, on the other hand, the Hindus may be on the whole less p.r.o.ne to violence than the Mahomedans, with whom the sword is still the symbol of their faith, the grave agrarian disturbances which have twice this year resulted from the "Non-co-operation" campaign in the United Provinces, and other disorders of a similar kind on a less serious scale in other provinces, show that Hindus too are not proof against temptations to violence. Mr. Gandhi may go on preaching non-violence, and he may himself still disapprove of violence and refuse to believe that his teachings, as interpreted at least by many of his followers, are as certain to produce violence as the night is to produce darkness; but that "Non-co-operation" more and more frequently spells violence is beyond dispute, and more and more faint-hearted--to put it very mildly--are his reprobations of violence.
The most threatening feature of the "Non-co-operation" movement, now that it has failed so completely in its appeal to the better and more educated cla.s.ses, is that it is concentrating all its energies on the ignorant and excitable ma.s.ses. If one takes a long view of India"s progress under the new dispensation, it may well be a source of satisfaction and encouragement that the insane lengths to which "Non-co-operation" has gone have served at least to drive in a deep wedge between the Moderates and the Extremists. But in the immediate future "Non-co-operation" may prove not less but more formidable because, except with a few eccentrics, it has lost whatever hold it may have had for a time on the politically minded _intelligentsia_, and feels, therefore, no longer under any restraint in addressing itself to hungry appet.i.tes and primitive pa.s.sions amongst the backward Hindu ma.s.ses as well as amongst Mahomedans. That it has not appealed to them in vain there are increasingly ominous indications in such wanton destruction as the firing of immense areas of forest in the k.u.moon district of the United Provinces. For the G.o.ds to be worshipped in fear and trembling are the G.o.ds that revel in, and can only be placated by, destruction. Wherever there are local discontents--and such there must always be in a vast country and amongst vast populations that too often have a hard struggle for bare existence--"Non-co-operation" is at once on the spot to envenom the sores. Economic conditions aggravated by the great rise in prices for all the necessaries of life since the Great War press heavily on the most helpless cla.s.ses. The vitality of the whole population has been depressed for years past by the ravages of the plague, now fortunately much abated, which have carried off about eight million lives within the last two decades, and by the still more appalling ravages of two epidemics of influenza which in 1918 within one twelvemonth carried off some six or seven millions of lives, mostly in their very best years, and left many more millions of lives either older or younger wretchedly enfeebled. Add to all this the many direct and indirect reactions of the general unrest which in so many different forms has spread over the whole face of the globe, and of the particular forms of political unrest which have kept India in periodical ferment since 1905, constantly fed by violent speeches and by a still more violent vernacular press. All these discontents "Non-co-operation" has set itself to link up to a common purpose by inflaming racial hatred, stirred as never since the Mutiny by the story, bad enough in itself and unscrupulously distorted and exaggerated, of the events in the Punjab which has been for two years the trump card of the Extremists, with an additional appeal to the religious fanaticism of the Mahomedans in the alleged wrong done to their faith by the Turkish peace terms.
Consciously and unconsciously Mr. Gandhi has lent his saintly countenance to all these menacing features of the "Non-co-operation"
movement, and given them a religious sanction which captures many who would not have succ.u.mbed but for their faith in a Mahatma who can do and say no wrong.
One of the weapons of "Non-co-operation" which Mr. Gandhi has lately sharpened up is the boycott of British imported goods, now reiterated and clearly defined in relation first of all to British textiles. Not only must the Indian wear nothing but home-spun cotton cloth, but the Indian importer must cease to do any business with British firms, and Indian mills must forgo their profits in order to help the boycott. Mr.
Gandhi has inaugurated the boycott by presiding over huge sacrificial bonfires of imported cloth on the seash.o.r.e at Bombay, amidst the acclamations of vast crowds all wearing the little "Gandhi" white cap which is the badge of "Non-co-operation." This is the same mad form of _Swadeshi_ that Mr. Tilak preached over twenty years ago in the Deccan, and the Anti-Part.i.tion agitators over fifteen years ago in Bengal. It failed in both cases. Is it less likely to fail to-day when post-war economic conditions both in England and in India militate still more strongly against its success, however much it may for a time appeal to Indian sentiment and to the disgust of Indian traders with Government"s currency and exchange policy? Mr. Gandhi admitted it was impracticable unless carried out in the spirit of religious self-sacrifice for the Motherland, which impelled him even to veto the suggestion made by some of his own followers that the existing stocks of imported cloth, instead of being burnt, should be given away in charity to the poor. He may himself really dream of an India from whose face the busy cities built up by European enterprise, and the railways, the telegraphs, and every other symbol of a Satanic civilisation shall have disappeared, and Indians shall all be content to lead in their own primitive villages the simplest of simple lives clad only in the produce of their handlooms, fed only on the fruits of their own fields, and governed only by their own _panchayats_ in accordance with Vedic precepts and under the protection of their favourite G.o.ds. But how many Extremists who shelter behind his name are not already speculating on the failure of the _Swadeshi_ movement to which their dupes are committed, in order that when disillusionment comes it shall add to the area of popular discontent in which racial hatred is most easily sown? Non-payment of taxes is another of the weapons which "Non-co-operation" has threatened to use, and it includes non-payment of the land-tax which would directly incite the whole agricultural population to lawlessness, and an attack upon excise revenue which in the shape of a temperance movement, in itself perfectly commendable, has already led to many cases of indefensible violence, chiefly in the urban industrial centres. He has not yet committed himself openly to "civil disobedience" on the scale for which many Extremists are already clamouring, but he has started on an inclined plane along which he may not have the power, or even the will, to arrest his descent. Much will depend on this year"s monsoon. If the rains are good and the harvests abundant, the peasants, relieved for the time from the pressure of the economic struggle, will be less inclined to take--even at his behest--the risk of refusing payment of taxes. Should there unfortunately be another bad season following on last year"s partial failure,[5] the temptation may prove irresistible if reinforced by the religious exaltation which Mr. Gandhi knows so well how to call forth. Deep down, too, there is always the latent antagonism of all the irreconcilable elements in an ancient civilisation of which British rule no more than Mahomedan domination, and in still earlier times the spiritual revolt of Buddhism, has shaken the hold upon the Hindu ma.s.ses.
By a strange fatality the confidence of the inarticulate millions upon which we have hitherto prided ourselves has been turned into bitterness and hatred hitherto unknown amongst large sections of them at the very moment when we have for the first time regained in a large measure the confidence of the _intelligentsia_, and we have to reckon with the possibility of popular disturbances which may call for strong action just when on broad grounds of policy any resort to force must be specially undesirable. One of the retributions which always overtake such mistakes in the manner of employing force as were made two years ago in the Punjab is that the actual employment of force, however legitimate, becomes discredited. The Government of India realises--and no one probably more fully than Lord Reading after his visit to Amritsar--that with the Punjab fresh in their memories, even Indian Moderates must require very strong evidence before they give any willing support to the employment of force, even if circ.u.mstances arise to make it inevitable for the mere maintenance of public order which no government can allow to be wantonly imperilled. Such evidence is acc.u.mulating only too fast. When the time comes for action, the existence of a responsible body of Indian opinion, const.i.tutionally organised, and const.i.tutionally represented in the new Legislatures, will give Government the moral backing and the moral courage which failed it with disastrous results in 1919.
It is sad to see a man of Mr. Gandhi"s immense power for good drifting into such deep waters. Mr. Gokhale, who had given him his enthusiastic support in South Africa, warned him on his return to India that methods of agitation and pa.s.sive resistance which were permissible there under great provocation, and had been used by him with considerable success, would be quite unwarranted in India where they would only lead to disaster. Mr. Gokhale died soon afterwards and Mr. Gandhi has disregarded his advice. At times he has given signs of profound discouragement and talked of retiring to the Himalayas to spend the rest of his days in meditation, as pious Hindus not infrequently do. At times in a more worldly mood he seems to be playing for a crown of martyrdom, and he was perhaps bidding for it when soon after a series of interviews with the Viceroy, conducted on both sides with perfect courtesy, he replied to the official announcement of the impending visit of the Prince of Wales to India by proclaiming it to be the duty of Indians to boycott the heir to the Throne in the same way in which he had exhorted them last winter to boycott the Duke of Connaught. He must certainly have been bidding for it when in the course of a raging and tearing temperance campaign in Bombay he declared, it seems, that liquor shops must be closed even if it cost rivers of blood. Government has so far wisely shrunk from adding to his halo as a saint that of a "confessor and martyr." But he may yet force Government"s hands.[6] For there must be limits to the impunity granted even to a Mahatma who professes and preaches the doctrine of _Ahimsa_, but whose footsteps are dogged by violence which is the negation of _Ahimsa_.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Later reports promise a far better monsoon than was at first indicated.
[6] Whilst these pages are going through the press, reports are coming in of a Moplah rising on the Malabar coast, far more ominous than any of the disturbances already referred to in this chapter. The Moplahs are an extremely backward and unruly race, with an infusion of Arab blood, always notorious for their fierce Mahomedan fanaticism, wrought up to a white heat by a recent visit from the two Mahomedan firebrands of "Non-co-operation." The murder of Europeans, the burning and looting of Government buildings, the tearing up of railways and telegraphs, recall the worst excesses committed by Indian mobs two years ago in the Punjab. But on this occasion there has been no Mahomedan-Hindu fraternisation. The Moplahs have vented their _Khilafat_ fury equally upon the helpless Hindu populations of the whole district, who have been slaughtered and plundered or forcibly converted to Islam as in the earliest days of Mahomedan domination.
Hindu members of the Legislative a.s.sembly, realising that their co-religionists owe their safety only to the military forces which are being rushed up by a Satanic Government to arrest a campaign of sheer murder and rapine, may well ask, as Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas has just done, how long such men as Mahomed and Shaukat Ali are to be allowed to go on preaching the doctrines which the Moplahs have so effectively carried into practice. However local this outbreak may remain, it is only another and a more sinister symptom of the widespread upheaval against all const.i.tuted authority into which "Non-co-operation" has degenerated under the leadership of Mr. Gandhi and his Mahomedan allies.
CHAPTER XVI
THE INDIAN PROBLEM A WORLD PROBLEM
A great const.i.tutional experiment, of which the expressed purpose is to bring a self-governing India into full and equal partnership with all other parts of the British Empire, has been courageously launched in deep waters still only partially explored, and it has resisted the first onslaught of a singular combination of malignant forces. It is too early yet to speak with absolute a.s.surance of its enduring success. For success must depend upon many factors outside India as well as within.
All that can be said with confidence is that it has made a far more promising start than might have been looked for even in less unfavourable circ.u.mstances, and many Englishmen, and Indians also, who disliked and distrusted the reforms and would have preferred to stand in the old ways, are coming round to the belief that in their success lies the best and possibly the one real hope for the future. Faith is naturally strongest in those who see in the experiment the natural and logical corollary of that even bolder experiment initiated nearly a hundred years ago when we introduced Western education in India. That was the great turning-point in the history of British rule. We had gone to India with no purpose of seeking dominion, but circ.u.mstances had forced dominion upon us. With dominion had come the recognition of the great responsibilities which it involved, and having imposed upon India our own rule of law we imposed it also upon the agencies through which we then exercised dominion--a self-denying ordinance for ourselves, for Indians a pledge of justice. Dominion pure and simple made room for dominion regarded as a great trust. But when we introduced Western education, we placed upon our trusteeship a new and wider construction.
We invited Indians to enter into intellectual partnership with our own civilisation, and for the purpose, admitted at the time but afterwards sometimes forgotten, of training them to a share in the responsibilities of Indian government and administration. Many Englishmen from that moment contemplated intellectual partnership as the means to political partnership as the end. That was indeed--nearly a century before Mr.
Asquith coined the phrase--"the new angle of vision." The Mutiny distorted it, and it remained obscured when the great experiment was found to result, like all human experiments, in the production of some evil as well as of much good. If the tares may have been sometimes more conspicuous than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them. After many hesitations, and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that intellectual partnership however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partnership. It became, indeed, impossible for us to refuse to do so without being untrue to the principles that had governed not only our own national evolution long before the war, but all our declared war aims and all our appeals, which never went unheeded, to Indian loyalty and co-operation during the war.
The experiment can only succeed if it secures the steadfast and hearty extension to new purposes of the co-operation between British and Indians to which the British connection with India has owed from the very beginning, as I have tried to show, its chief strength and its best results. One may feel confident that amongst the British in India there will be few to deny their co-operation, though scepticism and prejudice may die hard and social relations may prove even harder to harmonise than political relations. The new Const.i.tution was inaugurated under Lord Chelmsford"s Viceroyalty. If he perhaps failed, especially at certain gravely critical moments, to rise above a somewhat narrow and unimaginative conception of his functions as the supreme depositary of British authority in India, and was too apt to regard himself always as merely _primus inter pares_ in a governing body, peculiarly liable from its const.i.tution to hesitate and procrastinate even in emergencies requiring prompt decision, Lord Chelmsford was as upright, honourable, and courageous an English gentleman as this country has ever sent out as Viceroy, and India will always gratefully a.s.sociate his name with the reforms which have opened up a new era in her history. His place has now been taken by another Viceroy, Lord Reading, whose appointment at a time when so many Indians were smarting under a deep sense of injustice has been all the more heartily welcomed as, apart from many other qualifications, he went out to India with the special prestige of a great justiciary who had exchanged for the Viceroyalty the exalted post of Lord Chief Justice of England. Lord Reading"s own liberalism is a sufficient guarantee that he will apply himself with all his approved ability to the carrying out of the new reforms. But, if anything more had been needed, the revised Instrument of Instructions under Royal Sign Manual which he took out with him for his guidance prescribed both for the Government of India and for the Provincial Governments the utmost restraint, "unless grave reason to the contrary appears," in any exercise of the emergency powers still vested in them in opposition to the policy and wishes of the Indian representative a.s.semblies. "For, above all things," His Majesty concluded, "it is Our will and pleasure that the plans laid by Our Parliament for the progressive realisation of responsible government in British India may come to fruition, to the end that British India may attain its due place among Our Dominions."
That in carrying out those instructions Lord Reading will be able to rely on the full support of the British members of his own Executive Council and of the Provincial Governments the most practical proof has been already given in the wise and conciliatory att.i.tude displayed by them during the first session of the new Legislatures in Delhi and in the Provinces, in marked contrast to the sense of impregnable authority too often made manifest when autocratic power was still entrenched behind official majorities voting to order. To the credit of the public services, and not least of the Indian Civil Service, I should add that, if I may venture to judge by the great majority of those I know best, there is now a genuine desire to make the reforms a success, however apprehensive some of them may have formerly been. The change unquestionably often involves considerable sacrifices of power, and even sometimes power for good, as well as of old traditions and prejudices, and such sacrifices come hardest to those whose habits of life and mind are already set, but they are worth making. It is far easier for the younger men who have more recently joined to realise that their opportunities of service to India and to the Empire will, if anything, be greater than before, though they will call for somewhat different qualities, as their influence will now depend more upon capacity to persuade than to give orders. To the non-official British communities the European-elected members of the new a.s.semblies have already given an admirable lead by the cordiality of their personal relations with their Indian colleagues, as well as by such public manifestations of goodwill and sound judgment as their unanimous vote in support of the Indian resolution on Amritsar in the Legislative a.s.sembly. One of the greatest obstacles to fruitful co-operation is racial aloofness, even amongst the best-disposed Indians and Europeans, and every Englishman can on his own account and within his own sphere do something to overcome it.
The visit of the Duke of Connaught last winter to India for the express purpose of representing the King-Emperor at the opening of the new Councils in the three great Presidencies, and of delivering a Royal Message of unprecedented import to the new Indian Legislature in the Imperial capital, bore perhaps its happiest fruits in the personal appeal, prompted by his old love and knowledge of the Indian people, in which he sought to dispel "the shadow of Amritsar" that had "lengthened over the face of India," and did in fact do much to dispel it. The Prince of Wales is to follow this winter not only in the Duke"s recent footsteps, but, as heir to the Throne, in the footsteps of his royal father and grandfather. Even if opinions are divided as to the political expediency of his visit before the clouds that still overhang the Indian horizon have been dispelled, we may rest a.s.sured that his personal qualities will win for him too the affection and reverence which the Indian people are traditionally and instinctively inclined to give to those whom the G.o.ds have invested with the heaven-born attributes of kingship.
That Indian co-operation will not fail us if we persevere in ensuing it, not only in the letter of the great Statute of 1919 but in the spirit of the King-Emperor"s messages to his Indian people, is an a.s.sumption which there is much to justify us in making. But, for the present, it cannot be much more than an a.s.sumption. In support of it we can rely not only, one may hope, on the continued support of large if inarticulate ma.s.ses, and of the old conservative interests that have been content to stand aloof from all political agitation, but also on the fine rally of the great majority of the politically minded cla.s.ses in India whom intellectual partnership has to some extent prepared for political partnership. They still form, unfortunately, but a very small numerical minority. But their influence cannot be measured by mere numbers. If it grew in the past even when we were showing more impatience than sympathy with its aspirations, it may be expected to grow still more rapidly in future under new conditions that give it more recognition and more encouragement. In all countries the impulse to progress has always proceeded from small minorities, and in India the small but active minority from which it has proceeded has been essentially of our own making, since it owes to us all its conceptions of political freedom and national unity and the very language in which it has learnt to express them. Out of the ancient world of India we have raised a new Indian middle cla.s.s, with one foot perhaps still lingering in Indian civilisation but with the other certainly planted in Western civilisation. It has long claimed that its leaders were fit to be the leaders of a nation. We have now conceded that claim. It rests with those leaders to make it good. They have already given proofs of both political wisdom and courage; for it is they who bore the brunt of the battle against the wreckers of the new Const.i.tution during the elections and won it, and it is they who, forming the majority in the new a.s.semblies, have shown sagacity and moderation in the exercise of their new rights and the discharge of their new responsibilities as the means to closer co-operation between Indians and British. But the opposing forces arrayed against co-operation, as I have shown in the previous chapter, are still formidable. They a.s.sume many different shapes. They exploit many different forms of popular discontent. If they have failed to lay hold of the better and more educated cla.s.ses, they have captured in some parts at least the ma.s.ses that were never before anti-British.
They have inflamed the racial hatred which untoward incidents helped to stir up. In Mr. Gandhi they have found a strangely potent leader who appeals to the religious emotions of both Hindus and Mahomedans to shake themselves free from the degrading yoke of an alien civilisation, and implores them to return to the ancient and better ways of India"s own civilisation.
It is just there that Mr. Gandhi strikes a responsive chord in many thoughtful Indians who repudiate him as a political leader. For their faith in either the material or moral superiority of Western civilisation is, one must admit, far less general and deep-seated than it still was only a generation ago. The emergence of j.a.pan and her sweeping victories on land and water over the great European power that tried to humble her dealt the first heavy blow at their belief in the material superiority of the West. Just as severely shaken is their belief in its moral superiority, even with many whose loyalty to the British cause never wavered during the Great War and who still pride themselves on India"s share in its final victory, when they see how the world of Western civilisation has been reft asunder by four years of frightful conflict which drenched all Europe with blood and left half of it at least plunged in black ruin. We have preached to Indians, not untruly, but with an insistence that seems to them now more than ever to savour of self-righteousness, that our superior civilisation redeemed them out of the anarchy and strife which devastated India before British rule brought her peace and order and justice. Now they ask themselves how it comes, then, that the Western civilisation which they are told to thank for their own salvation has not saved Europe itself from the chaos which has overtaken it to-day. Still more searching are the questions that they ask when they see the great powers that have been fortunate enough to emerge victorious from the struggle still postulating the superiority of Western civilisation as sufficient grounds for denying to other races who do not share it or have only recently come under its influence the right to equal treatment. Their gorge rises most of all when Western civilisation actually bases its claim to superiority not on ethical but on racial grounds, and nations that profess to be followers of Christ, Himself of Asiatic birth and descent, carve out the world which He died to save--not for the benefit of one race alone--into water-tight compartments, from some of which the Asiatic is to be excluded by a colour-bar, but to all of which the white man is to have access for such purposes and by such means as he himself deems right. If the British Empire stands for a merely racial civilisation of which the benefit is reserved for the white man only, what, they ask, is the value of a promise of partnership in it when Indians are _ipso facto_ racially disqualified from partnership?
There lies the rub. The argument may have been stated in an extreme form, but it has to be faced, for it goes home to many Indians who would not be moved by Mr. Gandhi"s cruder abuse of a "Satanic" civilisation.