Part 6 (1/2)

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 rulers.h.i.+p. 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 leaders.h.i.+p.

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 fas.h.i.+on religious and political leaders.h.i.+p?

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.