Part 9 (1/2)

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 rulers.h.i.+p 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 statesmans.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p. 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 citizens.h.i.+p 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 citizens.h.i.+p--it is for them that we plead, where they are lawfully settled, that they must be admitted into the general body of citizens.h.i.+p, 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 partners.h.i.+p 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, wors.h.i.+pped 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 wors.h.i.+p 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”