Part 9 (2/2)
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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 _Swades.h.i.+_ 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 _Swades.h.i.+_ 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 trustees.h.i.+p a new and wider construction.
We invited Indians to enter into intellectual partners.h.i.+p 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 partners.h.i.+p as the means to political partners.h.i.+p 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 partners.h.i.+p however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partners.h.i.+p. 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 kings.h.i.+p.
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 partners.h.i.+p has to some extent prepared for political partners.h.i.+p. 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 partners.h.i.+p in it when Indians are _ipso facto_ racially disqualified from partners.h.i.+p?
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.
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