Let us, at any rate, make victory so complete that national liberty, whether for great nations or for small nations, can never be challenged. That is the ordinary law. The small man, the poor man, has the same protection as the powerful man. So the little nation must be as well guarded and protected as the big nation.
David Lloyd George
“The Pan-German Dream,” Speech delivered at Queen’s Hall on the third anniversary of the Declaration of War, August 4, 1917.
The eminent authors of the report have devoted an entire chapter to a consideration of what they call the “conditions of the problem.” These may be considered under two different heads: (a) those that necessitate a rather radical reorganisation of the Government of India; (b) those that prevent the authors from recommending immediate responsible government and justify the limitations of their scheme.
IMMENSITY OF THE PROBLEM AND THE GRAVITY OF THE TASK
Before we take up the two sets of facts relied upon by them in support of either position we may express our general agreement with them as regards the gravity of the task and the immensity of the problem. The size of the country and the vastness of its population are the measure of the extent of the problem. The existence of powerful vested interests at present possessed by the ruling race which may be interfered with by extended changes in the system of Government are the measure of its gravity. “The welfare and happiness of hundreds of millions of people,” which the authors say are in issue cannot be adequately provided for by any autocratic system of Government however benevolent its purpose, and however magnificent its organisation. An “absolute government” is an anachronism, but when it is foreign it is doubly so. To bring out “the best in the people” for their own “welfare and happiness” as well as for that of mankind in general, it is necessary that the people should be free to develop on their own lines, manage their own affairs, evolve their own life, subject only to such restrictions as the general interests of humanity demand; and subject to such guidance as the better placed and more experienced people of the earth can furnish.
The people of India are willing to be guided in their development towards modern democracy by the people of Great Britain and they would be grateful for their coÖperation in this difficult task, but they must be made to realize that the task is their own and that they should undertake it in a spirit of courageous faith—faith in their destiny, faith in their ability to achieve it, and faith in the friendship of the great British nation. The test of all measures in relation to the Government of India in future should be, not how far the people of India can coÖperate, how far they can be entrusted with responsibility, but how far it is necessary in their interests to control and check them. The difference between the two points of view is fundamental and important. Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford have looked at the problem from the former point of view; the Indian leaders want them to look at it from the latter. They want the great British nation to recognise the justice of India’s claim to manage her own affairs, and to keep in their hands in future only such control as is absolutely necessary (a) to enable the Indian people to conduct their business efficiently and successfully, (b) to make them fulfill their obligations to the great Commonwealth of nations of which they hope soon to be a component part. As long as British statesmen insist on looking at the problem from the former point of view, they will make mistakes and raise a not entirely unreasonable suspicion of their motives. The moment they adopt the other point of view, they remove all grounds of distrust and create an atmosphere of friendliness in which they can deal with the problem in a spirit of mutual trust, absolute frankness and candid perspicacity. There are many contentions of the British statesmen which the educated Indians would gladly admit to be valid and necessary were they sure that their admission would not be used against them by the power whom they habitually regard as their adversary. There is much in this report which could at once be struck out if both parties were actuated by feelings of mutual trust and friendliness. It cannot be denied that many of the proposed restrictions on the power of the popular assemblies and the would-be Indian Administrators are the outcome of distrust. It is no wonder then that the Indian leaders in their turn are not quite sure of the face value of the many professions of good will that characterise the scheme. It is for the removal of this distrust that we appeal as earnestly as we can to the better mind of Great Britain.
In looking at the conditions of the problem, there is another fallacy which underlies the oft-exaggerated estimates of the blessings of British rule in India by British statesmen and British publicists. They compare the India of today with the India of 1757 and at once jump to the conclusion that “the moral and material civilisation of the Indian people has made more progress in the last fifty years than during all the preceding centuries of their history.” The proper comparison is of the Great Britain, the France, the United States, the Germany, the Italy and the Japan of 1757, with the India of that year and of India’s progress within the last century and a half, or even within the last 50 years, with the progress of these countries in the same period. We have no desire to withhold credit for what Great Britain has done in India, but what she has misdone or could have done but failed to do, by virtue of her rule in India being absolute and thus necessarily conditioned by limitations inevitable in a system of absolute rule, should not be forgotten.
The Indian critics of British rule in India have repeatedly pointed out that what they condemned and criticised was the system and not the personnel of the Government, and the distinguished authors of the Report “very frankly recognise that the character of political institutions reacts upon the character of the people” and that the exercise of responsibilities calls forth capacity for it (Paragraph 130), which mainly accounts for the conditions that serve as reasons for withholding responsible government from the Indian people. In discussing “the basis of responsibility” Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford very properly point out that the qualities necessary for it are only developed by exercise and that though “they are greatly affected by education, occupation and social organisation” “they ultimately rest on the traditions and habits of the people.” “We cannot go simply to statistics for the measure of these things.” Yet, unfortunately, it is exactly these statistics that seem to have influenced them largely in the framing of their half-hearted measures. The two dominating conditions which obsess them are (1) that the immense masses of the people are poor, ignorant and helpless far beyond the standards of Europe; and (2) that there runs through Indian society a series of cleavages—of religion, race and caste—which constantly threaten its solidarity.
We admit the existence of these conditions, but we do not admit that they are an effective bar to the beginnings of responsible government even on that scale on which European countries had it when the conditions of life in those countries were no better than they are now in India.
It is said that 226 of 244 millions of people in British India live a rural life: “agriculture is the one great occupation of the people” and “the proportion of these who even give a thought to matters beyond the horizon of their villages is very small.” We ask did not similar conditions exist in Great Britain, France and Germany before the inauguration of the Industrial Revolution, and if they did, did they stand in the way of their people getting responsible government or parliamentary institutions? Everyone knows what the conditions in France were in years immediately preceding the Revolution. Italy was no better off in the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is not much better even today. The masses of the people in these and other countries of Europe, including Great Britain, were far more ignorant, poor and helpless when these countries obtained parliamentary government than they are in India today. And the authors of the report are not unaware that similar concerns are perhaps the main interests of the population of some country districts in the United Kingdom even today. In several of the Balkan States, Roumania, Serbia and Bulgaria—in Italy and in the component parts of Russia—the conditions are no better, yet their right to autonomous government, nay, even to absolute independence, is hardly questioned. Moreover, as has been pointed out by Mr. Sidney Webb,
“It is a mistake to assume that a land of villages necessarily means what is usually implied by the phrase, a people of villagers. In truth, India, for all its villages, has been also, at all known periods, and to-day still is, perhaps, to a greater extent than ever before, what Anglo-Saxon England, for instance was not or the South African Republic in the days before gold had been discovered, and what the Balkan peninsula even at the present time may perhaps not be, namely a land of flourishing cities, of a distinctly urban civilization, exhibiting not only splendid architecture, and the high development of the manufacturing arts made possible by the concentration of population and wealth, but likewise—what is much more important—a secretion of thought, an accumulation of knowledge, and a development of literature and philosophy which are not in the least like the characteristic products of villages as we know them in Europe or America. And to-day, although the teeming crowds who throng the narrow lanes of Calcutta or Benares, Bombay or Poona, Madras or Hyderabad, or even the millions who temporarily swarm at Hardwar or Allahabad or Puri may include only a small percentage of the whole population, yet the Indian social order does not seem to be, in the European understanding of the phrase, either on its good or on its bad side, essentially one of the villagers. The distinction may be of importance, because the Local Government developed by peoples of villages, as we know of them in Anglo-Saxon England, in the early days of the South African Republic, and in the Balkan States, is of a very different type from that which takes root and develops, even in the villages, in those nations which have also a City life, centers of religious activity, colleges and universities, and other ‘nodal points,’ from which emanate, through popular literature, pilgrimages, and the newspaper press, slow but far-spreading waves of thought and feeling, and aspirations which it is fatal to ignore.”[1]
We have also quoted, in the chapter on “Democracy in India,” the statement of Morse Stephens, about the condition of the people of Europe in the eighteenth century.
EDUCATIONAL BACKWARDNESS
“The Educational returns,” remark the authors of the Report, “tell us much the same story,” viz., the appalling dissimilarity of conditions in Europe and in India. While it is painfully true that the percentage of illiteracy in India is greater than in any of the countries of Europe, we cannot admit that that fact is a fatal bar to the beginnings of responsible government in India or to the granting of a democratic constitution to the country. Literacy is, no doubt, a convenient, but by no means a sure index of the intelligence of the people, even much less of their character. The political status of a country is determined more by intelligence and character than by literacy. In these the people of India are inferior to none. By that we do not mean that they are possessed of the same kind of political responsibility as the people of the United Kingdom or of France or of Germany or of the United States, but only that by intelligence and character they are quite fitted to start on the road to responsible government, at least to such kind as was conceded for the first time to Canada, Australia, Italy, the Balkan States, Austria, Hungary, etc. The illiteracy of the masses may be a good reason for not introducing universal suffrage, but it is hardly a valid reason for refusing a kind of constitution which may place India in the same position, in the matter of responsible Government, as Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy and the United States were when those countries showed the same percentage of illiteracy. Literacy has nowhere been the test of political power. Burma had almost no illiteracy when the British took possession of it; its population was absolutely homogeneous and the solidarity of the nation ran no risk from “cleavages of religion, race and caste.” Even today Burma has the highest figures of literacy in the whole of British India. In that respect it occupies a higher position than Roumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, many of the Russian States and perhaps even Italy and Hungary and possibly some of the South American Republics. In the matter of race and religion, too, its position is better than that of the countries mentioned, yet the authors of the Report do not propose to concede to it even such beginnings of responsible government as they are prepared to grant to the other provinces of India. The fact is that mere literacy does not play an important part in the awakening of political consciousness in a people. It is a useful ingredient of character required for the exercise of political power but by no means essential.
POVERTY
The argument based on poverty is of still less force. On the other hand, it is the best reason why the people of India should have the power to determine and carry out their fiscal policy. We hope the admissions made in Paragraph 135 of the Report which we bodily reproduce[2] will once for all dispose of the silly statement, so often repeated even by men who ought to know better, that materially India has been highly prosperous under British rule. If so, how is it that in the language of the Secretary of State for India and the Viceroy “enormous masses of the population have little to spare for more than the necessaries of life”? What about the prosperity of a province, one of the biggest in India (the United Provinces), in which the number of landlords (not tenants and farmers) whose income derived from their proprietary holdings exceeds £20 ($100 a year, which comes to 30 cents a day for the whole family), is about 126,000 out of a population of 48 millions!
Acceptance of the argument of poverty as sufficient to deprive people of political right is putting a premium on it which is hardly creditable to the political ethics of the twentieth century. It is the poorest and the most ignorant in the community who most egregiously suffer at the hands of autocracy. It is they who require protection from it. The wealthy and the educated know how to placate the bureaucrat and get what they want. It is the poor who pay the penalty of political helplessness, yet, curiously, it is for them and in their interest that the English Government in India proposes to withhold the power of the purse from the proposed Indian Councils and insists on denying the Indian people even the elements of responsible government. While we admit the general justice and accuracy of the observations made under the head of “extent of interest in political questions,” “political capacity of the rural population,” we fail to see anything in them which justifies the conclusion that the interests of the classes not politically minded will be safer in the hands of the British officer, and on the whole better protected by him than by his educated countrymen who are likely to get the power in case of responsible government being conceded now. In our judgment no greater argument for the immediate grant of a substantial step in the direction of complete responsible government throughout India and in all spheres of government, could be advanced than what is involved in the following observation of the authors of the joint Report:
“The rural classes have the greatest stake in the country because they contribute most to its revenues; but they are poorly equipped for politics and do not at present wish to take part in them. Among them are a few great landlords and a larger number of yeoman farmers. They are not ill-fitted to play a part in affairs, but with few exceptions they have not yet done so. But what is perhaps more important to appreciate than the mere content of political life in India is its rate of growth. No one who has observed Indian life during even the past five years can doubt that the growth is rapid and is real. It is beginning to affect the large landholders: here and there are signs of its beginning to affect even the villages. But recent events, and above all the war, have given it a new earnestness and a more practical character. Men are coming to realise more clearly that India’s political future is not to be won merely by fine phrases: and that it depends on the capacity of her people themselves to face difficulties and to dispose of them. Hence comes the demand for compulsory education, for industries, for tariffs, for social reform, for social, public and even military service.”
In the next paragraph, the authors approvingly give an extract from an official report in which it is frankly admitted that the rural population “may not be vocal, but they are certainly not voiceless.” The last meeting of the Indian Congress was attended by 700 farmer delegates. Thousands of farmers have joined the Home Rule Leagues. The statement that “hitherto they have regarded the official as their representative in the Councils of the Government” is entirely devoid of any truth. In their eyes the official is the Government itself. Some of them may think that the official represents the Government, but to say that they regard the official as “their representative in the Councils of the Government” is a mere travesty of truth. The paragraph on the “interests of the ryot” bristles with so many unwarranted assumptions that we must enter an emphatic protest against its misleading nature.
But it gives us pleasure to accord our whole-hearted support to the following statement with which the paragraph opens:
“It is just because the Indian ryot is inarticulate and has not been directly represented in our deliberations that we feel bound to emphasise the great claim he has upon our consideration. The figure of the individual cultivator does not often catch the eye of the Governments in Simla and Whitehall. It is chiefly in the mass that they deal with him, as a consumer of salt or of piece-goods, or unhappily too often as the victim of scarcity or disease.”
It is true that “the district officer and his lieutenants” are in a position to know the difficulties that beset the ryot and his very human needs. But of what good is this knowledge of the district officer and his lieutenants to him if it has neither provided for the education of his children nor made any provision for his employment in occupations other than agriculture; nor saved him from the intricacies of the law; nor protected him from the ubiquitous salt tax; nor raised his wages proportionately to the increase of prices; nor yet put him in a position to assert his human rights and to obtain redress for his human, too human, wrongs. If we examine a little more carefully the merits of what is claimed to have been done for him so far by “an official Government,” we will find that the claim is by no means established.
We have no desire to deny that among the foreign officers of the British Government in India there are and have been a great many who were genuinely anxious to help the ryot and do all which is claimed to have been done for him in this paragraph, but that they have been unable to do anything worth mentioning will be admitted by every right-minded official.[3] The reasons for their failure were not of their making. The laws of the land made by the British legislators fresh from the Inns of Court, the spirit of the administration and the system of land taxation have effectively prevented them from doing many of the things which they might otherwise have liked to do. We are sorry that the eminent statesmen responsible for the report should have been the unconscious instruments of producing an entirely wrong impression by the statements in this paragraph. If the statements are true, India must be a veritable paradise and the lot of the Indian ryot enviable. But we know, and the authors of the Report knew it as well, and they have stated in so many words that it is not so. We can quote any number of authorities to show that the Indian ryot is the most pitiable figure in the whole length and breadth of India, if not in the whole world. This is not the place to quote the easily accessible opinions of eminently qualified and highly trustworthy British writers and administrators on the subject.[4] The English official Government has no doubt professed to do all it claims to have done for the ryot, but how far it has benefited him in these directions is another story. To ask credit for having provided him with a system of law “simple, cheap and certain,” or for having established schools and dispensaries within reasonable distance of his residence; or for even having looked after his cattle, by the provision of grazing lands; or for having supplied wood for his implements is to run violently in the face of facts to the contrary. These are verily his principal complaints against British rule. The official Government is certainly entitled to some credit for having started the coÖperative credit societies and a few coÖperative rural banks for the benefit of the peasantry, but the reform is so belated and at present plays such an insignificant part in the rural economy of India that it seems hardly worth mentioning or discussing.[5]
But even assuming that the official Government has so far done all that for the ryot, what reason is there to insinuate that the Government of the people will fail to do it for him in the future or will not do it so well as or even better, than has been heretofore done by the bureaucracy? It is quite a gratuitous assumption that in future he will be required to do all these things for himself. Even in the most advanced democracies in the world the peasantry or the masses of the people do not do these things for themselves. Most of these things are done by officials. The only difference is that in a responsible government the officials are the servants of the people while in an absolute government they are their masters. We are really surprised at the presumption of the British bureaucrat, in posing as the special friend of the Indian masses as against their own educated countrymen. The experience of the past does not support the claim and there is absolutely no reason to assume that it will be different in the future. A mere cursory glance at the resolutions of the Indian National Congress passed continuously for a period of thirty years, will show how persistently and earnestly the educated classes have been pleading inter alia for (a) compulsory and free education, (b) for technical instruction in vocations, (c) for the reduction of the salt tax and the land tax, (d) for the raising of the minimum incomes liable to income tax, (e) for the provision of pasture lands, (f) for the comforts of the third-class railway travelling public, (g) for the milder administration of the forest laws, (h) for the reform of the Police, etc. All these years the bureaucracy did nothing for the ryot and now they pose as his special friends, whose continuance in power and in office is necessary for his protection from the politically minded middle classes. We are a friend neither of the landlord nor of the capitalist. We believe that the ryot and the working men in India as elsewhere are being exploited and robbed by the classes in possession of the means of production and distribution. We would wholeheartedly support any scheme which would open a way to a just and righteous distribution of wealth and land in India and which would insure the ryot and the working man his rightful place in the body politic. We would not mind the aid of the foreign bureaucracy toward that end if we could be sure that the bureaucracy would or could do it. But we have no doubts in the matter that it cannot be done. The bureaucracy has so far played into the hands of the plutocrat. They have served first their own capitalists and then the capitalists and landlords of India. Some among them have tried to do a little for the submerged classes, the poor ryot and the ill-paid sweated laborer, but their efforts were of no consequence. They have failed and their failure is writ large on the face of the ryot. We are not sanguine that the politically minded classes when they get power will immediately rehabilitate the ryot and give him his due. We have no hope of that kind. Yet we unhesitatingly support the demand of the politically minded classes for a responsible government in India. In our judgment, that is the only way to raise the masses to a consciousness of their rights and responsibilities. The experience of the West tells us that in that way and in that way alone lies salvation. Political consciousness must travel from the classes to the masses and the longer the inauguration of popular Government is delayed, the greater the delay in the awakening of the ryot and the working man. Absolutism must first give way and transfer its power to the politically minded classes, then will come the turn of the masses to demand their rights and compel compliance. We can see no risk of a greater harm or injury to the masses of India from the transference of power from the hands of a close bureaucracy of foreigners into the hands of the educated and propertied oligarchy of their own countrymen. Even in countries like Great Britain, America and France it is the educated and the propertied classes who rule. Why then this hubbub about the impropriety and danger of giving power to the same classes in India? Why are the representatives of landlordism and capitalism in the British House of Lords and among the ranks of Imperial Anglo-Indians so solicitous of the welfare of the Indian masses, when they have for so long persistently denied justice to the proletariat of their own country? It is a strange phenomenon to see the champions of privilege and status, the defenders of capitalism and landlordism, the advocates of the rights of property, the upholders of caste in Great Britain, spending so much powder and shot to protect the Indian ryot from the prospective exploitation of him by the Indian Brahmin and the Indian Banya[6] (the priest and the capitalist). Let the British Brahmin and the British Banya first begin by doing justice to the proletariat of their own country and then it will be time for them to convince the Indian of their altruism and honesty of purpose in obstructing the inauguration of responsible government in India in the interests of the Indian proletariat. In this connection the authors of the Report make some pertinent observations which deserve to be quoted. After speaking of “religious animosities and social cleavages” and the duty of discouraging them the authors say:
“Nor are we without hope that the reforms will themselves help to provide the remedy. We would not be misunderstood. Representative institutions in the West, where all are equal at the ballot box, have checked but not abolished social exclusiveness. We do not make a higher claim for similar institutions in India than that they will help to soften the rigidity of the caste-system. But we hope that these incidents of it which lead to the permanent degradation and ostracism of the lowest castes will tend to disappear in proportion to the acceptance of the ideas on which the new constitution rests. There is a further point. An autocratic administration, which does not share the religious ideas of the people, obviously finds its sole safe ground in leaving the whole department of traditional social usage severely alone. In such matters as child-marriage, it is possible that through excess of caution proper to the regime under which it works, it may be actually perpetuating and stereotyping customs which the better mind of India might be brought, after the necessary period of struggle, to modify. A government, in which Indians themselves participate, invigorated by a closer touch with a more enlightened popular opinion, may be able with all due caution to effect with the free assent or acquiescence of the Indians themselves, what under the present system has to be rigorously set aside.”
Nor are the authors unmindful of the effect of free institutions on the character of the people as they themselves over and over again recognise.
Among the authors’ reasons for what they call a gradual advance they state the following also: (a) “We find it freely and widely admitted that they (i.e. the Indians) are not yet ready.” This admission may legitimately be used against the total withdrawal of all control of Indian affairs by the Parliament. Firstly, it is questionable whether any such admission is really “freely and widely” made. Secondly, the admission justifies the retention of the powers of vital, general supervision and general control and also the retention of some Europeans in the higher services, but not the total denial of all responsibility for maintaining law and order and of all power to control the central Executive. (b) That the responsibility of India’s defence is the ultimate burden which rests on the Government of India; and this duty is the last which can be intrusted to inexperienced or unskilful hands.
The defence of India involves, (a) men for the army and the navy, (b) officers, (c) war materials and war ships, (d) experts in strategy, (e) money. That India pays for her defense and also contributes towards the defence of the Empire are facts which cannot be questioned. That she shall continue to do so in the future may also be assumed. That it is extremely desirable that in the matter of war supplies she should be self-dependent has been freely admitted. The permanent Indian army as constituted in pre-war days contained two-thirds Indians and one-third British. If the present strength of the Indian army be examined it will be found that the proportion of British troops is still smaller. There is absolutely no need of British soldiers in India for the purposes of defence, but if the British Government wants to keep them as safeguards against mutiny among the purely Indian army or against the spirit of rebellion that at any time may exhibit itself among the Indian people, then the British exchequer must pay for them as it did in the case of British garrison in South Africa or as the United States does in the case of American troops in the Philippines. It is adding insult to injury to argue that we should not only pay for British troops but that the fact that British troops form a constituent element of the Indian army should be used against us for denying us full responsibility even in civil affairs. The armies of the various Asiatic Governments surrounding India have no European elements in them and the Indian soldier is as efficient a fighter as is needed as a protection. That the Indian army should be almost exclusively officered by the British is a survival of the policy of mistrust, jealousy and racial discrimination which has hitherto prevailed. It is time that the Indian army should in future be mainly officered by the Indians. Until that is achieved it must continue as a tentative measure to be officered by the British, and the Indian Revenues must bear the burden. But that is hardly any reason for denying us full responsible government even on the civil side. The Indians do not desire nor demand the transfer of the control over the Army or the Navy until the Army is principally officered by the Indians and an Indian Navy has been built to supplement the Imperial Navy. From this criticism of the reasons advanced by the authors for a very mild “advance” (called “gradual”) it is with pleasure that we turn to the brighter side of the picture showing the favorable features of the situation. The position of the educated Indian is described fairly and squarely in Paragraph 140.
In face of these observations about the politically minded classes of India it is rather unkind of the authors to insinuate later on that in the interests of the foreign merchant, the foreign missionary and the European servants of the state it is necessary that the Government of India should yet remain absolute and that, in the provinces as well, important branches of the administration should be excluded from the jurisdiction of the popular assemblies.
To sum up, while we are prepared to concede that the conditions of the problem may justify the withholding of absolute autonomy,—political, fiscal, and military,—for some time, there is nothing in them which can in any way be deemed sufficient to deny full political, and, if not complete, at least substantial fiscal autonomy to the Indian people at once.
