The Political Future of India

XIII THE PUNJAB

We may now consider the case of the Punjab. Lord Morley’s verdict notwithstanding, it is abundantly clear that the troubles of 1907, with which the history of unrest in the Punjab begins, were principally agrarian in their origin. Lord Morley’s speech in the House of Commons (in 1907) as to the root of the trouble was based on reports supplied to him by the Government of the Punjab and we know from personal knowledge how unreliable many of these reports are. We may here illustrate this point by a few extracts from these documents.

(1) Lord Morley stated that: “There were twenty-eight meetings known to have been held by the leading agitators in the Punjab between 1st March and 1st May. Of these five only related, even ostensibly, to agricultural grievances; the remaining twenty-three were all purely political.”

The number of meetings held from March 1 to May 1, 1907 was, at the lowest calculation, at least double of 28, or perhaps treble, and most of them related “even ostensibly to agricultural grievances”; the number of purely political meetings could not have exceeded ten or twelve.

(2) On p. 61 the committee writes that “Chatarji’s father too had ordered him home on discovering that he was staying with Hardayal in the house of Lajpat Rai.” The whole of this statement is absolutely false. I am prepared to swear and to prove that Chatarji did not stay in my house even for a single night. He came there a few times with Hardayal. Hardayal was at that time living in a house he had rented for himself in the native city about one mile from my place which is in the Civil Station on the Lower Mall.

On the same page the committee has approvingly quoted a sentence from the judgment of the Sessions Judge in the Delhi Conspiracy Case. Speaking of Amir Chand, one of the accused in that case who was sentenced to death, the Sessions Judge describes him as “one who spent his life in furthering murderous schemes which he was too timid to carry out himself.” Now I happen to have known this man for about 20 years before his conviction. I have no doubt that he was rightly convicted in this case but I have no doubt also that this description of him by the Sessions Judge was absolutely wrong. Up till 1910 the man had led an absolutely harmless life, helping students in their studies and otherwise rendering assistance, according to his means, to other needy people. No one ever credited him with violent views. His revolutionary career began in 1908. Before that he could not and would not have tolerated even the killing of an ant, much less that of human beings.

In governments by bureaucracies one of the standing formulas of official etiquette is never to question the findings of facts arrived at by your superiors or predecessors. This naturally leads to the perpetuation of mistakes. A wrong conclusion once accepted continues to be good for all times to come. The Rowlatt Committee has studiously acted on that formula throughout its present inquiry. They have invariably accepted the findings of executive and judicial authorities preceding them about the incidents that happened since 1907, without making any independent inquiry of their own. Hence their opinion about the original or the principal cause of the unrest of 1907 in the Punjab is not entitled to greater weight than that of the Punjab officials whose mishandling of the affairs of the province produced the unrest. One ounce of fact, however, is of greater weight in the determination of issues than even a hundred theories. The fact that the Government of India had to veto the Punjab Government’s Land Colonies Act in order to allay the unrest proves conclusively that the unrest was due to agrarian trouble.

The unrest of 1907 subsided after the repeal of the land legislation of 1907, but the legacy it left is still operative.

The Sikhs and the Mussulmans of the Punjab, as well as the military classes among the Hindus, the Rajputs and the Jats, are the most virile portions of the population. They have fought the battles of the Empire. In the interests of the Empire they have travelled far and wide. Yet we find that educationally, as well as economically, they have suffered most. They have the largest numbers of illiterates among them. They are the least developed and the least progressive of all the classes in the Punjab. They are heavily in debt. The Government has occasionally recognised it and has tried to satisfy them by preferential treatment in the filling of Government posts, or in the bestowal of titles or in nominating their supposed leaders to Legislative Councils. These ridiculous palliative measures, however, have failed in their objective. The classes disaffected do not get any satisfaction by these palliative measures. They need opportunities of education and economic betterment. These could not be provided without making education general and without a more equitable distribution of land among the agricultural classes and the inauguration of industries other than agriculture. This the Government never cared to do. The Sikhs and the Mussulmans naturally directed their attention to emigration.

The opportunities they found in other parts of the Empire whetted their appetites. They compared the conditions abroad with conditions at home and drew their own conclusions. Having helped in the expansion and development of the Empire they thought they were entitled to benefit therefrom. They demanded fair treatment. Instead they found the doors shut upon them. Even those that had been admitted were made to feel the humiliation of their position. Deliberate, active, concerted measures were taken to drive them away or to make life for them intolerable. Their wives and children were refused admittance and various pretexts were invented to keep them out or to drive them away. The revolutionary movement in the Punjab amounted to nothing until it was reinforced by the return of the Sikh members of the Ghadr party during the war. The Committee has failed to answer the question: Why did the Sikhs of Vancouver and California readily fall in with the schemes of Hardayal and Barkat Ullah, the alleged founders of the revolutionary party of California? These latter had nothing in common with the Sikhs. In language and religion, by habits and associations, they were poles apart from each other. Why did then Hardayal’s propaganda find such a ready soil among the Sikhs of Vancouver B. C. We quote from the report:

“The doctrines which he preached and circulated had reached the Sikhs and other Indians resident in British Columbia. At a meeting in Vancouver in December, 1913, a poem from the Ghadr newspaper was read, in which the Hindus were urged to expel the British from India. The main grievance of the Vancouver Indians was the Canadian immigration law under which every intending Asiatic immigrant, with a few particular exceptions, has to satisfy the Canadian authorities that he is in possession of 200 dollars and has travelled by a continuous[1] journey on a through ticket from his native country to Canada. In 1913 three Sikh delegates visited the Punjab. They had come from America and were members of the Ghadr party who had come to reconnoitre the position. Their real purpose was recognised after their departure. They addressed meetings at various towns on the subject of the grievances of Indians in Canada and caused resolutions of protest to be passed in which all communities joined.”

Again, tracing the origin of the Budge-Budge riot, the Committee remarks:

“The central figure in the narrative is a certain Gurdit Singh, a Sikh of the Amritsar district in the Punjab, who had emigrated from India 15 years before, and had for some time carried on business as a contractor in Singapore and the Malay States. There is reason to believe that he returned to this country about 1909. He was certainly absent from Singapore for a space; and when he returned there, going on to Hong Kong, he interested himself in chartering a ship for the conveyance of Punjabis to Canada. Punjabis, and especially Sikhs, frequently seek employment in the Far East, and have for some time been tempted by the higher wages procurable in Canada. But their admission to that country is to some extent impeded by the immigration laws which we have described already.

“There were already in Canada about 4,000 Indians, chiefly Punjabis. Some of these were revolutionists of the Hardayal school, some were loyal, and some had migrated from the United States on account of labour differences there. The Committee of Enquiry, which subsequently investigated the whole affair, considered that Gurdit Singh’s action had been much influenced by advice and encouragement received from Indian residents in Canada. At any rate, after failing to secure a ship at Calcutta, he chartered a Japanese vessel named the Komagata Maru through a German agent at Hong Kong. He issued tickets and took in passengers at that post, at Shanghai, at Moji and at Yokohama. He certainly knew what the Canadian law was, but perhaps hoped to evade it by means of some appeal to the courts or by exercising political pressure. It is equally certain that many of his passengers had no clear comprehension of their prospects. The Tribunal that subsequently tried the first batch of Lahore conspirators held that probably Gurdit Singh’s main object was to cause an inflammatory episode, as one of the witnesses stated that Gurdit Singh told his followers that should they be refused admission, they would return to India to expel the British. On April the 4th, 1914, the Komagata Maru sailed from Hong Kong. On the 23rd of May the Komagata Maru arrived at Vancouver with 351 Sikhs and 21 Punjabi Muhammadans on board. The local authorities refused to allow landing except in a very few cases, as the immigrants had not complied with the requirements of the law. Protests were made, and, while negotiations were proceeding, a balance of 22,000 dollars still due for the hire of the ship was paid by Vancouver Indians, and the charter was transferred to two prominent malcontents.... A body of police was sent to enforce the orders of the Canadian Government that the vessel should leave; but with the assistance of firearms, the police were beaten off, and it was only when a Government vessel was requisitioned with armed force that the Komagata Maru passengers, who had prevented their Captain from weighing anchor or getting up steam, were brought to terms. On the 23rd of July they started on their return journey with an ample stock of provisions allowed them by the Canadian Government. They were by this time in a very bad temper as many had staked all their possessions on this venture, and had started in the full belief that the British Government would assure and guarantee their admission to a land of plenty. This temper had been greatly aggravated by direct revolutionary influences....

“During the return voyage the War broke out. On hearing at Yokohama that his ship’s company would not be allowed to land at Hong Kong, Gurdit Singh replied that they were perfectly willing to go to any port in India if provisions were supplied. The British Consul at Yokohama declined to meet his demands, which were exorbitant; but the consul at Kobe was more compliant, and after telegraphic communication between Japan and India, the Komagata Maru started for Calcutta. At neither Hong Kong nor Singapore were the passengers allowed to land. This added to their annoyance, as, according to the findings of the Committee, many had not wished to return to India at all.”

The Committee found that most of the passengers were disposed to blame the Government of India for all their misfortunes. “It is well known,” states the Report, “that the average Indian makes no distinction between the Government of the United Kingdom, that of Canada, and that of British India, or that of any colony. To him these authorities are all one and the same. And this view of the whole Komagata Maru business was by no means confined to the passengers on the ship. It inspired some Sikhs of the Punjab with the idea that the Government was biased against them; and it strengthened the hands of the Ghadr revolutionaries who were urging Sikhs abroad to return to India and join the mutiny which, they asserted, was about to begin. Numbers of emigrants listened to such calls and hastened back to India from Canada, the United States, the Philippines, Hong Kong and China.” [The italics are ours.]

We have given this extract to show the real cause of the growth of the revolutionary movement among the Sikhs. Let the reader omit, if he can, for a moment, all references to active revolutionary propaganda and he will find that the underlying cause of this trouble was economic. Why did the Sikhs want to emigrate to Canada? Why did they stake all their possessions on the venture? Why were they unwilling to return to India at all? Because the economic conditions at home were so bad and the prospects abroad so good. At home their lands were not sufficient to absorb all their energies, the income was not sufficient to keep body and soul together and, in a majority of cases, what they made from land was hardly more than sufficient to pay Land Revenue to the Government and interest to the money-lender. There was nothing to bind them to their homes except the love of home land and the domestic ties. These melted away in the presence of dire necessity. In extreme need they left their homes to make more money to be able to pay their debts, to redeem their lands, if possible to purchase more land and to make life bearable and tolerable. When they came in the open world they found insurmountable barriers between them and plenty. They had helped in making the empire; the empire had enough land for all her sons and daughters; men were urgently needed to bring land into cultivation and otherwise to develop the empire; men of other races and colours were not only welcome but were being induced to come and settle by offers of all kinds. They, and they alone, were unwelcome and barred.

Add to this the attitude and the record of the Punjab Government towards political agitation and political agitators, to use their own favorite expressions. The Punjab Government was the first to resuscitate the old Regulation III of 1818 for the purpose of scotching a legitimate agitation against an obnoxious legislative measure. A wise and sagacious Government would have dropped the legislation which it was eventually found necessary to veto to maintain peace. The deportations drove the seeds of unrest deeper. The other contributory causes may be thus summed up:

(1) The Punjab Government has been the most relentless of all local governments in India in suppressing freedom of speech and press.

(2) The Punjab Government at one time was very foolishly zealous in persecuting the Arya Samajists and in making a mountain out of a molehill about the letters found in the possession of Parmanand.

(3) The sentences which the Punjab Courts have passed in cases of seditious libel are marked by such brutality as to make them notably unique in the history of criminal administration in India.

(4) The strangulation of all open political life by direct and indirect repression led to the adoption of secret methods.

(5) The sentences passed in the Delhi Conspiracy case were much more severe than those given in Bengal in similar cases. In this case four men were hanged, two of them only because of membership in the secret conspiracy and not for actual participation in the outrage that was the subject of the charge, and two others were sentenced to seven years rigorous imprisonment each.

(6) The Budge-Budge riot and the considerable loss of life that resulted therefrom was another case of stupid management and utter incapacity to handle a delicate situation.

(7) For the Lahore Conspiracy 28 persons were hanged, and about 90 sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and transportation for life. But for the interference of Lord Hardinge the hangings would have exceeded 50. In addition some mutinous soldiers of two regiments were tried by Court Martial and a few murderous robbers and train-wreckers were dealt with by the ordinary courts. The reader may well compare this with the record of convictions relating to Bengal.

Now, we have not the slightest intention of justifying the conduct of those who conspired to overthrow the Government by force, or who committed murders, robberies or other offences in the furtherance of that design. In our judgment only madmen, ignorant of the conditions of their country, could have been guilty of such crimes. Nor are we inclined to blame the Government much for the sharp steps they took to preserve order and maintain their authority during the war. But, after all has been said, we must reiterate that the underlying causes were economic and were the direct result of Government policy.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] There never was a continuous steamer service between India and Canada.

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