Part of the problem was that the Indian government had an inadequate economic planning capacity. The senior ICS men who staffed the viceroy’s ministries had been trained on tour in the provinces, assessing land disputes or bringing troublesome border tribes to order. They had little notion of making capital available to fund development or of how to increase industrialisation and they did not really think it was their job to do so anyway. By 1931 there were only three industries employing more than 200,000 people: jute, cotton and coal mining, and still only 9,206 factories across the whole of India.42 Many of these were in the Princely states where the rulers were more sensitive to the importance of financial incentives and tax breaks. S. Moolgaonkar, a Tata executive, recalled that virtually the entire cement industry was located in the Princely states as the Indian government would not give it any financial support in the British provinces, something he, like many, ascribed to a desire to protect imported cement supplies from Britain. ‘The Brits imported everything’, he complained, ‘even the man hole covers’.43
It was trade that had brought the East India Company to India in the late sixteenth century, originally to acquire saltpetre (for gunpowder), cotton, silk and spices. Later, as the Indian trade became less profitable, Bengal became the base from which they could trade opium to China in return for tea. Under the Raj, India was to become one of the most important markets for British manufactures. Although India came to be seen as the prop of the British Empire, and strategically important as an end in itself, it was trade that still underpinned Britain’s interest. Up until the First World War India bought most of its iron, steel, coal and heavy machinery from Britain. It also bought cotton cloth, something that it could easily have manufactured; in 1914 Indians bought the staggering total of 3,000-million yards of British spun cloth, or approximately a hundred yards per person.44 Britain also benefited enormously in terms of the balance of payments advantages, also known as the multilateral system of settlements, from India exporting goods such as jute, tea and leather worldwide while firmly ‘Buying British’ for imports. As competition to British commercial dominance grew from Europe and the United States, Indian exports allowed Britain to buy more from these countries than she was selling to them thereby masking a weakness in the British economy that would not become apparent until the First World War.
By the 1930s the younger ICS officers, many of whom now had a smattering of economics as well as the almost mandatory Latin and Greek, were finding the Delhi government’s inability to fund development frustrating and embarrassing. In 1944 Norval Mitchell, a dedicated ICS man who had been seconded to the Maratha state of Kolhapur, was desperate to fund a dam on part of the Panchganga river system which would have substantially improved the productivity of the local farmers. Try as he might, and however detailed the financial plans he submitted, no official in Delhi would sanction a project that could not show at least a 3 per cent return in its first year, something that was clearly impossible. Mitchell’s dam was not built until after independence. There was not, he believed, a single official in Delhi who understood the employment of capital nor who would accept any of the states taking on debt.45
Indian nationalism took its time to get organised after 1857 but began to assert itself more strongly from the early twentieth century. The very strong Hindu opposition to Curzon’s division of Bengal in 1905 was the first time it started to be effective but it would take nearly fifty years to achieve its aim of full independence for the country. The Raj responded to its challenge grudgingly and in a series of four blocks of measures, each of which, until 1947, were inadequate to satisfy nationalist demands or to secure a permanent way forward. The first measures, the Morley-Minto Reforms, named after the Secretary of State and Viceroy respectively, came in 1909. There had been for some time Legislative Councils advising both the viceroy and the provincial governors although these were composed entirely of nominated members, a large part of whom were officials. The 1909 reforms introduced an elected element to these councils, albeit based on a very limited and selective franchise. Critically, the reforms introduced a separate electorate for Muslims.
The next set of reforms came after the First World War, the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, but it was these measures, and the events that surrounded them, that would prove to be the turning point. Up until 1919 it may have been possible to find a solution in India that preserved some sort of mutually beneficial link to Great Britain, much as Canada and Australia had done as dominions, and could have satisfied nationalist aspirations; after 1919 it was to prove impossible. The reason for this lies in the expectation created by both British politicians and world events during the First World War. The 1909 reforms had led Indians to believe that they were a step towards assuming their own government, an attitude strengthened by a statement in Parliament by Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, on 20 August 2017, that the government’s policy was the ‘gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the Empire’.46 Indians also thought they deserved this because of their unstinting support of the British war effort despite it being at best peripheral to Indian interests. The Indian Army had grown to 1.2 million men, all volunteers, 800,000 of whom were combatants. These men had been incompetently managed in France and subsequently took heavy casualties in Mesopotamia. India also contributed £100 million as a one-off grant to Westminster in 1914, followed by generous annual payments, funded by increasing taxes. British troop levels in India were reduced to 15,000, and despite there having been some nationalist violence in the pre-war years, particularly in Bengal, there was no attempt to take advantage of Britain’s unpreparedness.
The First World War also led many Indians to question British moral superiority. Here was the nation they had long been taught to revere as the ultimate in civilisation locked in a bitter struggle with other European powers, accusing each other of atrocities and coming near to defeat. The Russian Revolution showed that it was possible to challenge the existing order successfully while the entry into the war by the United States promised international emphasis on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and their call for national self-determination. Indian Muslims were also deeply disturbed by their troops fighting the Turks, whose sovereign, the Ottoman Sultan, was still regarded as the Caliph. Britain’s answer that all these aspirations would be dealt with ‘after the war’ was accepted but when that answer came it was thought to be inadequate and ungrateful.
There is something illogical and self-defeating in much of the British government’s colonial policy in the years immediately following the end of the First World War. In Ireland, a country the Indian nationalists watched carefully, correctly seeing many similarities to their own situation, the unnecessarily violent British overreaction to the 1916 Irish nationalist uprising meant that any hope of a peaceful move to home rule was almost impossible and led instead to a violent war of independence. In India the Montagu-Chelmsford package promised much, Montagu even describing Gandhi as a ‘pure visionary’47 but delivered far less than was expected. In fact constitutionally the reforms were quite far-reaching. They contained two major provisions. The first was to create a system of shared power in the provinces, termed ‘dyarchy’. The provincial Legislative Councils were expanded, their franchise widened considerably, and they were given powers under ministers to deal with public health, education and local government, what became known as the ‘transferred subjects’. The governor, answering to the viceroy, continued to exercise powers for law and order and finance, the so-called ‘reserved subjects’. In the central government, now in Delhi, two new bodies were created, a Council of State and a Legislative Assembly to replace the old Legislative Council, and although the Viceroy’s Executive Council remained appointed by the Secretary of State, it was now to have three as opposed to a single Indian member. It could have been seen as a progressive series of measures that established an assembly, a legislature, and an executive,
but in fact the former had little control over the latter; the Council of State and the central Legislative Assembly still contained a significant number of officially nominated members and the viceroy had the power to reject any legislation he regarded as unnecessary. The system of ‘dyarchy’, with power divided between the central government and the provinces, would also lead to a monumental confusion as to who was responsible for what, which would soon have tragic consequences.
Yet what really caused resentment was not the reforms themselves but the accompanying Rowlatt Acts. Although there had been very little violence in India during the war, there was still some, largely a hangover from Hindu opposition to the partition of Bengal. During the war India had been subject to the Defence of India Act which had given the government wide internal security powers. Now this was no longer applicable, a prominent judge, Mr Justice Rowlatt, was asked to advise on what alternative measures should be put in place. He recommended two bills: the first would allow judges to try political cases without juries while the second permitted internment without trial. Despite being opposed by every Indian member of the Executive Council, they became law on the vote of the official majority. Congress, ably orchestrated by Gandhi, mobilised opposition and rioting broke out across India but particularly badly in the Punjab, the province that had suffered most from increased taxation and recruitment during the war. It had also suffered terribly from outbreaks of plague and then flu in 1917–18. During early April the violence escalated, with attacks on banks, post offices and the railways.
The government’s response was uncompromising. On 13 April 1919, martial law was imposed on the Punjab. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, commanding the brigade responsible for the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, deployed about a hundred soldiers from the Gurkha and Baluch regiments to deal with a gathering, belatedly declared illegal, of approximately 20,000 people in a confined space called the Jallianwalla Bagh, an area of rough ground close to the Golden Temple, surrounded by buildings and with only two very narrow exits. The large crowds were there because Amritsar was packed due to the annual Baisakhi horse fair. Dyer first blocked the entrances and then ordered his troops to fire into the crowd without warning. His men fired 1,650 rounds in ten minutes. The terrified crowd could not escape and were mown down in what became a confined killing ground. You can still see the bullet holes in the walls.
At least 379 people were killed and a further 1,000 wounded. When later asked why he had blocked the entrances so people could not disperse he replied that the shooting was not intended to disperse the crowd but to punish them for disobedience. One macabre advantage of the lack of access was that Dyer could not use the armoured car he had brought along, which, with its turret-mounted machine gun, would have greatly increased the casualty toll. In the days after the massacre, Indians were forced into humiliating gestures, being made to crawl down a street where a European woman had been molested, with British soldiers posted at either end to ensure that they did so, and subjected to indiscriminate physical punishment from the police. Public flogging was instituted.
It is difficult to exaggerate the effect of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. Of all the many terrible events of Empire, it ranks as one of the worst. Even Churchill, usually so determined in his defence of authority, said, ‘It was an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’.48 Dyer was sacked, his conduct condemned in the House of Commons and he was sent home from India, but the damage was done. Indian opinion was incensed that he still received a vote in his favour in the House of Lords and a fund set up in appreciation of his services. Although a commission was created to investigate his actions he was never prosecuted, instead just found guilty of a mistaken notion of duty. Of all the events of that immediate post-war period, it is the Amritsar Massacre that did the most to destroy trust and the reputation of the Raj. Instead of being thanked and recognised for their part in a war in which they had little direct interest, Indians had been subject to repressive legislation and then seen their people mown down when they had gathered to protest about it. Dyer’s conduct, so untypical of a British army and particularly a British Indian army specifically constituted and trained to maintain law and order with a minimum of violence, is a testament to the brutalising effect of the war. In Delhi, as in Dublin, a political solution had suddenly become much more difficult.
The aftermath of Amritsar was an inevitable strengthening of Indian nationalism. Congress, orchestrated by Gandhi, realised that they must develop an all-India campaign to get rid of the British and to establish home rule, Swaraj. At a conference in Lucknow in 1916, Congress had agreed with the Muslim League that they would work together, in return for which Congress reaffirmed the 1909 provision that there would be a separate Muslim electorate and a reserved allocation of Muslim seats in the various representative bodies. Consequently during the 1920s and early 1930s the emphasis was very much on getting rid of the Raj rather than on inter-communal issues. Gandhi realised that taking on the Raj by force would not be successful and was in any case inimical to his own strong belief in non-violence. Instead he developed his satyagraha campaign, which broadly meant using non-cooperation, civil disobedience and peaceful protest. Gandhi also needed to widen the support for independence from the rather narrow group of middle-class Hindus who constituted the Congress leadership to make it a mass movement. Satyagraha was not that successful in practical terms but morally and psychologically it left the British government floundering. Through a series of non-cooperation protests, hunger strikes and jail sentences interspersed with dialogue, Gandhi made the unshakeable case that the Raj was unjustified and must go. British reaction was generally clumsy. In 1927 they appointed Sir John Simon to head a commission to report on the effects of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms ten years on. Simon’s team were entirely British and reported solely to the Westminster Parliament; predictably Gandhi organised for it to be boycotted.
More positively, in 1926, Lord Irwin became viceroy. He managed to persuade reluctant politicians in London to say that the goal of British policy was for India to gain Dominion status. He and Gandhi achieved an understanding and in March 1931 they signed a joint agreement that led to a round table conference in London to work out how this might be achieved. The round table conference in the end achieved very little but the very fact that it took place showed that there was a split emerging in British opinion. The Raj itself, its officials and its rigid, almost racist society in India was only grudgingly coming to terms with acknowledging that ultimately Indians had a right to independence, whereas in the British Isles attitudes had moved more quickly. In many areas of life Indians and Indian culture were becoming accepted and welcomed, helped by the obvious bravery of Indian soldiers in the First World War. As early as 1892, when no Indians even had the vote in India, Dadabhai Naoroji had been elected as Member of Parliament for Finsbury, despite Lord Salisbury’s assertion that, ‘However far we have advanced in overcoming prejudices, I doubt we have yet got to that point when a British constituency will take a black man to represent them’.49 K. S. Ranjitsinhji captained Sussex and played for England. Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of the eponymous maharajah, was a prominent member of the suffragette movement at a time when even extending the franchise to all men in India was considered laughable. Indian food became universally popular in the early 1930s, due to Mulk Raj Anand’s curry cookbook and Uday Shankar dazzled London audiences dancing with Anna Pavlova at the Royal Opera House in 1923. Here was a society that now saw Indians as friends and equals and it was the Raj itself that seemed to be an anachronism. The well-known Indian novelist Kushwant Singh summed it up when he said that: ‘Most Indians who had Brit friends met them in England not India’. It became apparent to most British voters that Indian independence was not only inevitable but also desirable.
India also became less important to British commerce after the First World War. It was still importing £185 million worth of woven cloth from British mills in 1928 but this n
ow represented only 29 per cent of total cloth imports, the rest mostly coming from other Asian countries. In 1929 India imported 3,645 British cars but 7,943 from the United States, and Britain was buying more from India – over 200,000 tons of jute and 300 million pounds of tea.50 The British stranglehold on India’s balance of payments was gradually reducing, and there had been at least some British recognition of the unfairness of the previous system. A tariff board was created in 1923, in 1925 the cotton excise was abolished, and measures introduced to protect Indian manufacturers from cheap Japanese imports.
Reducing commercial pressure, Indian nationalist agitation and changing British attitudes combined to influence the British government to move, albeit grudgingly, towards home rule – the Swaraj that Gandhi and the Congress Party were demanding. The resulting 1935 Government of India Act was, like the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, both a success in that it introduced significant improvements in self-government but a failure in that it omitted any clear commitment to actual independence. Its first major provision was to introduce a strong federal system. The provinces were reorganised into the eleven that Wavell now ruled and given significant autonomy. Provincial governments were to be elected by a franchise that increased from 6 to 30 million people, and also included women for the first time, although property qualifications meant few could actually vote. These provincial governments assumed full powers for everything except defence and foreign affairs, which remained with a ‘strong centre’ in Delhi. It was a sensible outcome in many ways, which recognised the wide diversity of the country but it was also to cause confusion since British governors remained in place with their staffs and with powers to intervene but it was not always clear who was in charge; this was soon to prove catastrophic in Bengal. It also meant that in reality power remained in Delhi. The allocation of seats to Muslims was also confusing, with Muslims over-represented in the United Provinces but insufficiently in the Punjab.
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