Safeguarding Muslims’ interests and representing their views were the principle aims of the Muslim League, which was founded in 1906. It represented the better-off Muslims and aimed to seek guarantees from the government that their interests would be upheld in the event of greater popular representation in government. Minto and Morley welcomed the League and promised to take cognisance of its views when framing reforms. In the light of subsequent events, the creation of the League and its warm reception by the Raj have been seen as the beginning of the process which ended with India’s partition forty-one years later. Furthermore, official reaction to the League has been interpreted as the implementation of a policy of divide and rule, devised to drive a religious wedge into the nationalist movement. It is, however, hard to imagine how the viceroy and minister could have responded otherwise to the early approaches of the League. They were friendly and it represented a substantial community whose members were disproportionately represented in the army and police. The League was also willing to distance itself from the largely Hindu protests against the partition of Bengal and the boycott of British wares, both of which were condemned at its 1908 conference.
Undercurrents of Hindu–Muslim antipathy were always present in India. Outbreaks of sectarian violence did occur, although they were rare and localised. In East Bengal, Hindu attempts to enforce the boycott of British goods between 1905 and 1907 led to clashes with Muslim traders.4 A commoner source of friction was the slaughter of cows. Hindus rated it as matricide, believing that the cow represented a universal mother, deserving the protection of the devout. The law, as laid down in 1886, excluded the cow from the blanket protection given to all religious buildings and objects, and the result was the emergence of the Cow-Protection movement. There followed a number of sporadic, localised disturbances in which bands of rioters fought pitched battles, defiled mosques and temples, and threatened, beat or plundered those guilty either of selling cows for slaughter or killing them.
Most were small eruptions, but in 1916–17 there were large-scale riots in the Shahabad district, south-west of Patna, which involved murder and looting. Prior to the upheavals, patias (chain letters) passed from village to village in a manner reminiscent of the distribution of chapattis on the eve of the Mutiny. One missive ordered Hindus to ‘loot the houses of Muslims, kill the Muslims and distribute five patias’. Failure to perform these acts would brand a man as one willing to violate his own daughter or sell his mother as a bride for a Muslim.5 Incidents like this reinforced the British belief that only they could keep order even-handedly in a country where religious passions were strong and violence always close to the surface.
Muslims had always been welcomed in Congress which, despite its Hindu majority, wished to create a secular, pluralist India. In 1906 its ultimate goal was still a liberal state whose people were capable of ruling themselves, thanks to the spread of Western education and political systems. This could only be accomplished through co-operation with the British, who, according to the moderate leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale, still had much to teach the Indians:
Man for man they are better men than ourselves, they have a higher standard of duty, higher notions of patriotism, higher notions of loyalty to each other, higher notions of organised work and discipline, and they know how to make a stand for the privileges of which they are in possession.6
There was no reason why Hindus, with their concepts of dharna (duty) and varna (caste), could not cultivate these qualities and, in doing so, shake off that sense of inferiority which so troubled men like Gokhale. Asked by the Prince of Wales in 1906 whether Indians would be happier if they ran their own country, he answered: ‘No, Sir. I do not say they would be happier, but they would have more self-respect.’7 Self-respect went with responsibility, and this seemed within Indians’ grasp with Morley’s arrival in the India Office. The arid years of pleading with viceroys and canvassing in London had finally yielded a harvest.
II
The first sign of a new attitude at the top came from Bengal. Here, the agitation against partition was gathering momentum, with university students and older schoolboys taking the lead in the swadeshi (economic self-sufficiency) campaign. Many who took part did so for the sheer joy of kicking over the traces in what appeared to be a good cause, although many were unclear as to what exactly it was. Consider the letter, written in 1907, to the revolutionary journal Yugantar (New Era) and intercepted by the police:
I, a schoolboy living in the hilly country, don’t feel the oppression of the Feringhi [foreigner], and I give way before people for want of information. I am, therefore, in need of Yugantar, for it acquaints us to a great extent with the desire of driving away the Feringhis, and also make us alive to wrongs. I am in straitened circumstances, hardly able to procure one meal a day; nevertheless my desire for newspaper reading is extemely strong.8
If he ever received it, the extremist magazine Yugantar would have soon alerted this politically naïve youth to the alleged oppression of the Raj and how to oppose it. He would have thrown himself into the campaign against the sale of British wares and joined the processions of young people chanting ‘Bande Mataram’ (Hail to the Motherland), the title of a patriotic verse which exhorted Bengalis to stand up for themselves. In one demonstration protesters held aloft a figure of Kali dancing on the corpse of an Englishman.
The Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal, Sir Bampfylde Fuller, was an iron-willed Irishman in his early fifties who possessed great charm and an ever greater determination not to allow the province to slip into the hands of mobs of giddy schoolboys. Above all, he was resolved to do everything within his power to uphold the prestige of the Raj which, he feared, was wilting. Looking back on the situation, he wrote: ‘The glory of England is dropping from us. There is no Englishman who should not blush for shame to know that in many places our women cannot venture outside their houses without fear of insult.’9 Fuller banned anti-partition marches, forbade the slogan ‘Bande Mataram’ and used armed police to disperse a Congress conference at Barisal in April 1906. Those undeterred were warned that agitators and their well-wishers would be excluded from government posts. After an incident in which Hindu schoolboys overturned the carts of Muslim traders selling British cloth and assaulted a British bank manager, Fuller warned that in future schools which could not control their pupils would find Calcutta university closed to their alumni. In this and other cases, he believed that the masters had connived at, even encouraged, their students’ misbehaviour.
Fuller’s unbending line embarrassed Minto, who considered him ‘hysterical and absolutely unsuited’ for his post.10 When the Lieutenant-Governor, sensing he was not getting the support he wanted, offered his resignation, the Viceroy accepted unhesitatingly. Morley concurred, giving the distinct impression that the government was delighted by Fuller’s departure. A shock wave ran through the upper echelons of the ICS. Sir Denzil Ibbetson, a close friend of Fuller and soon to be appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, spoke for many when he asked whether ‘the Bengali agitator, or the Government of India, is to run the country?’11 The Times commented that Fuller had been undone by ‘agitation and intrigue’ and the ‘native mind’ would take heed of the fate of a man who had resisted both. A retired Indian civil servant with long experience agreed, adding that: ‘In England . . . the impudent young politicians and progressives would have been subjected to the wholesome and effective discipline so often resorted to by the celebrated Dr Keate.’12 Quite so; but had the miscreants got a caning, the matter would have been raised in the Commons by those Liberal, Labour and Irish Home Rule MPs who kept an eye open for reports of high-handedness by servants of the Raj. Between June and November 1906 there were three Parliamentary questions specifically on the treatment of disorderly Bengali schoolboys, including a protest about a pair who had been given thirty strokes each for obstructing a policeman.13
Henceforward, any official who acted firmly and with rigour ran the risk of Parliamentary censure and the possibility that
his superiors would buckle under it. Indian Civil Service morale had been struck a severe blow; no official could rely on wholehearted support from his superiors. Furthermore, the rightness or wrongness of decisions made hastily in a crisis were liable for close scrutiny in Parliament, where party political prejudices clouded judgement. The everyday administration of India was now the small change of domestic political debate.
At the close of 1906 the focus for agitation shifted to the Punjab. The trouble centred on proposals for higher charges and stricter regulations for settlers in the ‘canal colonies’, those areas irrigated by government-financed waterways. The measures were an additional burden for already hard-pressed farmers, and provoked an unforeseen wave of agitation which united zamindars and peasants, the classes which, according to the new Lieutenant-Governor, Ibbetson, ‘owe everything they possess to the government’.14 Newspapers protested and there were meetings attended by thousands and addressed by political leaders from within and beyond the province. For the first time since 1857, the government was confronted by a widespread popular movement that, and this was deeply alarming, was gaining ground among the peasantry, which the government had always regarded as its staunchest ally. Moreover, Punjabi Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus from the traditional warrior classes made up over a quarter of the Indian army. Indignation against Ibbetson’s new laws soon spread to serving Punjabi soldiers, who were naturally distressed about a possible fall in their families’ incomes.
During the first quarter of 1907 reports reached army headquarters in Simla which indicated that the army had been disturbed by the agitation. A Eurasian informer claimed that two Punjabi junior officers had approached Gokhale after a meeting and promised him that the army would rise against the government if necessary. The Congressman spurned their offer. Other sepoys were attending political rallies in the United Provinces; Sikhs returning from home leave grumbled about higher taxes and less water in their villages; and in a conversation in a waiting room on Delhi station, a cavalry sowar told a plain-clothes CID officer that his comrades would fight for their countrymen rather than the government. Some agitators reminded soldiers of their long-standing service grievances – lack of promotion beyond a fixed point and poor travel facilities for men on leave.15
Not surprisingly, the recipients of these scraps of intelligence imagined that another mutiny was in the offing. So too did those orators who reminded the Sikhs how they had betrayed India in 1857 but now had the chance to redeem themselves.16 Hoti Lal of Mathura and other like-minded Hindu holy men were prophesying the fall of the Raj within the next six years and, interestingly, an end to cow-killing.17 There were also persistent rumours that the government was behind the current epidemic of bubonic plague in the Punjab and elsewhere, and that Europeans were contaminating wells. In August 1907 an audience fled during a lecture on innoculation, believing that the sterilisation equipment was a device to spread the plague.18 Foreign visitors, in whom politically-minded Indians sometimes confided, passed on to the authorities stories they had heard of a secret underground movement ready to rise suddenly against the British. Most scaring of all was the tale that, when the uprising began, servants would murder their masters and mistresses.19 Unrest continued to simmer in East Bengal where the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Lancelot Hare, noticed that agitators were now appealing to the peasantry by playing on their grudges against the zamindars.20 Tension was so high in Calcutta during May that plans were concocted for the police and army to take control of the city if matters looked like getting out of hand.21
Ibbetson blamed the Punjabi unrest on Lahore lawyers whom, he believed, had turned the heads of the peasantry with their slogans. Two, Lajpat Ral and Ajit Singh, had taken the lead and had spoken passionately at many mass meetings. The former insisted that the Punjab belonged to the King Emperor and was not a fief of Ibbetson and the ICS and that, united, its people would force the bureaucrats to abandon the new regulations. Ajit Singh was a firebrand whose rhetoric was that of action designed to make the Punjab ungovernable. He invited all Punjabis to withhold rents and taxes and boycott British imports; those who refused were to be treated as outcasts.
Ibbetson, reading through transcripts of speeches and police intelligence reports, concluded that he was facing something more sinister than a protest movement against an unpopular new law. The tenor of what was being said strongly indicated that protests in the Punjab were the façade for a massive conspiracy, whose ultimate goal was a major uprising against the Raj. Indians already sensed that its prestige was waning; why else were sahibs and memsahibs hooted at in the streets of Lahore?22 Strong measures alone would forestall more trouble and serve as a reminder to the Punjab that the government’s nerve was as strong as ever. At the beginning of May and against a background of near panic in Lahore, Ibbetson reached for the apparatus of coercion. He asked Minto for permission to deport the leading agitators, Ajit Singh and Hoti Lal, and impose press censorship.
The Viceroy agreed; he too had read the reports and tended to share Ibbetson’s apprehension about a conspiracy. Morley was not so easily persuaded; he imagined that the whole business had been exaggerated by jittery officials who mistook all legitimate political activity for sedition. Nonetheless, and against his better judgement, he backed Minto. Soon after, Ibbetson left for England and medical treatment. Before he left, Kitchener had ordered an enquiry into the loyalty of Punjabi soldiers which revealed that they had been considerably swayed by the agitation. Some had been urged to strike to gain redress of such grievances as pay and promotion prospects.23
The potential danger to the loyalty and discipline of his men convinced the commander-in-chief that it was imperative for Minto to veto the Punjabi legislation. The Viceroy agreed and quashed the regulations on 26 May, to the delight of thousands of Punjabis, who were effusive in their expressions of loyalty to a government which had heard their complaints and given them justice. Ignorant of the machinery of local and central government, some imagined that Ibbetson had been the instrument of their deliverance and contributed to a fund for a statue to him.24
The Punjabi unrest had been a severe shock for the Raj. Hitherto, the province had been regarded as its greatest success story, both in terms of the quality of the local administration and the steadfast allegiance of the Punjabis. The former had miscalculated the temper of its subjects and their loyalty had suddenly evaporated. The fault lay in the underlying philosophy of the Punjabi government, which stressed the personal authority of an individual officer and his rapport with those beneath him. He was a patriarch who, true to the traditions of Sir John Lawrence and his acolytes, governed through a combination of fairness and firmness, never shrinking from meting out punishment when it was deserved. Above all, he knew what was best for those he ruled and they trusted his judgement. In accordance with this unwritten code, the administration had made no attempt to discover what the Punjabis felt about the new arrangements for the canal colonies. The lesson to be learned from the unquiet months in Punjab was that the Raj could no longer take for granted the passive acquiescence of those thought to be its most faithful supporters. Given the right circumstances, they could become disenchanted and fall under the spell of the agitators who had previously been dismissed as a noisy minority of malcontents. The masses were not as inert as had been imagined.
III
In East Bengal the unrest which had forced Fuller’s resignation continued and had recently taken on a frightening form – terrorism. The years 1906 and 1907 witnessed the growth of small terrorist cells, known as samiti, each of which contained a handful of ardent young men, mostly of good family and from the higher Hindu castes. Often, as in the IRA today, the typical terrorist was a youth whose ambitions outstripped his capacities and education. Entering the secret brotherhood of the terrorists was an escape from the boredom and frustration of an unfulfilled life into a world full of excitement and risks, in which he enjoyed considerable power, even adulation. On the day when the assassins of Mrs and Miss Kennedy were hanged i
n 1908, ‘every school that dares, in the seclusion of the jungle or the slums’ celebrated their executions with processions and the singing of nationalist songs.25 Icons of the murderers were sold in the streets, despite the fact the pair had killed two harmless civilians whose carriage they had mistaken for that of a judge.
Political terrorism therefore attracted plenty of failed university graduates and ill-taught pupils from indifferent schools who had drifted from job to job, succeeding in none. Perverted patriotism was their last resort, and it was expressed through the murders of officials, policemen and informers, and armed robberies whose proceeds topped up the terrorists’ war chest. Once admitted to a cell, the terrorist recruit became a man apart in a hidden pseudo-monastic world. He passed through initiation rites, bound himself by oath to his cause and his fellow fighters, dieted, followed a severe regimen of physical exercise, and repudiated smoking, alcohol and all sexual activity.
Extremes of physical and mental self-discipline tempered the terrorists’ idealism. It had two main roots: Hindu tradition and the recent activities of Russian revolutionaries, to whom Bengalis looked for models of their own organisations. Consider Aurobindo and Barindra Kumar Ghose, both prominent in the Bengali terrorist movement during the early 1900s. They were the sons of an Aberdeen University-educated physician, who practised for a time in Norwood before becoming a government medical officer. His offspring did not flourish: the younger, Barindra, made no headway in business and his elder brother, having failed the ICS entrance exam, took posts in the Baroda government. By 1901 they were active in Bengali politics, founding the newspapers Yugantar and Bande Mataram. Strongly influenced by Tilak, they became convinced that Indian self government could only be achieved by violent revolution and began to collect weapons. They sent agents to Paris for instruction in bomb-making from exiled Russian anarchists; lacking specialist knowledge in this arcane technology, the Bengalis had been forced to improvise their bombs from ballcocks and hollow knobs from brass bedsteads.
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