Raj

by Lawrence, James

  The official explanation shared the blame for the insurrection between the regiment’s internal problems and Turko-German intrigue, which was convenient for the authorities, but untrue. Religious apprehension lay at the heart of the mutiny, made worse by fears of service in France, sentiments which were self-generated and indicated that the sepoys thought for themselves. Pathans, always highly receptive to Pan-Islamic appeals, were responsible for two mutinies of the 130th Baluchis during the winter of 1914–15, both sparked off by fears of being forced to follow Muslims. Distress at having to fight in what was considered a sacred land led to murmurs among the 15th Lancers at Basra and when NCOs reported the men’s disquiet firm action was immediately taken. An artillery battery and British troops surrounded the lancers’ camp, the cavalrymen were disarmed, and, according to the maulavi attached to the regiment, their belongings were plundered.32

  The gravest unrest in India was generated by the underground Ghadr (Revolt) party during the winter and early spring of 1914–15. The Ghadr movement had been active for seven years, was based in the Punjab, and drew its strongest support from the Sikh émigré communities which had settled on the west coast of Canada and the United States. Its primary aim was to kindle a mutiny among the Punjab garrison, which would begin a mass uprising in which Europeans would be massacred and Lahore and Delhi seized. To this end, hundreds of Sikhs from North America and the Far East began converging on India during September 1914. Forewarned and armed with the recent legislation which allowed them to intern returned emigrants whose politics were suspect, the authorities prepared to intercept the returning emigrants as they disembarked. They had limited success; some militants were killed in gun battles and some arrested, but a significant number escaped the net and proceeded to the Punjab. Here, they initiated a campaign of assassinations and dakaiti during the winter of 1914–15 under the overall direction of Rash Behari Bose, a slippery and experienced terrorist wanted for his part in the bomb attack on Lord Hardinge two years before. The climax of the Ghadrite campaign was to have been a series of mutinies by Punjabi troops which would signal a general insurrection. Informers, undercover police work and the energy of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Governor of the Punjab, frustrated the conspiracy in the nick of time. The subsequent clampdown shattered the Ghadrite leadership, with some in detention and the rest on the run. Among them was Rash Behari Bose, who finally surfaced in Japan, from where the authorities failed to extradite him. The ambivalent attitude of the Japanese towards India’s most notorious terrorist, together with other incidents, aroused suspicions that its government was dangerously sympathetic to Asian nationalism.33

  What is striking about all these outbreaks is that they were, so to speak, home-grown enterprises, although some rebellious troops had certainly been exposed to unofficial jihadic propaganda. Nonetheless, Delhi had been given an unpleasant shock, even though the Ghadrites had had very little popular support. In March 1915 an Indian version of the British Defence of the Realm act was passed, with strong backing from O’Dwyer. It allowed for the internment of political agitators and the suspension of trial by jury in cases of sedition and terrorism. To the apparatus of the law was added that of the expanded intelligence services, in India and abroad, and the provincial police CIDs.

  These measures began to take effect the moment that Turko-German plans for Indian subversion were coalescing. They owed their genesis to the German chancellor, Von Bethmann Hollweg, who was convinced that India could be set alight by the astute use of Islamic fervour, Ghadrites and Bengali terrorists. Exiled revolutionaries of all these persuasions had made their way to Berlin by the beginning of 1915. The Intelligence Bureau for the East could call upon the Ghadrite Hal Dayal, Virendranath Chattopadhaya, a Bengali terrorist who had been based in London and Paris, various fanatical Muslim clerics and a trickle of Indian deserters, mostly frontier tribesmen. An exotic addition to this band was Kunwar Mahendra Pratap, a dethroned minor raja of a Walter-Mittyish disposition, who fancied himself as India’s future ruler. Like all political exiles, they were hosts to daydreams which led them and their German accomplices to imagine that a single, spectacular masterstroke would simultaneously overthrow the Raj and arouse the masses. They also shared a tendency to disregard the considerable physical obstacles which lay in their way. A successful Indian revolution required arms and a cadre of dedicated leaders, both of which would have to be smuggled into India. Two routes were open and each was perilous. Britain controlled the world’s seaways, Germany and its allies were under close blockade, and the 1,500-mile overland route to India from Turkey ran across Persia, which was then under the thumbs of Britain and Russia.

  If, by some means, an Indian uprising was engineered, it could not rely on any close support from either Turkey or Germany. By contrast the 1916 Arab Revolt, masterminded by the Foreign Office and military intelligence agencies, was kept alive by regular injections of cash, arms, aircraft and troops, which were delivered by sea. It was also helped by the advice of British and French specialist officers, most famously T. E. Lawrence. Any Turko-German inspired movement in Afghanistan, Persia or India could not expect such crucial technical back-up. This was why the endeavours of Wilhelm Wassmuss to lead an anti-British and anti-Russian rebellion in Persia came to nothing.

  The Germans and their collaborators optimistically believed they would overcome these handicaps by a two-pronged secret offensive. The aim of the first was to secure a base in Afghanistan or, better still, persuade its ruler, the Amir Habibullah, to declare war on Britain in the name of Islam. After a secret and risky journey across northern Persia, a Turko-German mission reached Kabul in October 1915, but found Habibullah obdurate in his neutrality. Promises of arms shipments and cash did not shift him, understandably given the problems of transporting them across hostile territory. He was, however, prepared to give house room to Pratap who, in December 1916, declared himself head of the ‘Provisional Government of India’. Although he hoped to find allies among non-Muslim Punjabi and Bengali revolutionaries, Pratap’s most promising source of support was among Muslim extremists, the so-called ‘Hindustani Fanatics’. Some of these holy warriors were implicated in the ‘Silk Letter Plot’, uncovered at the end of 1916, which indicated the existence of vague plans for the formation of an ‘Army of God’ in India. It proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp, but gave the authorities some nervous moments.

  If German artifices worked according to plan, Habibullah’s invasion would have coincided with a mass insurrection in Bengal, spear-headed by local nationalists under German direction and armed with weapons purchased in the United States and smuggled through Siam. Procurement of the rebel arsenal was in the hands of the German military attaché in Washington, the foxy Franz von Papen, who later became the last chancellor of Weimar Germany before Hitler’s coup. He contrived to buy 11,000 rifles and 500 revolvers but, after a series of blunders in the shipping arrangements, they were impounded by the United States government. A second consignment failed to leave port thanks to the vigilance of local British intelligence agents who alerted the American authorities.

  Just how these weapons might have been used was revealed by Vincent Kraft, a German spy, who offered himself as a double agent to the British in Singapore in August 1915. Anxious to ingratiate himself with his new employers and earn his £2 a day, he outlined the amazingly ambitious plan which the Germans then had in hand. An ‘extensive organisation’ for ‘stirring up revolution’ was already in place and, to date, it had run 8,000 rifles into Siam, where German officers were waiting to take command of a Bengali uprising scheduled for October.34 In his new guise and still enjoying the trust of his masters in Berlin, Kraft made fresh contacts in China, from where he returned with a hair-raising tale of a coup planned in Calcutta for Christmas Day, 1915. German agents in the Dutch East Indies were to hire a ship, fill it with arms, land on the Andaman Islands, liberate the convicts and convey them to Calcutta for a surprise revolt, which would catch the sahibs unawares as they celebrated Chris
tmas.35 Hardinge, who was naturally jumpy, believed him, but there is very little evidence to substantiate Kraft’s tale, although it eventually helped him and his family to begin an anonymous life in America, financed by Britain.36

  The Viceroy ought to have had more faith in his intelligence services, which were well abreast of their adversaries in India, the Far East and North America. Newly re-united Bengal proved the exception as terrorism increased, with a stepping-up of the murders of informers, detectives and senior policemen during 1915. Effective counter-measures were hindered by the Governor, Lord Carmichael, who was temperamentally unfitted to rule a turbulent province. A Lowland laird of strong Liberal views, ‘Tom’ Carmichael loved art, kept bees and, in his youth, had written a monograph on centipedes. He spoke slowly and took care never to offend anyone’s feelings, save those of policemen, whom he instinctively mistrusted. For this reason, he was extremely unwilling to implement the Defence of India act and intern suspected terrorists. Just as it seemed that they were getting the upper hand, Carmichael retired and moved to the relative tranquillity of the world of the company boardroom. His place was taken by the more robust Lord Ronaldshay, who dealt rigorously with terrorism. An augmented and reorganised police intelligence department returned to the fray with fresh heart, and, by the end of 1918, the number of outrages was falling and the number of convictions increasing.

  If the Germans had adopted the policy of backing small sabotage units, as the Japanese did in 1942, rather than attempting John Buchanesque conspiracies designed to topple the Raj at a stroke, they might have done greater damage to their enemies. Nevertheless, the Turko-German propaganda campaign caused some nervous moments – at one stage in 1916 there were only eight British battalions in India, all of them guarding the North-West Frontier, and Hardinge was pleading with the War Office for more. His alarm, like that shown by his predecessors at moments of crisis, rested on the assumption that in a dire emergency white troops alone could save the Raj. By early 1917, it was clear that the Germans had failed, overcome by geography, the prudence of the Afghan amir, Anglo-Indian counter-measures and the sheer impossibility of co-ordinating Indian subversion from centres as far apart as Constantinople and San Francisco. Pan-Islamic propaganda had made few converts, thanks in large part to the Aga Khan’s proclamation of loyalty to the King Emperor and the fact that Indian pilgrims were free to visit Mecca after it had fallen to the forces of the Arab revolt.

  IV

  For non-violent nationalists, the war was a period of immense hope. Unstinting Indian participation demonstrated to Britain their fitness for running their own affairs. Tilak argued in 1917 that: ‘If you want Home Rule be prepared to defend your Home. Had it not been for my age I would have been the first to volunteer. You cannot reasonably say that the ruling will be done by you and the fighting for you.’37 Gandhi, speaking at the time of the great German offensive in France in July 1918, insisted that India’s future was now in the balance:

  An Empire that has been defending India and of which India aspires to be the equal partner is in great peril, and it ill befits India to stand aloof at the hour of its destiny. . . . India would be nowhere without Englishmen. If the British do not win, whom shall we go for claiming equal partnership? Shall we go to the victorious German or the Turk or the Afghan for it? We shall have no right to do so; the victorious nation will set its mind on imposing taxes, or repressing, harassing and tyrannizing over the vanquished. Only after making its position secure will it listen to our demands, whereas the liberty-loving English will surely yield, when they have seen that we have laid down our lives for them.38

  By this time Congress had set Home Rule within a federal empire as India’s first priority. Its conversion owed much to the labours of Mrs Annie Besant, the sometime wife of a Lincolnshire parson and champion of what were, for a middle-class Englishwoman and most of her contemporaries, outrageous causes. In succession, she had been a militant atheist and accomplice of Bradlaugh, an advocate of free love, a trade union organiser and a Fabian socialist. Her final resort was the murky and manic world of occult religiosity which offered unlimited outlets for her energy and preoccupations. In 1893 she arrived in India, aged forty-six and intent on exploring Hinduism which, she imagined, was highly compatible with her own Theosophy. She was not disappointed; one of her first revelations was that the daughter of a Hindu mathematics professor was a reincarnation of the founding mother of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky. India also offered new causes for adoption and she soon found herself immersed in the current Hindu renaissance, helping to found the new Hindu university at Benares (Varanasi). She was also the sponsor of Khrisnamurti, a young Madrasi whom she presented to the world as a messianic prophet, in which role he gathered a considerable congregation in Europe, mostly female and well-heeled. He died in 1986, having lived to see a revival of the vogue for Indian gurus uttering portentous platitudes.39

  Mrs Besant entered Indian national politics with a supernatural revelation. There existed what she called the ‘Great Plan or World Drama’, whose scenario was divinely written and aimed at the wholesale elevation of mankind.40 The individual could only climb this ladder of perfection through an acute awareness of God, and the Indian nation by the re-adoption of ancient Hindu virtues. This was not a new programme; Tilak and the Bengali nationalists had long advocated a Hindu revival as the foundation for national resurgence. What Mrs Besant offered was an enticing blend of the spiritual and the secular, and it was a recipe which appealed to the educated classes. Her Wake Up India! appeared in 1913, and subsequently she embarked on lecture tours across the country on behalf of her All-India Home Rule League. Her message closely coincided with that of Tilak, now the head of the Home Rule League. Neither impeded the war effort in any way, and Mrs Besant went to great lengths to emphasise India’s huge debt to Britain and repeatedly urged Indians to imitate British patriotism and public spiritedness. In December 1918 she was elected chairman of a Congress which had been converted to her political goal of home rule.

  Patriotic nationalism presented the British government with a dilemma. It could not ignore the sacrifices made by Indians which were growing heavier as the war proceeded, nor disregard the war-weariness which infected India as it did every other combatant nation. Government expenditure was steadily rising and recruits were flowing into the army; by 1918 half a million men had enlisted, a fifth of them from the Punjab, and 400,000 had been recruited for behind-the-lines labour; all at little cost to the British government. Political India was interpreting the news that the Russian autocracy, which nationalists had sometimes likened to the Raj, had been overthrown and replaced by a popular government as a sign that a new spirit was abroad in the world. Above all, they were looking for rewards for loyalty. Facing the third year of the war, and aware that it would demand further, almost superhuman efforts from the empire’s population, Lloyd George’s coalition Cabinet agreed that Indian political progress would have to be accelerated. Its direction, if not its exact pace, was outlined in August 1917 by the new Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu. Henceforward, Britain’s overall objective was

  the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as part of the British Empire.

  ‘Responsible government’ had been inserted by Curzon during Cabinet discussions as a replacement for ‘self-government’, but, nonetheless, many Indians imagined that the goal was dominion status and that it would be achieved swiftly.

  Transforming a declaration of intent into action was the job of Montagu. He was thirty-eight, a passionate Liberal who had worked under Morley in the India Office before the war, and a member of a Jewish banking family. Jewishness was an asset, he believed, when it came to gaining the confidence and friendship of Indians. ‘I am an Oriental,’ he wrote in his diary of the Indian tour. ‘Certainly that social relationship which English people seem to find so difficu
lt comes quite easy to me; and we shall go from bad to worse, until we are hounded out of India, unless something is done to correct this sort of thing.’ He had in mind the frostiness of the new Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, whom he found ‘thoroughly nice, but unfortunately cold, aloof and reserved’. He acted true to form when he refused to be draped with a floral garland by Mrs Besant, while Montagu accepted his from Tilak, who, in any case, did not ask his permission.41

  Encounters with Mrs Besant and Tilak were part of Montagu’s peregrinations across India which lasted from November 1917 to May 1918. He was there to sound Indian opinion for clues as to how best to reshape their government and, like Morley, he felt that India offered him the chance to make his mark on history. He dreamt of accomplishing ‘something big’ and ‘epoch-making’ and was worried by it. Still, there were many diversions laid on by the government and the princes. A keen ornithologist and egg-collector, he watched birds and indulged another passion, shooting game. Montagu saw new birds, which delighted him, but had old prejudices confirmed, which did not. After the publication of the Mesopotamian enquiry the previous July, he had roused some hackles, by alleging in the Commons that the Indian administration was ‘too wooden, too iron, too inelastic, too antediluvian to be of any use for the modern purposes we have in mind’. In India he found that ‘the dead hand’ of Olympian officials was everywhere, and he feared that Chelmsford would easily succumb to the persuasions of ‘reactionaries’ among his staff. One, O’Dwyer, who struck Montagu as a ‘rough Irishman’, was particularly vehement in denouncing any further Indian participation in government.