by John Keay
Sporadic assassinations and ‘swadeshi dacoities’ (political crimes) continued, notably in Maharashtra and Bengal. Clandestine revolutionary groupings headed by V.D. Savarkar, Rashbehari Bose and others also made contacts outside India. In 1909 London itself witnessed its first Indian atrocity when Sir Curzon Wyllie, an India Office official, was gunned down by a Panjabi, Madanlal Dhingra.
Such assassination attempts, many of them botched, remained a threat to both British and Indian officials. The only viceroy to die in a terrorist attack would be the last – Lord Louis Mountbatten – and the nationalists responsible would be Irish rather than Indian. But in 1913 Lord Hardinge, one of Mountbatten’s viceregal predecessors, would have a bomb tossed into his howdah while making his ceremonial entry into Delhi to mark its adoption as the new capital; severely wounded, both viceroy and elephant yet survived. The culprit proved to be one of Rashbehari Bose’s Bengali followers. ‘They gave us back the pride of our manhood,’ writes an irresponsible but not untypical apologist for these first ‘revolutionaries’.19 Happily by 1910 their threat was being contained and the ‘moderate’ Congress rump, headed by Gokhale and Mehta, at last had something to show for its moderation.
Curzon had resigned as viceroy within days of the Bengal partition, although not as a result of it; the affront to his dignity from a petty row with his notorious commander-in-chief, Lord Kitchener, proved a more fatal wound than swadeshi. His successor, Lord Minto, reached India in late 1905 just as a Liberal ministry was taking over in London. With the appointment of the Liberal scholar John Morley as Secretary of State for India a new programme of reforms/concessions had soon come under consideration. These did not materialise till 1909, but knowledge of their preparation, plus swadeshi’s assertion of mainly Hindu demands, prompted a Muslim deputation to the viceroy at Simla in late 1906.
Not without British encouragement, the Muslim deputees cited the under-representation of Muslims amongst those Indians already elected to official bodies and demanded that any future reforms include separate electorates for Muslims. They also wanted a weighted system of representation which would reflect the size of the Muslim population and the value of its ‘contribution to the defence of the empire’. Headed by the Aga Khan and heavily supported by mainly landed and commercial Muslim interests in the United Provinces (which were the same as the early-nineteenth-century North-West Provinces and the future Uttar Pradesh), the deputees had inherited Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s distrust of Congress. In early 1907 they duly consummated this distrust by forming the All India Muslim League. Not all Muslim interests supported them, however. Some groups continued to subscribe to Congress, amongst them one headed by a brilliant young Bombay lawyer, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
The Morley – Minto Indian Councils Act, when it at last materialised in 1909, was the first major reform package since the 1892 Councils Act and apparently did no more than, as Minto put it, ‘prudently extend’ the principle of representative institutions. The councils in question were those attached to the central government, still in Calcutta but about to remove to Delhi, and to the now numerous provincial governments in Madras, Bombay, Agra (for the United Provinces), Lahore (for the Panjab and North-West Frontier provinces) and so on. Known as Legislative Councils, all were now increased in size; more seats were to go to non-officials and more of these non-officials were to be indirectly elected. With up to sixty members the Legislative Councils would thus accommodate more Indians, some of whom would represent a wider spectrum of Indian opinion. They became in effect chambers rather than councils and, although Minto disclaimed the very idea, could be seen to foreshadow a parliamentary system.
But they were not legislatures and had no power to initiate or frustrate legislation, merely to question and criticise it; India remained a British autocracy, albeit a consultative one. Additionally, an Indian member, Satyendra Sinha, was co-opted onto the viceroy’s Executive Council, and in London two Indians served on the council which advised the Secretary of State for India.
The reforms were initially welcomed by Congress, but not by the Muslim League. When supplementary regulations later revealed that some seats were indeed to be reserved for Muslims and elected only by Muslims, the situation was reversed; Congress complained and the League rejoiced. Other seats were reserved for other sectional interests. It was not the principle of reservation which caused controversy but that of a separate electorate for the perhaps 20 per cent of the population, distributed throughout the subcontinent, who happened to adhere to Islam. Fairly in the subsequent view of Pakistanis, fatally in that of most citizens of the Republic of India, the principle of a separate electorate along sectarian lines had been conceded to a fifth of all Indians.
It would be impossible to deny that the arrangement suited British interests. But once again it was hardly an insidious application of ‘divide and rule’. It neither fractured an existing consensus nor prejudiced any future consensus. No division had been created that did not already exist, no demand created which could not subsequently be accommodated. In fact, seven years later, Congress would itself accept the principle of separate electorates. The 1916 Lucknow Pact, by which Congress and the League agreed a joint programme, would see the League accept Muslim under-representation in Muslim majority areas (like East Bengal) in return for Congress’s acceptance of Hindu under-representation in Hindu majority areas (like the United Provinces). Here was precisely the political horse-trading essential to the working of a plural society. Both sides embraced it; so even did an ‘extremist’ like the lately returned Tilak. At this stage, with one partition having just failed, another was not only unthinkable; it was eminently avoidable.
AN AFTERNOON IN AMRITSAR
Steeped in the gradualist traditions of their own constitutional evolution, the British assumed that India’s induction into the practice of representative government would be a protracted business. Ripon’s minimalist programme had sufficed for a decade, and the first Indian Councils Act (1892) for rather more. The Morley – Minto reforms were expected to stem the tide for at least as long. Congress demands for swaraj were not yet accompanied by an ultimatum, and their objective was not that dissimilar to the ‘responsible government’ envisaged by the more enlightened amongst the British. In what the latter often characterised as a doctor – patient relationship, it looked as if India could be retained on a drip-feed of concessions until the sacred cows came home.
The First World War changed all that. With the imperial medico coming under severe strain, the Indian patient was co-opted onto the nursing staff. He was fitter, evidently, and the doctor frailer than had been supposed. Doing the rounds he heard tell of an American panacea called self-determination and of a more revolutionary cure being pioneered in Russia. It was doubtful whether he should be in hospital at all. If the doctor was so obviously fallible, why should the patient be patient?
News of war had been greeted in India with a demonstration. For once it was not of dissent but of enthusiastic support. British hearts warmed at the protestations of loyalty and the offers of support which poured in not only from the predictably sycophantic princely states but also from the Muslim League and Congress. With recruitment exceeding all expectations, Indian troops were soon sailing for novel destinations like Flanders, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. Over two million Indian combatants and support staff would eventually serve overseas, dwarfing all other imperial contributions to the war effort. ‘It was the performance of India which took the world by surprise and thrilled every British heart,’ reported John Buchan, then writing his Thirty-Nine Steps.20
While the troopships sailed forth, other Indians headed home. From Africa by way of Britain and a failed attempt to enlist in the ambulance corps came Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Already forty-six, his twenty years in Africa had transformed a gawky and rather unsuccessful London-trained lawyer into a wiry social activist with a formidable record of unconventional protest. In India he continued to support the war effort and encourage enlistment. He retained a stron
g belief in British justice and he acknowledged as his mentor Gokhale, the Bombay Congressman who epitomised ‘moderate’ opinion.
But Gandhi did not, therefore, launch into conventional politics. On behalf of the racially disadvantaged Indian community in Natal, mostly end-of-indenture settlers, he had developed a form of protest which he called satyagraha, or ‘truth-force’. To most observers it was just ‘passive resistance’ but to Gandhi it was something much more constructive and much more demanding. Drawing on the non-violent Jain and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat, it elevated suffering and denial into a quasi-religious discipline, like yoga or meditation. The realising ‘force’ for truth and selflessness which could be released by such self-discipline transcended the forms of protest through which it might be manifest. In fact, such outward demonstrations (petitions, boycotts, etc.), without the inward sanction of satyagraha, would merely encourage the violence and intolerance which it was supposed to negate. Like a secret weapon, therefore, satyagraha needed careful study and the deftest of handling; it was only to be invoked selectively and in carefully controlled doses.
Instead of making it available to the Western-educated intelligentsia of Congress, Gandhi spent a year sizing up the situation and then two years experimenting with limited and unfashionable campaigns well away from the presidency cities. A satyagraha in the remote north of Bihar won redress for its wretched indigo cultivators, whose status reminded him of Natal’s indentured labourers. In Gujarat in 1917 he led a satyagraha on behalf of farmers unable to meet the revenue demand, and another on behalf of underpaid mill-workers in Ahmadabad’s cotton industry. Not all were successful, but the support they mobilised amongst groups hitherto considered as politically irrelevant greatly enhanced both Gandhi’s reputation and his following. To one who so readily identified with the underprivileged and who in dress and lifestyle resembled a religious sadhu more than a political activist the epithet mahatma (‘great soul’) was first applied by Tagore and then widely adopted. Amongst Gandhi’s Bihar recruits from this period was the lawyer Rajendra Prasad, a future President of India, and from Gujarat Vallabhai Patel, a landlord and lawyer who would become the Congress power-broker at the time of independence. In short, Gandhi’s homecoming, though low-key, glinted with novel purpose.
Other returnees to India at the beginning of the war fared less well. In September 1914 a Japanese steamer disembarked over three hundred Panjabis, mostly Sikhs, at Budge Budge, a port on the Hughli river below Calcutta. The ship had originally been chartered by a Sikh businessman in Singapore to convey its immigrant passengers from various places of Indian settlement in east and south-east Asia to a new life in Vancouver. But the Canadian authorities had refused permission to land and now at Budge Budge, after recrossing the Pacific (during which time war was declared), the ship had attracted the suspicions of the British authorities in India. Troops escorted the passengers ashore and, when some attempted to reach Calcutta, they opened fire. Twenty-two were killed; the rest, sent by train to the Panjab, were kept under the closest surveillance. To the British, if the returning Gandhi represented the acceptable face of Indian protest, these not so ‘Pacific Panjabis’ represented its unacceptable obverse, mutiny.
Ghadr, or ‘Mutiny’, was indeed the title of a weekly newspaper which had been circulating widely amongst expatriate Indians in the Far East and North America. Lest any doubt remain about its politics, its subtitle boldly declared it the ‘Enemy of the British Government’. A party of the same name, founded in the USA but now operating from British Columbia, was responsible for the paper’s publication, and it was one of the party’s Singapore adherents who had chartered the Japanese steamer. With the outbreak of war other ships from North America and east Asia brought back to India more returning migrants of ‘Ghadrite’ sympathies. Committed to the violent overthrow of British rule, the Ghadrites had identified the war as a golden opportunity to foment rebellion. Already a German cruiser, the Emden, was loose in the Indian Ocean and playing havoc with British shipping. In September 1914, tearing a leaf from the annals of the French Compagnie des Indes, it even shelled Madras. For a minute it looked as if the world war might engulf India itself.
But the Emden’s bombardment would not be repeated, and the Ghadrites soon found that they had badly miscalculated. Many never reached the Panjab; others were betrayed by their own disorganisation or by the pro-British loyalties of most Panjabis. Additionally the war had strengthened the British capacity to deal with them thanks to the newly-imposed Defence of India Act. A few murders and robberies were carried out, but a planned uprising was foiled and by 1916 most of the perhaps five thousand Ghadrite activists had been rounded up. Of those who stood trial in the Panjab, forty-six were hanged and two hundred transported or jailed. The only actual mutiny was that staged by sympathisers, both Muslim and Sikh, amongst Indian troops in Singapore in early 1915; after courts-martial, thirty-seven of the Singapore mutineers faced a firing squad. According to one of the finest of India’s twentieth-century historians, ‘these lowly Ghadr peasant and sepoy heroes have been much less remembered than the bhadralok [gentleman] Bengal terrorists – yet surely they deserve a better fate.’21 The British would certainly remember them. Insurrection was a far more serious affair in the recruiting grounds of the Panjab than in Bengal. With consequences which, come 1919, Gandhi would rightly call ‘diabolical’, the Panjab would now be policed with exceptional vigilance and rigour.
While Gandhi stalked the mofussil and evaded institutional politics, while Ghadrites blundered into police traps, and while Indian troops tasted the horror of the trenches and the appalling mismanagement of the Mesopotamian campaign, government and politicians continued their centre-stage recitative of agonised complaint and trumpeted concession. To encourage wartime support, to compensate for its economic hardships, and to allay the dangers of a necessarily reduced British military presence, the government let it be known that a new package of reforms was under consideration. This was in 1915. In 1916 the new viceroy Lord Chelmsford and the Liberal secretary of state Edwin Montagu began active discussions. In 1917 they issued a public statement of intent. In 1918 they toured India collecting representations from every conceivable interest group. In 1919 they finally announced the Montagu – Chelmsford (or ‘Mont-ford’) reforms. And in 1921 the reforms finally came into effect. ‘The motto I would ask you to place before yourselves is Festina lente,’ said Chelmsford.
‘Hastening slowly’ themselves, Congress ‘moderates’ had kept up their genteel demands for greater representation and equal access to the civil service while outlawing tactics which under wartime restrictions might be construed as seditious. This left the field clear for Bal Tilak, who returned from his Burma exile in 1914, and for another ageing but formidable campaigner in the person of Mrs Annie Besant. A professional patron of radical causes, Besant’s Theosophical interests had brought her to Madras in 1907 where her Irish parentage, Fabian principles and bustling energy converted her to active championship of Indian home-rule. In 1916 both she and Tilak founded Home Rule Leagues outside the control of Congress and campaigned energetically for them.
Tilak concentrated on his old stamping grounds in the Deccan. There he adopted, as well as the national campaign, a local home-rule agenda which included the promotion of the Deccan’s regional languages – Marathi, Kannada and Telugu – as media of education and as criteria for the creation of distinct language-based states (the future Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh). Other leaders, Muslim as well as Hindu, invariably espoused similarly non-national issues which were dear to particular religious communities, castes, language groups, economic interests or labour organisations. Politicisation, while heightening national awareness, was also heightening sectional competition. In fact the frantic behind-the-scenes activity at the 1916 Lucknow Congress brings to mind post-independence politics with its mass of ‘parties’ engaged in fickle alliances for the advancement of particular interests. Not only did Congress and the Muslim Lea
gue agree a joint programme at Lucknow but, with the deaths of the moderate Gokhale and Ferozeshah Mehta in 1915, both Tilak and Besant negotiated their way back into the Congress fold.
It did not mean that they eschewed ‘extremism’. Six months later Besant’s rhetoric became so outspoken that she was arrested. Howls of protest from the whole spectrum of nationalist opinion greeted this affront. Even Gandhi, who had no liking for either Besant or her Westernised methods, threatened a satyagraha. But Montagu and Chelmsford remained in conciliatory mood. In what amounted to a milestone in British policy they declared the goal of their proposed reform package to be ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’.
This constitutional mouthful, once its jaw-breaking roughage about ‘gradual’ development and ‘progressive’ realisation had been spat out, tasted much like home-rule. Moreover, as Congress gulped, Montagu and Chelmsford made a sincere effort to secure the widest possible co-operation in the consultation process which was to precede the final package. Annie Besant was therefore released after just three months’ detention and in December 1917 was elected president of Congress. The consultations went on throughout 1918. Meanwhile the war ended and, to replace the wartime Defence of India Act which had proved so effective against the Ghadrites, the government opted for preventative powers of summary trial and detention. Embodied in the Rowlatt Bills, this package of ‘no charge, no trial, no appeal’ proved decidedly unpalatable. It belied the spirit of the imminent reforms, it insulted a people who had lately made such heavy sacrifices for the empire, and it foreshadowed British readiness to resort to further repression. Even those Indians who now sat on the viceroy’s council unanimously rejected the bills. The Home Rule Leagues of Besant and Tilak mobilised for defiance. More significantly they deferred to Gandhi, who now forsook his lofty detachment to declare the first national satyagraha. Though many nationalists had gulped down the ‘Montford’ promise, all gagged on the Rowlatt repression.