The Deluge
Page 47
Spitting was no longer enough to put out the fire. But London was determined to maintain its grip. At Versailles, Balfour and Lloyd George worked to extract recognition from France and the United States of their protectorate over Egypt.20 Having secured its strategic grip, Zaghloul was released from his exile and in December 1919 a commission headed by Lord Milner arrived in Cairo to consider the ‘form of constitution which, under the protectorate be best calculated to promote its peace and prosperity, the progressive development of self-governing institutions and the protection of foreign interests’.21 Such patronizing language would have been provocative in 1914. Twelve months into a national rebellion it was entirely inadequate. Even Milner was forced to conclude that ‘nationalism had established complete domination in Egypt over every social and articulate element. The country had become impossible to govern.’22 By the summer of 1920 it was clear to those on the spot that Britain would have to negotiate over the continued presence of British military forces in an independent Egypt. As Milner reassured the British cabinet, though ‘Egypt is truly the nodal point of our whole imperial system’, it was not necessary for Britain to ‘own it’. All that Britain needed was a ‘firm foothold’, which was provided by the recognition of Britain’s right to station troops in the Suez canal zone whilst it consolidated its position on the upper reaches of the Nile in Sudan.23 Indeed, Milner was willing to regard Egypt’s independence as ‘the most striking tribute to the efficacy of Great Britain’s reforming work . . . The establishment of Egypt as an independent state in intimate alliance with Great Britain, so far from being a reversal of the policy with which we set out, would be the consummation of it . . . That we should attempt it at all, is evidence . . . of our good faith and of our confidence in the soundness of the work which we have been doing in Egypt . . .’24 But Downing Street dragged its feet.
In February 1922 it took a threat of resignation by Allenby to force London to agree to acknowledge Egyptian independence and to end martial law. The problem was that, as in Ireland, Egyptian nationalism was already too strong to allow the British to feel comfortable with this compromise. In one election after another between 1923 and 1929 the Wafd won huge majorities for its moderate programme of national reform. Repeatedly, the British intervened to block its road to power, resulting in the suspension of Egypt’s first liberal constitution and the installation in 1930 of a government sufficiently authoritarian to be able to square its limited vision of national independence with British interests. London extracted a heavy price for Cairo’s limited sovereignty. The promise of democratic politics in Egypt was compromised at birth.
Britain’s aggression toward Egyptian nationalism is even more puzzling given the lack of serious strategic threats in the region. Turkey and Germany were defeated. Russia was disarmed and America disinterested. Italy and France both looked to an Entente with Britain for their security and neither was in any position to mount a serious challenge to its pre-eminence. At times, indeed, it seemed as though the massive preponderance of Britain’s forces was what carried it forward into further aggression. When T. E. Lawrence rode into Damascus alongside Amir Feisal and 1,500 horsemen in October 1918, it seemed that Britain was claiming patronage over territory that had already been allocated to the French in 1916. London insisted that it was simply making good on the promise to establish an independent Arab state. But it also burdened Feisal with responsibility for honouring the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Zionist homeland in Palestine, a project that by the autumn of 1919 was already arousing indignant Arab opposition.25 Then, following the San Remo Conference in April 1920, as part of a new arrangement with France, the British abandoned their support for Feisal.26
Instead of Syria that was allocated to the French, Britain would base its position on Egypt and on a consolidated Iraqi state, a prospect which promptly aroused fierce tribal opposition in Mesopotamia. Heedless of this resistance, after the French had blasted out the Syrian nationalists with tanks and airpower, Feisal was switched from Damascus to Baghdad, whilst his brother was installed as king of Trans-Jordan.27 The humiliation of the Arab political class reached its finale in March 1924 when the elected members of Iraq’s constituent assembly were dragged into parliament by armed British guards to ratify the Anglo-Iraq Treaty that established Iraq’s independence, but gave Britain control of its army and its finances.28 A new order had been created in the Middle East, anchored on nominally independent Egypt and Iraq, but in fact based on a wilful disregard for political legitimacy, a lack that in turn rebounded on the moral foundation of the British Empire as a whole.29
London’s aggression toward Turkey was even more naked and the consequences even more disastrous. By 1918 the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire had become official Entente policy. Turkey was to be left with Anatolia and eastern Thrace. By early May 1919 the Sultan was under Franco-British supervision in Istanbul. Some 40,000 British imperial troops were deployed along the railway lines of Anatolia. Greek troops established a brutal regime of occupation in Smyrna and Italian soldiers, in compensation for their disappointment in the Adriatic, were emplacing themselves on Aegean beachheads.30 To the east autonomist movements were stirring amongst the Armenians and Kurds.31 Insofar as Entente policy toward Turkey had had any political rationale, it consisted in the claim that through decrepitude and atrocity the Ottoman Empire had forfeited its right to historical existence.
However, what this ignored was the new force of Turkish nationalism. Though the killers of the Armenians in 1915 had discredited themselves, the March 1920 general elections for the Ottoman parliament returned a crushing majority for the nationalists. The British responded by occupying Istanbul, declaring martial law, and backing a Greek assault into the Anatolian interior. The nationalists withdrew to Ankara in the Anatolian highlands where a Grand National Assembly declared a national uprising. Heedless, the Western Powers pushed ahead. On 10 August 1920 the Sultan was forced to sign the humiliating provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres.32 Lloyd George proclaimed that the Entente was ‘releasing all non-Turkish populations from Turkish sway’. However, by putting his signature to the treaty, the Sultan also released the Turks from any loyalty to his dynasty. For the nationalist leader Ataturk it meant the ‘passing of government . . . into the hands of the people’.
Over the summer of 1920 the Greek Army had made good headway in its invasion of Anatolia. But on 1 November in an unexpected turn of events the pro-monarchist Greek electorate repudiated the expansionist and liberal government of Eleftherios Venizelos. In bitter winter fighting the Greek advance was first halted and then driven back by the newly constituted army of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly. In January 1921 the Assembly declared a new constitution and entered into a treaty with the Soviet Union. During the summer the Greek forces advanced once more. They drove to within 40 kilometres of Ankara, only for the Turkish national forces to rally around Ataturk, who inflicted a shattering defeat on the invaders in the three-week battle on the Sakarya river line.33 As the Greeks began their long and bloody withdrawal to the coast in mid-September 1921, Lloyd George faced the shipwreck of his Middle Eastern policy. Britain’s support for the Greeks had driven the Turks into an unlikely coalition with Russia. Meanwhile, the antagonism stirred up between Britain and France in the Middle East fractured the Entente and helped to unhinge Lloyd George’s policy in Europe. Worst of all, Britain’s aggression toward Turkey threatened to create an unmanageable situation in India.
III
The scale of the possible challenge to British rule in India had become clear in 1916 when Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant launched their Home Rule agitation. In 1918 the promise of the Montagu Declaration and the containment of the threatening monetary crisis had served to hold unrest at bay. But, within the year, London quite suddenly found itself facing a mass movement on an imposing scale. In 1916 the crowds had numbered in the tens of thousands. By 1919 the anti-British movement ran into the millions. The new energy of the Indian Nat
ional Congress and the Home Rule League no doubt owed much to the common denominator of economic distress. And it suited British administrators in the Raj only too well to blame the upsurge of rebellion in 1919 on economic factors. If it was hunger and frustration that were driving the Indians to revolt, then economic remedies would suffice. If a rising cost of living produced unrest, then deflation was the cure.34
Since before the war, Indian nationalists had been demanding the gold standard. In February 1920 London announced that they would have their wish. At the height of the post-war boom, the rupee was established on gold. Given the exaggerated rate chosen by the British, the result was not stability but a monetary squeeze, which by the summer of 1920 had drained India’s currency reserves and triggered unrest amongst the business community. For the first time the Bombay bourgeoisie swung squarely behind the nationalist movement.35 If the aim was to depoliticize economic issues, the strategy backfired. In any case, the tendency of the Raj administration to explain away unrest as economically motivated was itself part of their failure to come to terms with the true scale of the rebellion. Compounded of religious feeling and local resentments, melded with the radical energy of millions of dissatisfied students, workers and peasants, the uprising against the Raj was a whirlwind of heterogeneous elements. Economic grievances were one factor, but huge masses of the Indian population were now moved to political protest by outrage at the injustices of British rule.
In 1918, to persuade the conservative British provincial governors to accept the liberal provisions of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, a committee had been appointed under Sir Sidney Rowlatt to consider the need for wide-ranging post-war security measures. In January 1919, over the protests of Secretary of State Montagu, the government of India proposed to extend its emergency wartime powers indefinitely. India would, in effect, remain in a state of siege. The result was to trigger an unprecedented popular protest.36 By early April, Bombay and Lahore were in uproar and Ahmedabad was under full martial law. On 10 April there began a wave of sweeping preventative arrests in Punjab. In Amritsar this sparked violent counter-demonstrations in which five Europeans were murdered and a female teacher was assaulted. With the White community in uproar, Brigadier Reginald Dyer was dispatched to Amritsar with 300 colonial troops. On 13 April, confronting a crowd of 20,000 who refused to disperse, he gave the order to fire and to continue firing. Ten minutes later 379 men, women and children lay dead. Hundreds more were wounded. Deaths in scuffles with British soldiers and imperial police were a regular occurrence throughout the post-war crisis of the empire. But the massacre at Amritsar set a new benchmark for violent repression, and Dyer clearly intended to drive the message home. Weeks of terror and humiliation followed.
In India, as in Ireland, it seemed that the point was rapidly approaching at which the tensions within imperial liberalism could no longer be sustained. Indian nationalists, including figures such as Gandhi who had sought an accommodation with the British, criticized the indiscipline of the protests that had given Dyer his excuse to act. But they could hardly be expected to sustain cooperation with a regime built on such naked and unapologetic force. For their part, Viceroy Chelmsford and the British cabinet could not distance themselves from their beleaguered and aggressive subordinates without a full inquiry. But their dismay was real. As Montagu commented to the Viceroy, ‘our old friend, firm government, the idol of the club smoking room, has produced its invariable and inevitable harvest’: violence, death and further radicalization.37 Montagu was true to his personal convictions. In July 1920, presenting the results of the Amritsar inquiry to the House of Commons, he denounced the massacre as precisely the kind of shameful act of ‘racial humiliation’ that was calculated to bring the British Empire into ill repute. Dyer, he declared, had been proven guilty of ‘terrorism’ and ‘prussianism’. To the embarrassment of the government whips, the reply from the Tory backbenches was an unseemly storm of racist bluster and anti-Semitic slur directed not at Dyer but at the Liberal Secretary of State.
If the outrage in the Hindu community was not enough, the British in early 1919 faced another threat. Safeguarding the Muslim minority population had long provided the British with a rationale for their presence in India. In 1916 this had been thrown into question by the Lucknow Agreement between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. By the spring of 1919, as the full severity of the peace terms with the Ottoman Empire became clear, Britain came instead to be seen, in Viceroy Chelmsford’s own words, as the ‘arch enemy of Islam’.38 In the Khilafat movement, the formerly quiescent Muslim population rose in protest against the humiliating treatment being meted out to the Turkish Sultan, who as Caliph served as the anointed secular guardian of the Sunni faith. In February 1920 at the movement’s conference in Bengal, long one of the hotbeds of anti-British protest, there was a majority not for reform of the Raj, but for a wholesale rebellion against British rule. Abdul Bari, one of the most radical pan-Islamist leaders, came close to calling for Jihad. Again and again Montagu and the British administration in India petitioned London to revise their policy toward the Turks, or at least to allow the government of India to take an independent stance, distancing the Raj from the attack on Turkey. But London refused. The result was to unite India against the British.
What gave Gandhi his pivotal role was precisely his unique ability to orchestrate this unprecedented coalition. In November 1919 he attended the all-India Khilafat conference in Delhi as the only representative of Hindu India. It was on that stage that he first advocated for India the strategy of non-cooperation he had first developed to protest anti-Asian racism in South Africa.39 At the same time Gandhi’s mass following transformed the staid assembly of the Indian National Congress. The Nagpur Congress of December 1920 was attended by a clamorous throng of 15,000 delegates. At Gandhi’s insistence, Congress was reorganized so as to give recognition to the village as the ‘basic institution’ of Indian communal life. The effect was to empower the national leadership headed by Gandhi at the expense of the regional elites. Nor was gradual change any longer on the agenda. To the tumultuous applause of the assembly Gandhi promised self-rule, Swaraj, within the year. To achieve that goal Congress resolved to adopt not only constitutional methods, but any ‘legitimate and peaceful means’.40
Whilst challenging British rule, Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence played on the liberal aspirations still cherished by Secretary of State Montagu and the new Viceroy, Lord Reading. In December 1919 the Government of India Bill passed both houses of the British Parliament intact. With some reluctance Parliament approved the separate electorates agreed between Congress and the Muslim League.41 Even after the Amritsar massacre the Congress meeting of December 1919 had still been willing to give grudging approval to Montagu’s reforms. Gandhi himself had not yet rejected cooperation. It was the brutal terms of the Sèvres Treaty with Turkey, combined with the utterly inadequate official reaction to Dyer’s massacre, that finally convinced Gandhi of London’s lack of good faith. In August 1920 Congress declared its refusal to cooperate in the elections scheduled for November. The British had no option but to proceed anyway. They could not afford to disappoint those Indians who were still willing to cooperate with them. Amongst the Congress elite there was dismay at the emergence of Gandhi’s new mass movement and over the winter of 1918–19 a faction of so-called ‘moderates’ had split away to form the National Liberal League. The constrained franchise under the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms suited them well.
By 1925, when the new constitution had begun to take on stable form, 8.258 million Indians were entitled to vote for Provincial Legislative councils. Some 1.125 million had a vote for the Indian Legislative Assembly, and an exclusive group of 32,126 dignitaries chose the members of the Council of State. Overall, less than 10 per cent of the adult male population were entitled to vote at any level.42 Nevertheless, despite the boycott by Congress, the vast majority of the seats were contested by rival local factions, and the constitue
ncy of those mobilized was far wider than those enfranchised. In the first election in 1920, thanks to the Congress abstention, the Liberal League did well. The moderates who favoured compromise with the British had the dominant voice in the Assembly. The most surprising result was in Madras where the self-exclusion of the Hindu upper class allowed the non-Brahmin classes represented by the newly formed Justice Party to gain an unprecedented prominence, securing 63 of the 98 elected seats.
With local government in its entirety being transferred into Indian hands, Britain’s imperial liberalism could finally claim to be delivering on its promises. Indian democracy had taken the first steps in its remarkable twentieth-century career. But the narrative of a ‘British legacy of democracy’ was losing its credibility almost before it began to be spun. The political event of 1920 was not India’s first steps toward its own version of mass democracy, but the spectacular rise of anti-British non-cooperation. In India’s first general election only 25 per cent of those entitled to vote at the provincial level did so, varying from 53 per cent of urban Hindus in Madras to less than 5 per cent amongst the highly politicized Muslim population of urban Bombay. As even British commentators were forced to admit, the result was to create quiescent councils that operated in ‘an atmosphere of unreality.’43