The Political Future of India

by Lala Lajpat Rai

IMMENSITY OF THE PROBLEM AND THE GRAVITY OF THE TASK

Before we take up the two sets of facts relied upon by them in support of either position we may express our general agreement with them as regards the gravity of the task and the immensity of the problem. The size of the country and the vastness of its population are the measure of the extent of the problem. The existence of powerful vested interests at present possessed by the ruling race which may be interfered with by extended changes in the system of Government are the measure of its gravity. “The welfare and happiness of hundreds of millions of people,” which the authors say are in issue cannot be adequately provided for by any autocratic system of Government however benevolent its purpose, and however magnificent its organisation. An “absolute government” is an anachronism, but when it is foreign it is doubly so. To bring out “the best in the people” for their own “welfare and happiness” as well as for that of mankind in general, it is necessary that the people should be free to develop on their own lines, manage their own affairs, evolve their own life, subject only to such restrictions as the general interests of humanity demand; and subject to such guidance as the better placed and more experienced people of the earth can furnish.

The people of India are willing to be guided in their development towards modern democracy by the people of Great Britain and they would be grateful for their coöperation in this difficult task, but they must be made to realize that the task is their own and that they should undertake it in a spirit of courageous faith—faith in their destiny, faith in their ability to achieve it, and faith in the friendship of the great British nation. The test of all measures in relation to the Government of India in future should be, not how far the people of India can coöperate, how far they can be entrusted with responsibility, but how far it is necessary in their interests to control and check them. The difference between the two points of view is fundamental and important. Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford have looked at the problem from the former point of view; the Indian leaders want them to look at it from the latter. They want the great British nation to recognise the justice of India’s claim to manage her own affairs, and to keep in their hands in future only such control as is absolutely necessary (a) to enable the Indian people to conduct their business efficiently and successfully, (b) to make them fulfill their obligations to the great Commonwealth of nations of which they hope soon to be a component part. As long as British statesmen insist on looking at the problem from the former point of view, they will make mistakes and raise a not entirely unreasonable suspicion of their motives. The moment they adopt the other point of view, they remove all grounds of distrust and create an atmosphere of friendliness in which they can deal with the problem in a spirit of mutual trust, absolute frankness and candid perspicacity. There are many contentions of the British statesmen which the educated Indians would gladly admit to be valid and necessary were they sure that their admission would not be used against them by the power whom they habitually regard as their adversary. There is much in this report which could at once be struck out if both parties were actuated by feelings of mutual trust and friendliness. It cannot be denied that many of the proposed restrictions on the power of the popular assemblies and the would-be Indian Administrators are the outcome of distrust. It is no wonder then that the Indian leaders in their turn are not quite sure of the face value of the many professions of good will that characterise the scheme. It is for the removal of this distrust that we appeal as earnestly as we can to the better mind of Great Britain.

In looking at the conditions of the problem, there is another fallacy which underlies the oft-exaggerated estimates of the blessings of British rule in India by British statesmen and British publicists. They compare the India of today with the India of 1757 and at once jump to the conclusion that “the moral and material civilisation of the Indian people has made more progress in the last fifty years than during all the preceding centuries of their history.” The proper comparison is of the Great Britain, the France, the United States, the Germany, the Italy and the Japan of 1757, with the India of that year and of India’s progress within the last century and a half, or even within the last 50 years, with the progress of these countries in the same period. We have no desire to withhold credit for what Great Britain has done in India, but what she has misdone or could have done but failed to do, by virtue of her rule in India being absolute and thus necessarily conditioned by limitations inevitable in a system of absolute rule, should not be forgotten.

The Indian critics of British rule in India have repeatedly pointed out that what they condemned and criticised was the system and not the personnel of the Government, and the distinguished authors of the Report “very frankly recognise that the character of political institutions reacts upon the character of the people” and that the exercise of responsibilities calls forth capacity for it (Paragraph 130), which mainly accounts for the conditions that serve as reasons for withholding responsible government from the Indian people. In discussing “the basis of responsibility” Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford very properly point out that the qualities necessary for it are only developed by exercise and that though “they are greatly affected by education, occupation and social organisation” “they ultimately rest on the traditions and habits of the people.” “We cannot go simply to statistics for the measure of these things.” Yet, unfortunately, it is exactly these statistics that seem to have influenced them largely in the framing of their half-hearted measures. The two dominating conditions which obsess them are (1) that the immense masses of the people are poor, ignorant and helpless far beyond the standards of Europe; and (2) that there runs through Indian society a series of cleavages—of religion, race and caste—which constantly threaten its solidarity.

We admit the existence of these conditions, but we do not admit that they are an effective bar to the beginnings of responsible government even on that scale on which European countries had it when the conditions of life in those countries were no better than they are now in India.

It is said that 226 of 244 millions of people in British India live a rural life: “agriculture is the one great occupation of the people” and “the proportion of these who even give a thought to matters beyond the horizon of their villages is very small.” We ask did not similar conditions exist in Great Britain, France and Germany before the inauguration of the Industrial Revolution, and if they did, did they stand in the way of their people getting responsible government or parliamentary institutions? Everyone knows what the conditions in France were in years immediately preceding the Revolution. Italy was no better off in the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is not much better even today. The masses of the people in these and other countries of Europe, including Great Britain, were far more ignorant, poor and helpless when these countries obtained parliamentary government than they are in India today. And the authors of the report are not unaware that similar concerns are perhaps the main interests of the population of some country districts in the United Kingdom even today. In several of the Balkan States, Roumania, Serbia and Bulgaria—in Italy and in the component parts of Russia—the conditions are no better, yet their right to autonomous government, nay, even to absolute independence, is hardly questioned. Moreover, as has been pointed out by Mr. Sidney Webb,

“It is a mistake to assume that a land of villages necessarily means what is usually implied by the phrase, a people of villagers. In truth, India, for all its villages, has been also, at all known periods, and to-day still is, perhaps, to a greater extent than ever before, what Anglo-Saxon England, for instance was not or the South African Republic in the days before gold had been discovered, and what the Balkan peninsula even at the present time may perhaps not be, namely a land of flourishing cities, of a distinctly urban civilization, exhibiting not only splendid architecture, and the high development of the manufacturing arts made possible by the concentration of population and wealth, but likewise—what is much more important—a secretion of thought, an accumulation of knowledge, and a development of literature and philosophy which are not in the least like the characteristic products of villages as we know them in Europe or America. And to-day, although the teeming crowds who throng the narrow lanes of Calcutta or Benares, Bombay or Poona, Madras or Hyderabad, or even the millions who temporarily swarm at Hardwar or Allahabad or Puri may include only a small percentage of the whole population, yet the Indian social order does not seem to be, in the European understanding of the phrase, either on its good or on its bad side, essentially one of the villagers. The distinction may be of importance, because the Local Government developed by peoples of villages, as we know of them in Anglo-Saxon England, in the early days of the South African Republic, and in the Balkan States, is of a very different type from that which takes root and develops, even in the villages, in those nations which have also a City life, centers of religious activity, colleges and universities, and other ‘nodal points,’ from which emanate, through popular literature, pilgrimages, and the newspaper press, slow but far-spreading waves of thought and feeling, and aspirations which it is fatal to ignore.”[1]

We have also quoted, in the chapter on “Democracy in India,” the statement of Morse Stephens, about the condition of the people of Europe in the eighteenth century.