The Rise of Ghandi
To India, thus seething with bitterness over the Punjab disturbances, there was added the Moslem resentment over the fate of Turkey. I was myself in London and Paris in a humble capacity at the Peace Conference, and I know that our leading statesmen were fully informed of the Moslem attitude and the dangers of unsympathetic and dilatory action in this matter. But an arrogant diplomacy swept all warnings aside and scorned the Moslem menace as a bogey. What was the result? Troubles in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India. Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral, entente between the two great rival creeds.
It was in this electric atmosphere that Ghandi, emerging from his ascetic retirement, found himself an unchallenged leader. Short of stature, frail, with large ears, and a gap in his front teeth, he had none of the outward appearance of dominance. His appeal lay in the simplicity of his life and character, for asceticism is still revered in the East. But his intellectual equipment was mediocre, his political ideas nebulous and impracticable to a degree, his programme archaic and visionary; and from the start he was doomed to fail. The Hijrat movement which he advocated brought ruin to thousands of Moslem homes; his attack on Government educational establishments brought disaster to many youthful careers; non-co-operation fizzled out. Government servants would not resign their appointments, lawyers would not cease to practise, and title-holders, with a few insignificant exceptions, would not surrender their titles; the “back to the spinning-wheel” call did not attract, and the continual failure of Ghandi’s predictions of the immediate attainment of complete Swaraj or self-government, which he was careful never to define, like hope deferred turned the heart sick.
From being a demi-god Ghandi gradually became a bore, and when he was at last arrested, tragic to relate, there was hardly a tremor of resentment through the tired political nerves of India. The arrest was indeed a triumph of wise timing that does credit to the sagacity of the Government of India. Had the arrest been effected when the name of Ghandi was at its zenith, there would have been widespread trouble and bloodshed. As it was, people were only too glad to be rid of a gadfly that merely goaded them into infructuous bogs.
I apologise for this long excursus on the somewhat threadbare subject of the causes of unrest in India. But I want those here present to realise what potent forces have been at work and to believe that the Indian generally is not the ungrateful, black-hearted seditionist he is painted by the reactionary press. India is going through an inevitable stage of political transition, and we must not hastily judge her peoples—for the most part so gallant, so kindly, so law-abiding, so lovable—by the passing tantrums of political puberty.