Rulers of India: The Earl of Mayo

by William Wilson Hunter

CHAPTER V

LORD MAYO'S FOREIGN POLICY

When Lord Mayo entered on his Viceroyalty, three Asiatic States were in disorder beyond the North-Western Frontier, and two great Powers were stealthily but steadily advancing towards India through those disordered States. On the Punjab Frontier, Afghánistán had just emerged from six years of anarchy; and Russia was casting hungry eyes on Afghánistán as a line of approach to India. On the Sind Frontier, Balúchistán was the scene of a chronic struggle between the ruling power and the tribal Chiefs; while Persia was taking advantage of that struggle to encroach upon the Western Provinces of Balúchistán. In the far north, beyond Kashmír, the new Muhammadan State of Eastern Turkestán had erected itself on a ruined fragment of the Chinese Empire, and was looking eagerly out for recognition on the one side to Russia, and on the other side to the British Government of India.

Lord Mayo's foreign policy was therefore of necessity a Central Asian policy. Its immediate object was to create out of the disordered territories of Afghánistán and Balúchistán two friendly powers, who should have not only the desire to be our friends, but also the strength which might make their friendship worth having. Its ulterior design was, by thus erecting a breakwater of faithful States around the North-Western Frontier of India, to counterbalance the ominous preponderance which Russia had lately acquired in Central Asia. Its result has been, as I mentioned in my opening chapter, to supply the necessary complement to the change inaugurated by Dalhousie; and to remove the relations of Russia and England in the East from the arena of Asiatic intrigue to the jurisdiction of European diplomacy.

During the seven years preceding Lord Mayo's arrival, the British policy towards Afghánistán had been subjected to an increasing strain, and a few months before his arrival that policy had manifestly broken down. Our relations with Afghánistán continued nominally on the basis laid down by Mr. [afterwards Lord] Lawrence and Major Lumsden in 1858. Its cardinal principle was, in Major Lumsden's words, 'to have as little to say to Afghánistán as possible, beyond maintaining friendly and intimate intercourse with the de facto Government.' But in 1863, on the death of the powerful Afghán ruler, Dost Muhammad, the de facto Government of Afghánistán disappeared. A war of succession followed among the sons and nephews of the late Amír. Sher Alí, the rightful successor, was for a time driven out of the field by his brother Afzul Khán, in 1866. Instead, therefore, of a single de facto Government in Afghánistán—such as existed in 1858—there were at least two Rulers, each of whom claimed to be the Sovereign Power.

Lord Lawrence still endeavoured to maintain our relations with that country upon the basis laid down in 1858. Both the claimants to the succession asked for the recognition of the British Government. Lord Lawrence expressed his willingness to recognise either of them who should succeed in establishing a de facto Government. 'My friend,' he wrote to Afzul Khán, when he had obtained a footing in Kábul, 'the relations of this Government are with the actual Rulers of Afghánistán. If your Highness is able to consolidate your power in Kábul, and is sincerely desirous of being a friend and ally of the British Government, I shall be ready to accept your Highness as such.'

The Afgháns retorted that this policy was a direct premium upon successful revolt, and tended to render the establishment of any stable government in Afghánistán impossible. It amounted, in their view, to a declaration that the British Government, while anxious to obtain the support of the Afghán Ruler, was willing to turn against that Ruler the moment that a rebel made head against him, and to transfer its friendship to the rebel Chief. 'It is difficult,' said the indignant Afgháns, 'for any nation to get on with the English. The meaning of this letter would appear to be that the English desire that our family shall exterminate one another.... Without doubt they will have written the same to Sher Alí.'

Lord Lawrence did not shrink from accepting this situation. As a matter of fact, he was not only willing to recognise any successful claimant to the sovereignty of Afghánistán; he was also willing to extend that recognition to even a partially successful claimant, to the extent which such a claimant might have succeeded in dismembering the country. 'So long,' Lord Lawrence distinctly declared to Afzul Khán, 'as Amír Sher Alí holds Herát and maintains friendship with the British Government, I shall recognise him as Ruler of Herát, and shall reciprocate his amity. But, upon the same principle, I am prepared to recognise your Highness as Amír of Kábul and Kandahár, and I frankly offer your Highness in that capacity the peace and goodwill of the British Government.'

This policy, instead of making allies of the two claimants, excited the wrath of both. Sher Alí, on hearing of the above declaration, exclaimed, 'The English look to nothing but their own interests, and bide their time. Whosoever's side they see the strongest for the time, they turn to him as their friend. I will not waste precious life in entertaining false hopes from the English, and will enter into friendship with other Governments.'

There was another Government which was only too happy to accept the friendship thus offered. If Russia could intervene as the ally of Afghánistán, and consolidate a sovereign power in that State, she would not only pose as the arbiter of Central Asia, but would also establish a commanding influence on the very frontier of India. Lord Lawrence, before he left India, recognised this fact. In the summer of 1868, Sher Alí, by a desperate effort, regained the throne, and entered Kábul in triumph. In September, 1868, he finally drove his rival claimants out of the country. Meanwhile Sir Henry Rawlinson had penned in England his memorable Minute of the 20th July, 1868. 'The fortunes of Sher Alí are again in the ascendant,' he wrote. 'He should be secured in our interests without delay. Provided he is unentangled with Russia, the restoration of his father's subsidy, and the moral support of the British Indian Government, would probably be sufficient to place him above all opposition, and to secure his fidelity; and it may indeed be necessary to furnish him with arms and officers, or even to place an auxiliary contingent at his disposal.'

During the last four months of his rule, Lord Lawrence pondered deeply over these words. On the 4th of January, 1869, he sent a Despatch to the Secretary of State, which may fitly be regarded as the political testament of the wearied Viceroy. 'We think that endeavours might be made to come to a clear understanding with the Court of St. Petersburg as to its projects and designs in Central Asia, and that it might be given to understand in firm, but courteous language, that it cannot be permitted to interfere in the affairs of Afghánistán or in those of any State which lies contiguous to our frontier.' 'Then we think that our relations to the Court of Teheran should be placed entirely under the Secretary of State for India, and that we should be empowered to give to any de facto ruler of Kábul some arms and ammunition and substantial pecuniary assistance, as well as moral support, as occasion may offer, but without any formal or defensive alliance.'

'I cannot bring my mind,' wrote Sir Stafford Northcote, then Secretary of State for India, 'to the proposal that we should subsidise first one, and then the other, according as accident brings up Sher Alí or Abdul Rahman to the head of affairs.'

Nine days after Lord Lawrence signed his political testament, Lord Mayo reached Calcutta. On the new Viceroy devolved the heavy responsibility of carrying out the transition policy, somewhat vaguely indicated by his predecessor, in such a way as to disclose no break in the continuity of the Indian Government. In March 1869, the Amír Sher Alí, who had meanwhile consolidated his power in Afghánistán, came in state to India to pay his respects to the new Governor-General. I do not propose to record the splendours of the Ambálá Darbár. All well-managed Darbárs are imposing, and form an oriental edition of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. I had the privilege of being a guest of the Viceroy at the historical gathering of troops, Native Princes, and British administrators which encamped on the Ambálá Plain. But if I were to enter on the spectacular aspects of an Indian Viceroy's career this book would swell far beyond the limits assigned to it. My business is with the less imposing but more permanent work actually accomplished. From the moment the Amír crossed our frontier he was received with a magnificence of hospitality which deeply impressed him. At Lahor he let fall the words, 'I now begin to feel myself a King.'

Sher Alí came to India with five distinct objects in view. He desired, in the first place, a treaty. In the second place, he hoped for a fixed annual subsidy. In the third place, for assistance in arms or in men, to be given 'not when the British Government might think fit to grant, but when he might think it needful to solicit it.' In the fourth place, for a well-defined engagement, 'laying the British Government under an obligation to support the Afghán Government in any emergency; and not only that Government generally, but that Government as vested in himself and his direct descendants, and in no others.'¹ Finally, he cherished a desire that he might obtain some constructive act of recognition by the British Government in favour of his younger son, Abdullá Ján, whom he brought with him, and whom he wished to make his heir, to the exclusion of his elder son, Yákub Khán, who had helped him to win the throne.

¹ Minute in Council, by the Hon. Sir John Strachey, G.C.S.I., sometime acting Governor-General, dated 30th April, 1872.

In not one of these objects was the Amír successful. The first four were distinctly negatived; the fifth was not, I believe, even permitted to enter into the discussions. Lord Mayo adhered to a programme which he had deliberately put in writing before he left Calcutta. Yet, by tact and by conciliatory firmness, he sent the Amír away satisfied, and deeply impressed with the advantage of being on good terms with the British Power. 'We have distinctly intimated to the Amír,' he wrote, 'that under no circumstances shall a British soldier cross his frontier to assist him in coercing his rebellious subjects. That no fixed subsidy or money allowance will be given for any named period. That no promise of assistance in other ways will be made. That no treaty will be entered into, obliging us under every circumstance to recognise him and his descendants as rulers of Afghánistán. Yet that, by the most open and absolute present recognition, and by every public evidence of friendly disposition, of respect for his character, and interest in his fortunes, we are prepared to give him all the moral support in our power; and that, in addition, we are willing to assist him with money, arms, ammunition, Native artificers, and in other ways, whenever we deem it desirable so to do.'

These may seem but small concessions compared with the expectations which the Amír had formed. But they were all that Lord Mayo deemed it right to grant, and he granted them in such a way as to render the Amír a firm and grateful friend during the whole of his Viceroyalty.

The Amír, on his return to Kábul, initiated English improvements with an amusing promptitude. He forbade his troops and the inhabitants to wear arms between 10 P.M. and 4 A.M. He appointed night watchmen, and a judicial officer to hear petitions from the citizens. He established post offices. He substituted cash payments for the old practice of paying the Government servants by assignments of land or revenue. He ordered the shoemakers of Kábul to sell off all their old stock, and to make boots according to the English pattern! He dressed himself in the English costume of coat and pantaloons, and directed his officers to do the same! He organised a Council of State, composed of thirteen members, as a constitutional body for advising him in all departments of the administration. He remitted the more terrible forms of punishment, and pardoned several ancient enemies. In short, he did what in him lay to establish good government and win the confidence of his people. Rapid reforms, however, are usually short-lived. The most promising of them, namely, the substitution of cash payments for assignments on the revenue, was so violently opposed by the official class in Afghánistán, from the great Sardárs downwards, that, so far as I can learn, it was never really introduced.

'Surround India,' wrote Lord Mayo, shortly after the Ambálá Darbár, 'with strong, friendly, and independent States, who will have more interest in keeping well with us than with any other Power, and we are safe.' 'Our influence,' he says in another letter, 'has been considerably strengthened, both in our own territories and also in the States of Central Asia, by the Ambálá meeting; and if we can only persuade people that our policy really is non-intervention and peace, that England is at this moment the only non-aggressive Power in Asia, we should stand on a pinnacle of power that we have never enjoyed before.'

Lord Mayo's next object was to open conciliatory relations with Russia by honestly explaining the real nature of the change which had taken place. He accepted Russia's splendid vitality in Central Asia as a fact neither to be shirked nor condemned, but as one which, by vigilant firmness, might be rendered harmless to ourselves. The formal relations between the Courts of St. James and St. Petersburg are of course conducted by the Foreign Office in England. But Lord Mayo's travels in Russia had given him an insight into the strong personal element in the working of the Russian official system, and had made several of the Russian Ministers his warm friends for life. Without interfering, therefore, with the regular relations between the two Courts, he thought it might be advantageous that an unofficial interchange of views should take place between the high officers connected with the actual administration of Asiatic affairs.

He therefore took the opportunity of a distinguished Bengal Civilian going home on leave, to authorise him, if it met with the concurrence of Her Majesty's Ministers, to give assurances to the leading Russian officials of his peaceful policy, and to enter into frank and friendly explanations on Central Asian affairs. Sir Douglas (then Mr.) Forsyth reached St. Petersburg in October 1869. The result of the confidential interchange of opinions which followed was the acceptance of Lord Mayo's view that the best security for peace in Central Asia consisted in maintaining the great States on the Indian frontier in a position of effective independence. Efforts were also made to prevent the recurrence of those unauthorised aggressions by Russian frontier officers, which had kept Central Asia in perpetual turmoil. Of these efforts it may be briefly said that they were successful during the term of Lord Mayo's Viceroyalty.

In the interviews of Sir Douglas Forsyth with the Russian Minister of War and the Minister of the Asiatic Department it was agreed that Russia should respect as Afghánistán all the Provinces which Sher Alí then held, that the Oxus should be the boundary line of Sher Alí's dominions on the north, and that both England and Russia should do their best to prevent aggressions by the Asiatic States under their control. Lord Mayo lost no time in securing for Sher Alí the guarantee of a recognised boundary against the Amír's neighbours in Central Asia. In 1871 the Russians, however, raised grave objections to Badakshán being included within the Afghán line. This question was settled by friendly negotiations in 1872. In January, 1873, Count Schouvaloff arrived in London to personally express the Emperor's sanction to the disputed territories being recognised as part of Afghánistán. Subsequent delimitations have given precision to the frontier. But practically it may be said that Afghánistán, as territorially defined by Lord Mayo in 1869, remained substantially the Afghánistán of the following twenty years.

Having thus placed the affairs of Afghánistán on a satisfactory footing, Lord Mayo turned his attention to the great territories which stretch southward from it along our Sind Frontier and eastwards to Persia. He found that our relations with these territories, loosely named Balúchistán or Khelát, were perplexed by two distinct sets of complications—one external, the other internal. The first referred to the frontier between Balúchistán and Persia. This had never been settled, and had for generations formed the arena of mutual aggressions and sanguinary raids. The internal complication arose from the ill-defined position of the Khán or Ruler towards his nobility. According to one party in Khelát, the Khán is the Sovereign of the State; according to another, he is the head of a confederacy of Chiefs. The net result was, that what between wars of extermination on the Persian Frontier, and the internecine struggle between the royalist and oligarchic parties within the State, Balúchistán knew no rest, and might at any moment prove a troublesome neighbour. Her internal rebellions and her border feuds rendered it very hard to discover with whom the actual authority rested, or how far it extended, and made it difficult for the British Government to take measures for the consolidation of the titular ruler's power.

Lord Mayo vigorously addressed himself to the solution of both the external and the internal problem of Balúchistán. His action led to the demarcation of a political boundary between Afghánistán and Persia; which practically put an end to the aggressions of the latter. He displayed not less vigour in trying to help Balúchistán to evolve from her conflicting factions a stable and permanent central power. The task proved a most difficult one. Each of the great parties in Balúchistán had a real basis of right on which to found its claims. The nobles could show that they had frequently controlled the Khán, and compelled him to act as the head of a confederacy of Chiefs rather than as a supreme ruler. The Khán could prove that although he had from time to time succumbed to his rebellious barons, yet that he had only done so after a struggle, and that he had exercised his royal authority whenever he again found himself strong enough.

The question resembled the worn-out discussion as to whether England was or was not a limited monarchy under the Plantagenets. The constitutional difficulties in Balúchistán were embittered by wrongs both great and recent on both sides; and at the time of Lord Mayo's death, its consolidation into a well-governed kingdom yet remained to be accomplished. He lived, however, to see his efforts bear fruit in a period of unwonted rest to its unhappy population, and to place the whole problem in a fair train for settlement. Before his sudden end, he had the satisfaction of being able to authorise a high British officer to act as arbitrator between the Khán and the tribal Chiefs.

Due north of India, beyond Kashmír and the Himálayas, another State made pressing claims on Lord Mayo's attention. This State was known as Eastern Turkestán. It owed its origin to one of those revivals, partly religious, partly political, which at that time threatened to dismember the Chinese Empire. The Panthays had proved the efficacy of such a revival by the establishment of an independent Muhammadan State in the south-west of China. The Chinese Musalmáns of the Desert of Gobi on the far north-western frontier followed their example, and ended by raising their rebellion to the dignity of a holy war. The Chinese authorities were expelled and all who supported them were massacred. In 1864 the new Musalmán Power, composed of very heterogeneous elements, found itself in possession of Eastern Turkestán. After a further struggle among the victors, Yákúb Kushbegí, a brave soldier of fortune, emerged in 1869 as the Ruler of the vast central territory which stretched eastwards from the Pamír Steppe to the Chinese Frontier, and from the British-protected State of Kashmír on the south to the Russian outposts on the Shan and Muzart ranges on the north.

In January, 1870, an envoy from the new Ruler arrived in India to solicit, inter alia, that a British officer might accompany him back on a friendly visit to his master. Lord Mayo consented to send Mr. Douglas Forsyth on one express condition—that in no sense was the visit to be a mission, nor was it to have a diplomatic object.

Mr. Forsyth was to abstain from taking part in any political questions, or in any internal disputes, further than repeating the general advice already given to Yákúb's envoy by Lord Mayo: namely, that Yákúb would best consult the interests of his kingdom by a watchful, just, and vigorous government; by strengthening the defences of his frontier; and above all, by not interfering in the political affairs of other States, or in the quarrels of Chiefs or tribes that did not directly concern his own interests. Mr. Forsyth was to limit his stay in the country, so as to run no risk of finding the Himálayan passes closed by the winter's snow, and of thus being detained in Yárkand till the following year. He was to collect full and trustworthy information concerning the nature and resources of Eastern Turkestán and the neighbouring countries, their recent history, their present political condition, their capabilities for trade, the Indian staples most in demand, their price in the Yárkand market, and the articles which could be most profitably brought to India in exchange.

Mr. Forsyth, on his arrival in the Yárkand territory, found that Yákúb had not yet succeeded in consolidating his dominions. He scrupulously abstained from being drawn into political discussions of any sort, and after a brief halt at the southern capital, Yárkand, to refit his camp with provisions and beasts of burden, he returned to India. He brought back complete information regarding the most practicable routes across the Himálayas, the industrial capabilities and resources of the country, its recent history, and the actual position of its Ruler. From first to last he made it clearly understood that his mission was of a purely tentative and commercial character.

As a part of the same policy, Lord Mayo opened up a free trade-route through the Chang Chenmu valley by a treaty with Kashmír, and placed the transit of Indian merchandise across the Himálayas on a securer basis. The traffic which will pay the cost of carriage across the snowy altitudes of Central Asia can never seem great, when expressed in figures and compared with the enormous sea-borne exports and imports of India. But it is a very lucrative one to certain classes in the inland and warlike Province of the Punjab, whose population we were trying to habituate to peaceful industry by every ameliorating influence of wealth and commerce.

I have now described the measures which Lord Mayo took in pursuance of his fixed resolve to create a cordon of friendly and well-governed States on our western and northern frontier, from Balúchistán on the Arabian Sea, round by Afghánistán, to Eastern Turkestán. He acted in the same spirit to his neighbours along the north-eastern and south-eastern borders of the British dominions. Towards Nepál he maintained an attitude alike firm, friendly, and dignified, and consolidated the satisfactory relations which he found existing with that State. On the north-east of Bengal he may be said to have created a frontier, by means of the Lúshai Expedition, and to have given to those long distracted regions a period of quiet and peace. Proceeding farther south, we find him equally busy in Burma, restraining the warlike propensities of the king, developing trade relations, and enforcing respect for the British Power. But the hard work of his foreign policy lay on the western and north-western frontier, and I have given so much space to its narration, that I must close this chapter without branching out into less essential details.