The Political Future of India

by Lala Lajpat Rai

“The political domination of one country by another attracts far more attention than the more formidable, though more unfelt, domination which the capital, enterprise and skill of one country exercise over the trade and manufactures of another. This latter domination has an insidious influence which paralyses the springs of all the various activities which together make up the life of a nation.”

In the course of a letter addressed to the Westminster Gazette in 1917, Lord Curzon said that “the fiscal policy of India during the last thirty or forty years has been shaped far more in Manchester than in Calcutta.” This candid admission about “the subordination of Indian fiscal policy to the Secretary of State and a House of Commons powerfully affected by Lancashire influence,” is the keynote of the Indian demand for Home Rule. The authors of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report say so quite frankly and fairly in Paragraphs 332 to 336 of their report, from which we make the following extracts:

“The people are poor; and their poverty raises the question whether the general level of well-being could not be materially raised by the development of industries. It is also clear that the lack of outlet for educated youth is a serious misfortune which has contributed not a little in the past to political unrest in Bengal. But perhaps an even greater mischief is the discontent aroused in the minds of those who are jealous for India by seeing that she is so largely dependent on foreign countries for manufactured goods. They noted that her foreign trade was always growing, but they also saw that its leading feature continued to be the barter of raw materials valued at relatively low prices for imported manufactures, which obviously afforded profits and prosperity to other countries industrially more advanced. Patriotic Indians might well ask themselves why these profits should not accrue to their country: and also why so large a portion of the industries which flourished in the country was financed by European capital and managed by European skill.”

“The fact that India’s foreign trade was largely with the United Kingdom gave rise to a suspicion that her industrial backwardness was positively encouraged in the interests of British manufactures, and the maintenance of the excise duty on locally manufactured cotton goods in the alleged interests of Lancashire is very widely accepted as a conclusive proof of such a purpose. On a smaller scale, the maintenance of a Stores Department at the India Office is looked upon as an encouragement to the Government to patronize British at the expense of local manufacturers.”

There can thus be no autonomy without fiscal autonomy. In fact, the latter alone is the determining characteristic of an autonomous existence.

The one national trait which distinguishes the British from other nations of the world is their habit of truthfulness and frankness. When we say that we do not thereby mean that all Britishers are equally truthful—to the same extent and degree. But we do mean that on the whole the British nation has a larger percentage of truthful and candid persons in her family than any other nation on the face of the earth. Where their interests clash with those of others, they can be as hard, exacting and cruel as any one else in the world. But repentance overtakes them sooner than it does the others. They have a queer but admirable faculty of introspection which few other people possess to the same extent and in the same numbers. This is what endears them even to those who are never tired of cursing their snobbishness and masterful imperialism. The faculty of occasionally seeing themselves with the eyes of others, makes them the most successful rulers of men. They are as a nation lacking in imagination, but there are individuals amongst them who can see, if they will, their own faults; who can and do speak out their minds honestly and truthfully, even though by so doing they may temporarily earn odium and unpopularity.

The remarks and observations of the eminent authors of the Report relating to the fiscal relations of India and England reflect the honesty of their purpose and the sincerity of their mind as no other part of the Report does. They have entered upon the subject with great diffidence and, though expressing themselves with marked candor and fairness, have refrained from making any definite recommendations.

In this respect it will be only fair to acknowledge the equally candid opinion of Mr. Austin Chamberlain, who, in 1917, made a most significant confession by stating on an important occasion that “India will not remain, and ought not to remain content to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the rest of the Empire.”

To our simple minds, not accustomed to the anomalies of official life, it seems inexplicable how, after these candid admissions, the authors could have any hesitation in recommending the only remedy by which India’s wrong could be righted and her economic rights secured in the future—viz., fiscal autonomy.

In Paragraph 335 the authors of the report give the genesis of the Swadeshi boycott movement of 1905, and very pertinently observe that “in Japanese progress and efficiency” the educated Indians see “an example of what could be effected by an Asiatic nation free of foreign control,” or in other words, of what could be achieved by India, if she had a national government of her own interested in her industrial advance. Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford thus rightly observe that “English theories to the appropriate limits of the State’s activity are inapplicable in India” and that if the resources of the country are to be developed the Government must take action.