Indian civilisation in all its branches,—religion, education, art, industry, home life and government,—is healthy, spiritual, beautiful and good. It has become corrupted in the course of centuries, but that is largely the result of the cruelty and aggression of the Muhammadans in former times and now of the British. The Indian patriot must toil to restore Indian life and civilisation.
Western civilisation in all its parts,—religion, education, art, business and government,—is gross, materialistic and therefore degrading to India. The patriotic Indian must recognise the grave danger lurking in every element of Western influence, must hate it, and must be on his guard against it.
India ought to be made truly Indian. There is no place for Europeans in the country. Indians can manage everything far better than Europeans can. The British Government, Missions, European trade and Western influence of every kind, are altogether unhealthy in India. Everything should belong to the Indians themselves.
Hence it is a religious duty to get rid of the European and all the evils that attend him. The better a man understands his religion, the more clear will be his perception that Europeans and European influence must be rooted out. All means for the attainment of this end are justifiable. As Krishna killed Kamsa, so the modern Indian must kill the European demons that are tyrannically holding India down. The bloodthirsty goddess Kali ought to be honoured by the Indian patriot. Even the Baghavad Ghita was used to teach murder. Lies, deceit, murder, everything, it was argued, may be rightly used.
Not till some years later did a Committee, presided over by a British High Court judge sent out from England for the purpose, fully explore the many ramifications of a revolutionary movement which had one of its head centres in London, until the murder of Sir W. Curzon-Wylie by an Indian student during a crowded reception at the Imperial Institute aroused the attention of the authorities to the activities of the "India House," and Mr. Krishnavarma, its familiar genius, had to transfer to Paris his notorious paper, the Indian Sociologist, in which he openly glorified murder. The "Sedition Committee's" Report was only made public in 1918, and if the action taken upon it by the Government of India was to furnish the occasion for another popular explosion different in character from, but no less formidable than, the explosion which followed the Partition of Bengal, the facts which it marshalled and the conclusions which it drew from them with judicial soberness have never been seriously challenged. It found that the long series of crimes of which it recorded the genesis and growth had been "directed towards one and the same objective, the overthrow by force of British rule in India," and nothing revealed more clearly the mainspring of the movement than the statistics given as to age, caste, and occupation of persons who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst committing them. The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age; most of them students and teachers; all of them Hindus, and almost all high-caste Hindus, either Brahmans or Kayasthas—the latter a writer-caste ranking just below the Brahman caste. These statistics did not cover the large number of crimes of which the authors escaped scot-free and were never brought to justice.
Not the least alarming feature of the situation was the attitude of the Indian public generally towards this epidemic of political crime which assumed some forms hitherto quite unknown to India and abhorrent to most Indians. The movement could only be correctly described as an Anarchist movement in so far as the methods to which it resorted were largely modelled upon those of Russian anarchists and aimed, like theirs, at the subversion of the existing Government. It differed fundamentally from Russian anarchism in that it was directed against alien rulers of another faith and another civilisation. That it created a widespread feeling of apprehension and even of detestation amongst the great majority of peaceful and sober-minded Indians cannot be doubted, and especially amongst those who watched with alarm the ravages it was making amongst the younger generation. But few had the courage to carry reprobation to the length of assisting Government in the detection and repression of crimes which terrorism made it less dangerous to extenuate as lamentable exhibitions of a misguided patriotic frenzy. The Western-educated classes were completely estranged and smarted so bitterly over the contempt with which their representations and protests against the policy of Government had been treated that those even of the more moderate school of politics were content to throw up their hands in horror and declare that if they were unable to stem the torrent, the fault lay entirely with the bureaucracy which had killed by long years of neglect and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress. The Extremists boldly threw the whole responsibility for the movement on British rule and combined with a perfunctory and dubious condemnation of the crimes themselves an ecstatic admiration for the heroism which had driven the youth of India to follow the example of the Russian intelligentsia in its revolt against an autocracy as brutal and as odious as that of Russia. Mere measures of repression under the ordinary law were clearly incapable of coping with a situation which was becoming no less dangerous in its negative than in its positive aspects. British rule in India had concentrated so largely on mechanical efficiency that it had gradually lost sight of the old and finer principles of Anglo-Indian as well as of British statesmanship based on the paramount importance of genuine co-operation between British and Indians. During the Mutiny there were few of the Western-educated classes whose loyalty to the British Raj ever wavered. Fifty years later, when the Raj was confronted with a less violent but more insidious movement of revolt, a large part of the Western-educated classes, whose influence and numbers had increased immensely in the interval, were, if not in league, at least to some extent in sympathy with it, and many of those who deplored and reprobated it remained sulking in their tents. Government, they declared, had always despised their co-operation. As it had made its bed, so it must lie. It was a desperately short-sighted attitude, which has had its nemesis in the "Non-co-operation" movement of the present day. But, in a situation so severely strained, relief could only come from England and from a return to the earlier British ideals, and to those Indians who still looked for it there with some confidence after the change of Government which had taken place at home in December 1905 it seemed to come very slowly.
CHAPTER VII
THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS
A British Government of a more advanced type of liberalism than any of its Liberal predecessors found itself confronted as soon as it took office with a more difficult situation in India than had ever been dreamt of since the Mutiny, and the difficulties grew rapidly more grave. When Mr. Morley went to the India Office during the respite from agitation against the Partition of Bengal, procured by the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India even more than by Lord Curzon's departure from India, the new Secretary of State allowed himself to be persuaded that an agitation directed, so far, mainly against a harmless measure of mere administrative importance must be largely artificial, and he determined to maintain the Partition. He was entirely new to Indian affairs, and his Recollections show him to have been often sorely perplexed by the conflict between his own political instincts and the picture of Indian conditions placed before him by his official advisers at home and in India. He felt, however, on the whole fairly confident that he could deal with the situation by producing a moderate measure of reforms which would satisfy India's political aspirations and by keeping an extremely vigilant eye on Indian methods of administration of which "sympathy" was in future to be the key-note rather than mere efficiency. But when in the course of 1907 the agitation broke out afresh with increased fury and began to produce a crop of political outrages, Mr. Morley found himself in a particularly awkward position. He was known from his Irish days to be no believer in coercion. But the Government of India was not to be denied when it insisted that a campaign of murder could not be tolerated and that repression was as necessary as reform. The Secretary of State agreed reluctantly to sanction more stringent legislation for dealing with the excesses of the Extremist press in India, but he was only the more resolved that it must be accompanied by a liberal reforms scheme. The Viceroy himself shared this view and lent willing assistance. But the interchange of opinions between India and Whitehall was as usual terribly lengthy and laborious. A Royal Proclamation on November 28, 1908, the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's Proclamation after the Mutiny, foreshadowed reforms in "political satisfaction of the claims of important classes representing ideas that have been fostered and encouraged by British rule." But not till the following month, i.e. three years after Mr. Morley had taken over the India Office, did the reforms scheme see the light of day.