India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

THE EMERGENCE OF MR. GANDHI

Before this great statute could be brought into operation, and even whilst Parliament was still laboriously evolving it, a strange and incalculable figure was coming to the forefront in India, who, favoured by an extraordinary combination of untoward circumstances, was to rally round him some of the most and many of the least reputable forces which, sometimes under new disguises, the old and passive civilisation of India is instinctively driven to oppose to the disintegrating impact upon it of the active and disturbing energies of Western civilisation. Saint and prophet in the eyes of the multitude of his followers—saint in the eyes even of many who have not accepted him as a prophet—Mr. Gandhi preaches to-day under the uninspiring name of "Non-co-operation," a gospel of revolt none the less formidable because it is so far mainly a gospel of negation and retrogression, of destruction not construction. Mr. Gandhi challenges not only the material but the moral foundations of British rule. He has passed judgment upon both British rule and Western civilisation, and, condemning both as "Satanic," his cry is away with the one and with the other, and "back to the Vedas," the fountain source of ancient Hinduism. That he is a power in the land none can deny, least of all since the new Viceroy, Lord Reading, almost immediately on his arrival in India, spent long hours in close conference with him at Simla. What manner of man is Mr. Gandhi, whom Indians revere as a Mahatma, i.e. an inspired sage upon whom the wisdom of the ancient Rishis has descended? What is the secret of his power?

Born in 1869 in a Gujarat district in the north of the Bombay Presidency, Mohandas Karamchamd Gandhi comes of very respectable Hindu parentage, but does not belong to one of the higher castes. His father, like others of his forebears, was Dewan, or chief administrator, of one of the small native States of Kathiawar. He himself was brought up for the Bar and, after receiving the usual English education in India, completed his studies in England, first as an undergraduate of the London University and then at the Inner Temple. His friend and biographer, Mr. H.S.L. Polak, tells us that his mother, whose religious example and influence made a lasting impression upon his character, held the most orthodox Hindu views, and only agreed to his crossing "the Black Water" to England after exacting from him a three-fold vow, which he faithfully kept, of abstinence from flesh, alcohol, and women. He returned to India as soon as he had been called to the Bar and began to practise as an advocate before the Bombay High Court, but in 1893, as fate would have it, he was to be called to South Africa in connection with an Indian legal case in Natal. In South Africa he was brought at once into contact with a bitter conflict of rights between the European population and the Indian settlers who had originally been induced to go out and work there at the instance of the white communities who were in need of cheap labour for the development of the country. The Europeans, professing to fear the effects of a large admixture of Asiatic elements, had begun not only to restrict further Indian immigration, but to place the Indians already in South Africa under many disabilities all the more oppressive because imposed on racial grounds. Natal treated them harshly, but scarcely as harshly as the Transvaal, then still under Boer government. In the Transvaal the Imperial Government took up the cudgels for them, and the treatment of the Indian settlers there was one of the grievances pressed by Lord Milner during the negotiations which preceded the final rupture with the Boer Republics. When the South African war broke out Mr. Gandhi believed that it would lead to a generous recognition of the rights of Indians if they at once identified their cause with that of the British, and he induced Government to accept his offer of an Indian Ambulance Corps which did excellent service in the field. Mr. Gandhi himself served with it, was mentioned in despatches, and received the war medal. His health gave way, and he returned to India in 1901 where he resumed practice in Bombay with no intention of returning to South Africa, as he felt confident that when the war was over the Imperial Government would see to it that the Indians should have the benefit of the principles which it had itself proclaimed before going into the war. He was, however, induced to return in 1903 to help in preparing the Indian memorials to be laid before Mr. Chamberlain whose visit was imminent in connection with the work of reconstruction. On his arrival he found that conditions and European opinion were becoming more instead of less unfavourable for Indians, and though in 1906, when the native rebellion broke out in Natal, he again offered and secured the acceptance of an Indian Stretcher-Bearer Corps with which he again served and received the thanks of the Governor, he gradually found himself driven into an attitude of more and more open opposition and even conflict with Government by a series of measures imposing more and more intolerable restraints upon his countrymen. It was in 1906 that he first took a vow of passive resistance to a law which he regarded as a deliberate attack upon their religion, their national honour, and their racial self-respect. In the following year he was consigned, not for the first time, to jail in Pretoria, but his indomitable attitude helped to bring about a compromise. It was, however, short-lived, as misunderstandings occurred as to its interpretation. The struggle broke out afresh until another provisional settlement promised to lead to a permanent solution, when Mr. Gokhale, after consultation with the India Office during a visit to England, was induced in 1912 to proceed to South Africa and use his good offices in a cause which he had long had at heart. Whether, as Mr. Gokhale himself always contended, as a deliberate breach of the promise made to him by the principal Union Ministers, or as the result of a lamentable misunderstanding, measures were again taken in 1913 which led Mr. Gandhi to renew the struggle, and it assumed at once a far more serious character than ever before. It was then that Mr. Gandhi organised his big strikes of Indian labour and headed the great strikers' march of protest into the Transvaal which led to the arrest and imprisonment of the principal leaders and of hundreds of the rank and file. The furious indignation aroused in India, the public meetings held in all the large centres, and the protest entered by the Viceroy himself, Lord Hardinge, in his speech at Madras, combined with earnest representations from Whitehall, compelled General Smuts to enter once more the path of conciliation and compromise. As the result of a Commission of Inquiry the Indians' Relief Act was passed, and in the correspondence between Mr. Gandhi and General Smuts the latter undertook on behalf of the South African Government to carry through other administrative reforms not actually specified in the new Act. Mr. Gandhi returned to India just after the outbreak of the Great War, and the Government of India marked its appreciation of the great services which he had rendered to his countrymen in South Africa by recommending him for the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal, which was conferred upon him amongst the New Year honours of 1915.

The South African stage of Mr. Gandhi's career is of great importance, as it goes far to explain both the views and the methods which he afterwards applied in India. He brought back with him from South Africa a profound distrust of Western civilisation, of which he had unquestionably witnessed there some of the worst aspects, and also a strong belief in the efficacy of passive resistance as the most peaceful means of securing the redress of all Indian grievances in India as well as in South Africa should they ever become in his opinion unendurable. Mr. Gokhale, before he died, obtained a promise from him that for at least a year he would not attempt to give practical expression to the extreme views which he had already set forth in the proscribed pamphlet Hind Swaraj. At an early age Mr. Gandhi had fallen under the spell of Tolstoian philosophy, and he has admitted only quite recently that for a time he was so much impressed with the doctrines of Christ that he was inclined to adopt Christianity; but the further study of the spiritual side of Hinduism convinced him that in it alone the key of salvation could be found, and all his teachings since then have been based on his faith in the superiority of the Indian civilisation rooted in Hinduism to Western civilisation, which for him in fact represents in its present stage only a triumph of gross materialism and brute force. Nevertheless, when the Great War broke out, he was prepared to believe that the ordeal of war in the cause of freedom for which Britain had taken up arms might lead to the redemption of Western civilisation from its worst evils, and whilst in London on his way to South Africa he had already offered to form, and to enrol himself and his wife in, an Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps. Yet he was not blind to the flaws of the civilisation for which he stood. He conducted a temperance campaign amongst his countrymen in South Africa, and, brought there into close contact with many Indians of the "untouchable" castes, he revolted against a system which tried to erect such insurmountable barriers between man and man. Perhaps the best clue to the many contradictions in which his activities have continually seemed to involve him was furnished by himself when he said, "Most religious men I have met are politicians in disguise; I, however, who wear the guise of a politician am at heart a religious man," and the doctrine which he holds of all others to be the corner-stone of his religion is that of Ahimsa, which, as he has described it, "requires deliberate self-suffering, not the deliberate injuring of the wrongdoer," in the resistance of evil.

Throughout the war Mr. Gandhi devoted his ceaseless energies chiefly to preaching social reforms and the moral regeneration of his countrymen. He was then an honoured guest at European gatherings, as for instance at the Madras Law dinner in 1915, at various conferences on education, at the Bombay Provincial Co-operative Conference in 1917 when in connection with the admirable Co-operative Credit movement in India he lectured on the moral basis of co-operation, at missionary meetings in which he showed his intimate familiarity with the gospels by reverently quoting Christ's words in support of his own plea for mutual forbearance and tolerance. As late as July 1918 he defined Swaraj as partnership in the Empire, and war service as the easiest and straightest way to win Swaraj, inviting the people of his own Gujarat country whom he was addressing to wipe it free of the reproach of effeminacy by contributing thousands of Sepoys in response to the Viceroy's recent appeal for fresh recruits for the Indian army at one of the most critical moments during the war. His comments about the same time on the Montagu-Chelmsford scheme were by no means unfavourable, and he specifically joined in the tribute of praise bestowed upon the Indian Civil Service for their steadfast devotion to duty and great organising ability. Government itself resorted to his services as the member of a Commission appointed to inquire into agrarian troubles at Camparan, and his collaboration was warmly welcomed by his European colleagues. Nor were there any signs of implacable hostility to British rule in his vigorous protests in the following year against the anti-Asiatic legislation of the South African Union which was again stirring up bad feeling in India.

The circumstances which drove him to declare war against British rule and Western civilisation arose out of the action taken by Government on the report of the "Sedition Committee," which, under the presidency of Mr. Justice Rowlatt, a judge of the High Court of King's Bench, sent out especially to preside over it, had not only carefully explored the origins and growth of political crime during the great wave of unrest after the Partition of Bengal, but recommended that in some directions the hands of the executive and judicial authorities should be strengthened to cope with any fresh outbreaks of a similar character. The Committee pointed out that in spite of the preventive legislation of 1911 it had become apparent before the war broke out that the forces of law and order were still inadequately equipped to cope with the situation in Bengal. For the duration of the war the Defence of India Act had conferred upon Government emergency powers which had enabled the authorities summarily to intern a large number of those who were known to be closely connected with the criminal propaganda, but almost as soon as the war was over their release would follow automatically upon the expiry of the Defence Act, and a dangerous situation would arise again if Government had nothing but the old methods of procedure to fall back upon.

In January 1919 the Government of India announced that legislation in conformity with the recommendations of the Sedition Committee would be required from the Imperial Legislative Council, and two draft bills were published, one of them embodying permanent alterations in the law and the other arming the Executive with emergency powers. The publication of these bills threw the country into a fresh ferment of agitation, and even an Indian judge of undeniably moderate views, Sir Narain Chandavarkar, declared that such measures were no longer required, as with the advent of constitutional reforms revolutionary agitation would, he believed, cease, and, as a warm supporter of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, he felt bound to protest against legislation so entirely at variance with the spirit in which the Report had been conceived and with the expectations which it had aroused. The Extremists read into the bills another proof of the organised hypocrisy characteristic of British rule in general and of the Report in particular, and denounced them as a monstrous engine of tyranny and oppression, against which no Indian would be safe. Government, however, was not to be moved from its determination, and in explaining the necessity for proceeding with the bills the Viceroy pointed out in his opening speech that "the reaction against all authority that had manifested itself in many parts of the civilised world was unlikely to leave India entirely untouched and the powers of evil were still abroad." The Indian non-official members, on the other hand, were solid in opposition, and even those who did not challenge the report of the Sedition Committee intimated that now the war was over they could not acquiesce in such measures until the reforms had come into operation, and unless it was then found that revolutionary forces were still at work and constituted a real public danger. The two amendments, supported by all the Indian non-official members, were voted down by the official bloc. Government did something to allay opposition by agreeing that the Act which was to have been permanent should operate for three years only, and the title of the bill was amended to show clearly that its application would be confined to clearly anarchical and revolutionary crimes. It was further modified in form in the committee stage, but the opposition within the Council remained unmoved, and outside the Council grew more and more fierce. The Extremists who had shrunk from no efforts to misrepresent the purpose of the bills received a great accession of strength when Mr. Gandhi instituted the vow of Satyagraha, or passive resistance, under which, if the bills became law, he and his followers would "severally refuse to obey these laws and such other laws as a committee to be thereafter appointed might see fit," whilst they would "faithfully follow the truth and refrain from violence to life, person, or property." The Moderate leaders at Delhi at once issued a manifesto condemning Satyagraha, but Government stuck to its guns, the bills being finally passed on March 18, after very hot discussion. Mr. Gandhi, having formed his committee, proclaimed a Hartal, i.e. a demonstrative closing of shops and suspension of business for March 30. This Hartal at Delhi started a terrible outbreak which spread with unexpected violence over parts of the Bombay Presidency and the greater part of the Punjab, with sporadic disturbances in the North-West Frontier Province, and even in Calcutta.

The Delhi Hartal brought for the first time into full relief the close alliance into which the Mahomedan Extremists had been brought with the Hindu Extremists, as well as the influence which both had acquired over a considerable section of the lower classes in the two communities. The political leaders had fallen into line in the Indian National Congress and the All-India Moslem League during the 1916 and 1917 sessions, when they united in demanding Home Rule for India, and they had united since then in rejecting as totally inadequate the scheme of reforms foreshadowed in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. But not till towards the conclusion of the war did the Mahomedan Extremists discover a special grievance for their own community in the peace terms likely to be imposed upon a beaten Turkey. That was a grievance far more likely to appeal to their co-religionists than the political grievances which had formed the stock-in-trade of Hindu Extremism, if they could be worked upon to believe that Great Britain and her allies were plotting not merely against the temporal power of the Ottoman Empire, but against the Mahomedan religion all over the world by depriving the Sultan of Turkey of the authority essential to the discharge of his office as Khalif or spiritual head of Islam.

The agitation was at first very artificial, for the bulk of Indian Mahomedans had until recent years known very little about and taken still less interest in Turkey, and their loyalty had never wavered during the war. Some of the leading Indian Mahomedans had indeed openly disputed Sultan Abdul Hamid's claim to the Khalifate of Islam when he first tried at the end of the last century to import his Pan-Islamic propaganda into India. But the long delay on the part of the Allies in formulating their Turkish peace terms allowed time for the movement to grow and to carry with it the more fanatical element amongst Indian Mahomedans. The Government of India tried in vain to allay Mahomedan feeling by receiving deputations from the Khilafat Association founded to prosecute an intensified campaign in favour of Turkey, and professing its own deep anxiety to procure what it called "a just peace with Turkey," for which the Indian delegates to the War and to the Peace Conferences in Europe had been constantly instructed to plead. The greatest success which the Khilafat agitators achieved was when Mr. Gandhi allowed himself to be persuaded by them that the movement was a splendid manifestation of religious faith, as he himself described it to me. For, once satisfied that the cause which they had taken up was a religious cause, he was prepared to make it his own without inquiring too closely into its historical or political justification. For him it became a revolt of the Mahomedan religious conscience against the tyranny of the West just as legitimate as the revolt of the Hindu conscience against the same tyranny embodied in the Rowlatt Acts. Whilst Mahomedans proved their emancipation from narrow sectarianism by joining in the Satyagraha movement of passive resistance in spite of the Hindu character impressed upon it by its Sanscrit name, it was, he declared, for Hindus to show that they, too, could rise above ancient prejudice and resentment by throwing themselves heart and soul into the Khilafat movement. Both movements were to be demonstrations of the "soul-force" of India, to be put forth in passive resistance according to his favourite doctrine of Ahimsa, the endurance and not the infliction of suffering.

But Mr. Gandhi, with all his visionary idealism, was letting loose dangerous forces which recked naught of Ahimsa. Hindus and Mahomedans "fraternised" at the Delhi Hartal in attempts to compel its observance by violence which obliged the authorities to use forcible methods of repression, and of the five rioters who were killed two were Mahomedans. These deaths were skilfully exploited by the Extremists of both denominations, and a day of general mourning for the Delhi "martyrs" was appointed. The spark had been laid to the train, and Hindus and Mahomedans continued to "fraternise" in lawlessness, arson, and murder wherever the mob ran riot. Systematic attempts to destroy railways and telegraphs at the same moment in widely separated areas pointed to the existence of a carefully elaborated organisation. Public buildings as well as European houses were burnt down in half a dozen places, and Europeans were often savagely attacked and done to death, nowhere more savagely than at Amritsar, where five Europeans, two of them Bank managers, were killed with the most fiendish brutality, and a missionary lady, known for her good works, barely escaped with her life. The authorities were not slow to take stern measures. Troops were rapidly moved to the centres of disturbance, flying columns were sent through the country, and armoured cars and trains and aeroplanes were used to disperse the rioters. A Resolution issued by the Government of India on April 14 asserted its determination to use all the powers vested in it to put down "open rebellion" even by the most drastic means. By the end of the month the Viceroy was able to announce that order had been generally restored, though in some places there was still considerable effervescence.