India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

With regard to the administration of martial law the despatch considers it

impossible to avoid the conclusion that the majority of Lord Hunter's Committee have failed to express themselves in terms which, unfortunately, the facts not only justify, but necessitate. In paragraphs 16 to 25 of chapter xii. of their report the majority have dealt with the "intensive" form generally which martial law assumed and with certain specific instances of undue severity and of improper punishments or orders. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the instances which the Committee have enumerated in detail in both their reports, nor would any useful purpose be served by attempting to assess, with a view to penalties, the culpability of individual officers who were responsible for these orders, but whose conduct in other respects may have been free from blame or actually commendable. But His Majesty's Government must express strong disapproval of these orders and punishments and ask me to leave to you the duty of seeing that this disapproval shall be unmistakably marked by censure or other action which seems to you necessary upon those who were responsible for them. The instances cited by the Committee gave justifiable ground for the assertion that the administration of martial law in the Punjab was marred by a spirit which prompted—not generally, but unfortunately not uncommonly—the enforcement of punishments and orders calculated, if not intended to humiliate Indians as a race, to cause unwarranted inconvenience amounting on occasions to injustice, and to flout the standards of propriety and humanity, which the inhabitants not only of India in particular but of the civilised world in general have a right to demand of those set in authority over them. It is a matter for regret that, notwithstanding the conduct of the majority, there should have been some officers in the Punjab who appear to have overlooked the fact that they were administering martial law, not in order to subdue the population of a hostile country temporarily occupied as an act of war, but in order to deal promptly with those who had disturbed the peace of a population owing allegiance to the King Emperor, and in the main profoundly loyal to that allegiance.

This clear enunciation of bed-rock principles and emphatic condemnation of many of the methods of repression used in the Punjab would have done more to reassure the public mind in India had the actual punishment inflicted on General Dyer and a few others been more commensurate with the gravity of the censure passed on their actions, and in any case it came far too late. It came too late to stem the rising tide of Indian bitterness, intensified by many gross exaggerations and deliberate inventions, which lost all sense of proportion when the Extremists demanded Sir Michael O'Dwyer's impeachment, though many responsible Indians had expressed their unabated confidence in him before he left the Punjab on the expiry of his term of office, just after the troubles, in terms more unstinted even than those in which the Government of India and the British Government conveyed their appreciation of his long and distinguished services—services which assuredly no errors of judgment committed under great stress could be allowed to overshadow. It came too late also to correct the effects of the panic that had taken possession of the European mind when it was still largely in ignorance of the actual facts. For most Europeans had at once rushed to the conclusion that the outbreak in the Punjab, in which no single Sepoy ever took part, was or threatened to be a reproduction of the Mutiny. In the first days, as a measure of precaution, European women and children had been hurriedly collected into places of refuge lest the horrible excesses perpetrated by the Indian mob at Amritsar might prove the prelude to a repetition of Cawnpore. The hardships and anxiety they underwent and the murderous outrages actually committed on not a few Europeans moved most of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen to unmeasured resentment, and not until they gained at last a fuller knowledge of all the facts so long allowed to remain obscure did a gradual reaction set in against the belief which was genuinely entertained by most Europeans, non-official and official in India, and which spread from them to England, that General Dyer's action and the rigours of martial law alone "saved India."

What drove the iron into the soul of India more than the things actually done in the Punjab, for which many Indians admit the provocation, was the reluctance of her rulers to look them in the face, and the tardiness and half-heartedness of the atonement made for them. Not till nearly half a year after the troubles had occurred did the Government of India announce the appointment of the Hunter Committee of Inquiry, and this announcement was coupled with the introduction of a Bill of Indemnity for all officers of Government engaged in their repression, which wore, in the eyes of Indians, however unreasonably, the appearance of an attempt to shelter them against the possible findings of the Committee. Again nearly half a year passed before the report of the Committee was made public, and the bloom had already been taken off it for most Indians by the report of a Commission instituted on its own account by the Indian National Congress which, partisan and lurid as it was, never received full refutation, as the witnesses upon whose evidence it was based were, for technical reasons, not heard by the Hunter Committee. The complete surrender of civil authority into military hands first at Amritsar, and then, under orders from Simla, at Lahore and elsewhere, was, as His Majesty's Government afterwards acknowledged, a disastrous departure from the best traditions of the Indian Civil Service. But, whatever the mistakes committed by the civil authority in the Punjab or by those charged with the administration of martial law in that province, there is above the Punjab the Government of India, and its plea of prolonged ignorance as to the details of the occurrences in the Punjab can hardly hold water. The preoccupations of the Afghan war which followed closely on the Punjab troubles were no doubt absorbing, but had the Viceroy or the Home member or the Commander-in-Chief or one of his responsible advisers proceeded in person, the moment the disorders were over, to Lahore or Amritsar, barely more than a night's journey from Delhi or Simla, is it conceivable that a halt would not have been forthwith called to proceedings which these high officers of state were constrained later on unanimously to deplore and reprobate? And if the Government of India were too slow to move, was there not a Secretary of State who knew, from statements made to him personally by Sir Michael O'Dwyer on his return to England, at least enough to insist upon immediate inquiry on the spot? Mr. Montagu has seldom, it is believed, hesitated to require in the most peremptory terms full information on far more trivial matters. Had prompt action been taken in India, there would never have been any need for the Hunter Committee. As it was, Indian feeling had run tremendously high before its findings were made public. So when the Government of India and the Secretary of State published their belated judgment, the people of India weighed such a tardy measure of justice against the dissent of an important minority in the House of Commons and of the majority of the Lords, the stifling of discussion in the Indian Legislature, which was still more directly interested in the matter, and above all the unprecedented public subscriptions in England and in India for the glorification of General Dyer, whilst the Punjab Government was still haggling over doles to the widows and orphans of Jallianwala—and, having weighed it, found it lamentably wanting, until at last the Duke of Connaught's moving speech at Delhi for the first time began to redress the balance.

The story of Jallianwala and all that followed in the Punjab scattered to the winds Mr. Gandhi's threadbare penitence for the horrible violence of Indian mobs, and he poured out henceforth all the vials of his wrath on the violence of the repression, far more unpardonable, he declared, because they were not the outcome of ignorant fanaticism, but of a definite policy adopted by European officers high in rank and responsibility. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that a Government that tolerated or condoned or palliated such things was "Satanic," and that the whole civilisation for which such a Government stood was equally Satanic. For Indians to co-operate with it until it had shown "a complete change of heart" was a deadly sin. To accept any scheme of constitutional reforms as reparation for the wrongs of the Punjab with which the wrongs of Turkey were linked up with an increased fervour of righteous indignation when the terms of the treaty of Sèvres became known, was treachery to the soul of India. Thence it was but a step to the organisation of a definite "Non-co-operation" movement to demonstrate the finality of the breach. Mr. Gandhi appealed in the first place to the educated classes to set the example to the people. He called upon those on whom the State had conferred honours and titles to renounce them, upon barristers and pleaders to cease to practise in the law-courts, and upon parents to withdraw their children from the schools and colleges tainted with State control and State doles. If parents would not hearken to him, schoolboys and students were exhorted to shake themselves free of their own accord. To the people he opened up simpler ways of "Non-co-operation" by abstaining from tea and sugar and all articles of consumption and of clothing contaminated by alien hands or alien industry. If all would join in a common effort he promised that India would speedily attain Swaraj—the term mentioned was generally a year—and, quit of the railways and telegraphs and all other instruments and symbols of Western economic bondage, return to the felicity and greatness of Vedic times. All this, however, was to be done by "soul force" alone and without violence.

In the course of the only long conversation I had with Mr. Gandhi I tried to obtain from him some picture of what India would be like under Swaraj as he understood it. In a voice as gentle as his whole manner is persuasive, he explained, more in pity than in anger, that India had at last recovered her own soul through the fiery ordeal which Hindus and Mahomedans had undergone in the Punjab, and the perfect act of faith which the Khilafat meant for all Mahomedans, and that, purged of the degrading influences of the West, she would find again that peace which was hers before alien domination divided and exploited her people. As to the form of government and administration which would then obtain in India, he would not go beyond a vague assurance that it would be based on the free will of the people expressed by manhood suffrage for which Indians were already ripe, if called upon to exercise it upon truly Indian lines. When I objected that caste, which was the bed-rock of Hindu social and religious life, was surely a tremendous obstacle to any real democracy, he admitted that the system would have to be restored to its pristine purity and redeemed from some of the abuses that had crept into it. But he upheld the four original castes as laid down in the Vedas, and even their hereditary character, though in practice some born in a lower caste might well rise by their own merits and secure the deference and respect of the highest castes, "such as, for instance, if I may in all modesty quote my own unworthy case, the highest Brahmans spontaneously accord to me to-day, though by birth I am only of a lowly caste." I tried to get on to more solid ground by pointing out that, whatever views one might hold as to his ultimate goal, the methods he was employing in trying to break up the existing schools and colleges and law-courts and to paralyse the machinery of administration was destructive rather than constructive, and that, confident as he might feel of substituting better things ultimately for those that he had destroyed, construction must always be a much slower process than destruction; and in the meantime infinite and perhaps irreparable harm would be done. "No," he rejoined—and I think I can convey his words pretty accurately, but not his curious smile as of boundless compassion for the incurable scepticism of one in outer darkness—"no, I destroy nothing that I cannot at once replace. Let your law-courts with their cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her old Panchayats, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we will give them simpler structures, open to God's air and light, and the learning of our forefathers that will make them free men once more." Not that he would exclude all Western literature—Ruskin, for instance, he would always welcome with both hands—nor Western science so long as it was applied to spiritual and not to materialistic purposes, nor even English teachers, if they would become Indianised and were reborn of the spirit of India. Indeed, what he had looked for, and looked in vain for, in the rulers of India was "a change of hearts" by which they too might be reborn of the spirit of India. He hated no one, for that would be a negation of the great principle of Ahimsa, on which he expatiated with immense earnestness.

As I watched the slight ascetic frame and mobile features of the Hindu dreamer in his plain garment of white home-spun, and, beside him, one of his chief Mahomedan allies, Shaukat Ali, with his great burly figure and heavy jowl and somewhat truculent manner and his opulent robes embroidered with the Turkish crescent, I wondered how far Mr. Gandhi had succeeded in converting his Mahomedan friend to the principle of Ahimsa. Perhaps Mr. Gandhi guessed what was passing in my mind when I asked him how the fundamental antagonism between the Hindu and the Mahomedan outlook upon life was to be permanently overcome even if the common cause held Hindus and Mahomedans together in the struggle for Swaraj. He pointed at once to his "brother" Shaukat as a living proof of the "change of hearts" that had already taken place in the two communities. "Has any cloud ever arisen between my brother Shaukat and myself during the months that we have now lived and worked together? Yet he is a staunch Mahomedan and I a devout Hindu. He is a meat-eater and I a vegetarian. He believes in the sword, I condemn all violence. But what do such differences matter between two men in both of whom the heart of India beats in unison?"

I turned thereupon to Mr. Shaukat Ali and asked him whether he would explain to me the application to India under Swaraj of the Mahomedan doctrine that the world is divided into two parts, one the "world of Islam" under Mahomedan rule, and the other "the world of war," in which infidels may rule for a time but will sooner or later be reduced to subjection by the sword of Islam. To which of these worlds would Mahomedans reckon India to belong when she obtained Swaraj? Mr. Shaukat Ali evaded the question by assuring me with much unction that he could not conceive the possibility of the Hindus doing any wrong to Islam, but, if the unthinkable happened, Mahomedans, he quickly added, would know how to redress their wrongs, for they could never renounce their belief in the sword, and it was indeed because Turkey is the sword of Islam that they could not see her perish or the Khalifate depart from her.

I wondered as I withdrew how long the fiery Mahomedan would keep his sword sheathed, did he not feel that his own personality and that of his brother Mahomed Ali would count for very little without the reflected halo with which they were at least temporarily invested by the saintliness of Mr. Gandhi's own simple and austere life of self-renunciation, so different in every way from their own. For it is to his personality rather than to his teachings that Mr. Gandhi owes his immense influence with the people. It is a very different influence from that of Mr. Tilak, to whom he is sometimes, but quite wrongly, compared. Mr. Tilak belonged by birth to a powerful Deccani Brahman caste with hereditary traditions of rulership. He was a man of considerable Sanscrit learning whose researches into the ancient lore of Hinduism commanded respectful attention amongst European as well as Indian scholars. Whatever one may think of his politics and of his political methods, he was an astute politician skilled in all the ways of political opportunism. Mr. Gandhi is none of these things. He is not a Brahman, but of the humbler Bania caste; he does not come from the Deccan, but from Gujarat, a much less distinguished part of the Bombay Presidency. He does not claim to be anything but a man of the people. He looks small and fragile and his features are homely. He lives in the simplest native way, eating simple native food which he is said to prepare with his own hands, and dresses in the simplest native clothes from his own spinning-wheel. His private life is unimpeachable—the only point indeed in which Mr. Tilak resembled him. Though he lays no claim to Sanscrit erudition, his speeches are replete with references to Hindu mythology and scripture, but they usually reflect the gentler, and not the more terrific, aspects of Hinduism. He blurts out the truth as he conceives it with as little regard for the feelings or prejudices of his supporters as for those of his opponents. He will tell the most orthodox Brahman audience at Poona that if they want to be the leaders of the nation they must give up their worldly notions of caste ascendancy and their harsh enforcement of "untouchability"; or he will lecture a youthful Bengalee audience, intensely jealous of their own language, upon their shameful ignorance of Hindi, which he believes to be the future language of India and of Swaraj. No one could suspect him of having an axe of his own to grind. He is beyond argument, because his conscience tells him he is right and his conscience must be right, and the people believe that he is right, and that his conscience must be right because he is a Mahatma, and as such outside and above caste. His influence over the Indian Mahomedan cannot be so deep-rooted, and the ancient antagonism between them and the Hindus still endures amongst the masses on both sides; but it is of some significance that his warm espousal of the grievances which large and perhaps growing numbers of them have been induced to read into the Turkish peace terms, has led some of his most enthusiastic Mahomedan supporters to bestow upon him the designation of Wali or Vicegerent which is sometimes used to connote religious leadership.

No leader has ever dominated any meeting of the old Indian National Congress as absolutely as Mr. Gandhi dominated last Christmas at Nagpur the 20,000 delegates from all parts of India who persisted in calling themselves the Indian National Congress, though between them and the original Congress founders few links have survived, and the chief business of the session was to repudiate the old Congress profession of loyalty to the British connection as the fundamental article of its creed, and to eliminate the reference hitherto retained, with the consent even of the Extremists, to India's participation on equal terms with the other members of the Empire in all its rights and responsibilities. The resolution moved and carried at Nagpur stated bluntly that "the object of the Indian National Congress is the attainment of Swaraj by the people of India by all legitimate and peaceful means." Many of the members would have left out the last words which were intended to ease the scruples of the more weak-kneed brethren. But Mr. Jinna, a Mahomedan Extremist from Bombay, whose legal mind in spite of all his bitterness does not blink the cold light of reason, warned his audience that India could not achieve complete independence by violent means without wading through rivers of blood. Mr. Gandhi himself intimated that India did not "want to end the British connection at all costs unconditionally," but he declared it to be "derogatory to national dignity to think of the permanence of the British connection at any cost, and it was impossible to accept its continuance in the presence of the grievous wrongs done by the British Government and its refusal to acknowledge or redress them." He explained that the resolution of which he was the mover could be accepted equally by "those who believe that by retaining the British connection we can purify ourselves and purify the British people, and those who have no such belief." He concluded on a more minatory note: "The British people will have to beware that if they do not want to do justice, it will be the bounden duty of every Indian to destroy the Empire"—which Mr. Mahomed Ali, however, with less diplomacy, declared to be already dead and buried.