India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

The battle, in fact, was not fought out chiefly at the polls. It was waged very fiercely in the press and on the platform between those who were bent on paralysing the reforms as the malevolent conception of a "Satanic" Government and those who were determined to bring them to fruition, not indeed in blind support of Government, but as a means of exercising constitutional pressure on the Government. Mr. Gandhi certainly succeeded not only in dissuading his immediate followers but in frightening a good many respectable citizens who have no heart for militant politics from coming forward as candidates. Could he have made "Non-co-operation" universally effective, there would have been no candidates and no nominations, no elections and no councils. But in this he failed, as some of the more worldly Extremists foresaw who obeyed him in this matter with reluctance. In the Bombay Presidency, Gokhale, though dead, had a large share in the victory of the old principles for which he had stood when there had been little will to co-operate on the part either of Government or of the majority of Western-educated Indians. For none fought the battle of the Moderates more steadfastly and faced the rowdiness of the "Non-co-operationists" more fearlessly than Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, who had succeeded him as the head of his "Servants of India" Society, and Professor Paranjpe, who had long been closely associated with him in educational work at the Ferguson College in Poona. Enough Moderates were found to stick to their colours in practically every constituency, and they secured their seats, in the absence of Extremist nominations, without contest, or after submitting their not very acute political differences to the arbitrament of the polls.

Nowhere had the Extremists developed their plan of campaign on more comprehensive lines than in those great United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, which with their huge and dense population of over forty-eight millions under one provincial government form the largest and in some respects the most important administrative unit in British India. It was within the area which it now covers that the Mutiny broke out and, with the exception of Delhi itself, was mainly confined and fought out. The bitter memories of that period have not yet wholly vanished. It contains a larger proportion than any other province of historic cities—Agra, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Muttra, Jhansi, Benares, Allahabad, some of them still the nerve centres of Hinduism and of Islam. The Mahomedans form only a minority of about one-sixth of the population, but their influence must not be measured merely by numbers, for one of the distinctive features of the United Provinces is the survival of a great landed aristocracy in which the Mahomedans are largely represented. Nowhere else, indeed, is the land still held in such an overwhelming proportion by great landlords, or the rights of the humble tillers of the soil more precarious.

The Extremists were quick to exploit the various fields of agitation which those peculiar conditions provide. They even launched the forces of "Non-co-operation" against the two Indian universities only founded within the last few years, in deference to the demands of the Indians themselves, on frankly denominational lines, in derogation of the very principle of undenominational education that we had upheld in all other Indian universities. It is one of the many strange anomalies of Gandhiism that it should have elected to concentrate its wrecking policy on the very universities in which Islam and Hinduism respectively have been conceded a closer preserve than anywhere else for the training of Indian youths in the spirit of the two great national religions of India. The joint efforts of the Hindu saint and of his chief Mahomedan henchmen, the brothers Ali, failed to take either the Hindu or the Mahomedan stronghold by storm. Mr. Gandhi, indeed, showed some reluctance to press his attack upon the Hindu university at Benares with anything like the same vigour with which he backed up Mahomed and Shaukat Ali's raid on the Mahomedan university at Aligurh, and from so marked a contrast many Mahomedans might have been expected to draw very obvious conclusions.

More insidious, and perhaps more dangerous, was the organised attempt of the Extremists to get hold of the agricultural masses through the widespread discontent, by no means of recent date, due to the peculiar conditions of land tenure in these provinces. In an essentially agricultural country such as India still is, and must probably always remain, agrarian questions are amongst the most difficult and complicated with which British rule has had to deal. For they present themselves in the different provinces in forms as diverse as the past history and local conditions of each province, long before it was brought under British administration, had combined to make them. Whereas in the Bombay Presidency, for instance, land is chiefly held by small landlords and peasant proprietors, it was held in Agra and Oudh before they became British by a great landed aristocracy whose rights, like all established rights, it was a principle of British policy to respect, and the talukdars of Oudh and the zemindars of Agra stood for the most part very loyally by the British Raj during the Mutiny, and have continued to stand by Government in many difficult if not equally critical moments since then.

The relationships, varying almost ad infinitum between landlords and tenants and sub-tenants, have created marked differences which still exist very widely in the two divisions of the United Provinces. In Agra, about half the tenants possess at least occupancy rights, but only a very small percentage in Oudh enjoy even that measure of protection. There have been successive endeavours to improve the position of the tillers of the soil by benevolent legislation. But worse even than the precarious nature of the tenures are the many forms of arbitrary exaction to which bad landlords can subject their peasants without any definite breach of the law. Often landlords who want to build a new house or send a son to England or buy a new motor simply levy an extra anna in the rupee on their rent-rolls which the wretched tenants dare not refuse to pay. As in many other matters, the ancient institution of caste, which is still the corner-stone of the whole Indian social structure, introduces yet another disturbing factor. For tenants and sub-tenants who belong to the depressed castes are exposed to much harsher treatment at the hands of their superior landlords than those who are privileged to belong to less down-trodden castes. Even the best landlords who show some real consideration for their people are actuated rather by a natural kindliness of disposition than by any conscious sense of duty or recognition of the special responsibilities that attach to their high position. Government has for some time past realised the necessity of dealing with these questions on broader lines, but when the reforms scheme first took substance, legislation was, not unreasonably, postponed until the new Councils met, though the subject is not one of those transferred under the Act to Indian ministers.

Agrarian questions, moreover, are very intimately connected with the larger question of land revenue, in regard to which there are signs of a considerable change in the attitude of the politically-minded classes, or at least of the Moderate section. For a long time the lawyer element, always very strong in the Indian National Congress, was not particularly keen to see it take up agrarian questions which would have probably estranged a good many fat clients, and some, though perhaps fewer, political supporters, amongst the land-owning classes. The old Congress platform was, moreover, drawn up by and for the intelligentsia of the towns, who had little in common with the great rural population of India; and in so far as it professed to champion also the agricultural interests of the country, it preferred to concentrate its attacks on the general system of Indian land revenue and to press for its revision on the lines of the "permanent settlement" in Bengal—not so much perhaps on account of any intrinsic merits of that "settlement," as because it was identified with the province which was then regarded as in the van of Indian political progress and enlightenment. The "permanent settlement" in Bengal, effected more than a century and a quarter ago by Lord Cornwallis under a complete misapprehension, as was afterwards realised, of the position of the Bengalee zemindars, determined once and for all the proportion of land revenue which Government was entitled to collect in the province, instead of leaving it, as in other parts of India it is still left, to be varied from time to time after periodical inquiry into the constantly varying yield and value of the land. The result in Bengal has been highly satisfactory from the point of view of the large land-owners whose property has appreciated enormously with the general growth of prosperity during a long period, unprecedented in its earlier annals, of internal and external peace. It has been less satisfactory to the tenants with inferior and infinitely subdivided interests who have shared very little in the increased wealth of their superior landlords, and nowhere else has sub-infeudation been carried to such extravagant lengths. But for the State, above all, the results have been singularly unfortunate, as it has debarred itself from taking toll of the unearned increment that has been constantly accruing to the zemindars.

So long as the National Congress saw little or no hope of securing the transfer of any substantial share in the governance of the country to Indian shoulders, it could afford to indulge in wholesale criticism of Government finance and to propose sweeping changes without stopping to consider ways and means or to weigh the ultimate effects upon the revenue of the State, and it was easy for it to court popularity by inveighing against the land tax and advocating the extension of the "permanent settlement" to the whole of India as a sovereign panacea. But sober Indian politicians have begun to look farther ahead and to reckon with the costs of the many popular reforms which Indian Ministers will be expected to carry through in the new Councils. Mr. Gandhi and his followers, who are determined if possible to wreck them, are deterred by no such considerations, and the non-payment of the land tax, which must remain the backbone of Indian revenue, already figures in their programme of "Non-co-operation," of which the avowed object is to paralyse Government and render British rule impossible without any resort to the methods of violence they profess to deprecate. It can hardly fail to prove a fairly popular cry, for there is no more unpalatable form of co-operation with Government all the world over than the payment of taxes, and the Extremists combine this part of their propaganda with more specialised efforts to capture the confidence of the particular classes amongst the peasantry who have rent and tenure grievances by warmly espousing their cause against the landlords and inciting them to organised resistance. They not only stimulate thereby a general feeling of unrest and discontent, but they actually carry the war to the very doors of the great land-owning class which has hitherto been least accessible to revolutionary influences.

This was one of the special features of the "Non-co-operation" campaign in the United Provinces, and Mr. Gandhi himself arrived on the scene to lend it the full weight of his personal influence on the very eve of the elections. How extraordinary is the influence of his mesmeric personality and style of oratory I realised when I drove out on the day of the elections into a district outside Allahabad where he had himself addressed on the previous afternoon a vast crowd of twenty thousand peasants. It was about noon, and only a few creaking bullock-carts and "the footfall mute of the slow camel"—neither of them suggestive of a hotly contested election—disturbed the drowsy peace which even in the coolest season of the year in Upper India falls on the open country when the sun pours down out of the cloudless sky. Here at a roadside shrine a group of brightly dressed village women were trying to attract the attention of a favourite god by ringing the little temple bell. There some brown-skinned youngsters were driving their flock of goats and sheep into the leafy shelter of the trees. But the fields, now bare of crops, were lifeless, and the scattered hamlets mostly fast asleep. About fifteen miles out we reached the big village of Soraon—almost a small township—in which there seemed equally little to suggest that this was the red-letter day in the history of modern India that was to initiate her people into the great art of self-government. Still the small court-house, we found, had been swept and garnished for use as a polling station. Two small groups of people stood listlessly outside the building, the candidates' agents on the one side of the entrance, and on the other the patwaris—the village scribes who keep the official land records—brought in from the different villages to attest the signatures and thumbmarks of the voters. Inside, the presiding officer with his assistants sat at his table with the freshly printed electoral roll in front of him and the voting paper to be handed to each voter as he passed into the inner sanctuary in which the ballot-boxes awaited him. But voters there were none. From eight in the morning till past twelve not a single voter had presented himself out of over 1200 assigned to this polling station, nor did a single one present himself in the course of the whole day.

Nowhere else, however, was the boycott so effective, and throughout the province a full third of the qualified electors recorded their votes—not a bad percentage under such novel conditions and in the face of such a determined effort to wreck the elections. The land-owning class secured the representation to which its hereditary influence unquestionably entitles it, but it has held so much aloof from modern education that with some notable exceptions it contributes numbers rather than capacity to the Council. With forty-four members belonging to the legal profession out of a total of one hundred members this Provincial Council, like most others, is doubtless somewhat overstocked with lawyers. But upon no other profession has Mr. Gandhi urged more strongly the duty of "Non-co-operation," and that, after having been for years conspicuous for political disaffection, it should have rallied so generally in support of the reforms shows how great is the change they have wrought amongst the Western-educated classes. Nowhere in the United Provinces was the electoral battle so fierce as in the town of Jhansi, where Mr. Chintamani, once the irreconcilable editor of the Allahabad Leader, came out at the head of a large poll, though in order to defeat him the "Non-co-operationists" sacrificed their principles and put up and supported with their own votes an obscure candidate by whose election they hoped to bring the new Council into contempt.

The outstanding feature of the elections in Bengal was the striking evidence afforded of a return to political sanity in a province which, a dozen years ago, was the chief political storm-centre in India. Many of the same leaders who, formerly, at least dallied with lawlessness during the violent agitation that followed the Partition of Bengal now came forward openly as champions of constitutional progress on the lines of the new reforms and as candidates for the new Councils. They knew what all their own attempts to make a Swadeshi boycott really effective by developing "national" industries and substituting "national" products and "national" trade agencies for foreign ones had ended in. They remembered the failure of the "national" schools and colleges which were to have supplanted Government schools and colleges. They realised that a dangerous propaganda which had involved hundreds of immature youths in a network of criminal conspiracies had tended to the subversion of every principle of authority, at the expense of the parent at least as much as of good government and public peace. When the famous Pronouncement of August 20, 1917, opened up for India the prospect of ultimate self-government within the Empire, and the recommendations of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report finally took shape in a new Government of India Act, there was found a solid body of public opinion in Bengal which had been taught by actual and very costly experience not to throw away the substance for the shadow. The most influential perhaps amongst the Extremists during the Anti-Partition campaign was Mr. Arabindo Ghose, who, like Mr. Gandhi, had studied in England and with great distinction. Though, unlike Mr. Gandhi, he never indulged in wholesale denunciations of Western civilisation, his newspaper, the Yugantar, was a daily trumpet-call to revolt against British rule, and he himself narrowly escaped conviction on a charge of bomb-making. Yet as far back as 1910, from his place of retirement in Pondicherry, he issued after the Morley-Minto reforms had been promulgated a significant message to his fellow-countrymen advising them to accept partial Swaraj as a means to ensure complete Swaraj, and amongst the literature that helped to defeat "Non-co-operation" in Bengal, one of the most striking pamphlets was one entitled "Gandhi or Arabindo?" in which a very fervent disciple and collaborator of the latter in the most fiery days of the Yugantar argued with great force the case for co-operation with Government against "Non-co-operation" as now preached by Mr. Gandhi. Only less remarkable has been the conversion of many other old Bengalee leaders, including the veteran Sir Surendranath Banerjee, who never, however, went quite to the same lengths of extremism.