India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

The agreement arrived at between General Smuts and Mr. Gandhi in 1914 was in the nature of a compromise which gave the Indians some relief without conceding the principle of equal rights, and it only brought the long struggle to a temporary close. The old sore was reopened with the Asiatics' Trading and Land Act of 1919, which, the Indians contend, wantonly violated both the terms and the spirit of the 1914 settlement and which Europeans have declared to be "necessary in the interests of a white population." The chief grievances of the Indians are the denial of representation and franchise (except in Cape Colony), their segregation within appointed areas, and the curtailment of their "inherent right to trade." Some Europeans would fain deny that colour prejudice affects their view of the problem, which they regard as essentially eugenic and economic. As far as the mixture of races is concerned the European's objections to it should be readily understood by the Indians, whose own caste laws are as rigidly directed as any in the world against the drawbacks of miscegenation. The European, however, has legislated not to prevent mixed marriages but to arrest the general depression of the standards of life—low wages, a lower standard of skill in skilled trades, and low housing conditions which, he alleges, have resulted from the unrestricted influx of a large coloured population into the towns—and he uses the term "coloured" to include the Indians. With regard to the restrictions of trade licences he deduces the necessity for them from the economic effects of unrestricted competition which has led, he declares, to the bankruptcy of European firms, to their displacement in the same premises by Indians, and to the depreciation of European property. But, the Indian replies, if Indians have thriven in South Africa in the past it is because they work harder and live more frugally, and if they flourish more especially as traders it is because Europeans, finding it to their interest to trade with them, have been their best customers. Apart from the material ruin which South African legislation has brought upon many Indians, what they most deeply resent is unquestionably its specifically racial character. They may suffer fewer personal disabilities as to travelling on railways and in tram-cars and walking on street pavements than they did a few years ago, when very special precautions had to be taken to prevent such a distinguished Indian as Mr. Gokhale being exposed to them during his visit to South Africa. But they still suffer, they complain, under the supreme indignity of racial discrimination with which South African legislation is openly stamped. Repatriation could only take place slowly even if the cost of compensation, which no fair-minded European could then reasonably deny, were not in itself an almost insurmountable obstacle. From the merely practical point of view the question therefore is now reduced to the discovery of a modus vivendi for the Indian community now in South Africa, and it would be very near a solution if legislation to secure the economic and eugenic standards on which the Afrikander lays so much stress were so framed as to apply to the whole population, even should it in practice bear more heavily on the Indian than on the European, if the former less frequently rose to the required standards. A similar solution would remove the sense of grievance arising out of the denial of the franchise in Natal and the Transvaal, of which the injustice seems to Indians to be merely heightened by the fact that it has been given to them in Cape Colony, where they form a much smaller minority. But there is no sign that the temper of the South African Union, in which British and Dutch are united on no issue more firmly than on this one, will abate its claim to treat the Indians within its borders as an inferior race that has no rights to be weighed against the interests, real or assumed, of the superior white race.

The Government of India has never questioned the reality of Indian grievances in South Africa. In 1903, shortly after the Boer war, Lord Curzon strongly urged the British Government to enforce their redress in the Transvaal whilst it was still governed as a Crown Colony. At the end of 1913, when the struggle was most acute, Lord Hardinge expressed his sympathy with a frankness and warmth which fluttered Ministerial dovecots both at home and in the Union. Since then Indian troops have fought during the war side by side with South African troops, and the representatives of India have sat in the War and Peace Councils of the Empire side by side with Ministers of the South African Union. So long as South African legislation bears the impress of racial discrimination the Government of India is bound to maintain its opposition to it, and the more fully it voices Indian opinion under the new constitution, the more emphatic its opposition must be.

In other Dominions the Indian question is much less acute, as there has never been anything like the same amount of Indian immigration, and it is now practically stopped. But it must be remembered that it was the return to India of a large number of Sikhs who were refused permission to land in British Columbia that was the signal for grave disorders in the Punjab in the second year of the war. And not so long ago the Aga Khan, as well known in London as in India, had to give up visiting Australia in view of the many humiliating formalities to which as an Asiatic he would have been subjected before being allowed to land there. It is surely not beyond the resources of statesmanship to devise at least a scheme by which Indians of good repute who wish to travel for purposes of business or study, or for the mere satisfaction of a legitimate curiosity to see other parts of the Empire, should be free to do so without any restraints on the score of race. The attitude of the other Dominions seems certainly to be at present far less uncompromising than that of the South African Union, and one may look forward with some confidence to an agreement by which the rights of Indians already settled in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada will obtain sufficient recognition to satisfy Indian self-respect.

The Indian question is not, however, confined to the Dominions. It is unfortunately in some of the Crown Colonies that it has recently assumed an even more serious aspect than in South Africa, inasmuch as in the Crown Colonies the British Government is directly responsible for the treatment of Indians, whilst only indirectly in a Dominion, where the primary responsibility rests with the Dominion Government. The question of Indian indentured labour in Fiji, British Guiana, and some other smaller colonies is of lesser importance, though Indians have been deeply moved by stories of ill-treatment inflicted upon them by European planters, and indenture itself is held nowadays to connote a state almost of servitude incompatible with Indian national self-respect. There the Government of India has a remedy in its own hands. It can stop, and is stopping, the export of Indian labour to those colonies. Far graver is the situation that has only recently been created for Indians in the Crown Colony of East Africa, known since the war as Kenia. Indians were settled in that part of Africa even before British authority was ever established there, and Mr. Churchill, now Secretary of State for the Colonies, himself admitted some years ago, after his travels in that part of the world, that without the Indians the country would never have reached its present stage of development and prosperity. Whilst if in the case of a self-governing Dominion the British Government can at least urge, as an excuse for its acquiescence in the disabilities imposed upon Indians, that it cannot override the constitutionally expressed will of the Dominion people, it can plead no such excuse where a Crown Colony is concerned over which its authority is absolute and final. This is indeed the point on which the Government of India laid stress last winter in a long and closely reasoned despatch elaborating the view already formally enunciated by the Viceroy that in a Crown Colony Indians have a constitutional right to equality of status with all other British subjects. That right has, it is contended, been violated in Kenia in regard more especially to the three major questions of franchise, segregation, and land ownership. At the very moment when, in India, elected assemblies have been created under a new constitution on the broadest possible franchise, the Legislative Council of Kenia, with a population of 35,000 Indians and only 11,000 Europeans, is so constituted that it has only two Indian members out of fourteen, whilst of the remaining twelve, eleven are European and one represents the very backward Arab community. Land ownership in the uplands has been reserved exclusively for Europeans on the plea that the climate of the lowlands to which the Indians are relegated is more suitable for them than for Europeans. Yet the climatic argument is itself disregarded when, even in the lowlands, racial segregation is enforced in areas reserved there too for Europeans alone. The representations of the Government of India have commanded the attention they deserve, and the Colonial Office has sent out instructions to the Kenia authorities to suspend all segregation measures. The whole question will, one may hope, be reopened and settled on a new basis of justice for Indians. The British settlers will surely themselves recognise, on further consideration, that their interests cannot be allowed to override the far larger obligations of Great Britain to the people of India.

The question of the treatment of Indians in the Crown Colonies is one that has to be settled between the British Government and the Government of India, and it could not therefore come before the Imperial Cabinet—or Conference—recently attended by the Prime Ministers of all the Dominions assembled in London. But in regard to that question in the Dominions, Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, one of India's representatives, laid down in their presence firmly and plainly the principle on which all Indians are at one:

There is no conviction more strongly in our minds than this, that a full enjoyment of citizenship within the British Empire applies not only to the United Kingdom but to every self-governing Dominion within its compass. We have already agreed to a subtraction from the integrity of the rights by the compromise of 1918 to which my predecessor, Lord Sinha, was a party—that each Dominion and each self-governing part of the Empire should be free to regulate the composition of its population by suitable immigration laws. On that compromise there is no intention whatever to go back, but we plead on behalf of those who are already fully domiciled in the various self-governing Dominions according to the laws under which those Dominions are governed—to these peoples there is no reason whatever to deny the full rights of citizenship—it is for them that we plead, where they are lawfully settled, that they must be admitted into the general body of citizenship, and no deduction must be made from the rights that other British subjects enjoy.

In commending the matter to his audience for earnest consideration and satisfactory settlement, Mr. Srinivasa Sastri spoke with the added authority of his position as a member of the Indian Legislature and one of the ablest leaders of the Moderate party. "It is," he said, "of the most urgent and pressing importance that we should be able to carry back a message of hope and of good cheer." He will have to report to the Legislature on his mission when he returns to India, and no part of his report will be looked for with more anxiety or more closely scrutinised.

Indians have already demonstrated their willingness to recognise accomplished facts and to accept in practice any reasonable settlement which does not strike fatally at the principle laid down by Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, not only on behalf of his fellow-countrymen, but in the name of the Government of India, which here again has acted as a national Indian Government. South Africa, it may be, will nevertheless persist in subordinating to a narrow conception of her own interests the higher interests of Imperial unity, which, if it ever ceased to include India, would assuredly be a much poorer thing. It is all the more essential that if India's faith in the Empire is not to be, perhaps irretrievably, shaken, South Africa should remain, in her refusal to honour the pledge of partnership given to India on behalf of the whole Empire, a solitary exception amongst the self-governing Dominions, and that the United Kingdom, whose responsibility to India is most directly involved, should insist that the pledge be redeemed to the full in the Crown Colonies which are under the immediate and direct control of the Imperial Government.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] August 1921.