Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

Moslems feel that while at present the Government in India is British in spirit as well as in name, there are already indications that it might gradually become Hindu in fact, though the British form might remain. The whole object of the advanced Congress Party and of the leaders of the Nationalist movement is not the overthrow of British rule in name, but in fact. You may say that this is a wild apprehension, and that the Government is not foolish enough or weak enough to degenerate into a mere form. That may be the attitude of an Englishman who is in India only as a bird of passage (and all Englishmen are there as birds of passage, for only those whose children belong to the country are permanently bound up with it). For us who live here, and whose children are to live here, the distant as well as the immediate future is of essential importance. Now what is the tendency of Government? Can any one deny that, taken as a whole, it is towards Hindu predominance in the long run? English observers must not forget that there is throughout India amongst Hindus a strong tendency towards imitating the National movements that have proved successful in European history. Now, while vis-à-vis the British the Hindu irreconcilables assume the attitude of the Italian patriots towards the hated Austrian, vis-à-vis the Moslems there is a very different European model for them to follow. Not only Tilak and his school in Poona, but throughout the Punjab and Bengal the constant talk of the Nationalists is that the Moslems must be driven out of India as they were driven out of Spain.

This is no invention of ours. Nor is it quite so wild as it appears at first sight. I have gone into the matter carefully and I can certainly conceive circumstances—50 or 100 years hence—that would make India intolerable for our upper middle classes; and once you get rid of the intelligent and wealthy Moslems the masses could be reduced to absolute subjection in the hands of Hindu rulers. Far be it from me to say that all Hindus are of this purpose or that the school of "liberal Nationalism" to which Gokhale belongs has ceased to exist. But the other school predominates, and as our very existence is at stake we Moslems do not want to take any risks or to see even the very first steps taken towards transforming the British into a Hindu raj. Yet those steps are now being taken, though not quite so fast as we at one time feared and Hindus expected. That the sad and terrible fate which our people had in Spain may still be ours in India is a proposition that sounds extravagant at first, but I for my part (and most thoughtful Moslems agree with me) consider it quite possible, and in a matter of such moment we must take possibilities as well at probabilities into consideration.

The Imperial problem in India is not to get this or that law changed, or so and so many troops increased, or such and such measures of repression or concession adopted. It is to bring about a new mental and spiritual attitude, and to replace the narrow "Nationalism" of the present day by a broad and truly liberal Imperialism in the practical sense of securing general recognition for India's difficulties and divisions, and for the natural and necessary maintenance of the British connexion and of British rule. The statesman who can suggest practical means for carrying out this intellectual conversion will certainly have saved England and India much unhappiness and disaster.

On the other hand, I am bound to say that there are also many Mahomedans who, though professing similar apprehensions, show no disposition towards fatalistic resignation. For they believe that, whatever may be the fate of the British raj, the future must belong to the more virile peoples of India, and certainly those who do not merely put their trust in the fighting traditions of a conquering race may find a good deal of encouragement for the faith within them from the vital statistics of Hindus and Mahomedans respectively in India.

Whilst it is most important that nothing should be done to give colour to the idea sedulously promoted by the Hindu politician that Government intend to favour, or, as he generally puts it, to "pamper," the Mahomedans at the expense of the Hindus, it is equally important that Government should do nothing to strengthen the apprehensions entertained by so many intelligent and educated Mahomedans. Those apprehensions are no doubt exaggerated, and may even be quite unfounded; but they correspond exactly with what I have been told were Tilak's hopes and anticipations, and if we will only take the trouble to try to see things as they may well strike an Indian Mahomedan we can hardly dismiss them as wholly unreasonable.

The antagonism between the two communities is not the creation or the result of British rule. It is the legacy of centuries of conflict before British rule was ever heard of in India. It has been and must be one of the chief objects of British statesmanship to compose this conflict, and the Mahomedans do not deny that their British rulers have always desired to deal as fairly with them as with the Hindus. They hold, however, that, as a matter of fact, British rule has in many ways worked out to the relative detriment of Mahomedan influence and to the greater advantage of the Hindus. Nor is that fact rendered any more palatable to the Mahomedans because it is mainly due to the greater adaptability and suppleness displayed by the Hindus ever since India has been brought into contact with Western education and Western methods. The establishment of English as the official language of the Law Courts and of all public Departments necessarily favoured the Hindus by displacing Persian and the vernaculars in which the Mahomedans were most proficient. At the present day the vast majority of Indians employed in every branch of the Government service are Hindus, and this majority is entirely out of proportion to the numerical preponderancy of the Hindu community at large[11]. According to the last Census Report the Hindus of Bengal (which was then unpartitioned), though only twice as numerous as the Mahomedans, held 1,235 higher appointments under Government in Bengal, as against only 141 held by Mahomedans. In the Bombay Presidency the Hindus held 266 such appointments, as against 23 held by Mahomedans; and in the Central Provinces 339, as against 75. Of the provinces in reference to which the report furnishes detailed statistics the United Provinces alone failed to show the same disparity, the number of posts held by the Mahomedans, 453, against 711 held by Hindus, being actually and very largely in excess of their proportion to population. The Mahomedans, moreover, complain that where Mahomedans are employed as clerks in Government Departments the head clerks, who are almost always Hindus and alone have direct access to the English superior officers, use their influence with the latter to prejudice them against their Mahomedan subordinates. Education has passed very largely from our own hands into those of Hindu teachers. In all the liberal professions, at the Bar, in the Press, the preponderance of Hindus is greatly out of proportion even to the numerical preponderance of the Hindu population as a whole. Intelligent Mahomedans are conscious that all this is to a great extent the result of the backwardness of their community, but hardships are none the less hardships because they are largely of one's own making. Again, the principal seat of the Government of India and those of the two great Presidency Governments are in centres of Hindu life where the voice of the Mahomedan element does not make itself easily heard.

Then Mahomedans who watch public opinion in England note that one of the two great parties in the State has for many years past professed to recognize in the views of Hindu politicians a commendable affinity to its own political principles, whilst the memory of its greatest leader, Mr. Gladstone, is chiefly associated in India with a violent hostility to Turkey, which, at any rate amongst many of his followers, degenerated into violent denunciations of Islam in general. By his personal qualities Lord Ripon, the most pronounced Liberal ever sent out in our time as Viceroy, endeared himself to many Mahomedans as well as to the Hindus, but he never made any secret of his political sympathies with Hindu aspirations. Whilst Unionist Governments were in office, with only one short break during a period of nearly 20 years, and especially whilst Lord Curzon was Viceroy, the alliance between the Hindu leaders and Radical politicians at home became more and more intimate. The Hindu National Congress, which the Mahomedans had come to regard as little more than a Hindu political organization, was not only generally acclaimed by English newspapers of an advanced complexion as the exponent of a new-born Indian democracy, but it had founded[12] in London an organ of its own, India, subsidized out of its funds, and edited and managed by Englishmen, which may not have a very large circulation at home, but is the chief purveyor of Indian news to a large part of the Liberal Press. When Radical members of Parliament visited India the views they chiefly cared to make themselves acquainted with or reproduced when they went home were the views of Hindu politicians, and when the latter visited England they could always depend upon the demonstrative hospitality not only of Radical clubs and associations but also of the Radical Press for their political propaganda.

When the Liberal Party returned to power at the end of 1905 the majority in the new House of Commons included a very active group that identified itself wholeheartedly with a campaign which, in Bengal, soon assumed a character of scarcely less hostility to the Mahomedans than to the British Administration, and the new Government announced their intention of preparing a scheme of reforms which, whatever its merits, was greeted in India as a concession to Hindu rather than to Mahomedan sentiment. For the Mahomedan has always been a believer in personal rule, and one of the objects of the reforms scheme was to diminish to some extent that element in the Indian Administration. Moreover, when it was first outlined by the Secretary of State, the scheme contained provisions which seemed to the Mahomedans to be at variance both with principles of fair and equal treatment for all races and creeds and classes upon which British rule had hitherto been based, and with the specific pledges given by the Viceroy to the Mahomedan deputation that waited upon him four years ago at Simla when the reforms were first contemplated. The new representation in the enlarged Indian Councils was based proportionally upon a rough estimate of the populations of India which credited the Hindus with millions that are either altogether outside the pale of Hinduism or belong to those castes which the majority of educated Hindus of the higher castes still regard as "untouchable." The effect would have been to give the Hindus what the Mahomedans regarded as an unfairly excessive representation. Happily, though, the question trembled for a long time in the balance, Lord Morley listened to the remonstrances of the Mahomedans, and in its final shape the Indian Councils Act made very adequate provision for the representation of Mahomedan interests. But the Mahomedans saw in the angry disappointment of the Hindu politicians when the scheme was thus modified ample justification for the fears they had entertained. Even as it is—and the Mahomedans recognize both the many good points of the scheme and Lord Morley's desire to deal fairly with them—these new reforms may well seem to the Mahomedans to have enured mainly to the benefit of the Hindus. The Mahomedans appreciate as warmly as the Hindus the appointment of an Indian member to the Viceroy's Executive Council, and if the first Indian member was to be a Hindu they admit that Mr. Sinha had exceptional qualifications for the high post to which he was called. The Indian members added under the now Act to the Executive Councils of Bombay and Madras are also both Hindus, and another Hindu will almost certainly be nominated in like manner to the Executive Council of Bengal. None of these appointments may be open to objection, but the fact nevertheless remains that it is the Hindus and not the Mahomedans who will have had the immediate benefit of this new departure to which Indian opinion attaches the greatest importance.

The fact is that the more we delegate of our authority in India to the natives of India on the principles which we associate with self-government, the more we must necessarily in practice delegate it to the Hindus, who form the majority, however much we may try to protect the rights and interests of the Mahomedan minority. This is what the Mahomedans know and fear. This is what explains their insistence upon separate electorates wherever the elective principle comes into play in the composition of representative bodies. It is not merely that they have yet to learn the elementary business of electoral organization, in which the Hindus, on the contrary, have shown great proficiency, and that they have consequently fared badly even in local bodies where their numbers ought to have secured them more adequate representation. Many Mahomedans realize the disadvantage of locking up their community in a watertight compartment, but they regard it as the lesser evil. It is, they contend, an essential safeguard not only against an excessive Hindu predominance in elective or partly elective bodies, but also against the growing disposition which they note amongst those who claim to be the spokesmen of the rising British democracy to accelerate the rate at which political concessions should be made to Hindu opinion, and also to disregard the claim of the Mahomedan minority to be protected against any abuse by the Hindus of the power which a majority must necessarily wield.

My object is to explain the views actually held by the leaders of the Indian Mahomedan community, rather than to endorse or to controvert them. Even if the construction they place upon the attitude of their Hindu fellow-countrymen and of an influential section of British public opinion be wholly unreasonable, the fact that that attitude is liable to such a construction is one which we ought to bear in mind. Nor can it be disputed that, however generous the sentiments that prompt us to delegate some part of our authority to elective or partly elective assemblies, it must to some extent diminish the power of the Executive to ensure that equality of treatment for all races and creeds and classes by which we have hitherto justified our rule in India. Our sense of equity should make us, therefore, all the more scrupulously careful to adjust the balance as evenly as possible under the new conditions which we are ourselves creating, and to err, if at all, in favour of the protection of minorities. Elementary considerations of statesmanship impose the same obligation upon us.