Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

Yet even after this the "moderates" lacked the courage of their convictions. The breach has never been altogether repaired, but there have been frequent negotiations and exchanges of courtesies. In the very next year at Madras a man as incapable of promoting or approving criminal forms of agitation as Dr. Rash Behari Ghose was holding out the olive branch to "the wayward wanderers" who had treated him so despitefully at Surat; and last year at Lahore, when Pandit Mohan Malavya was expounding from the chair the latest formula adopted by Congress as a definition of its aims, his chief anxiety seemed to be to prove that it offered no obstacle to the return of the Surat insurgents to the fold. This formula, it may be mentioned, lays down that "the objects of the Indian National Congress are the attainment by the people of India of a system of Government similar to that enjoyed by the self-governing members of the British Empire and a participation by them in the rights and responsibilities of the Empire on equal terms." This is a formula which many "moderates" no doubt construe in a spirit of genuine loyalty, but it does not exclude the construction which more "advanced" politicians like Mr. Pal place upon Swaraj.

The last session of the Congress at Lahore, in December last, is generally admitted to have aroused very little enthusiasm, and there are many who believe that, weakened as it has been by recent dissensions, it will scarcely survive the creation of the new enlarged Councils. These Councils have been so constituted that they will be able to discharge usefully the functions which the Congress arrogated to itself without any title or authority. Perhaps it was the consciousness that the Congress would at any rate be henceforth overshadowed by the new Councils that led Pandit Malavya to inveigh so bitterly in his presidential address at Lahore against the shape ultimately given to the reforms. What one may hope above all is that the Councils will help to give the Indian "moderates" a little more self-reliance than they have hitherto shown. The Indian National Congress has at all times contained many men of high character and ability, devoted to what they conceived to be the best interests of their country, and at first, at any rate, quite ready to acknowledge the benefits of British rule and to testify to their conviction that the maintenance of British rule is essential to the welfare and safety of India. Many of them must have seen that the constant denunciation of Government by men who claimed to represent the intelligence of the country must tend to stimulate a spirit of disaffection and revolt amongst their more ignorant and inexperienced fellow-countrymen. Yet not one of them had the courage to face the risk of temporary unpopularity by pointing out the danger of the inclined plane down which they were sliding, until they actually saw themselves being swept hopelessly off their feet at Surat. It was then too late to avert the consequences of pusillanimity or to shake off their share of responsibility for the evils which the tolerance they had too long extended to the methods of their more violent colleagues had helped to produce. One of the main purposes of the Indian National Congress has avowedly been to set up a claim for the introduction of representative government in India. Yet it has itself seldom escaped the control of a handful of masterful leaders who have ruled it in the most irresponsible and despotic fashion. The Congress has, in fact, displayed exactly the same feature which has been so markedly manifested in the case of municipalities, namely, the tendency of "representative" institutions in India to resolve themselves into machines operated by, and for the benefit of, an extremely limited and domineering oligarchy.

CHAPTER XIII.

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS.

When Lord Minto closed at the end of March the first Session of the Imperial Council, as the Viceroy's Legislative Council, enlarged under the Indian Councils Act of 1909, is now officially designated, in contradistinction to the enlarged Provincial Councils of Provincial Governments, his Excellency very properly described it as "a memorable Session." It was, indeed, far more than that. Even to the outward eye the old Council Chamber at Government House presented a very significant spectacle, to which the portrait of Warren Hastings over the Viceregal Chair always seemed to add a strange note of admiration. The round table at which the members of the Viceroy's Legislative Council used to gather, with far less of formality, had disappeared, and the 59 members of the enlarged Council had their appointed seats disposed in a double hemicycle facing the Chair. They sat for the most part according to provinces, and the features as well as, in some cases, the dresses, of the Indian members showed at a glance how representative this new Council really was.

The tall burly frame of the Kuvar Sahib of Patiala was only more conspicuous than that of the Maharajah of Burdawan because the former wore the many-folded turban and brocaded dress of his Sikh ancestry, whereas the latter, like most Bengalees of the upper classes, has adopted the much more commonplace broadcloth of the West. The bold, hawk-like features of Malik Umar Hyat Khan of Tiwana in the Punjab were as characteristic of the fighting Pathan from the North as were the Rajah of Mahmudabad's more delicate features of the Mahomedan aristocracy of the erstwhile kingdom of Oudh. The white swadeshi garments affected by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, from the United Provinces—who opened the last meeting of the Indian National Congress at Lahore with a presidential address which lasted for two hours and a quarter, and wound up with an apology for its brevity on the ground that he had had no time to prepare it—testified, at any rate more loudly, to the sternness of his patriotic convictions than the equally swadeshi homespun, cut at least in European fashion, of another "advanced" politician, Mr. Bhupendranath Bose, of Bengal. More worthy of attention was the keen, refined, and intellectual face of Mr. G.K. Gokhale, the Deccanee Brahman with the Mahratta cap, who, by education, belongs to the West quite as much as to the East, and, by birth, to the ruling caste of the last dominant race before the advent of the British Raj. The red fez worn by the majority of Mahomedan members showed that their community had certainly not failed in this instance to secure the generous measure of representation which Lord Minto spontaneously promised to them three years ago at Simla. The peculiar glazed black headdress of the Parsee and the silk kerchief of the Burman in turn indicated the racial catholicity of the assembly in which Sir Sassoon David, of Bombay, worthily represents, by his authority as a financier, the small Jewish community of India.

Nor were the different interests and classes, with two important exceptions, less adequately represented than the different races and creeds. Besides the great territorial magnates, of whom I have already mentioned two or three by name, there were not a few other well-known representatives of the landed interests which, in a country like India where agriculture is still the greatest of all national industries, have a special claim to respectful hearing, even though they have hitherto for the most part held aloof from the fashionable methods of political agitation. There was indeed a good deal of disappointment among the urban professional classes, in whose eyes a Western education—or rather education on what are, often quite erroneously, conceived to be Western lines—should apparently constitute the one indispensable qualification for public life. But they too had secured no inconsiderable number of seats, and if the voice of the Indian National Congress did not predominate it had certainly not been reduced to silence.

Doubts were freely expressed among Englishmen before the meetings of the new Councils as to the competence of the Anglo-Indian officials for the novel duties allotted to them in these assemblies. It was argued, not unreasonably, that men who had never been trained or accustomed to take part in public discussions might find themselves at a disadvantage in controversial encounters with the quick-witted Hindu politician. It is generally admitted now that the first Session at any rate of the Imperial Council by no means justified any such apprehensions. Not a few official members, it is true, were inclined at first to rely exclusively upon their written notes, and there was indeed, from beginning to end, but little room for the rapid thrust and skilled parry of debate to which we are accustomed at Westminster. Most of the Indian members themselves had carefully prepared their speeches beforehand, and read them out from typed or even printed drafts before them. In many cases the speeches had been communicated two or three days ahead to the Press, and sometimes a speech was printed and commented upon in the favoured organ of some honourable member, though he had ultimately changed his mind and preserved silence, without, however, informing the editor of the fact. In other cases a speech was published without the interruptions and calls to order which had compelled the orator to drop out some of his most cherished periods. As it was the custom for Indian members to communicate also to the departments immediately concerned the gist of the remarks which they proposed to make, the official members were tempted at first to frame their replies on similar lines and to read out elaborate statements bristling with figures, which would have been much more suitable for circulation as printed minutes. But gradually many of them took courage and showed that they could speak easily and simply, and quite as effectively as most of the Indian members.

Indeed, one of the best speeches of this kind was that delivered on the last day but one of the Session by Mr. P.C. Lyon, a nominated member for Eastern Bengals, in reply to the fervid oration of Mr. Bupendranath Bose on the threadbare topic of Partition. On this, as on other occasions, the florid style of eloquence cultivated by the leaders of the Indian National Congress fell distinctly flat in the calmer atmosphere of the Council-room, as indeed Mr. Gokhale warned some of his friends it was bound to do. During the last two days discussion was allowed somewhat needlessly under the new rules, to roam at large over all manner of irrelevant subjects, but on this occasion it served at least one useful purpose. If it were not that the Bengalee politician has no other grievance to substitute for it, the question of the Partition of Bengal should, one would think, have received its quietus, for two excellent speeches, delivered with much simple force by Maulvi Syed Shams ul Huda, Mahomedan member for Eastern Bengal, and by Mr. Mazhar-ul-Haq, another Mahomedan who sits for Bengal, completed the discomfiture which poor Mr. Bose had already experienced at Mr. Lyon's hands.

Needless to say that amongst the Indian members it was the politician, and especially the more "advanced" politician, who figured most prominently in the discussions. The more conservative Indians were usually content to listen, with more or less visible signs of weariness, to the facile and sometimes painfully long-winded eloquence of their colleagues. When they did intervene, however, their speeches were usually short and none the less effective. In most of the divisions that were taken they supported the Government, and in no single instance was the Government majority hard pressed. The minority in support of any resolution resisted by Government never reached 20, and generally fluctuated somewhere between 16 and 20. The only resolution which would have certainly combined all the native members in support of it was Mr. Gokhale's resolution with regard to the position of British Indians in South Africa, but, as it was accepted by Government, it was passed nem. con. without a division.