India: A History. Revised and Updated (86 page)

Briefly an ‘extremist’ splinter group known as ‘Lal, Bal and Pal’ now made most of the running – as well as providing its youthful followers with a head-banging mantra. ‘Lal’ was otherwise Lala Lajpat Rai, the militant
Arya Samaj
leader from the Panjab; ‘Bal’ was the fiery Maratha revivalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak; and ‘Pal’ the radical Bengali leader Bipin Chandra Pal. Pal also edited the journal
Bande Mataram
, itself named after the patriotic Bengali anthem which, written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, had been set to music by Tagore.
Swadeshi
ideals were extended to educational reform, labour organisation, self-help programmes and cultural activities. But in advocating a total boycott amounting to non-co-operation and including non-payment of taxes, ‘Lal, Bal and Pal’ invited a ferocious government clampdown. In 1907, fifty years after the last Mughal had been packed off to Burma, an untried ‘Lal’ trod the deportee’s road to Mandalay, and in 1908 he was followed by ‘Bal’. Tilak’s trial for incitement had brought Bombay’s industries to a standstill; for leftist nationalists this ‘massive outburst of proletarian anger … remains a major landmark in our history’.
¹⁷
The even more explosive response to his six-year sentence brought troops onto the streets and sixteen reported deaths. In a quieter Mandalay, Tilak consulted his traditional inspiration. While awaiting the dawn ‘like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay’, he wrote a commentary on the
Bhagavad Gita
.

His offence had been that of apparently condoning terrorism. ‘The sound of the bomb’, a spontaneous response to government repression according to Tilak, was first heard in Bengal in 1907 when the lieutenant-governor’s train was derailed. More tragically two Kennedys, a mother and daughter, were killed at Muzaffarapur in Bihar in 1908; a bomb had been lobbed into their carriage in the mistaken belief that it was that of an unpopular magistrate. The apprehending of the culprits led to the discovery of a munitions factory in the garden of the Calcutta home of the Ghose brothers. Aurobindo Ghose was amongst those brought to trial. Disillusioned, he, like Tilak, then found in religion a ‘royal road for an honourable retreat’.
¹⁸
In Pondicherry (still under French rule) he also found a sanctuary from British rule and a site for his proposed ‘Auroville’, an urban experiment in internationalism and cross-cultural collaboration. Unlike Tilak in Mandalay, he would stay there.

Sporadic assassinations and ‘
swadeshi
dacoities’ (political crimes)
continued, notably in Maharashtra and Bengal. Clandestine revolutionary groupings headed by V.D. Savarkar, Rashbehari Bose and others also made contacts outside India. In 1909 London itself witnessed its first Indian atrocity when Sir Curzon Wyllie, an India Office official, was gunned down by a Panjabi, Madanlal Dhingra.

Such assassination attempts, many of them botched, remained a threat to both British and Indian officials. The only viceroy to die in a terrorist attack would be the last – Lord Louis Mountbatten – and the nationalists responsible would be Irish rather than Indian. But in 1913 Lord Hardinge, one of Mountbatten’s viceregal predecessors, would have a bomb tossed into his howdah while making his ceremonial entry into Delhi to mark its adoption as the new capital; severely wounded, both viceroy and elephant yet survived. The culprit proved to be one of Rashbehari Bose’s Bengali followers. ‘They gave us back the pride of our manhood,’ writes an irresponsible but not untypical apologist for these first ‘revolutionaries’.
¹⁹
Happily by 1910 their threat was being contained and the ‘moderate’ Congress rump, headed by Gokhale and Mehta, at last had something to show for its moderation.

Curzon had resigned as viceroy within days of the Bengal partition, although not as a result of it; the affront to his dignity from a petty row with his notorious commander-in-chief, Lord Kitchener, proved a more fatal wound than
swadeshi.
His successor, Lord Minto, reached India in late 1905 just as a Liberal ministry was taking over in London. With the appointment of the Liberal scholar John Morley as Secretary of State for India a new programme of reforms/concessions had soon come under consideration. These did not materialise till 1909, but knowledge of their preparation, plus
swadeshi
’s assertion of mainly Hindu demands, prompted a Muslim deputation to the viceroy at Simla in late 1906.

Not without British encouragement, the Muslim deputees cited the under-representation of Muslims amongst those Indians already elected to official bodies and demanded that any future reforms include separate electorates for Muslims. They also wanted a weighted system of representation which would reflect the size of the Muslim population and the value of its ‘contribution to the defence of the empire’. Headed by the Aga Khan and heavily supported by mainly landed and commercial Muslim interests in the United Provinces (which were the same as the early-nineteenth-century North-West Provinces and the future Uttar Pradesh), the deputees had inherited Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s distrust of Congress. In early 1907 they duly consummated this distrust by forming the All India Muslim League. Not all Muslim interests supported them, however. Some groups
continued to subscribe to Congress, amongst them one headed by a brilliant young Bombay lawyer, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The Morley–Minto Indian Councils Act, when it at last materialised in 1909, was the first major reform package since the 1892 Councils Act and apparently did no more than, as Minto put it, ‘prudently extend’ the principle of representative institutions. The councils in question were those attached to the central government, still in Calcutta but about to remove to Delhi, and to the now numerous provincial governments in Madras, Bombay, Agra (for the United Provinces), Lahore (for the Panjab and North-West Frontier provinces) and so on. Known as Legislative Councils, all were now increased in size; more seats were to go to non-officials and more of these non-officials were to be indirectly elected. With up to sixty members the Legislative Councils would thus accommodate more Indians, some of whom would represent a wider spectrum of Indian opinion. They became in effect chambers rather than councils and, although Minto disclaimed the very idea, could be seen to foreshadow a parliamentary system.

But they were not legislatures and had no power to initiate or frustrate legislation, merely to question and criticise it; India remained a British autocracy, albeit a consultative one. Additionally, an Indian member, Satyendra Sinha, was co-opted onto the viceroy’s Executive Council, and in London two Indians served on the council which advised the Secretary of State for India.

The reforms were initially welcomed by Congress, but not by the Muslim League. When supplementary regulations later revealed that some seats were indeed to be reserved for Muslims and elected only by Muslims, the situation was reversed; Congress complained and the League rejoiced. Other seats were reserved for other sectional interests. It was not the principle of reservation which caused controversy but that of a separate electorate for the perhaps 20 per cent of the population, distributed throughout the subcontinent, who happened to adhere to Islam. Fairly in the subsequent view of Pakistanis, fatally in that of most citizens of the Republic of India, the principle of a separate electorate along sectarian lines had been conceded to a fifth of all Indians.

It would be impossible to deny that the arrangement suited British interests. But once again it was hardly an insidious application of ‘divide and rule’. It neither fractured an existing consensus nor prejudiced any future consensus. No division had been created that did not already exist, no demand created which could not subsequently be accommodated. In fact, seven years later, Congress would itself accept the principle of separate
electorates. The 1916 Lucknow Pact, by which Congress and the League agreed a joint programme, would see the League accept Muslim under-representation in Muslim majority areas (like East Bengal) in return for Congress’s acceptance of Hindu under-representation in Hindu majority areas (like the United Provinces). Here was precisely the political horse-trading essential to the working of a plural society. Both sides embraced it; so even did an ‘extremist’ like the lately returned Tilak. At this stage, with one partition having just failed, another was not only unthinkable; it was eminently avoidable.

AN AFTERNOON IN AMRITSAR

Steeped in the gradualist traditions of their own constitutional evolution, the British assumed that India’s induction into the practice of representative government would be a protracted business. Ripon’s minimalist programme had sufficed for a decade, and the first Indian Councils Act (1892) for rather more. The Morley–Minto reforms were expected to stem the tide for at least as long. Congress demands for
swaraj
were not yet accompanied by an ultimatum, and their objective was not that dissimilar to the ‘responsible government’ envisaged by the more enlightened amongst the British. In what the latter often characterised as a doctor–patient relationship, it looked as if India could be retained on a drip-feed of concessions until the sacred cows came home.

The First World War changed all that. With the imperial medico coming under severe strain, the Indian patient was co-opted onto the nursing staff. He was fitter, evidently, and the doctor frailer than had been supposed. Doing the rounds he heard tell of an American panacea called self-determination and of a more revolutionary cure being pioneered in Russia. It was doubtful whether he should be in hospital at all. If the doctor was so obviously fallible, why should the patient be patient?

News of war had been greeted in India with a demonstration. For once it was not of dissent but of enthusiastic support. British hearts warmed at the protestations of loyalty and the offers of support which poured in not only from the predictably sycophantic princely states but also from the Muslim League and Congress. With recruitment exceeding all expectations, Indian troops were soon sailing for novel destinations like Flanders, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. Over two million Indian combatants and support staff would eventually serve overseas, dwarfing all other imperial contributions to the war effort. ‘It was the performance of India which took the
world by surprise and thrilled every British heart,’ reported John Buchan, then writing his
Thirty-Nine Steps
.
²⁰

While the troopships sailed forth, other Indians headed home. From Africa by way of Britain and a failed attempt to enlist in the ambulance corps came Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Already forty-six, his twenty years in Africa had transformed a gawky and rather unsuccessful London-trained lawyer into a wiry social activist with a formidable record of unconventional protest. In India he continued to support the war effort and encourage enlistment. He retained a strong belief in British justice and he acknowledged as his mentor Gokhale, the Bombay Congressman who epitomised ‘moderate’ opinion.

But Gandhi did not, therefore, launch into conventional politics. On behalf of the racially disadvantaged Indian community in Natal, mostly end-of-indenture settlers, he had developed a form of protest which he called
satyagraha
, or ‘truth-force’. To most observers it was just ‘passive resistance’ but to Gandhi it was something much more constructive and much more demanding. Drawing on the non-violent Jain and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat, it elevated suffering and denial into a quasi-religious discipline, like yoga or meditation. The realising ‘force’ for truth and selflessness which could be released by such self-discipline transcended the forms of protest through which it might be manifest. In fact, such outward demonstrations (petitions, boycotts, etc.), without the inward sanction of
satyagraha
, would merely encourage the violence and intolerance which it was supposed to negate. Like a secret weapon, therefore,
satyagraha
needed careful study and the deftest of handling; it was only to be invoked selectively and in carefully controlled doses.

Instead of making it available to the Western-educated intelligentsia of Congress, Gandhi spent a year sizing up the situation and then two years experimenting with limited and unfashionable campaigns well away from the presidency cities. A
satyagraha
in the remote north of Bihar won redress for its wretched indigo cultivators, whose status reminded him of Natal’s indentured labourers. In Gujarat in 1917 he led a
satyagraha
on behalf of farmers unable to meet the revenue demand, and another on behalf of underpaid mill-workers in Ahmadabad’s cotton industry. Not all were successful, but the support they mobilised amongst groups hitherto considered as politically irrelevant greatly enhanced both Gandhi’s reputation and his following. To one who so readily identified with the underprivileged and who in dress and lifestyle resembled a religious
sadhu
more than a political activist the epithet
mahatma
(‘great soul’) was first applied by Tagore and then widely adopted. Amongst Gandhi’s Bihar recruits from
this period was the lawyer Rajendra Prasad, a future President of India, and from Gujarat Vallabhai Patel, a landlord and lawyer who would become the Congress power-broker at the time of independence. In short, Gandhi’s homecoming, though low-key, glinted with novel purpose.

Other returnees to India at the beginning of the war fared less well. In September 1914 a Japanese steamer disembarked over three hundred Panjabis, mostly Sikhs, at Budge Budge, a port on the Hughli river below Calcutta. The ship had originally been chartered by a Sikh businessman in Singapore to convey its immigrant passengers from various places of Indian settlement in east and south-east Asia to a new life in Vancouver. But the Canadian authorities had refused permission to land and now at Budge Budge, after recrossing the Pacific (during which time war was declared), the ship had attracted the suspicions of the British authorities in India. Troops escorted the passengers ashore and, when some attempted to reach Calcutta, they opened fire. Twenty-two were killed; the rest, sent by train to the Panjab, were kept under the closest surveillance. To the British, if the returning Gandhi represented the acceptable face of Indian protest, these not so ‘Pacific Panjabis’ represented its unacceptable obverse, mutiny.