SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE ELECTIONS
On probably the last of seventeen visits to India spread over some forty
years, I landed after three years' absence in Bombay early in November
1920, on the eve of the first elections for the new popular assemblies
created by the Act of 1919.
Municipal elections there had been in India for a long time past, and
elections for the Councils since 1909, but on a very restricted
franchise or by indirect processes. To provide a real measure of popular
representation, and even to secure the usefulness of the reforms as a
means of political education for the Indian people, the franchise was
now placed on as broad a basis as possible, whilst in mapping out the
constituencies the principle of separate representation for particular
races and creeds and special interests had to be taken into account. The
territorial basis prevailed largely, and rural and urban constituencies
corresponded roughly to county and borough constituencies in this
country, but besides the "general constituencies" for all qualified
electors indiscriminately, "special constituencies" had to be created
wherever required for "community" representation, whether of Mahomedans,
or, in the Punjab, of Sikhs, or, in Madras, of non-Brahmans, or, in the
large cities, of Europeans and of Eurasians, besides still more
specialised constituencies for the representation of land-holders,
universities, commerce, and industries. There was no female suffrage,
and no plural vote. No elector could vote both in a "general
constituency" and in a "special" one. The qualifications laid down for
the franchise were of a very modest character. Illiteracy was no bar, as
to have made it so in a country where barely 10 per cent of the adult
males attain to the slender standard of literacy adopted for census
purposes would have reduced the electorate to very insignificant
proportions, and many Indians who cannot read or write have often quite
as shrewd a knowledge of affairs as those who can. The franchise varied
in slight details from province to province, but generally speaking was
based on a property qualification measured by payment of land revenue or
of income-tax or of municipal rates. Military service counted as a
special qualification. Under these regulations about 6,200,000 electors
were registered, or nearly 2-3/4 per cent of the total population
throughout India under direct British administration, excluding the
areas to which the Act of 1919 was not to apply.
The regulations, however, merely supplied the rough framework; the task
of compiling the lists of qualified electors devolved upon the
Government officers and special election commissions appointed _ad hoc_
throughout the country, and to the much-abused Civil Service mainly
belongs the credit of having made it possible to hold the elections
within less than a year of the passing of the Act. In the Bombay
Presidency, for instance, where I had my first opportunity of seeing the
new electoral system at work, the electoral rolls finally included some
550,000 electors out of a population of about 20,000,000 of widely
different races and creeds, speaking three absolutely different
languages. Even more laborious than the compiling of voters' lists was
the task of explaining to the vast majority of voters what the vote
meant, why they ought to use it, and how they had to record it. At many
polling stations ballot-boxes were provided of different colours or
showing different symbols--a horse, a flag, a cart, a lion,
etc.--adopted by candidates to enable the voter who could not read their
names to drop his ballot ticket into the right box without asking
questions apt to jeopardise the secrecy of the ballot.
Many voters instinctively distrusted the privilege suddenly thrust on
them, and scented in it some trap laid by Government, perhaps for
extracting fresh taxation, or worse. Many more remained wholly
indifferent and saw no reason for putting themselves to the slightest
trouble in a matter with which they could not see that they had any
personal concern. Except in large centres, the candidates themselves
often did very little to disarm distrust or to combat indifference.
There was little or no electioneering of the kind with which we are
familiar; and when once "Non-co-operation" led to the withdrawal of
Extremist candidates, there was generally no serious line of political
cleavage between the others, who, especially in the rural districts,
where their neighbours already knew all about them, were content to rely
on their local influence and personal reputation to carry them through.
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.
During the electoral campaign Mr. Gandhi could still find large
audiences, not all consisting of excitable students, to acclaim him or
to listen open-mouthed to his ceaseless flow of eloquence. But the
electors went to the polls and voted for the candidates against whom he
and his followers had fulminated, and, in the rural districts
especially, election meetings often refused to listen to any elaborate
political dissertations, and wanted only to hear what the candidates
were prepared to do for elementary education, sanitation, schools,
roads, etc. So the Bengal elections too resulted in the return, often by
relatively large bodies of voters, of members pledged and competent to
co-operate with Government. The _Khilafat_ agitation, accompanied in
Bengal as everywhere else by aggressive religious intimidation, affected
the polling in some of the Mahomedan constituencies. But during the
Anti-Partition campaign Mahomedans and Hindus had been in opposite
camps, whereas Mr. Gandhi was now making a strong and to some extent
successful bid for Mahomedan support by endorsing the Mahomedan
grievance. So the Mahomedan change of front merely emphasised
"Non-co-operation's" defeat in Bengal.
Equally hopeful were the signs of a better understanding and of the
revival of a spirit of friendly co-operation between Indians and
Englishmen in Calcutta, hitherto regarded, not quite without reason, as
a stronghold of reactionary European conservatism, especially amongst
the non-official community. It can hardly be denied that, except where
official relations brought them into contact--and not always
there--Europeans and Indians have lived too much in separate water-tight
compartments until each has ceased to see anything but the beam in the
other's eye. In Calcutta they have been far more rarely drawn together
in commercial and industrial co-operation, and they have rubbed up less
frequently against each other in healthy competition than, for instance,
in Bombay. It is one of the most promising features of the new reforms
that the Europeans, who have hitherto taken very little interest in
anything that was not directly connected with their own business or
their own amusements, have been at last roused to play the part which it
is their duty as well as their right to play in the political life of
the country, and the men who have been returned to sit in the new
Councils as the representatives of the European community seem to
realise fully, the importance of the task that is before them in giving
a practical example of what the helpful co-operation of Europeans with
Indians can do to promote the healthy political life of the country.
In social service there is an equally large field of co-operation of
which Calcutta has also provided an interesting illustration. In no
other city in India are University students, of whom there are nearly as
many--some 26,000--at the one university of Calcutta as in all the
universities of Great Britain put together, thrown so much on their own
resources without any guidance or control. The bulk of them may never
come in contact even with European professors, let alone with the
European community in general. What opportunities have they of forming
any opinion for themselves of what our civilisation stands for, except
possibly through the medium of cheap cinemas in which its worst and most
vulgar features are thrust before them? Bengalee youths are
extraordinarily quick to respond to the best European influence when it
has once established contact with them. Some teachers do secure a
strong personal hold upon them, most of all in the missionary and other
hostels where they live under the same roof with them, take part in
their games as well as in their studies, and encourage them to express
their own opinions freely and fearlessly. There relations of mutual
friendship and confidence grow up and endure. In this respect the
Y.M.C.A., in which Indian Christians act in close co-operation with
broad-minded Englishmen, has done admirable work, and none better and
with more definite and immediate results than when Government turned to
them for assistance last year in the difficult situation created by the
royal amnesty which required the immediate liberation of nearly a
thousand young Bengalees who, having been more or less concerned in
conspiracies and dacoities during the troublous years before the war,
had been interned after its outbreak under administrative orders. In
many cases they had broken with their families, who were not inclined to
take them back. Many had no means of earning a livelihood. To let them
loose upon the world without any provision for them would have been to
drive them to desperation. The Y.M.C.A. stepped into the breach. They
were given the use of an internment camp which German war _détenus_ had
vacated, and with the help of Mr. B.C. Chatterjee, who was well known to
that particular class of Indians for having constantly appeared as
counsel for the defendants in the innumerable political prosecutions of
the preceding decade, and had himself formed an Indian Committee for a
similar purpose, they induced a large number of these young fellows to
come to them. They were at first rather distrustful, but Mr.
Chatterjee's political past and the warm-hearted sympathy of Mr. Rahu,
an Indian Y.M.C.A. worker who was placed in charge of the hostel, soon
disarmed their suspicions. They learnt to appraise at their real value
the malicious rumours set afoot to prejudice them against their new
friends, and began to respond cordially to a generous treatment,
physical and moral, which was so unlike all that they had heard about
Western methods. They were given food and lodging, newspapers,
magazines, and books, and, when necessary, medical advice and care. They
had opportunities of learning a trade and securing employment as well as
facilities for indoor and outdoor recreation, and carefully planned
social gatherings helped to restore their self-respect and confidence.
To their credit be it said, their conduct was unexceptionable, and not a
single complaint was received with regard to any of those who thus found
a new start in life. One could well credit the assurance that they were
all as much opposed to any reversion to "Non-co-operation" as Sir
Surendranath Banerjee himself.
Much must always depend upon the example set by those in authority not
only as administrators but as the natural leaders of both European and
Indian society. Lord Ronaldshay, whose appointment as Governor of Bengal
was not at first very well received by the politically minded Indians in
Calcutta, has succeeded by patient effort in convincing them that they
have a genuine as well as a candid friend in him, and even his social
popularity is due not merely to the generosity of his hospitality but to
the keen interest he takes, amongst other things, in the renascence of
Indian art in which Bengal has taken the lead. There is amongst
Europeans in India a good deal of Philistine contempt for all Indian
forms of culture, and Indians are surprised and grateful when Governors
like Lord Ronaldshay, and his predecessor, Lord Carmichael, frankly
acknowledge that whilst Indian painting and Indian music are ruled by
other canons than those of the West, they pursue none the less high
ideals along different paths. What Indians look for too often in vain
from Europeans is any hearty attempt either to understand them or to
make them understand us. The influence which Lord Ronaldshay had
acquired by such forms of co-operation with the Indian mind stood him
and the Bengal Provincial Council in good stead when he had on one
occasion to appeal to it to reconsider its hasty refusal of a grant in
which it would have been impossible for Government to acquiesce, lest he
should be driven to override it by the exercise of the statutory powers
vested in him. He gave it to be understood that, if they became
frequent, such conflicts of opinion between him and the Council would
put an end to his usefulness either to the Government or to the
Presidency, and he would feel justified in demanding his release from
responsibilities he would no longer be able satisfactorily to discharge.
The Council was wise enough to take the hint and not to risk losing a
Governor who had done so much to earn the confidence of Bengal, and by
correcting an error of judgment, due chiefly to inexperience, it
confirmed the victory which had been won over "Non-co-operation" at the
polls.
Even in the storm-tossed Punjab the new Provincial Council made a better
start than might have been expected from the temper of Lahore and the
other large centres still brooding over the bitter memories of 1919. In
the Punjab and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province,
formerly itself part of the Punjab--but excluded from the operation of
the new Government of India Act and therefore lying outside this
survey--the _Khilafat_ agitation has gone deeper than probably in any
other part of India amongst large and very backward Mahomedan
populations. Yet upon the Punjab itself so cruel a lesson has not been
lost as that taught to thousands of unfortunate Mahomedan peasants in
the Frontier Province who were persuaded to give up their lands and trek
into Afghanistan to seek the blessings of Mahomedan rule, and came back
starved and plundered from their ill-starred exodus undertaken for the
sake of Islam. In Lahore and in the other chief urban constituencies
"Non-co-operation," with its usual methods of combined persuasion and
intimidation, was so far successful that not 5 per cent of the electors
went to the poll. In some of the Mahomedan rural constituencies the
attendances at the polls were, on the other hand, fairly large,
especially in those where the influence of old conservative families was
still paramount. Altogether the Punjab Provincial Council is perhaps
less representative of the whole electorate than in any other province
in India. Some official ingenuity had been displayed in grouping remote
towns together without any regard for geography, in order to prevent
townsmen undesirably addicted to advanced political views from standing
as candidates for the rural constituencies in which many of the smaller
towns would otherwise have been naturally merged. This was a last effort
based on the old belief that the population of the Punjab could be
divided into goats and sheep, the goats being the "disloyal" townsmen
and the sheep being the "loyal" peasantry. There may have been substance
in that belief before 1919, but how little there is in it now has been
shown by the large majority who, in an assembly in which it is just the
rural constituencies that are most effectively represented, passed a
Resolution for the remission of the fine imposed on Amritsar to punish
the disorders in that city, already amply punished, they considered, at
Jallianwala. The presence in the new Government of Mr. Harkishen Lal,
himself condemned two years ago under martial law to transportation for
life and treated for months as a common criminal, has done more than
anything else perhaps to restore public confidence. He was elected to
the Council, not by political firebrands, but by a sober constituency
specially constituted to represent the Punjab Industries, and in
courageously choosing him to be one of his new Ministers, the Governor,
Sir Edward MacLagan, gave a striking demonstration, of which the effect
has not been confined to the Punjab, of the profound change that has
been wrought in the attitude of the official world towards the
politically minded classes.
An appalling incident last spring showed how quick the fierce races of
Northern India are to burst into violent feuds amongst themselves for
which no responsibility can be imputed to their alien rulers. The
Sikhs, though less numerous than the Hindus and the Mahomedans, form an
extremely influential community in the Punjab, which was the cradle and
always has been the stronghold of their religion, and was only a century
ago the seat of their political and military power. Not many years ago,
however, Sikhism, which began in Moghul times as a revolt against the
social and religious trammels of Hinduism as well as against Mahomedan
domination, seemed to be tending steadily towards resorption into the
Hindu system. Its temples, most of them richly endowed, had passed out
of the control of the community, to whom they in theory belonged, into
the possession of lukewarm Mahunts, or incumbents, many of them half
Hinduised and most of them more concerned with the temporal advantages
than with the religious duties of their office. Even in the days of the
militant Sikh Confederacy under Ranjit Singh, upon whom religion sat
rather lightly, there was a growing trend towards laxity of belief and
practice, which continued to spread after the British annexation of the
Punjab had broken the political power of the Sikhs. Strange to say, the
old customs of pure Sikhism survived nowhere so immune from decay as in
the Sikh regiments of our Indian Army. But with the growth of Indian
Nationalism, which often manifested itself at first in a revival of
local and racial patriotism, there arose amongst the Sikhs a vigorous
reform movement which aimed at rebuilding their nationhood on the solid
foundations of the faith originally preached by their ten Gurus, or
religious teachers, and the strict observance of the peculiar customs
that were the badge of their faith. The first important step was the
opening of the Khalsa College for Sikhs at Amritsar in 1892, which did
not, however, fulfil its real purpose until it was gradually emancipated
from Government control. A religious Diwan, or assembly, was constituted
at Lahore, to which local bodies were affiliated, with the object of
preaching purity of religion and promoting the abolition of caste
distinctions and other Hindu influences that had crept back into
Sikhism.
In its essence a puritan movement, there was unquestionably a
nationalist side to it which tended to render it suspect in the eyes of
many Punjab officials, and these suspicions were heightened by the
_Gadr_ conspiracy fomented in the second year of the war by a number of
Sikhs, who returned from Canada bitterly estranged from British rule by
the anti-Asiatic policy of the Dominion and still more by the fiery
eloquence of Indian revolutionaries in German pay. But against the
disloyalty of a small section must be weighed the loyal war services of
the vast majority of Sikhs, and the Punjab Government proudly boasted at
the time that there were 80,000 Sikhs serving in the army, a proportion
far higher than in the case of any other community. It was doubtless
partly in recognition of such war services that in the reforms scheme
they were given the benefit of "community" representation in the new
Councils on the same lines as the Mahomedans. But with a tenacious
memory of the language used years ago by Lord Minto in reply to
Mahomedan representations, they still complain that the historical
importance and actual influence of their community have not received
nearly as full a measure of consideration. Unfortunately, bitterness was
revived by the large number of Sikhs amongst General Dyer's victims at
Jallianwala, most of them, according to the Sikh version, innocent
country-folk, who had come into Amritsar on that day because it happened
to be a Sikh religious holiday, and had merely strayed into the Bagh out
of harmless and ignorant curiosity.
The puritan movement struck a dangerous course when it addressed itself
to the recovery of the Sikh shrines which it held to have passed into
the possession of unorthodox and corrupt Mahunts, faithless both to
their religious and temporal trust. Considerable success was achieved by
the exercise, it was affirmed, of mere moral pressure, though not
perhaps always without a display or threat of material pressure behind
it in the event of moral pressure proving inadequate. Amongst others,
the incumbent of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the most sacred of all
Sikh shrines, was constrained to make a public confession of his
wrongdoings and resign his office into the hands of a Reformers'
Committee. Next to Amritsar in wealth and sanctity came Nankhanda Saheb
with a Mahunt to whom the Reformers imputed all kinds of enormities. A
great popular demonstration against him had been organised for March 5,
and some 150 Sikhs had gone out to make arrangements for sheltering and
feeding several thousands in the immediate vicinity of the shrine. The
Mahunt had already scented danger and he clearly believed in taking the
offensive. He collected some fifty Pathan cut-throats as a Praetorian
guard for the temple, and also, for a purpose which was soon to
transpire, a very large store of petrol. When the advance party of
reformers entered the shrine to perform their morning devotions the
gates were closed upon them and over 100 were butchered, and their
corpses so effectively soaked in oil and burned that when the District
Commissioner and a detachment of troops arrived post-haste on the scene,
the victims could scarcely be counted except by the number of charred
skulls.
There was a universal thrill of horror and fury, and passions rose so
high that Government found itself suddenly confronted with a situation
which at once put to a severe test the capacity of the new regime to
deal with emergencies endangering law and order. That Indian Ministers
now shared in the responsibility of government, and that there was a
popular assembly to undertake legislation for composing the differences
between the conflicting sections of the Sikh community, helped at least
as much to avert still graver troubles as the object-lesson which the
Nankhanda Saheb tragedy afforded to thoughtful Punjabees of all creeds.
The massacre carried out by a mere handful of Pathans was a grim
reminder of the dangers to which the Punjab would be the first to be
exposed if the hasty severance of the British connection for which Mr.
Gandhi is clamouring were to leave it defenceless against the flood of
lawless savagery that would at once pour down, as so often before in
Indian history, from the wild fastnesses of the North-West Frontier.