SHOALS AND ROCKS AHEAD
Unless the economic situation improves again with a rapidity beyond even
sanguine expectations, Government will have to lay before the Indian
Legislature next winter a budget scarcely less unpleasant than the last
one. Even if expenditure does not outrun the estimates, revenue can
hardly fail to fall short of them. Mr. Hailey, with perhaps forced
optimism, seems to have reckoned upon taxation old and new continuing to
yield at much the same rate during a year which began and is likely to
end in great depression as during the preceding year, a great part of
which had been a "boom" year. In the same way he budgeted on a 1s. 8d.
rupee, though the rate of exchange for the rupee was then under, and has
only quite recently[4] risen above, 1s. 4d. This means an inevitable and
considerable loss to the Government of India on all the home charges
which it has to remit to London. Another deficit to be met by another
increase of taxation would be a strain upon the Assembly far more trying
than that to which this year's Budget subjected it. Indian opinion will
press for further steps towards complete fiscal autonomy. Scarcely a
single Indian is a convinced free trader. In the old Indian National
Congress the desire not to estrange the sympathies of the Liberal party
in England, and the lack of interest then taken by Indian politicians in
economic questions, kept the issue somewhat in the background until the
Extremists raised it in the form of _Swadeshi_ and in an attempt to
organise a boycott of British imported goods. The immense development of
Indian industries during the war has made protection once more a very
live issue, for if that development is arrested or languishes as the
result of the general economic situation, the louder will be the demand
for protection. Even the outcry at first raised last winter in
Lancashire against the increase of the Indian import duties as an
intolerable blow to British textile industries, though at once firmly
checked by the Secretary of State, provoked enough irritation in India
to show how deeply engrained is the suspicion that, from the days of the
East India Company onward, the industrial and commercial interests of
India have always been deliberately or instinctively sacrificed to those
of Great Britain. Indians regard complete fiscal autonomy as one of the
first steps towards the fulfilment of the pledge of self-government, and
indeed as the logical consequence of the recommendation already made by
the Joint Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament. To believe that
in such matters the Government of India would now place itself in
opposition to the views of the Indian Legislature is to ignore the whole
spirit of the constitutional changes.
To the economic factors that react unfavourably upon a difficult
political situation must be added the growth of labour troubles, which
Extremist agitators know how to exploit to the utmost even when they do
not actually foment them. Strikes are as common to-day in India as they
are in England, and the epidemic has sometimes spread from industrial
workers to those employed by municipalities and by the State. There have
been strikes not only in the big cotton mills and jute mills and other
large manufacturing industries, but also amongst postmen, and amongst
railwaymen on State as well as on private-owned lines, amongst tram-car
drivers and conductors, and even amongst city scavengers. Lightning
strikes without any notice are of growing frequency. Some are
short-lived, others very obstinate, dragging on for weeks and months.
Some are grotesquely frivolous, others by no means lack justification or
excuse. Intimidation often not unaccompanied by violent assaults on
non-strikers is an ugly feature common to most of them. They sometimes
lead to very serious riots and bloodshed. They have played a prominent
part in the worst disorders of the last few years. Nowhere have they
assumed at times a more threatening shape than in the Bombay Presidency,
for in the cotton mills of Bombay itself and of the Ahmedabad district,
which employ over 200,000 hands, are collected the largest
agglomerations of factory workers in India.
Labour troubles were bound to come with the introduction of Western
methods of industrial development and Western machinery. It has led, and
very rapidly, to a demand for labour which the urban population could
not supply. But the wages soon attracted immigrants from the more or
less distant countryside, where at certain seasons of the year there is
little work to be done on the land. It became the custom for an
increasingly large number of rural districts to send their men into the
towns, where they worked for a few months. Then they went away after
they had put by a little money and came back again when they had
exhausted their hoard. These migrations became more and more regular and
on a larger scale as the demand for labour increased, and they
constitute to-day the feature which radically differentiates the problem
of Indian labour from that of British labour. There has not yet grown up
in India an industrial population permanently rooted in the towns. It is
still largely migratory, returning from time to time for more or less
lengthy periods to field-work in the villages, which remain the real
home. The Indian factory operative has not yet ceased to be a man of the
country rather than of the town. Hence perhaps the conditions under
which he is sometimes content to live whilst he is working in a town--in
Bombay, for instance, for the most part in huge overcrowded blocks,
known as _chawls_, ill lighted, ill ventilated, in a foul atmosphere and
unspeakable dirt--may seem to him less intolerable as he can look
forward to exchanging them again some day for the light and air which
surround even the most squalid village hovels. If there were reason to
believe that improved housing conditions such as are now assured to
Bombay by the huge city improvement schemes which, under Sir George
Lloyd's energetic impulse, are expanding the limits and transforming
almost beyond recognition the appearance of the most congested quarters
of the most congested of modern Indian cities, or even that increased
wages would substantially affect the temper of Indian labour, one might
look forward to the future in this respect with less apprehension. But
in Bombay labour troubles have been scarcely less rife in the best- than
in the worst-conducted mills. In Calcutta the British jute-mill owners
have set a splendid example to Indian employers of labour, and the
mill-hands, now largely imported from other provinces, not only work
under the best possible conditions of light and air, but are housed in
spacious quarters specially built for them, well ventilated and
scientifically drained, with playing-fields and elementary schools for
the swarms of children who certainly look healthy and well-fed and
happy. The Birmingham mills in Madras are recognised to be, from the
same point of view, second to none in the world. But the most humane and
generous employers--whether European or Indian--are as liable as the
most grasping and callous to see their workers suddenly carried away by
a great wave of unreasoning discontent and passion.
The greater the general unrest amongst these excitable and terribly
ignorant masses, the more urgent is the need for the establishment of
some effective means of determining the social and economic justice of
the claims of labour, as well as for the adjustment of actual conflicts
by bringing employers and employed together in a friendly atmosphere. A
real organisation of labour in its own sphere of interests and the
constitution of responsible trades unions would probably go far to
prevent labour from turning for encouragement and support to agitators
who have never been workers themselves, who have no personal knowledge
of its processes or of its needs, and who exploit its discontent,
reasonable or unreasonable, for purposes as disastrous, if fulfilled, to
its permanent interests as to those of the employers and of the whole
community. A Congress which called itself the first "All-India Trades
Union Congress" met this year in Bombay. The present organisation of
labour in India can hardly be said to justify the title it assumed, and
in answer to a deputation which waited on the Governor, Sir George Lloyd
expressed a legitimate desire for more information than was contained in
its high-flown address as to the status of these unions, their method of
formation, their constitution, their system of ballot and election, and
the actual experience in the several trades of those who claimed to
represent them. That information was not and could not be furnished,
because the ninety-two Trades Unions alleged to have been represented
are at present little more than embryonic. Their spokesmen have not
risen to the leadership of labour out of its own ranks by superior
industry and knowledge. Their organisation has not been a spontaneous
growth from within, but artificially promoted from without. The vast
majority of unskilled workers are illiterate, and even amongst ordinary
skilled labour the level of education is still extremely low. The actual
workers are therefore quite unable to organise, or even to think out the
simplest labour problems for themselves, and they easily become the
dupes and tools of outsiders--frequently lawyers or professional
politicians--who are not always disinterested sympathisers, but more
often stimulate and exploit grievances which may in themselves be
legitimate for purposes which have little to do with the real interests
of labour.
The economic causes of the growing frequency of strikes during recent
years have not yet been all explored, and Sir George Lloyd responded to
a crying need when, in his reply to the deputation, he announced that
the Bombay Government was about to establish a Labour Bureau under a
competent official from the British Board of Trade to advise it in the
interests of labour. One of the greatest difficulties in dealing with
industrial disputes in India is, the Governor rightly observed, the
absence of all trustworthy materials for forming an accurate judgment on
the actual cost of living for the working man, and the ever fluctuating
relations between the wages he receives and the expenditure he has to
incur even for the mere necessaries of life.
With a two-and three-fold appreciation, during and especially since the
war, in the cost both of the cotton stuffs which the working man needs
even for his scanty apparel and of the foodstuffs which constitute his
meagre fare, discontent grew steadily more acute, and wages, though more
than once enhanced, did not always keep pace with that appreciation. If
in circumstances, often of undoubted hardship, labour had been
sufficiently equipped to state its own case, or had found disinterested
friends to state it clearly and temperately, it would have been easier
to admit that economic causes sufficed, in some cases at least, to
explain, and perhaps even to justify, the increasing use of the strike
weapon. But there is unhappily very abundant evidence to show that
strikes would not have been so frequent, so precipitate, and so
tumultuous, had not political agitation at least contributed to foment
them as part of a scheme for promoting a general upheaval. The
Extremists, who, with few exceptions, have no part or lot in labour,
either as employers or as workers, began to carry on in Mr. Tilak's days
amongst the mill-hands of Bombay an active propaganda which originally
had little to do with labour. The mill-hands played an evil part in the
worst excesses committed during the outbreak in and around Ahmedabad in
April 1919, and twice within the last two years they have seriously
threatened the peace of Bombay itself and held up for weeks together the
normal life of the great city, necessitating the employment of large
military forces to overawe them, and to avert through the exercise of
disciplined forbearance collisions with which the police alone would
have been unable to cope, and which, when once started, could probably
have been quelled only at the cost of considerable bloodshed. Mr. Gandhi
has a great personal hold over the factory workers, especially in
Western India. Sometimes he uses it to restrain them, sometimes, though
one may hope less deliberately, he works dangerously on their emotions.
His influence when he preaches temperance to them on temperate lines may
be all to the good, and except that, when he denounces tea also, because
it is tainted with Western capitalism, he is waging war against a
popular substitute for spirits, one need not quarrel with the solemn
processions of mill-hands proceeding to a favourite shrine to break a
symbolical teapot in the presence of the deity as a pledge of
renunciation. But not all Mr. Gandhi's followers can be credited with
his earnest sympathies for labour, largely inspired by his detestation
of a "machine age," and he himself lapses into language that seems to
preach more rigid abstention from drink than from violence.
Factory legislation has never been neglected in India, though until
recently the chief impulse has had to proceed from Government itself. A
great increase of public interest has taken place in the last years, and
in India perhaps even more than anywhere else the activity in this
respect of the League of Nations and of the International Labour Office
has elicited prompt and vigorous response. The Secretary of State has
created at the India Office a new department for dealing with labour and
industry. India has had her own representation at international labour
conferences, and the Government of India is now engaged on a new Factory
Act in accordance with the draft covenants and recommendations of the
Washington Conference. Indeed in some directions the Bill is in advance
of Washington. The statutory definition of a child presents special
difficulties in India, where physical development is more precocious
than in Western countries, but, instead of making the general limit of
age for juvenile work lower, the Bill proposes to raise it not to
fourteen but to fifteen years, whilst still permitting the employment of
younger children on special and very stringent conditions. Provisions
are also made for securing longer daily intervals during the working
hours as well as a weekly holiday. Further legislation will be
introduced for the benefit of industrial workers, more particularly as
regards Trade Union rights and compensation for accidents. But however
excellent such measures may be, only the spread of education and the
better organisation with it of labour itself can be expected to give any
real stability to large struggling masses invested by the new economic
forces that have sprung so rapidly into existence with tremendous powers
for mischief, but with no individual or collective sense of
responsibility.
But the most dangerous rocks ahead are the questions which directly or
indirectly raise the racial issue. Even during the first session of the
Indian Legislature it could be seen underlying the attitude of Indian
members towards military expenditure, and military expenditure, not
likely to diminish, will be a sore subject again when the next budget is
introduced at Delhi. If one looks merely at the growth of such
expenditure, the enormously increased cost of the British Army which, in
respect of the British forces serving in India, falls upon the Indian
exchequer, furnishes Indians with a specious plea for reducing the
number of British troops as a measure of mere economy. But even if one
could concede the Indian argument that, in a contented India marching
towards self-government under the new constitution, there can no longer
be the same necessity for large British garrisons to guarantee the
safety of British rule, any considerable reduction of the proportion of
British to Indian forces in India would disturb the foundations of our
own military organisation in peace time, based for the last fifty years
on a certain fixed proportion of British regulars serving at home and
abroad. That an Indian territorial army would, on paper at least, be
less costly is beyond dispute, and if ultimately officered entirely or
almost entirely by Indians, it would meet the Indian demand for a
military career for those of the educated classes who regard themselves
now as shut out in practice from the profession of arms. That demand
cannot be met merely by the granting of British commissions to a few
Indian officers, which is already raising many difficult regimental
problems not easily grasped by Indians familiar only with the civil
administration. The difficulties do not arise so much out of objections
taken by the British officers, however repugnant still is to most of
them the idea of ever having to take orders from an Indian superior
officer, as out of the feelings, even if they be mere prejudices, of the
existing class of native officers and of the rank and file who belong to
the old and have no liking for the new India. Most of the politically
minded Indians are beginning, too, to measure the demands made upon
India for her military contribution to the needs of the Empire by those
that are made upon the self-governing Dominions. "We are quite willing,"
they say, "to bear our share of the military burdens of the Empire as
equal partners in it, and"--as some at any rate add--"we recognise that
in view of our geographical position, which lays us almost alone amongst
the Dominions open to the dangers of invasion on our land frontiers, we
require a larger army for our own defence. But even taking that into
account, as well as our inability at present to make any contribution in
kind to the naval defence of the Empire, can we be expected to submit to
military expenditure absorbing almost half our revenues? Can you point
to a single Dominion that is asked to make an annual sacrifice
comparable to that? Are we not at least entitled to claim that the
Indian tax-payer's money should not be spent merely on the maintenance
of British garrisons that are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and of an
Indian army that is so constituted as to lack all the essentials of a
national army, but should go to the building up of an army really worthy
to take its place on equal terms when India attains to self-government
with the other armies of a commonwealth of free nations?"
The racial issue dominates in a far graver form the whole question of
the status and treatment of Indians in the Dominions and Crown Colonies.
For there it enters a much larger field which extends far beyond India.
In India so far, in speaking of the racial issue, Indians and Europeans
alike have hitherto had in mind chiefly the relations between the ruling
and the subject race. When the rulers all belong to one race and come
from a far distant country not to settle permanently but chiefly to
maintain, each one in his own sphere and during his appointed time, the
continuity of rulership over millions of subjects of another and very
different race with a different civilisation, an additional element of
discord is introduced into their relations. But since Great Britain
achieved dominion over India the main issue between rulers and ruled has
been how far on the one hand British rulers should devolve on to their
Indian subjects a share in the government and administration of the
country, and how far on the other hand their Indian subjects could
hasten such devolution by various forms of pressure. Whatever part any
purely racial antagonism may have played in the controversy, the British
rulers of India have at least since 1833, and still more since the
Queen's Proclamation in 1858, debarred themselves from basing on racial
differences their refusal or reluctance to meet the growing aspirations
of their Indian subjects. They have been content to plead the political
immaturity of the Indian people and the lack of individual
qualifications amongst all but a few Indians, and even these
disabilities they had deliberately undertaken and expressed their
anxiety to remove by the introduction of Western education. Neither
colour nor descent, it was specifically declared, were to constitute
any barrier. It is quite otherwise with the question of the right of
Indians to immigrate into other parts of the Empire, and of the measure
of rights they are to enjoy as settlers there. It brings us face to face
with the racial issue pure and simple and in its widest aspects. There
is an open and declared conflict between the claims of the Dominions to
exclude or to restrict the rights of Indian settlers on grounds of
colour and descent for the avowed purpose of maintaining the paramount
ascendancy of one race over another, and the claims put forward by
Indians as British subjects to have access to all parts of the Empire
and to possess the same rights as other British subjects already enjoy
there. Some of the arguments employed to justify the attitude of the
Dominions allege inferior social standards of Indian life, but behind
them and quite undisguised is the supreme argument that Indians belong
to a coloured race and, in consequence, have no interests or rights that
can possibly prevail against those of a superior white race.
The magnitude of the issue and the resentment which it has caused in
India are, it is true, out of all proportion to the actual number of
Indians who have immigrated into other parts of the Empire. The Indians
are not a migratory people. Mostly engaged in agriculture, they cling,
as peasants are apt to do all over the world, to their own bit of land
and familiar surroundings. It is difficult even to induce them to move
from one part of India to another, and, intensely conservative in their
habits and outlook, with no horizon wider than their own village, they
generally prefer, even under the stress of economic pressure, the ills
they know of. But that does not affect the issue raised in the most
acute and naked form in some of the States now forming the South African
Union. To Mr. Gandhi's experiences and struggles in Natal and the
Transvaal can be traced back, as I have already shown, a great deal of
the bitterness which has now led him to denounce British rule as
"Satanic." It is only about fifty years ago that Indians began to go
across to South Africa, when the Government of Natal with the consent
and assistance of the Government of India sought to engage Indians to
work as indentured labourers on sugar and tea plantations. In 1911, the
year of the last census, the number of Indians in the Union was about
150,000, and, immigration having been since then checked and finally
stopped, they cannot have increased by more than 10 per cent during the
last decade. Of the total in 1911, 133,000 were in Natal, 11,000 in the
Transvaal, and 7000 in the Cape, with barely 100 in the Orange Free
State. The proportion of Indians to the total European population of the
Union, which was then about 1,400,000, was therefore only just over one
to ten. But they had not remained merely indentured labourers as at the
beginning. When their labour contracts expired many settled in the
country, acquiring small plots of land as their own or becoming petty
traders, artisans, etc., and, being frugal and hard-working and of a
higher type than the Kaffir and other natives, they throve as a whole.
The white population, who had found them at first very useful, began to
see in them either dangerous competitors or an undesirable element
calculated to complicate the social problems in a country in which the
European formed anyhow but a small minority face to face with 6,000,000
natives. Both the old Boer Government in the Transvaal and the Colonial
Government of Natal set to work to curtail by legislative enactments and
local regulations the rights which Indians had been at first allowed to
enjoy, and to assimilate their treatment to that of the lowest and most
backward natives. The Indians were systematically subjected to the
disabilities and indignities against which Mr. Gandhi for the first time
led them to organise a violent agitation and finally to offer passive
resistance.
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.