THE POSITION OF INDIANS IN THE EMPIRE.
The problems of Indian administration are in themselves difficult enough
to solve, but even more difficult are some of the problems connected
with the relations of India and her peoples to the rest of the Empire.
One of these has assumed during the last few years a character of
extreme gravity, which neither the Imperial Government nor the British
public seems to have at all adequately grasped.
"I think," said Mr. Gokhale in moving his resolution for the prohibition
of Indian indentured labour for Natal, "I am stating the plain truth
when I say that no single question of our time has evoked more bitter
feelings throughout India--feelings in the presence of which the best
friends of British rule have had to remain helpless--than the continued
ill-treatment of Indians in South Africa."
Every Indian member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council who spoke
during that debate, whatever race or creed or caste he represented,
endorsed the truth of Mr. Gokhale's statement, and had a vote been taken
on the resolution it would have had what no other resolution moved
during the whole session would have secured--the unanimous support of
the whole body of Indian members and the sympathy of every English
member, official as well as unofficial. The Government of India wisely
averted a division by accepting the resolution. Not a single attempt was
made either by the Viceroy in the chair or by other representatives of
Government to controvert either Mr. Gokhale's statement or the
overwhelming array of facts showing the nature and extent of the
ill-treatment of Indians in South Africa, which was presented by the
mover of the resolution and by every Indian speaker who followed him.
The whole tone of the debate was extremely dignified and
self-restrained, but no Englishman can have listened to it without a
deep sense of humiliation. For the first time in history the Government
of India had to sit dumb whilst judgment was pronounced in default
against the Imperial Government upon a question which has stirred the
resentment of every single community of our Indian Empire. It was the
one question which called forth very deep feeling in the Indian National
Congress at Lahore last December, where subscriptions and donations
flowed in freely to defray the expenses of a campaign throughout India,
and it figured just as prominently in the proceedings of the All-India
Moslem League, which held its annual meeting there in the following
month. In fact, Mahomedans have the additional grievance that the laws
of the Transvaal discriminate by name against those of their faith.
There is scarcely a city of any importance in India in which public
meetings have not testified to the interest and indignation which the
subject arouses in every class of Indian audience.
This is a very grave fact. I need not enter into the details of the
question. They are well known. There may be some exaggerations, Indian
immigrants may not always be drawn from desirable classes, there may be
differences of opinion as to the wisdom of the attitude taken up by some
of the Indians in South Africa, and Englishmen may sympathize with the
desire of British and Dutch colonists to check the growth of another
alien population in their midst. But that the Indian has not received
there the just treatment to which he is entitled as a subject of the
British Crown, and that disabilities and indignities are heaped upon him
because he is an Indian, are broad facts that are not and cannot be
disputed. The resolution adopted by the Imperial Council, with the
sanction of the Government of India, was formally directed against Natal
because it is only in regard to Natal that India possesses an effective
weapon of retaliation in withholding the supply of indentured labour
which is indispensable to the prosperity of that colony. But the Indian
grievance is not confined to Natal; it is even greater in the Transvaal.
Still less is it confined to the particular class of Indians who
emigrate as indentured labourers to South Africa. What Indians feel most
bitterly is that however well educated, however respectable and even
distinguished may be an Indian who goes to or resides in South Africa,
and especially in the Transvaal, he is treated as an outcast and is at
the mercy of harsh laws and regulations framed for his oppression, and
often interpreted with extra harshness by the officials who are left to
apply them. This bitterness is intensified by the recollection that,
before the South African War, the wrongs of British Indians in the
Transvaal figured prominently in the catalogue of charges brought by the
Imperial Government against the Kruger _régime_ and contributed not a
little to precipitate its downfall. In prosecuting the South African War
Great Britain drew freely upon India for assistance of every kind except
actual Indian combatants. Not only was it the loyalty of India that
enabled the British troops who saved Natal to be embarked hurriedly at
Bombay, but it was the constant supply from India of stores of all
kinds, of transport columns, of hospital bearers, &c., which, to a great
extent, made up throughout the war for the deficiencies of the British
War Office. There are monuments erected in South Africa which testify to
the devotion of British Indians who, though non-combatants, laid down
their lives in the cause of the Empire. Yet, as far as the British
Indians are concerned, the end of it all has been that their lot in the
Transvaal since it became a British Colony is harder than it was In the
old Kruger days, and the British colonists in the Transvaal, who were
ready enough to use Indian grievances as a stick with which to beat
Krugerism, have now joined hands with the Dutch in refusing to redress
them. The Government of India have repeatedly urged upon the Imperial
Government the gravity of this question, and Lord Curzon especially
pressed upon his friends, when they were in office, the vital importance
of effecting some acceptable settlement whilst the Transvaal was still a
Crown Colony, and, therefore, more amenable to the influence of the
Mother Country than it would be likely to prove when once endowed with
self-government. Yet the Imperial Government after a succession of
half-hearted and ineffective protests have now finally acquiesced in the
perpetuation and even the aggravation of wrongs which some ten years ago
they solemnly declared to be intolerable.
Apart from the sense of justice upon which Englishmen pride themselves,
it is impossible to overlook the disastrous consequences of this _gran
rifiuto_ for the prestige of British rule in India. One of the Indian
Members of Council, Mr. Dadabhoy, indicated them in terms as moderate as
they were significant:--
In 1899 Lord Lansdowne feared the moral consequences
in India of a conviction of the powerlessness of the British
_Raj_ to save the Indian settlers in the Transvaal from oppression
and harsh treatment. That was when there was peace all
over this country, when sedition, much more anarchism,
was an unheard-of evil. If the situation was disquieting then,
what is it now when the urgent problem of the moment
is how to put down and prevent the growth of unrest In the
land? The masses do not understand the niceties of the
relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies;
they do not comprehend the legal technicalities. The British
_Raj_ has so far revealed itself to them as a power whose influence
is irresistible, and when they find that, with all its traditional
omnipotence, it has not succeeded in securing to their countrymen
--admittedly a peaceable and decent body of settlers who
rendered valuable services during the war--equal treatment
at the hands of a small Dependency, they become disheartened
and attribute the failure to the European colonist's influence
over the Home Government. That is an impression which is
fraught with incalculable potentialities of mischief and which
British statesmanship should do everything in its power
to dispel. The present political situation in India adds
special urgency to the case.
No comments of mine could add to the significance of this warning.
The measure contemplated by Mr. Gokhale's resolution may have some
direct effect upon Natal, whose leading statesmen have repeatedly
acknowledged the immense value of Indian indentured labour to the
Colony, and may indirectly affect public opinion in the Transvaal. But
behind the immediate question of the worse or better treatment of
Indians in South Africa stand much larger questions, which Mr. Gokhale
did not hesitate to state with equal frankness:--
Behind all the grievances of which I have spoken to-day
three questions of vital importance emerge to view. First,
what is the _status_ of us Indians in this Empire? Secondly,
what is the extent of the responsibility which lies on the
Imperial Government to ensure to us just and humane and,
gradually, even equal treatment in this Empire? And,
thirdly, how far are the self-governing members of this
Empire bound by its cardinal principles, or are they to share
in its privileges only and not to bear their share of the disadvantages?
These issues have been raised in their most acute form in South Africa,
but they exist also in Australia, and even in Canada, where many Indians
suffered heavily from the outburst of anti-Asiatic feeling which swept
along the Pacific Coast a couple of years ago. They involve the position
of Asiatic subjects of the Crown in all the self-governing Dominions and
indirectly in many of the Crown Colonies, for they affect the relations
of the white and coloured races throughout the Empire. Here, however, I
must confine myself to the Indian aspects. I have discussed them with a
good many Indians, and they are quite alive to the difficulties of the
situation. Though they resent the colour bar, they realize the strength
of the feeling there is in the Colonies in favour of preserving the
white race from intermixture with non-white races. It is, in fact, a
feeling they themselves in some ways share, for, in India the
unfortunate Eurasian meets with even less sympathy from Indians than
from Europeans. Indian susceptibilities may even find some consolation
in the fact that Colonial dislike of the Indian immigrant is to a great
extent due to his best qualities. "Indians," said Mr. Mudholkar,
appealing to Lord Minto, "are hated, as your Lordship's predecessor
pointed out, on account of their very virtues. It is because they are
sober, thrifty, industrious, more attentive to their business than the
white men that their presence in the Colonies is considered
intolerable." Educated Indians know how little hold the Mother Country
has over her Colonies in these matters. They know that both British and
Anglo-Indian statesmen have recognized their grievances without being
able to secure their redress, and it is interesting to note how warm
were the tributes paid in the Imperial Council to the energy with which
Lord Curzon had upheld their cause, by some of those who were most
bitterly opposed to him when he was in India. They know, on the other
hand, that though the British Labour Party can afford to profess great
sympathy for Indian political aspirations in India, it has never
tried--or, if it has tried, it has signally failed--to exercise the
slightest influence in favour of Indian claims to fair treatment with
its allies in the Colonies, where the Labour Party is always the most
uncompromising advocate of a policy of exclusion and oppression, and
they know the power which the Labour Party wields in all our Colonies.
They are, therefore, I believe, ready, to reckon with the realities of
the situation and to agree with Lord Curzon that "the common rights of
British citizenship cannot be held to override the rights of
self-protection conceded to self-governing Colonies"--rights which,
moreover, are often exercised to the detriment of immigrants from the
Mother Country itself. They will, on the other hand, urge the
withholding of Indian labour if the Colonies are unwilling to treat it
with fairness and humanity, and they argue rightly enough, that India,
to whom the emigration of tens of thousands of her people is not an
unmixed advantage, will lose far less than Colonies whose development
will be starved by the loss of labour they cannot themselves supply. An
influential Indian Member stated in Council that they have accepted the
view that complete freedom of immigration is beyond the pale of
practical politics, and is not to be pressed as things stand. All that
they ask, he added, in the Transvaal is for the old Indian residents to
be allowed to live peaceably, as in Cape Colony for instance, without
being treated like habitual criminals, and for men of education and
position to be allowed to come in, so that they may have teachers,
ministers of religion, and doctors for themselves and their people. In
Natal they ask for the maintenance of the rights and privileges they
have had for years and years. On such lines a practical working
arrangement with the Colonies should not be beyond the bounds of
possibility. But what Indians also demand is that laws and regulations
of an exceptional character which may be accepted in regard to
immigration shall not be applicable to Indians who merely wish to travel
in the Colonies. An Indian of very high position whom every one from the
King downwards welcomes when he comes to England, wished a few years ago
to visit Australia, but before doing so he wrote to a friend there to
inquire whether he would be subjected to any unpleasant formalities. The
answer he received discouraged him. These are the sort of difficulties
which Indians claim should be removed, and one practical suggestion I
have heard put forward is that, on certain principles to be laid down by
mutual agreement between the Imperial Government, the Governments of
the Dominions, and the Government of India, the latter should have power
to issue passports to Indian subjects which would be recognized and
would exempt them from all vexatious formalities throughout the Empire.
The whole question is one that cannot be allowed to drag on indefinitely
without grave danger to the Empire. It evidently cannot be solved
without the co-operation of the Colonies. Next year the Imperial
Conference meets again in the capital of the Empire. If, in the
meantime, the Imperial Government were to enter into communication with
the Government of India and with the Crown Colonies, so many of whom are
closely interested in Indian labour, they should be in a position to lay
before the representatives of the Dominions assembled in London next
March considered proposals which would afford a basis for discussion
and, one may hope, for a definite agreement. A recognition of the right
of Colonial Governments to regulate the conditions on which British
Indians may be allowed admission as indentured labourers or for
permanent residence ought to secure guarantees for the equitable and
humane treatment of those who have been already admitted, or shall
hereafter be admitted, and also an undertaking that Indians of good
position armed with specified credentials from the Government of India,
travelling either for pleasure or for purposes of scientific study or on
business or with other legitimate motives, would be allowed to enter and
travel about for a reasonable period without let or hindrance of any
sort. That is the _minimum_ which would, I believe, satisfy the best
Indian opinion, and it is inconceivable that if the situation were
freely and frankly explained to our Colonial kinsmen they would reject a
settlement so essential to the interests and to the credit of the whole
Empire in relation to India.