Note.--Individual civil disobedience is disobedience of orders or laws
by a single individual or an ascertained number or group of
individuals. Therefore, a prohibited public meeting where admission is
regulated by tickets and to which no unauthorised admission is allowed,
is an instance of individual civil disobedience whereas a prohibited
meeting to which the general public is admitted without any
restriction, is an instance of mass civil disobedience.
Such civil disobedience is defensive, when a prohibited public meeting
is held for conducting a normal activity although it may result in
arrest. It would be aggressive, if it is held, not for any activity,
but merely for the purpose of courting arrest and imprisonment.
This shows that there is practically no change in the situation. This
may be read with the resolution of the congress 28th Dec. 1921 (App.
XX). Gandhi's agitation continues revolutionary.
For more than thirty years the constitutional Reform party have been
fighting for various indispensable reforms in the administration of the
country with but moderate success. At last however, in 1919 they
obtained a Reform scheme which brought India directly on to the path
leading to Home Rule. In fact the Reform Act made Home Rule inevitable
within a comparatively short time, and indicated the nature of the
constitutional methods of its early attainment. Mr. Gandhi was in India
for some years before that date. He scarcely lent any assistance to the
Reform party. Considering his principles he could not. After having
obtained the Act, the Reform party proceeded to work it, to carry out
the administrative reforms needed, to educate the masses to enable them
to claim and exercise larger political powers, in order to claim at as
early a date as possible that further instalment of Reform provided for
and contemplated in the act itself. Mr. Gandhi is standing right athwart
their path, thus preventing or at least retarding and dangerously
imperilling the indispensable reforms, regardless of the sufferings of
the people entailed thereby, in order to carry out his own wild
principles which have not the slightest chance of acceptance provided
they are understood by the people of the country for what they are,
emotional speculations without any considered relation to existing
conditions. Mr. Gandhi, to take him at his best is indifferent to facts.
Facts must submit to the dictates of his theories. The only difficulty
in his way is that they don't. Will o'the wisp politics are not of use
to a people who have to live in a world which, from long and bitter
experience, has at last come to realise that dreams of distorted brains
are not the stuff of which contented Nations are made. Gandhi in fact is
seeking not only to destroy the fruits of the long endeavour of the
constitutional reformers, but blast for ever any hopes of Indian
regeneration.
To push forward the working of the Act has been the work before the
Reform party which he is thus so perniciously thwarting. They had to
take up in the Legislative Councils the question of the redress of the
grievances under which the people suffered, not only to agitate for
their removal, but to show the people that by constitutional agitation
sooner or later they can get what they want. The most important question
with which the constitutional Reformers had to deal was one concerning
the great poverty of the country. For this it is necessary to consider
the question of the Land Tax--its nature, incidents, relation to other
taxes, its necessity, the distribution of the land produce between the
Government and the classes that own the land. This is a question in
which the landholding classes are very much interested. They would have
understood the arguments addressed to them and therefore it would have
served as a means of political and social education. The Councils have
already been dealing with it, and, considering the conditions,
satisfactorily. The Government have been meeting them in a sympathetic
spirit and are trying to give effect to their proposals as much as
possible. What is Mr. Gandhi's advice? He does not seek to co-operate to
make the tax less oppressive. He would have the people pay no land tax
to Government. Only the dreadful consequences that would ensue prevent
him in this case, from giving full effect to his intentions. In any
case, it is not the oppressive nature of the tax that he relies on, nor
is it alleged that it is an innovation of the British Government, which
of course it is not. He objects to the tax, not for itself, but because
it is another weapon with which to destroy the Government.
A cognate question is that which arises between the landlords and
tenants. In this also all the landholding classes are deeply interested,
and a discussion of the nature of the distribution of the produce
between the landlord, farmer and agricultural labourer would have been
of great educative value. The Legislative Councils are dealing with the
question. Government in this matter also are showing the greatest
possible consideration for the feelings of the people of the country.
Yet Mr. Gandhi and his friends would not only take no part in the
deliberations of the council but would prevent an amicable settlement by
steps which have produced riots between the classes interested in the
land, with the object of discrediting the Reform Scheme and paralysing
the Government of the country.
Closely connected with this is the question of Indian manufactures,
industries and the development of mineral resources, which, besides,
conferring other benefits, will relieve undue pressure on the land. Our
industries have been destroyed by English competition and constitutional
reformers are determined to take all the steps necessary to enter into
healthy competition with English industries in Indian interests and to
develop their own mineral and other resources. In so doing they have to
take care that the conditions which accompanied the rise of industrial
prosperity in the West are not reproduced in India. They have to see
that wage earners received adequate protection. What are the tactics of
Mr. Gandhi and his friends? All these industries are to him the
devil's-own agency to destroy the soul. He says they cannot add an inch
to India's moral stature. Starvation due to the absence of industries
may destroy the body and certainly hinders the development of the soul.
But to him this does not matter. He and his followers would taboo
machinery, without which competition or development is hopeless. Without
attempting to promote an amicable settlement between English capitalists
and Indian labourers they have on the contrary been responsible for a
deliberate widening of the chasm between the races.
The administration of justice is another matter in which all are
interested; and already the Legislative Councils are dealing with the
question of the separation of Judicial and Executive functions. The
Government again are not only not standing in their way but are
rendering every assistance towards the solution of the problem. This is
also the case with reference to the removal of discriminations between
Europeans and Indians in the administration of justice. The people of
the country understand this question well as they are deeply interested
in it. Mr. Gandhi is asking the people of the country to avoid all
courts and thus not to interest themselves in the improvement of
judicial administration.
I might take many other questions relating to finances, army, etc., and
show the baneful influence of his propaganda. In all these Mr. Gandhi's
campaign against Government has hampered the reformers who would
otherwise have made the redress of these grievances a more effective
plank in their platform; these questions would have been more widely
discussed throughout the country. But such discussion is now almost
impossible with the result that these questions are not settled as
satisfactorily as they might otherwise be. But it is as regards
education that the reformers have most felt the want of that popular
support necessary to carry out the reforms needed.
Mr. Gandhi will never be forgiven by all true lovers of sound National
Education for India for the campaign he has carried on against real
education. The education that has been hitherto imparted had been as
everybody, including Mr. Gandhi also recognised, lamentably defective.
The reformers had to insist on the imparting of suitable primary
education to the masses, to the workers, to the labouring men and
others, to enable them to improve their condition, because no class can
generally rise except under the ultimate stress of its own will and
ability. They had to demand suitable higher education, which was
required not only in the interests of the culture but also for the
industrial regeneration of the country and for the development of
India's natural resources. In the laboratories of Europe, America and
Japan students are devoting themselves to discover means for the
alleviation of misery and pain. Nay, higher claims are advanced, for it
has been declared by scientists that we are on the eve of discovery of
means for a practically indefinite prolongation of life under certain
conditions which make us intensely expectant to know whether they are
the same as described in our ancient books as efficacious for that
purpose, descriptions which have hitherto been contemptuously discarded
as worthless. Archaeologists are almost every day unveiling to us
ancient remains and writings which give us a different and a startling
conception of ancient History and Civilisation. Indian History is being
rewritten. When we hear of the Marconi wireless, our young men turn to
our own ancient descriptions of the training of human body and mind
which make these fit to receive and convey messages regardless of space
and distance and they show eagerness to take part in experiment and
research. When we find rays penetrating solid matter, our young
scientists wonder whether after all the stories of great seers whose
vision, not of the material eye, is not bounded by time or space or
distance, may not be true and wonder whether we should not now take up
the training prescribed to attain those results. Researches are made in
the laboratories to control the forces of nature, to increase human
comforts and happiness, to increase productivity in all directions.
Researches have already attained brilliant results. The lessons of the
survey of the regions above by the telescope, of all below by the
microscope, and generally speaking all these marvels of science which
lend fresh light and new significance to the lesson of ancients as to
the all pervading of the universe are all anathema to Mr. Gandhi.
He wants to hold back our boys from the Universities and post-graduate
studies and research that they may go back to their ploughs while the
Universities of the Western world are sending their delegates all over
the world to take stock of what has been done and to devise means for
the intellectual and moral uplift of the Nations.
The constitutional reformers and the Councils have the great task before
them of reconciling the Hindus and Mahomedans on a basis for their unity
other than the one which arose out of the Mahomedan fury against the
British Government for its failure to support Mahomedan interests in the
West. They have also to promote goodwill between the Hindus and the
Mahomedans on the one side and the Europeans on the other, both in India
and in the colonies. They have to face the rising antagonism between the
dark, the fair and the white--an antagonism which threatens in course of
time to engulf the whites with all that modern civilisation, whatever be
its faults, is standing for. The Reform party want India to take her
rightful place in the Indo-British commonwealth, the first place, in
fact, to which her natural genius and her resources entitle her, with
all its responsibilities. The conditions are all favourable to India.
Governorships of Provinces are thrown open to Indians. There are Indians
in the Viceroy's and other Councils. But Mr. Gandhi and his friends will
not only do practically nothing in that direction but they have created
what threatens to be a permanent gulf between the Mahomedans and
non-Mahomedans, and they are dangerously widening the gulf between the
Indians and Europeans. The reformers have to improve the conditions of
women both amongst the Mahomedans and the Hindus, as without such
improvement India is not entitled to take her place among civilised
nations. They have practically to get rid of the caste system as with
such a cancer political progress is impossible. Mr. Gandhi, on the other
hand, panders to Mahomedan vanity and justifies the racial differences
as between different classes of Hindus. He insists upon the necessity of
our going back to our own caste system, which is responsible for the
condition of our women and of the lower classes. He has given a handle
to those who want to maintain the repressive laws, and is really
responsible for the retention of them. He has not only thrown doubts as
to our fitness for Self-Government but has rendered it possible for our
opponents to urge with plausibility that danger would accrue to the
Empire and to India itself by granting Home Rule to India. He has thus
to the best of his sinister ability attempted to prevent all reforms and
has tried to paralyse all the efforts of the reformers in every
direction, fomenting racial and class differences, as I have already
explained.
Everywhere we see a class of narrow thought in the white world raising
the colour sentiment against the Asiatics, and against Indians in
particular, proclaiming that there is no place for Indians in British
Empire on terms of equality. These are not the intellectual leaders of
the white races, nor are they those who set the best standards of
morality. On the other hand, we see the noblest of them proclaiming and
striving with all their might, with varying degrees of success, to
enforce the opposite ideal. We know also that in India the question is
only one of time and within a short period absolute equality in every
respect will be carried out. We see further that our countrymen
elsewhere are weak and comparatively helpless, and till we in India
attain our manhood they must continue at the mercy of the white races.
What is it, then, that not only Religion, Universal morality, or good,
but also policy and prudence, dictate? There can be only one answer. We
must strengthen the hands of those who are fighting for race equality
and give no opportunity to those who maintain that the Indians are a
peril to the white race. What is Mr. Gandhi doing? He is doing
everything possible to increase racial and class hatred.
We see the wonderful phenomenon of Australian ladies begging pardon for
the atrocious treatment of their Indian sisters by a few Englishmen in
Fiji and elsewhere. We see the Universities and Professors, ashamed of
themselves for their aberration during the great War, hastening to make
amends by trying to bring together all classes and races of men. We see
white women trying to band themselves and other women of whatever colour
and creed into one sisterhood, without any difference, to throw
themselves into all social and political movements for sex
enfranchisement and uplift; to work for the good not only of themselves
but of children in particular, and generally to devote themselves to all
activities of mercy. We find various Nations calling to one another
across seas, deserts and mountains to join in a common fellowship, not
to work in opposition to one another. Every where, after the fearful
cataclysm through which we have passed, there is wistful yearning for
fellowship and brother-hood to carry out in practice the teachings of
the ancient prophets and seers, Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, the seers
of the Upanishads, Christ, Mahomed, in opposition to the Churches and
the dogmatic religions identified with their names. And is it not
extraordinary, we see this man, uninfluenced by this tremendous
intellectual and moral up-heaval, waging a bloody and racial struggle
for what? that if successful Indians may not take part in any of these
movements, shun them all, since God has not created man with his limited
means of natural locomotion to labour for general good, and may
therefore, retire to their village to lead a solitary life.
If he had followed this advice for himself, or had retired to the
Himalayas to live a mahatmaic life he would have saved the lives
literally of thousands, prevented horrible outrages worse than death,
saved thousands from incalculable misery. Instead of paying the penalty
themselves, he and his lieutenants stalk about the country dripping with
the blood of the victims of their policy.
Who is responsible for all this? The Government of India cannot divest
themselves of their responsibility and India will hold the Indian
members primarily responsible for the present situation. For no Viceroy
will venture to disregard their advice in a matter of this sort. They do
not seem to have strengthened the fibre of the Government. Nor have the
Legislative Councils who also must share the responsibility advanced the
claim for the transfer of the administration of justice to popular
control. The Gandhi movement will no doubt collapse by internal
disruption as it is composed of various elements, drawn from Tolstoy
Lenin communism, socialism, Rigid Brahmanism, militant Mahomedanism
mutually repellent and explosive when they come into contact with one
another and already producing the natural terrible results. But before
the final collapse comes it will have produced appalling misery and
bloodshed unless it is dealt with firmly and with statesmanship. The
Government should give Mr. Gandhi and some of his chief lieutenants who
accept the whole programme the rest, they sadly need. And the Congress
and the Khilafat associations must be treated as they themselves wish to
be treated as disloyal illegal associations.
Since the above lines were written Mr. Gandhi has been arrested, tried
and convicted. He pleaded guilty to the charges framed against him. His
statements are worthy of careful attention (App. XXI). He said "I wish
to endorse all the blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on
my shoulders in connection with the Bombay occurrences, Madras
occurrences and the Chauri Chaura occurrences. Thinking over these
deeply and sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible for me
to dissociate myself from the diabolical crimes of Chauri Chaura or the
mad outrages of Bombay." He is quite right when he says, that "as a man
of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education,
having had fair share of experience of this world, I should have known
the consequences of every one of my acts. _I knew that I was playing
with fire. I ran the risk and if I was set free I would still do the
same._ I have felt it this morning that I would have failed in my duty,
if I did not say what I said here just now." A man who says that if set
free he would still pursue the same course though aware of the
consequences of his acts is not a safe leader. There are signs however
of a general recognition throughout the country that Mr. Gandhi's
theories are no longer suitable as a guide for political action. The
Maharashtra party have apparently resolved to seek admission into the
Legislative councils. The Central Provinces are also apparently of the
same opinion. A large section of Bengal represented by the Chitagong
conference apparently hold the same view. In Madras a considerable
section is inclined to agree. But there is little doubt that it would
take a long time to eradicate the feeling of hatred that has been roused
by Mr. Gandhi throughout the country.
As I left the Government of India long before the campaign of
non-co-operation was launched, perhaps there is nothing inappropriate in
the few observations which I propose to make regarding the delay in
taking action against Mr. Gandhi and his followers. In September 1920
the Congress adopted the non-co-operation resolution. The Government
might then have taken action with the support of a large majority of
Indian politicians. After the final adoption of a non-co-operation
programme by the Nagpur Congress it was felt that the Government should
have stopped the activities of the party which from that moment had
openly declared their disloyalty. They maintained their silence however
even after Gandhi and the Congress party resolved on the recruitment of
volunteers and the organisation of a parallel Government. On the arrest
and trial of the Ali Brothers Mr. Gandhi challenged the Government to
arrest him as he maintained that the conduct of the Ali Brothers in
tampering with the loyalty of the Sepoys and uttering sedition was only
in pursuance of the policy adopted by himself and the congress. His
words are remarkable. "The National Congress began to tamper with the
loyalty of the sepoys in September last year, _i.e._ 1920 the Central
Khilafat Committee began it earlier and I began it earlier still, for I
must be permitted to take the credit or the odium of suggesting, that
India had a right openly to tell the sepoy and everyone who served the
Government in any capacity whatsoever that he participated in the wrongs
done by the Government."--"Every non-co-operator is pledged to preach
disaffection towards the Government established by law.
Non-co-operation, though, a religious and strictly moral movement,
deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government, and is therefore
legally seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code. But this is no new
discovery. Lord Chelmsford knew it. Lord Reading knows it" ... "we must
reiterate from a thousand platforms the formula of the Ali Brothers
regarding the sepoys, and we must spread disaffection openly and
systematically till it pleases the Government to arrest us." It will
hardly be believed that even after this no steps were taken against him.
Towards the end of the year he said "Lord Reading must clearly
understand that the non-co-operators are at war with the Government.
They have declared rebellion against it." It was after this that there
was an attempt to bring about a conference between him and the
Government which was contemptuously brushed aside by him. One of the
mopla leaders when tried for rebellion pleaded that he was under the
impression that the British Government no longer ruled the country and
had abdicated. There is very little doubt of the unfortunate fact that
there was a general belief that the Government was powerless and could
be safely defied by Gandhi and his congress.