Before we take up the two sets of facts relied upon by them in support
of either position we may express our general agreement with them as
regards the gravity of the task and the immensity of the problem. The
size of the country and the vastness of its population are the measure
of the extent of the problem. The existence of powerful vested interests
at present possessed by the ruling race which may be interfered with by
extended changes in the system of Government are the measure of its
gravity. "The welfare and happiness of hundreds of millions of people,"
which the authors say are in issue cannot be adequately provided for by
any autocratic system of Government however benevolent its purpose, and
however magnificent its organisation. An "absolute government" is an
anachronism, but when it is foreign it is doubly so. To bring out "the
best in the people" for their own "welfare and happiness" as well as for
that of mankind in general, it is necessary that the people should be
free to develop on their own lines, manage their own affairs, evolve
their own life, subject only to such restrictions as the general
interests of humanity demand; and subject to such guidance as the better
placed and more experienced people of the earth can furnish.
The people of India are willing to be guided in their development
towards modern democracy by the people of Great Britain and they would
be grateful for their coöperation in this difficult task, but they must
be made to realize that the task is their own and that they should
undertake it in a spirit of courageous faith--faith in their destiny,
faith in their ability to achieve it, and faith in the friendship of the
great British nation. The test of all measures in relation to the
Government of India in future should be, not how far the people of
India can coöperate, how far they can be entrusted with responsibility,
but how far it is necessary _in their interests_ to control and check
them. The difference between the two points of view is fundamental and
important. Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford have looked at the problem
from the former point of view; the Indian leaders want them to look at
it from the latter. They want the great British nation to recognise the
justice of India's claim to manage her own affairs, and to keep in their
hands in future only such control as is absolutely necessary (a) to
enable the Indian people to conduct their business efficiently and
successfully, (b) to make them fulfill their obligations to the great
Commonwealth of nations of which they hope soon to be a component part.
As long as British statesmen insist on looking at the problem from the
former point of view, they will make mistakes and raise a not entirely
unreasonable suspicion of their motives. The moment they adopt the other
point of view, they remove all grounds of distrust and create an
atmosphere of friendliness in which they can deal with the problem in a
spirit of mutual trust, absolute frankness and candid perspicacity.
There are many contentions of the British statesmen which the educated
Indians would gladly admit to be valid and necessary were they sure that
their admission would not be used against them by the power whom they
habitually regard as their adversary. There is much in this report which
could at once be struck out if both parties were actuated by feelings of
mutual trust and friendliness. It cannot be denied that many of the
proposed restrictions on the power of the popular assemblies and the
would-be Indian Administrators are the outcome of distrust. It is no
wonder then that the Indian leaders in their turn are not quite sure of
the face value of the many professions of good will that characterise
the scheme. It is for the removal of this distrust that we appeal as
earnestly as we can to the better mind of Great Britain.
In looking at the conditions of the problem, there is another fallacy
which underlies the oft-exaggerated estimates of the blessings of
British rule in India by British statesmen and British publicists. They
compare the India of today with the India of 1757 and at once jump to
the conclusion that "the moral and material civilisation of the Indian
people has made more progress in the last fifty years than during all
the preceding centuries of their history." The proper comparison is of
the Great Britain, the France, the United States, the Germany, the Italy
and the Japan of 1757, with the India of that year and of India's
progress within the last century and a half, or even within the last 50
years, with the progress of these countries in the same period. We have
no desire to withhold credit for what Great Britain has done in India,
but what she has misdone or could have done but failed to do, by virtue
of her rule in India being absolute and thus necessarily conditioned by
limitations inevitable in a system of absolute rule, should not be
forgotten.
The Indian critics of British rule in India have repeatedly pointed out
that what they condemned and criticised was the _system_ and not the
personnel of the Government, and the distinguished authors of the Report
"very frankly recognise that the character of political institutions
reacts upon the character of the people" and that the exercise of
responsibilities calls forth capacity for it (Paragraph 130), which
mainly accounts for the conditions that serve as reasons for withholding
responsible government from the Indian people. In discussing "the basis
of responsibility" Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford very properly point
out that the qualities necessary for it are only developed by exercise
and that though "they are greatly affected by education, occupation and
social organisation" "they ultimately rest on the traditions and habits
of the people." "We cannot go simply to statistics for the measure of
these things." Yet, unfortunately, it is exactly these statistics that
seem to have influenced them largely in the framing of their
half-hearted measures. The two dominating conditions which obsess them
are (1) that the immense masses of the people are poor, ignorant and
helpless far beyond the standards of Europe; and (2) that there runs
through Indian society a series of cleavages--of religion, race and
caste--which constantly threaten its solidarity.
We admit the existence of these conditions, but we do not admit that
they are an effective bar to the beginnings of responsible government
even on that scale on which European countries had it when the
conditions of life in those countries were no better than they are now
in India.
It is said that 226 of 244 millions of people in British India live a
rural life: "agriculture is the one great occupation of the people" and
"the proportion of these who even give a thought to matters beyond the
horizon of their villages is very small." We ask did not similar
conditions exist in Great Britain, France and Germany before the
inauguration of the Industrial Revolution, and if they did, did they
stand in the way of their people getting responsible government or
parliamentary institutions? Everyone knows what the conditions in France
were in years immediately preceding the Revolution. Italy was no better
off in the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is not much
better even today. The masses of the people in these and other countries
of Europe, including Great Britain, were far more ignorant, poor and
helpless when these countries obtained parliamentary government than
they are in India today. And the authors of the report are not unaware
that similar concerns are perhaps the main interests of the population
of some country districts in the United Kingdom even today. In several
of the Balkan States, Roumania, Serbia and Bulgaria--in Italy and in the
component parts of Russia--the conditions are no better, yet their right
to autonomous government, nay, even to absolute independence, is hardly
questioned. Moreover, as has been pointed out by Mr. Sidney Webb,
"It is a mistake to assume that a land of villages necessarily
means what is usually implied by the phrase, a people of
villagers. In truth, India, for all its villages, has been also,
at all known periods, and to-day still is, perhaps, to a greater
extent than ever before, what Anglo-Saxon England, for instance
was _not_ or the South African Republic in the days before gold
had been discovered, and what the Balkan peninsula even at the
present time may perhaps not be, namely a land of flourishing
cities, of a distinctly urban civilization, exhibiting not only
splendid architecture, and the high development of the
manufacturing arts made possible by the concentration of
population and wealth, but likewise--what is much more
important--a secretion of thought, an accumulation of knowledge,
and a development of literature and philosophy which are not in
the least like the characteristic products of villages as we know
them in Europe or America. And to-day, although the teeming crowds
who throng the narrow lanes of Calcutta or Benares, Bombay or
Poona, Madras or Hyderabad, or even the millions who temporarily
swarm at Hardwar or Allahabad or Puri may include only a small
percentage of the whole population, yet the Indian social order
does not seem to be, in the European understanding of the phrase,
either on its good or on its bad side, essentially one of the
villagers. The distinction may be of importance, because the Local
Government developed by peoples of villages, as we know of them in
Anglo-Saxon England, in the early days of the South African
Republic, and in the Balkan States, is of a very different type
from that which takes root and develops, even in the villages, in
those nations which have also a City life, centers of religious
activity, colleges and universities, and other 'nodal points,'
from which emanate, through popular literature, pilgrimages, and
the newspaper press, slow but far-spreading waves of thought and
feeling, and aspirations which it is fatal to ignore."[1]
We have also quoted, in the chapter on "Democracy in India," the
statement of Morse Stephens, about the condition of the people of Europe
in the eighteenth century.