A Decade of Indian Politics

Edwin Samuel Montagu laboured like a mountain and produced the Montford reforms. He, like everybody else, knew that Diarchy died the day it was born, though the post mortem examination was carried on for nearly ten years, till Coroner Simon delivered the verdict that death was due to natural causes. But between them Chelmsford who was all vague and blue about the reforms, and Montagu who had the manners of a Hebrew conjurer, rallied and organised the Moderates, who in their turn discarded Morley and adopted Montagu as their latest hero. Lord Reading with his shrewdness touched these Moderate leaders of public opinion and turned them into shapes of statesmen; they crowded into the Councils and became Ministers, Executive Councilors, and members of minor commissions. The Congress, however, stuck to Gandhi and his experiments with truth; and it was not until C. R. Das made a bold bid for power and divided the Congress at Gaya that the Swarajists entered the legislatures. The death of C. R. Das in the summer of 1925 was a first-rate national tragedy, for he had charmed his country-men by his dash and animation, his soulful idealism, and his ruthless self-sacrifices. His patriotism was highly poetic and heroic, and his brilliant record as leader is yet unbeaten.

It was left for Motilal Nehru to dominate the best part of the decade. He was a prince among politicians; and though he had not the almost coercive charm and power of Das, he had a charm of his own and political astuteness of a high order. He had wrought a remarkable revolution in his life, exchanging the luxury of epicureanism for the luxury of stoic suffering. It was he that had helped Das in driving out Gandhi into the wilderness, and it was he that dragged him out again. He had qualities which contradicted one another. He could be amiable and autocratic, charming and ferocious, could win over a wavering ally or kick out a recalcitrant follower with equal ease. He was at times bad tempered and Byronic, unable to brook opposition, and like most other leaders of the people, democratic in opinion but aristocratic by temperament. His affection for his family was proverbial; he had varied tastes; he loved pomp and hospitality; his pride was princely. It was as Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly that he shone at his brightest. He united brilliant social gifts with an iridescent intellect. The rare and delicate dignity, the elaborately enacted cynicism, the restraint and elegance and resistless logic, the power of illustrating argument with picturesque anecdotes or adorning it with brilliant epigrams, all captivated men with the least belief in that mockery of a legislature and secured for that bastard constitutionalism its fullest trial. That he was not more effectual did not matter to him or to his countrymen; he invested the Assembly with his own pomp and majesty and imparted a touch of drama to the dullest of debates. Nor did he lack in striking attitudes; he made history by moving the National Demand in 1924, a heroic gesture which could have been heroically answered. But Sir Malcolm Hailey, the clever and eloquent Home Member, preferred to parry and quibble; and the glorious opportunity of gaining the confidence of the people’s representatives was lost for ever.

Pandit Motilal Nehru showed generalship for the first time in the history of the Congress. The Simon Commission boycott and the All-Parties Conference were engineered with conspicuous skill and success. Under the most thrilling circumstances he made the Assembly fling the Commission in the face of Parliament. He co-operated admirably with Sapru and Jinnah who felt their self-respect had been outraged, for Birkenhead had ignored them, not as the Buddhists ignore God but as the biting dog ignores the fleas on its . The Nehru Report drawn up by the All Parties Conference was an unparalleled success. It outlined a constitution, appealing in its simplicity and comprehensiveness. It proved by figures that the Muslims had nothing to fear from general electorates in the Punjab and Bengal. For the first time the problem of the Princes was dealt with frankly and courageously. Nehru and his associates drew up a report which was, unlike other reports, readable; that was why educated men could grasp and understand, remember and discuss it. It was a model report; the analysis of things masterly; the statistics relevant and to the point; and it was, as far as the people were concerned, a better seller than the Simon Report. Nehru became a slogan, his report a nation’s poster; and for a time there was a country-wide unity. But soon there were dissensions and a reaction against the dominance of Nehru. The situation seethed with fatal incongruities. One saw the curious spectacle of Mr. Satyamurti, the stentor of the Congress, loudly welcoming the Report one moment and as loudly repudiating it the next. Mr. Jinnah preferred to be wagged by his party and was indifferent from the beginning. Mahomed Ali with his streak of mysticism, and Shaukat Ali who talked as if he were the heavy-weight champion of politics, were vehemently against it. The Viceroy's attitude was somnolent and exasperating. There was nothing left for the Congress but to drift towards vigorous agitation and even direct action; it delivered its ultimatum at Calcutta, and entered the battlefield at Lahore. Motilal Nehru had to give up his constitutionalism after a desperate trial. He had seen the Government sanction repressive legislation in the teeth of the bitterest opposition, unwanted commissions and committees tour the country at the behest of the Secretary of State and at great cost to the tax-payer, the opinion of the Assembly flouted again and again and its resolutions treated with utter disdain. He had moved the National Demand with moderation but without success. He had met the Government half-way without any response. He was disillusioned and could not stand against the combined disillusionment of his followers. He had now to choose more dangerous but more reliable weapons. He could not have lagged behind his followers a moment longer, and it was evident that India loves All-Parties conferences as little as England loves Coalitions.

History held out the prospect of something more heroic than mere reforms, and Coatman becomes as readable as Rushbrook Williams. It was rather fashionable at one time, even for Congressmen, to praise the shilly-shallying somnambulist statesmanship of Lord Irwin. They must all be wiser now. Lord Irwin had no doubt the episcopal earnestness of the model curate, but it was neither powerful nor convincing enough; and it is not high moral grandeur to spill milk and then have the courage to cry over it. If he had not the pomposity of Curzon nor the coldness of Reading, he neither showed the thorough mastery of the one nor the unbending will of the other. He time and again vacillated when he ought to have decided and acted; and, given the same conviction and purpose, Reading would have more successfully conducted the peace negotiations. We are also impelled to think that India and Indian nationalism have gained more from first-class brains like Curzon who gave life to a soulless administration, or Reading who imparted vigour and toughness to the bureaucracy, than the moral geniuses like Ripon who gave a bit of municipal reform or Irwin who gave the parson touch to the politician’s business. The virtues which distinguished Irwin from other Viceroys were that he added sermons to his ordinances, avoided unnecessary ceremony, and allowed himself to be fascinated by the strange personality of Mahatma Gandhi; but India will always mournfully associate his Viceroyalty with what Mr. Guedella would call ‘the Rain of Law.’

Congressmen refused to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’ They attacked the salt tax, the least sinister of taxes, but the most harassing to the sentiment of the people. Irwin consented to play the part of a minor Nero. The Congress was broken up. The Press was gagged. The public were asked not to picket. Men were afraid of talking politics together, of wearing khaddar caps, of sulking about shops. A docile Assembly approved all that the Viceroy decreed. Mr. Robert Bernays who ‘approached India without any previous convictions’ and who, catching the fever of the moment, wrote that Motilal Nehru was ‘extremely handsome, almost beautiful, with his long white beard’ and that the ‘Hindu Mahasabha is a revolutionary youth movement from Madras,’ watched lathi charges from the lawns of the Bombay Gymkhana club, drinking cocktails. We are much indebted to him for his contemporary record that the lathi was ‘a bamboo stick, thick enough to inflict serious injuries’: the description is as good as a definition. The Congress has been prepared for jails and gun-shots but not for this cold-blooded wood, which wounded without killing. The situation was Hogarthian. There were comic interludes. Some magistrates constituted themselves the Mussolinis of their districts and tried to suppress even caps. Provincial Governments imitated the ineptitude of the Central Government. The national agitation wavered between climax and anticlimax. Lord Irwin sat fiddling whenever he was not issuing ordinances. Petty officers distinguished themselves by their excesses behind the s of protective Home Members. Repression reigned in the guise of law and order. Martial law reached its limits in Sholapur. At Borsad women were said to have been forcibly dispersed, seized by their hair and kicked by boots. The country was bubbling and in high spirits. But the situation was called a stalemate and there were hurried negotiations. The ‘half-naked fakir’ and the unostentatious Christian gentleman entered into one of the most ambiguous and pragmatic of pacts. Sarojini Devi, the Madame de Stael of the Congress, who had given up her glamorous poetry for gorgeous patriotic prose, described them as ‘the two Mahatmas.’ The heroic suffering of an year was nullified, and Irwin went home with the reputation of a statesmen. The death of Motilal Nehru on the eve of the Pact was a disaster to Britain and India; for he would have gone to the second Round Table Conference and helped it to come to sensible and lasting conclusions. Gandhi as usual behaved like the Pope of politics and issued his powerful encyclicals. The conference was a tragic waste of time and energy; and it was for the Congress the biggest tactical blunder when the country was precipitated into civil disobedience for the second time.

The White Paper has been torn to pieces; it only remains to burn it; but it sums up the achievements of the Round Table Conferences. We must here celebrate for a while the remarkable astuteness of Sir T. B. Sapru. He showed, at a critical time, something of the political sagacity of Cavour, though it was unfortunate that he did not possess Cavour’s phenomenal craft or courage. All the delegates, the pink and cream of moderatism, the politicians with prefixes and suffixes, went to London and flopped about like Gullivers in Brobdingnag, but none of them had a mind of his own. The one politician who had thought out the whole problem saw himself and the other delegates in the roles of Alexander Hamilton and his fellow federalists. The flies all walked into Sapru’s parlour. It was a threefold trap. Sapru and his associates wanted provincial autonomy and some kind of responsibility at the centre; the Princes, still smarting under the Butler Report, saw a chance of getting rid of the tyranny of political agents on one hand and agitators on the other; the British Government was prepared to concede a certain quantum of responsibility at the centre with the Princes as bulwarks of Imperialism. That was the pathology of the process, apart from the ethics of it. Mr. Vijayaraghavachari and Mr. Jinnah have opposed the idea of Federation from the beginning, but they were voices in the wilderness and could not stand against the almost carnal obsession for Constitutions with ‘unrealised preambles’ and mammoth schedules. Mr. Sastri gave up the conviction of a life-time and meekly surrendered. Under the strong wing of the Empire, they thought, they could experiment and concoct a mixture. None of them could have ignored all the implications of such a scheme, a federation between autonomies to be created by statute and autocracies hedged in by treaties, with a heritage of legalism, formalism, and conservatism.

The first Round Table Conference was like the grand premiere of a musical comedy; the second was a costly show; the third was a benefit performance. Ramsay MacDonald lent the services of his platitudinous gestures and sugary sentiment. Winston Churchill, still ‘on the waiting list of England’s Mussolinis,’ has described the proceedings with his deadly wit; though, luckily for all, his bombastic impertinences have bored an audience which does not appreciate rhetoric that scintillates but does not persuade and convince. Mr. Jinnah, the most baronial of our politicians, promised to blow up the whole show, but he had chosen the role of a prophet, and except for suggesting the classic grace and pomp of George Arliss, he did nothing. And retired pro-consuls like Craddock pranced about and grew fussy. The whole scheme so far is a mule with ‘no pride of ancestry and no hope of posterity’; but if it becomes an accomplished fact we shall have to celebrate for ages the wisdom and folly of Hoare, Sapru, and Bikanir. Its most brilliant advocates used the now hackneyed annas simile; they say it gives us twelve annas out of the rupee of responsibility and the chance to fight for the remaining four annas; which all looks suspiciously like the ‘half a loaf’ philosophy in another form. What must be clear to all is that the Native States will be the pocket boroughs and the communal electorates the rotten boroughs which will return a surplus of reactionaries, so that it will be well-nigh impossible even to move this Car of Juggernaut. The Viceroys and the Governors, at least in theory, will be autocrats without the benevolence of the Tudors or the magnificence of the Moghuls. There will be conflicts between industrial Provinces and agricultural Provinces, Hindu Provinces and Moslem Provinces. The United States of India will pull against each other like the States of the Balkan Peninsula; and a Balkanized India will be a source of satisfaction to many. It will be divided against itself; it will invite interference. The one possible answer to these charges is that there is no easier way out of the impasse, with a reactionary party in power and a Congress beaten to the knees, and above all our geography which reminds uswe are a sub-continent, not a country, our history which reads like a wearisome doggerel, and the vast and baffling anachronism of the Princes.

The constitution of the Chamber of Princes was one of the most historic and significant events in the history of the Empire as well as the world; for the first time autocrats and demi-autocrats amounting to a big crowd had an organisation and a House of their own and could meet and discuss together. It focused attention on the age-old demand for a share of the Customs and a tribunal to decide justiceable disputes between the Princes and the paramount power, a demand for the minimum of equity but against the trend of constitutional practice as crystallized in the acts of paramountcy exercised by the Government. Sir Leslie Scott overloaded his plea with all the available powder, but the Butler Report blew up their hopes. Nor could they accept the faultless logic of the Nehru Report that the future government of India will succeed to the paramountcy when the country will have attained Dominion Status. They would be only too willing to join in any scheme if they are allowed a voice in the affairs of all-India, but they are not prepared to give all-India a voice in their affairs. Viceroys from Curzon to Willingdon have flattered them in the choicest language as links in a chain, as partners in a great task, as pillars in a great edifice. They have, however, their own fears, their doubts, and their forebodings. There is an open unrest even among them. The history of the present is too hazy, too slow, too unsettled, and it is yet too early to say whether the future of the Princes will be one-tenth as long as their past.

It is desirable to assess the political philosophy of some of the parties. ‘Like other idealisms patriotism varies from noble devotion to moral lunacy,’ says Dean Inge; and all the variations are to be found in our country. Some frankly do not believe in having such an encumbrance as a philosophy; they believe in the potency of the purse as long as there is money in it, and parties crop up on the eve of elections and reforms, leaders are hired, and fictitious followings created at a moment’s notice. The communalists, whether organised or disorganised, are always a powerful factor, and make use of thundering mouthpieces, though there is more rhyme than reason in their politics and they change their colours oftener than a chameleon. There are the landowners, the millowners, and other influential commercial communities, European and Indian, who have been no less vocal in an era of eloquent noises; they have planned their policy in the belief that economics and not politics will always decide Britain’s dealings with India; and they know too well that there is nothing so formidable as a vested interest pretending to be an intellectual conviction or principle.

Apart from these shifting interests and parties that rise and die like mushrooms, we have the Liberals and other Moderates on one side, and the Congress on the other. The Liberal leaders are charming statesmen. They parley with the Government one moment and with the Congress the next. They have chalked out a programme of perpetual vacillation and made an ideal of worm-eaten policies. Politics is the art of the possible, said Lord Morley, one of their apostles; and the world without the British Empire is to them simply impossible. Like Lord Halifax of the time of Charles II, they are boastful of their trimming, and we have the vile antithesis of a set of people living in a state of civilized slavery talking like free men. They enlighten nobody by their periodical discourses on the present discontents. This is a time when every party in the State must account for its existence; and taking all that the Liberals have said and done, it is unfortunate that this is a time when the Liberals, as Liberals, have no business to exist. Their political philosophy is summed up in the wise words of Sapru: ‘I fight as a subject of King George, for a place in his houselold, and I will not be content with a place in his stables,’ a lordly ambition recently answered with a place in the Privy Council, which may be kindly described as the curio-room of the British Empire.

Unfortunately for the country, there are a considerable number of people who are driven to embrace Communism a little prematurely and get entangled in conspiracy cases, while others have recourse to the courage of despair and, like Homer’s heroes, seem to prefer unnatural deaths. The Congress, on the other hand, sets up high ideals, passes brave resolutions, and wages a dilly-dallying war. The Civil Disobedience movement would have been wholly heroic if some lukewarm leaders had not been dragged into it like Don Quixotes to tilt at windmills. But everything has been over-shadowed by the spirituality of Mahatma Gandhi, his endless patience and energy, and the intense incandescence of his spiritual suffering. He mirrors in his personality the utter distortion of all sorrow, the agony of crucifixion which transfigured the Son of Man into the Son of God. With his rise, leaders like Tilak became minor figures in the country’s fight for freedom, and the past a prelude to his gigantic experiments; and as the situation grew intenser his personality sparkled the more intensely, and he caught the imagination of a highly intuitive people as the man of the times, keen-sighted, humorous, fanatical, a lawyer and a mystic, as frank as a child, and as inscrutable as a sphinx. He, more than any Round Table Conferences or earthquakes, has drawn world-wide attention and sympathy for the Indian problem; raised such an apparently harmless act as boycott to the dignity of a weapon of warfare, and even spread the belief that if the British were to withdraw tomorrow all the virgins and rupees would be quite safe. There is no more pride in aping English manners and accent. The bureaucracy, once suffering from a severe superiority complex, now feels almost boorish. Patriots are not pompous but humble. He has created a new technique for dealing with. superior powers while throwing the blame on them; and, more than anything else, he has made suffering fashionable as surely as Bernard Shaw has made self-conceit fashionable. The Congress has been endowed with a measure of his own fervour and noble endeavour. That is why Congressmen cannot think of a better guide or philosopher. His spiritual grandeur over-whelms them. They remember only too well that it was Gandhi who rescued a farce and rewrote it into a Passion Play of tremendous power and pathos.

Gandhi is retiring but he has blessed Council-entry. It is ominous for the Congress as well as the Government. The entire people are suffering from nausea at the sight of a Congress burdened with too many cares and anxieties, and a Government stupid and soulless to the core. The most ignorant of them know that it is easier for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven than for an Indian to become a citizen in the Dominions; they know that they are Indianizing the Army and other Services at the pace of a snail. The country is dangerously at the cross-roads of socialism and capitalism, constitutionalism and anarchy, reaction and progress. Socialism is inescapable sooner or later for a country like India, and the ponderous fact remains that we must plan or perish. There is no more trust in the British Labour Party, which when it had power acted as though it had read and misunderstood Morley on Compromise. Everyone, including the diehard, knows that the discontent is divine and simmering, and that there is too much law and too little order; but with the Congress blotted out for a while the Government could be sympathetic or sinister at will. It is but natural that youth should cry to youth and blood answer blood, but the bright young people of England develop a righteous indignation against oppression of every kind, while they seem to be ignorant of even the existence of India. It is clear that the country must fall on its own resources. The Congress has decided to repeat itself. We can understand this decision either as a revival of spontaneous affection for Council work or as a tactical move to fight on the only available front; though the sight of khadi-clad patriots puffing out their police-beaten chests and crowding into the legislatures might induce elegant speakers of the type of Mr. Jinnah to go on strike. Very few people, however, seem to think of the dangers that had overwhelmed men of better calibre. This time Gandhi and the Congress consent to have a grip over the Swarajist section and keep it inspired and obedient to the inner voice of the people. It is safer to consider possible developments. At their best the Swarajist councilors cannot do better than what Das did in Bengal; they might also hold a watching brief for detenus or secure butter-milk for C class prisoners; they might safely utter sentiments which would be considered seditious outside the Councils. One other possible way of adding momentum to their force is to adopt unadulterated Parnellism, obstructing and opposing every step, using every weapon of insolence and invective; but this in a powerless Parliament is not doing much. They might even accept office and wreck the bureaucracy from within. It is a vicious circle, vicious enough to demoralise the best of incorruptibles. Those who watched the Swarajists last time can easily recollect how some mouths watered for ministerships; how men like Tambe had the courage of their convictions and became Executive Councilors; how others in Madras tried to be minister-makers and made a mess of things. Some of the more youthful of them defied party commands and attended the ‘socials’ given by the wives of Members of the Government. Those questions will crop up again. The best that they could do is to revive the Nehru Report or the best part of it, instead of wasting time over All Parties Conferences and Constituent Assemblies.

We need not speak only as Congressmen or non-Congressmen; or believe that patriotism is the monopoly of the Congress and sanity the monopoly of the Moderates. There are a large number of intellectual men, young and old, who have been mere pawns in the game, who have suffered directly in the spirit and indirectly in the flesh, and are now looking for a real leader and a real party. Jawaharlal Nehru speaks for them when he says: ‘Our religion is one of the kitchen, of what to touch and what not to touch, of baths and top-knots, of all manner of marks, and fasts and ceremonies that have lost all meaning; our very gods are manufactured in the factories of England or Japan.’ He is a leader after the country’s heart, excitable, sententious, dogmatic. He is as intellectual as Tilak, as sincere and downright as Gandhi, as cold-blooded and logical as his father, with his own individual outlook and temper. Ready in action, vehement in speech, he represents, more than Gandhi, the youth and other popular elements in the country; and his mere existence is enough to inflame public opinion and endanger the safety of the Government. He is perhaps too heroic for the present day lumbering doggerel history. But as long as he is alive, he stands as a portent of illimitable power. There has been no such effective leader since the death of the great Desabandhu Das. But the leaders who stampeded the country into civil chaos are now panic-stricken and propose to stampede it into the councils. That the Congress should do this might seem a cowardly act. If the Congress cannot do anything else, it might at least take effective steps to kill this hydra-headed monstrosity, this patchwork constitution of a mob of Princes and motley Provinces, with self-government on the circumference and safeguards at the centre. If the Congress is not able to shape the circumstances even that much, it would be pitiable in the eyes of the public. It must be hoped that this time at least the Congress will not be led by the nose, and that a combination of circumstances and the emergence of a real leader will drive the old gang into the wilderness, so that at this time of unparalleled disillusionment nothing will stand between the people and their real representatives.

It will be interesting to see whether Bhulabhai Desai will succeed where Pandit Motilal Nehru failed. There is one hopeful factor: Desai will lead a compact host of tried warriors while Nehru led a mongrel crowd of responsivists, sanatanists, and lotus-eaters. The coming Assembly will not be as spectacular as the Third Assembly which was a splendid tournament of words, dominated by Nehru and presided over by Patel, but the Swarajists should be able to put up some solid opposition, if they will not indulge in mere sword-play. The Government may be left to supplement its sinister dual policy of doling out repression with one hand and reform with the other. It may or may not change its heart, for the State is said to be a corporation without a soul, and the ex-parte Government of Lord Willingdon is one of the most soulless of Governments. Lord Willingdon, it is clear, is not a namby-pamby statesman like Lord Irwin. He has issued ordinances with wooden precision. He has declared his sympathies with less than usual vagueness. In his shrewdness and diplomacy, as in his appearance, he resembles not a little Richelieu and other Cardinal statesmen of the eighteenth century. He has for the moment succeeded; and The Times of London has recently written: ‘No one is better equipped to deal with this sort of situation, and it would be a fitting climax to an Indian career of unprecedented length and variety that Lord Willingdon should be the Viceroy to start the new machine.’ But it must take at least two years more to say whether Lord Willingdon will have been the first of the new ‘constitutional’ Viceroys or only the last of the Bourbons.