The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (61 page)

With his doctrine of winning over the Indian ‘moderates’, Montagu eventually gained the grudging acquiescence of Chelmsford and his colleagues to what (the term was Curtis') came to be called ‘dyarchy’. In the provinces, government business was to be divided into ‘transferred’ and ‘reserved’ subjects: with the first category coming under the control of Indian ministers ‘responsible’ to elected legislatures. At the centre, the old legislative council was to be enlarged and have an elected majority. But it would have no control over any part of the central government; it could not prevent the passing of the budget; nor would any member of the Viceroy's government be responsible to it. To meet the long-standing Congress complaint, one-third of the Indian Civil Service would henceforth be recruited in India. For all its compromises, this was strong medicine for the Civilians, and even the civil servant charged with drafting the report could hardly conceal his distaste for its recommendations.
¹³⁴
Montagu went home to publish what was to be called the ‘Montagu–Chelmsford Report’ believing that he had headed off the impending crisis in Indian politics that he, like Curtis, had feared: the inevitable result (they thought) if Indian politicians were denied some responsibility for government and driven into demagogy or agitation. But, if Montagu had hoped that his reward for reforms that went far beyond what Morley had considered only nine years earlier would be the grateful thanks of ‘political India’, and the triumph of the ‘moderates’, he was to be sorely disappointed. In reality, India was on the brink of a political earthquake.

The first sign of this was the Congress' furious rejection of the reform scheme. At a special session to debate the reforms, speakers queued up to denounce the leisurely timetable for Indian self-government, the miserly allocation of civil service posts to Indians, and the failure to concede any measure of responsible government at the Indian centre.
¹³⁵
The delegates still spoke the language of loyalty. ‘We want to save the Empire’, said one, ‘we want to keep up the British connection…we see the far-ahead danger of an isolated India.’
¹³⁶
But they were outraged by the government of India's plans for new laws to deal with the threat of sedition (an omnibus term that covered terrorism, conspiracy and political unrest) once the wartime legislation ran out. The Rowlatt Report (it took its name from the judge who wrote it) was roundly condemned. Montagu had also been uneasy at the draconian powers the report recommended. He had pressed Chelmsford to reform the Criminal Intelligence department, which routinely spied on Indian politicians. ‘It is convenient but very dangerous to govern by means of your police’, he lectured the Viceroy.
¹³⁷
It was wrong to exaggerate the threat of violence by a ‘handful of deluded fanatics’.
¹³⁸
But he dared not press his opposition too far: the Rowlatt Act was the Viceroy's
quid pro quo
for reform. Whatever its justification, this was to be a staggering political blunder. For the Rowlatt Act was the catalyst for mass politics in India.

It was opposition to Rowlatt that brought Gandhi to the forefront of Indian nationalism. Gandhi had returned to India in 1915 after nearly twenty years in South Africa. He brought with him a new political creed of personal liberation through ‘truth-force’ or
satyagraha
. Gandhi professed indifference to the mechanics of constitutional reform and stressed instead a spiritual struggle against the mental domination of the British Raj. His ideal was not the unitary Indian state imagined by the Congress leadership but a myriad of self-sufficient villages, purged of the superstitions, inequalities and insanitariness that disfigured rural life, and an India freed from the tyranny of its overbearing foreign bureaucracy. By the middle of 1918, he had demonstrated in an electrifying way the potential of his social and political teaching for mobilising support far beyond the educated and literate. At Ahmedabad and Kaira in Western India, and at Champaran in Bihar, he championed local grievances and inspired local disciples. Skilful use of the press, and meticulous organisation allowed him to keep control over local activists, the
satyagrahis
; while mastery of paperwork and his willingness to act as an intermediary won him credibility with the government. He preserved a careful ambiguity over the constitutional issue, welcoming the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms but as the basis for transforming a ‘top-heavy and ruinously expensive’ regime.
¹³⁹
More controversially, he gave enthusiastic backing to the recruitment drive for the Indian army in the summer of 1918, arguing that only if Indians showed their martial qualities would they win British respect. ‘We want the same rights as an Englishman enjoys’, but Indians could never be treated as equals if they depended on British protection.
¹⁴⁰
But the Rowlatt Act seemed a throwback to the brutal dogmas of race supremacy. It was a moral outrage against which the whole force of Indian opinion could be rallied peacefully through
satyagraha
and
hartal
, the mass boycott or shutdown to show public discontent. It was the perfect issue with which to connect the local networks of Gandhian activism to the grander question of Indian freedom.

Part of Gandhi's motive was to throw a bridge to Muslim discontent. Indeed, Muslim irritation was just as dangerous to the Civilian Raj as Gandhi's experiments in local activism. Islamic consciousness had been growing before 1914 stimulated by the spread of newspapers, the diffusion of Islamic literature and more regular contact with the Islamic heartland in Southwest Asia. During the war, an alliance grew up between the educated ‘Young Muslim’ politicians and the
ulama
, the religious elite.
¹⁴¹
The gaoling of the leading Young Muslim politicians showed how seriously the threat of pan-Islamic agitation was taken. Their continued incarceration after the war was over meant that Indian Muslims were especially sensitive to the repressive implications of the Rowlatt Act: they had felt the main weight of its wartime equivalent. This was bad enough. But, at the same moment, Muslim opinion was becoming more and more alarmed over the fate of the Ottoman Empire, defeated in war and now destined, so it seemed, to be partitioned between the victorious (Christian) powers. To Muslim leaders who had escaped internment, the Rowlatt Act and the subjugation of what remained of the free Muslim world (including its Holy Places) were inextricably linked.

By early 1919, then, the old slogans of the Congress politicians had been taken up by an army of new activists. Into this cocktail of discontent was stirred a long list of material grievances: wartime shortage and inflation; rising taxation; the terrible scourge of influenza that carried off millions in 1918. In March 1919, Gandhi launched the Rowlatt
satyagraha
.
Hartals
, demonstrations and riots followed in many North Indian cities, including Delhi, a centre of pan-Islamic feeling. But, in the Punjab towns, the violence was far worse. News of Gandhi's arrest lit the fuze for widespread disorder. It reached a bloody climax at Amritsar. After three Europeans had been killed, troops under General Dyer were rushed to the city. Political meetings were forbidden, but enforcement was patchy. Then, on the afternoon of 13 April, nearly 400 demonstrators were shot dead at the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed space not far from the Golden Temple.

The ‘new politics’ had arrived with a vengeance. The result was not a downward spiral into violent confrontation (from which both sides drew back) but a profound remaking of the political world. The pattern was not immediately clear, but two great trends had been set in motion. The first was the growth of a novel form of cultural politics, radically distinct from the liberal programme of the pre-war Congress. It was rooted above all in religious identity, Muslim and Hindu, the appeal of which had been growing rapidly. It gave huge new impetus to the ‘communal’ tendency visible before the war in the separatist claims of the Muslim League, and ratified in the electoral arrangements of the Congress–League scheme. It would fuel the great Non-Cooperation movement of 1920–2, but cut short Gandhi's bold experiment in Hindu–Muslim unity, and give a lever to the embattled Civilians as they struggled to manage the new constitution. It would shape fundamentally the last phase of British rule. The second trend was its inevitable counterpart. As Indian politics became more ‘religious’, more populist and more introverted, the old identification of the educated elite with the Empire and ‘British connection’ became increasingly strained. They were harassed by new social and religious appeals, and betrayed by the meanness of the Montford reforms. They had expected (with British help) to make a British Indian nation from above. Now they had to reckon with the demand for new freedoms that welled up from below. In 1919, how it would all end was anyone's guess.

Ireland

In no part of the Empire, however, were the effects of war more drastic than in Ireland. Unless the British recovered the ‘courage and sureness of touch which rendered us famous as Empire builders’, Montagu had mused in June 1917, ‘we shall simply make a series of Irelands in different parts of the world’
¹⁴²
– a fate he meant to avoid in India. What Montagu had in mind, no doubt, was the unappeasable hostility with which a part at least of Irish nationalist opinion viewed the British connection; the vicious circle of forcible repression and violent resistance; the obstruction of Home Rule by Ulster and the Unionists. In fact, by the middle of 1917, much of Ireland outside Ulster was in the early stages of a political revolution that went far beyond anything seen before 1914. In the post-war election of December 1918, Sinn Fein swept the board with a programme of republican independence. In January 1919, it declared the new republic in being and began to create a parallel government. As London struggled to reassert its authority, the spasmodic violence between the republican ‘army’ and the Royal Irish Constabulary turned into full-scale guerrilla war.

What had made the Irish revolt against empire so much more extreme than that of Afrikaners or Indians? Of course, it was true that, in the last months before the outbreak of the war in 1914, the threat of armed Ulster resistance to Home Rule and the failure to find a political compromise had created a mood of violent confrontation between nationalists and unionists, and brought Ireland to the brink of civil war. But the emotions roused by the European war had brought an astonishing change of mood. The leaders of the Irish National party had declared their commitment to the imperial war effort. The ‘Irish Volunteers’, formed to counter the Ulster Volunteer Force, became the ‘National Volunteers’, the kernel, it was hoped, of an Irish Army Corps on the dominion model. John Redmond, the Irish Party leader, accepted the wartime deferment of Home Rule. Like Australian or New Zealand politicians (and like his Ulster rivals), Redmond intended this demonstration of imperial loyalty to reap a post-war reward. For the time being, the road to imperial influence lay through the drill-hall and recruitment meeting. The Irish dominion-to-be (Redmond's real objective) would be funded from London's wartime debt of honour.

The unsolved problem of Ulster's exclusion was bound to make this a risky and uncertain strategy. Many of Redmond's followers were bitterly opposed to anything that smacked of partition and deeply mistrustful of the London government. Redmond's best hope was that the wartime comradeship of Irish unionists and nationalists, and their common sacrifice, would soften their pre-war antagonism and win Ulster's agreement to Home Rule on a flood-tide of All-Irish patriotism. Any prospect of this was badly damaged by the Dublin Easter Rising in April 1916. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, which controlled the Volunteer units opposed to Redmond, had planned an armed insurrection in September 1915. It was delayed into 1916 for the sake of German help with the weapons needed for a general revolt. Even when these failed to arrive (they were intercepted by the Royal Navy), the conspirators under the charismatic leadership of Patrick Pearse went ahead with the Dublin rising. Their motives have been much debated, but a desperate determination to shock Irish opinion out of wartime loyalty, perhaps by a ‘blood sacrifice’, may have been uppermost. Whatever the aim, the effect was seismic. In six days of fighting, the city centre was wrecked and 450 people (mostly civilians) were killed. The initial revulsion against the reckless violence of the conspirators was disarmed by their subsequent fate: ninety were sentenced to death, sixteen were to die.
¹⁴³
Republicanism had found its martyrs. More immediately, the Dublin rising convinced the London government (which wrongly attributed it to the influence of Sinn Fein) that some new gesture was needed to isolate the ‘extremists’ in Irish politics and bolster the loyalty of Redmond's followers. Home Rule returned to the political agenda but in circumstances no more favourable than in 1914.

The result was a stalemate. Lloyd George won the shadow of consent but only by telling the Ulster Unionists that their exclusion from a Home Rule Ireland would be permanent, and the Redmondites that it would be temporary. When the truth was revealed, the ‘agreement’ fell apart. Redmond angrily rejected the offer of immediate Home Rule for the twenty-six counties outside Ulster, knowing that much of his following would reject a compromise that left many Catholic nationalists in a separate North. In the House of Commons in March 1917, the Redmondites complained bitterly of British betrayal. ‘What is it that stands in the way of Ireland's taking her place as a self-governing part of the Empire?’, asked the leader's brother, William Redmond.
¹⁴⁴
Ireland wanted to be like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, ‘side by side in the common cause’. John Redmond himself offered a sombre and prophetic warning. The ‘revolutionary party’, almost banished before the war, was now reviving. His own position had been made untenable. In a savage peroration, Redmond blamed his political bankruptcy on the treachery of British leaders. ‘Any British statesman who…once again teaches the Irish people the lesson that any National leader who, taking his political life in his hands, endeavours to combine local and Imperial patriotism, endeavours to combine loyalty to Ireland's rights with loyalty to the Empire – anyone who again teaches the lesson that such a man is certain to be let down and betrayed by this course, is guilty of treason not merely to the liberties of Ireland but to the unity, strength and best interests of this Empire.’
¹⁴⁵
Lloyd George replied merely that Ulster could not be forced into Home Rule.