The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (67 page)

These difficulties were compounded by the new political status towards which India was supposed to be moving. The August Declaration of 1917 had promised progress towards ‘responsible government’, the constitutional equivalent, it was widely assumed, of the self-government enjoyed by the dominions. The Imperial Conference in 1918 reinforced the impression that India would be treated in the meantime as an honorary dominion. India became, somewhat bizarrely, a non-self-governing member of the League of Nations and the Indian government campaigned actively (but abortively) to be given a mandate in East Africa as a reward for war service. These concessions implied that Indian views would be listened to more carefully than before the war in matters of foreign policy. The second complication was that both London and New Delhi were committed to implementing the ‘Montford’ reforms, to win Congress support for the gradual devolution of British rule – but on British terms, with safeguards for British interests and to a British timetable. Political calm – or at least the absence of violent controversy – was a precondition for their successful launch, even more so after the Rowlatt Act and Amritsar. Thirdly, while the emergency of war had passed, the urgency, in London's view, of the close coordination of Indian and British policy was as great as ever. For, if India was to play its (large) part in the new imperial burden in the Middle East, its army would have to be managed much more closely from London than in pre-war times. Its trade, revenues and currency would also need more direct supervision if they were going to contribute positively to the revival of British economic power.

The omens were unfavourable even without the additional friction that the Middle East threatened in Indian politics. The aftermath of war brought economic turbulence: a steep price rise followed by a slump in 1920. Resentment at the tax increases of wartime, and the coercive methods of recruitment practised by the Punjab government, were now reinforced by additional grievances. As prices fell, tenants and cultivators paying rent to landlords and land revenue to government came under heavy pressure. In many places, the light, benevolent hand of government now seemed more grasping and, where it upheld the claims of landlords, less just. In the towns, the see-saw of prices created labour unrest, symptomatic, the British thought, of socialist or communist infiltration. From all these came the risk of widespread disturbance. But what made them really dangerous was the chance that they would fuse with two more political movements whose object was mass mobilisation round a single issue.

The first of these was the ‘culturalist’ revolt that Gandhi had been organising since his return to India in 1915. At the heart of Gandhi's message (spelt out in his 1909 manifesto,
Hind Swaraj
, or Indian self-rule) was the call for isolation from the West and cultural renewal from within. This was not unique to India (a similar programme was advanced by social critics in contemporary Japan) but Gandhi's appeal was exceptionally wide and his powers of persuasion extraordinary. From his newspapers
Navajivan
(in Gujerati) and
Young India
(in English) poured a stream of political direction, tactical advice and moral instruction. It was aimed at the disparate constituencies he was intent on forging into a grand coalition. Among the most important of these were the cultural activists for whom the propagation of India's vernacular languages (as print and literature) was the vital medium of social improvement; social reformers who wanted to restore traditional morality and social cohesion (for example, through restraint of liquor-selling); religious reformers anxious to purify and invigorate Hinduism by an attack on superstition and greater emphasis on its spiritual content; and other groups for whom the status of women, or the treatment of untouchables was the most pressing concern. To all these interests and many others, the institutional politics fashioned by the British and adopted by the Congress offered little. All of them wanted their public concerns forced on to the political agenda. All of them were susceptible to the ‘culturalist’ programme that Gandhi urged and to his claim that India faced a parting of the ways between a genuine
swaraj
and the empty promise of British ‘reform’.

Gandhi's was not the only movement that reached out beyond the anglo-literate elite. Even before the war, social and religious reformism among Muslims had been attracted by the appeal of pan-Islamic feeling. The Ottoman Empire, guardian of the Holy Places, was in danger from Christian imperialism. During the war, the Indian government had been nervous enough to throw the Ali brothers in gaol for fear that they would canalise Indian Muslim unease and undermine discipline in the disproportionately Muslim Indian army. Mahomed Ali had been kept in gaol until late 1919. But on his release he soon began to call for Indian Muslim support against the victor powers’ treatment of the Ottoman Empire. The subjection of Muslim Arabs to Christian rule, the Greek invasion of Anatolian Turkey, the loss of Jerusalem – a Muslim Holy Place as much as a Christian – showed Western (and especially British) contempt for Muslim opinion. But it was the threat to the Ottoman Sultan, the Khalifa or ‘Commander of the Faithful’, that became the rallying cry for local Muslim elites who were keen to promote the cause of religious and social reform, and to assert their Islamic credentials. Through the
ulama
(scholars and scribes), and the sheikhs and mullahs who preached in the mosques, the downward transmission of this single-issue campaign to restore the Khilafat was likely to be more rapid and intense than any comparable movement among Hindus.

Gandhi grasped the urgency of uniting the Khilafat movement with his diffuse coalition of oppositional groups. The collapse of the Rowlatt
satyagraha
in the bloody aftermath of Amritsar had damaged his influence. The Congress leaders were rowing back hard from the confrontationist tactics of the spring. If the Muslims were left to go it alone, and the Congress endorsed the Montford constitution, his ‘culturalist’ programme would have failed and the reforms ‘could be used to deprive us of our freedom’.
⁶⁷
The Congress decision in December 1919 (meeting ironically in Amritsar) to accept the new constitution but press for its improvement showed the danger. Gandhi's response was immediate. In January 1920, he appeared at the Khilafat conference to call for Hindu–Muslim unity and urge non-cooperation with government. In March, the Congress inquiry into the Punjab disturbances – drafted mainly by Gandhi – was published. It was a brilliant polemic designed to convert the most respectable of Congress constitutionalists to the cause of the Khilafat and non-cooperation. Its main target was the Punjab government and the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer. His speeches were quoted to show his contemptuous attitude to Congress and the educated class – the ‘grasshoppers’ – reminiscent of Curzon's in 1905. The Punjab government was denounced as terroristic and corrupt. The moral was clear. By failing to repudiate O’Dwyer, the Raj had broken the concordat in which its respect for the law and the educated class was exchanged for Congress moderation. To right the ‘Punjab wrong’, and force British rule back to legality, Congress must unite with the Muslims and take up the ‘Khilafat wrong’ as its own. By the middle of 1920, Gandhi was winning the argument. The Turkish peace terms showed the scale of the Muslim grievance. The Indian members of the government's enquiry into the Punjab troubles (the Hunter Commission) refused to sign the report. The ‘small print’ of the Montford constitution showing that Civilian influence would still be entrenched in provincial politics was published in June.
⁶⁸
With few urban seats to contest, electoral victory would depend on the support of Muslims in almost every province.
⁶⁹
The Congress leaders risked being left behind by Gandhi's appeal for Hindu–Muslim unity and rejected by their disappointed provincial supporters. So, at the special Calcutta Congress in September, to which Gandhi brought large numbers of Muslim delegates, the Amritsar vote was reversed, and non-cooperation endorsed to bring ‘
swaraj
in one year’.

The decision for non-cooperation, reaffirmed at the main Congress meeting at Nagpur at the end of the year, marked a crucial shift in the politics of the post-Mutiny Raj. Non-cooperation meant boycotting elections to the new provincial councils, refusing or returning the award of honours, rejecting government in favour of ‘national’ schools, avoiding the courts in favour of unofficial tribunals and practising
swadeshi
, the choice of local over imported products. It was to be enforced by volunteers who would engage in
satyagraha
– non-violent civil disobedience. Gandhi reconstructed the Congress as a vehicle for his supporters and an organisation to challenge government at every level. Most dramatic of all was his repudiation of Congress' loyalty to the ‘British connection’, and its hope of inheriting the British Indian state. The Raj, insisted Gandhi, was an evil empire, guilty of ‘terrorism’
⁷⁰
and ‘Satanism’.
⁷¹
Hindu–Muslim unity was more important than preserving the British connection. What India needed was a ‘separate existence without the presence of the English’ and the right to secede from the Empire. Unless Indians were acknowledged as equals, only complete separation would bring ‘Swaraj, equality, manliness’.
⁷²
Non-cooperation was a programme for self-sufficiency and isolation, a rejection of the imperial duties whose discharge was burdensome to all and loathsome to Muslims. It redefined Indian nationalism as the search for community rooted in local values and vernacular culture, committed above all to Hindu–Muslim unity. It was an astonishing turn in Indian politics. Yet, Gandhi's success would have been inconceivable without Britain's advance into the Middle East, the furious reaction of India's Muslim politicians, and the skill he displayed in harnessing Congress and its ‘constitutional’ grievances to the Muslim cause and his own.

The campaign got under way in earnest in 1921. At the local level, it was often a struggle of wills between the Congress district committees and their volunteers and the British district officer, backed up by the police and local notables who were reluctant to alienate the official machine. The Viceroy's government thought that non-cooperation would fizzle out, and urged its officials not to make ‘prison martyrs’ of its leaders. But, by July 1921, the confrontation was becoming increasingly sharp. The Khilafat leadership veered towards more violent tactics. In September, the Ali brothers were arrested for sedition. In November, the visit by the Prince of Wales led to widespread rioting in Bombay in which several Europeans were killed. As the fear grew of more general violence, the Viceroy, Lord Reading, came under heavy pressure from London to arrest Gandhi and the Congress ‘high command’. Then at the end of January 1922, at Bardoli in Bombay, the Congress leadership called for mass civil disobedience, including non-payment of taxes. Non-cooperation had reached its climax.

At first sight, Gandhi's decision seems strange, and it turned out to be reckless. There were already signs that the anger of Muslims and peasants was being turned not only on government but against other Indians, Hindus and landlords. The Congress politicians, always doubtful of Gandhi's tactics, looked on with misgiving. But there were also signs that the government might give way. Lord Reading had been looking for a way out. He was pressing for a change of heart towards Turkey. He had offered a round table conference. His masters in London had come to terms with Sinn Fein (in December 1921) and were about to concede the ‘independence’ of Egypt. One more push might break the British will, before the Hindu–Muslim alliance fell apart and non-cooperation collapsed. But Gandhi miscalculated. When Reading tried publicly to force London into concessions to Turkey (mainly to show the Indian government's sympathy for Muslim feelings), Montagu (who had published his telegram) was sacked. Then, at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces, twenty-two policemen were killed by a mob. Gandhi called off mass civil disobedience. Soon afterwards he was gaoled. Within weeks, non-cooperation began to subside. By 1923, the return to constitutional politics had become irresistible. Had Gandhian politics been merely an episode?

The British certainly hoped so. The scale of non-cooperation had been a profound shock to the Civilians of the Indian Civil Service. They now had to work out new tactics for a constitution in which Indian ministers would control part of every provincial government, and elected politicians or ‘MLCs’ (Members of the Legislative Councils) would become much more important as intermediaries between provincial governments and the localities. The old ‘Anglo-India’ was dead, but the goal of the new polity seemed uncertain, even to the most senior Civilians. ‘Today I walked with Hailey for an hour and a half before dinner’, wrote Sir Frederick Whyte, who presided over the Central Legislative Assembly. ‘We tried to answer the question “Where are we going?”.’
⁷³
In fact, Hailey, who was soon to be governor of the Punjab, became the arch-exponent of the new Civilian policy. It was based on the assumption that there were two Indias: Congress India in the towns and districts, where Congress influence was strong, and Traditional India, where it was not. The object of Civilian policy was to contain the one and mobilise the other. At the provincial level, that meant careful attention to the franchise and the distribution of seats, and the deft encouragement of politicians and parties that would ‘play the game’ of constitutional politics rather than resorting to boycott or agitation. If shrewdly done, it meant that, even when the Congress returned to the electoral fray, its ‘assault on the Legislative Council can be awaited with interest and without alarm’.
⁷⁴
At the district level, it meant the vigorous use of patronage, influence and reward (like the grant of pensions, honours, or gun licences) to counter the influence of Congress politicians and build up a ‘loyal’ party of ‘Government men’.
⁷⁵
It also meant guarding the princely states against pressure or criticism from Congress. India might be pledged to eventual self-government, but there was no reason to think that it had to be self-government in the Congress (let alone the Gandhi) style.