Part 1

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_OTHER BOOKS BY LAJPAT RAI_

YOUNG INDIA

_An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within_

Price $1.50 net

ENGLAND'S DEBT TO INDIA

_A Historical Narrative of Britain's Fiscal Policy in India_

Price $2.00 net

THE ARYA SAMAJ

_An Account of its Origins, Doctrines and Activities_

Price $1.75 net

OBTAINABLE FROM ALL BOOKSELLERS

AN OPEN LETTER

TO

THE RIGHT HONORABLE DAVID LLOYD GEORGE PRIME MINISTER OF GREAT BRITAIN

BY LAJPAT RAI

NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXVII

Copyright, 1917, by Lajpat Rai Printed in the United States of America

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE DAVID LLOYD GEORGE _Prime Minister of Great Britain_

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE DAVID LLOYD GEORGE _Prime Minister of Great Britain_

Sir: I am an Indian who has, by the fear of your Government in India been forced to seek refuge in the United States, at least for the period of the war. In 1907, when Lord Minto's Government decided to put into operation an obsolete Regulation of the East India Company (III of 1818) against me, in order to put me out of the way, for a while, without even the form of a trial, Lord Morley, the then Secretary of State for India, defending his action, gave me the highest testimonial as far as my private character was concerned. You must have heard that speech though it would be presumptuous to imagine that you remember it.

MY CREDENTIALS

Even my worst enemies have not been able to point out anything in my life which would give any one even the shadow of a reason to say that, in my private life, I have not been as good and honorable a person as any British politician or diplomat or proconsul, is or has been or can be. My record as a wage-earner is as clean and as honorable as that of the best of Britishers engaged in governing India.

Mr. H. W. Nevinson, than whom a more truthful and honorable publicist is not known in British life, has said in his work, "The New Spirit in India," that once when he told a high Anglo-Indian official that I was a good man held in great esteem by my countrymen, the latter remarked, that because I had a high character in private life, I was the more dangerous as an agitator.

I am reciting all this as evidence of my credentials to speak on behalf of my countrymen. Just now I am a mere exile. For the present, I cannot think of returning to India, unless in course of time I begin to feel that by running the risk of being hanged or imprisoned, I should be doing a greater service to my country, than by remaining outside. I am now in the fifty-third year of my life, out of which more than thirty-four were spent in the limelight of public gaze. I am a man of family with children and grandchildren and have had my share, however small, of the good things of the world. Political freedom for India has been a passion to me ever since I was a boy. However hard the life of an exile or a convict may be, I am prepared to risk everything in the cause of my country.

In the language of that prince of political exiles, Joseph Mazzini, the word "exile," is perhaps the most cursed in the dictionary of man. It dries up the springs of affection; it deprives its victims of the sweet babblings and lispings of his little ones with whom every man of age loves to beguile the evening of his days; it closes the avenues of all comfort that are associated with that sweet word home; it shuts the doors of heaven and makes life a continued agony, hanging on the slender thread of such pity and hospitality as one may receive from the generous and kind-hearted foreigner.

INDIA COMPARED WITH GREAT BRITAIN

How can I ask you who have perhaps never left your country except for some pleasant trips on the Continent, to put yourself in my position, if possible, for a moment only, and imagine how I long to kiss the soil, with which are mixed the bones of my mother and other forbears; how I miss the loving embrace of my beloved father, the sweet, expectant, imploring eyes of my widowed daughter, the devoted look of my wife and the kindly affectionate hand-shake of good and devoted friends. Nor can you realize how an Indian loves his country. How can you, of dark, sombre, fog ridden and misty climes, who are born of a chill atmosphere, of treacherously changing weather, who count hours of sunshine and months of darkness and fog and rain and snow and sleet, enter into the feelings of one whose country is a perpetual sunshine, and where universal light reigns--a country where weather is neither treacherous nor continually and rapidly changing, where beautiful dawns, starry nights, moonlit fields, resplendent waters, snow-clad hills and joyous rivers constantly and unremittingly fill one's mind with the sublimity, grandeur and beauty of nature; where one needs no stimulants to make him feel lighter and happier. An Indian needs no alcohol to forget his troubles. He has only to go to the Himalaya, or to the banks of Ganga, Brahmputra, Sindh or their numerous tributaries by which the land is blessed and fertilized. Oh, no! It is impossible for you to understand how passionately an Indian loves his country. He would rather starve in India than be a ruler of men in a foreign climate. For him, India is the land of Gods--the _Deva Bhúmí_ of his forefathers. It is the land of knowledge, of faith, of beatitude--the _Gnan Bhúmí_, the _Dharma Bhúmí_ and the _Punni-Bhúmí_ of the ancient Aryas. It is the land of the Vedas and of the heroes--the _Veda Bhúmí_ and the _Vir Bhúmí_ of his ancestors. Yes, to him, it is the land of lands, the only place where he wishes to live, and more so, where he wishes to die. For a Hindu to die anywhere but in India, is as if he had been damned to hell. He shudders at the idea. To him, it is unthinkable. You may call it foolish, unpractical, sentimental and unprogressive; but there it is--a mighty fact of life into which no foreigner can penetrate.

Every Englishman loves his country, its darkness, its fog, its sleet and rain nothwithstanding. Who does not love his country and who does not say:

Home, kindred, friends and country--these Are ties with which we never part; From clime to clime, o'er land and seas, We bear them in our heart; But, oh! 'tis hard to feel resigned, When they must all be left behind!

--J. MONTGOMERY.

If then, an Indian decides to be an exile, voluntarily and maybe for life, he only does so either under a grave sense of duty or of danger. The duty lies in speaking _the truth_ about political conditions in India and the danger in being effectively prevented from doing so if he remains there. No Indian can speak the _whole truth_ while in India. The criminal laws of your Government--your Penal and Criminal Codes, Seditious Meetings and Conspiracy Acts, and Press Laws, your tribunals presided over by your own people unaided by jurors--effectively gag his mouth.

All honor to those who, though they cannot speak the whole truth, yet keep the fire burning in India and do as much as considerations of policy and expediency permit. If they do not speak the _whole truth_, they have at least the consolation of being at home, in the heart of their family and surrounded by their dear ones. For a political exile, however, there is nothing else to do, unless he has to carry on a fight for his living also, in which case he will divide his time between the two, that of earning bread and crying for justice for his country. Happily I have been comparatively free from much anxiety about the first. The only justification for my condition of exile, then, is that I continue to speak the truth about conditions in India and draw the attention of the world to them.

But an additional reason has just been furnished to me by the morning papers of March 15, 1917. It is said that your agents in India have decided to raise a war loan of $500,000,000, equivalent to 1,500,000,000 Rupees of Indian money, and also, to make the floating of the loan easy, your Government has agreed to increase the duty on cotton imports by 4% _ad valorem_. This war loan, it is added, would be a "_free gift_" of India to Great Britain! A free gift of $500,000,000 by starving, poverty-stricken India, to rich, wealthy, mighty Great Britain! Could anything be more astounding, more absurd and more tyrannical. The news has stunned me. I know that David Lloyd George, the British war-lord of 1917, is not the same person who was the radical Chancellor of Exchequer in the Liberal Government from 1908 to 1914, and who did magnificent service to the British workingman by reducing his burdens and alleviating his condition. I have been told that the said David Lloyd George is dead and you, sir, are an entirely different person. The Lloyd George of 1914 could not possibly have done the thing which you, sir, in alliance with Curzons and Milners have just accomplished. The newspapers say you are the same person; only you have changed. If so, the change is not of opinion but of personality. Evidently the soul of the original David Lloyd George has left the body to make room for an altogether different soul. We Indians believe in the possibility of such a metamorphosis taking place even in the lifetime of the same body! The best part of the joke, however, in connection with the £100,000,000 transaction lies in the fact that you call it _a gift by India_--_a gift indeed_. A gift like those given by Belgium to Germany. Is it not so, Mr. George? You are a shrewd person, very well educated, clever in diplomacy, well versed in tricks of speech and a master in statecraft; but even you ought to know that this trick will not deceive any one--not even the Indians who have been so often deceived by your predecessors in business. By way of adding insult to injury, you profess to do "_an act of justice_" to India by consenting to an increase of 4% on the duty leviable on imports of cotton goods. You say it is necessary for the success of the war loan of $500,000,000; but do you think that the Indians are so devoid of knowledge of the ordinary rules of arithmetic as not to understand what this "hitting below the belt" means to them? Your additional duty would but bring only $5,000,000 or $6,000,000 to the Indian exchequer, if the imports of cotton do not undergo a decrease. Your Government in India estimates it at £1,000,000 sterling. The interest at 5-1/2% amounts to $27,500,000. Your Government in India estimates an annual charge of £6,000,000 sterling. Where is the balance to come from except from the famished Indian _ryot_? Is that how you show your love for democracy, for the people at large, for the workingman? Your representatives in India and outside, are proclaiming to the world that India is the most lightly taxed country in the world, withholding the fact that the average income of an Indian is only £2 a year, of which he pays 7 shillings toward taxes. That was before the new taxes were imposed.

Your publicists circulate another lie, viz., that India pays no tribute, while they know that from 20 to 40 millions sterling are remitted to England every year, out of which only a portion represents interest on loans made to India for the building of railways which your countrymen have used in developing their trade, and the remainder is the profit you make out of India. Then you cite the figures of trade in support of your theory that India is prosperous under British rule, but you forget that that trade benefits your country more than it benefits India, if at all. We send you food and raw materials at cheapest prices, making ourselves liable to "famines." You pay us in articles of luxury, of flimsy value, at the highest prices. The balance of trade is always in your favor. We toil and sweat, and your countrymen enjoy the profit. All the paying industries, railways, tea, jute, half of the cotton industry, etc., are in the hands of your countrymen. Theirs are the insurance companies, banks, railways and ships that profit by their trade. The railway rates discriminate against native industries and internal trade. Your countrymen get the plum-pudding, while our people cannot have even two meals of the coarsest food every day. When there is famine, millions die. Of late, your "scientific" methods of famine relief have succeeded in controlling mortality figures in famine days. The method by which you do this is genuinely scientific. Most of the deaths are charged to epidemics and disease; no one notices, however, that the havoc caused by disease is due to lack of nourishment and consequent low vitality. God-fearing Englishmen have cried themselves hoarse over the situation. The misery of the Indian masses has been pictured by their powerful pens in pathetic and soul-stirring words, but you and your colleagues still continue to ignore what they have said. New methods are every day being invented to exploit us. New departments with fat salaries for Englishmen are being multiplied. The public debt is being piled up. While hundreds of millions are spent on railways, nothing has been done to develop local industries. The country is suffering from lack of capital (cash and credit). (See Sir D. M. Hamilton's article in the _Calcutta Review_ for July, 1916.) Every honest inquirer who makes inquiries on the spot and does not depend on the reports of your officials, finds and reports that the condition of the masses is the most pitiable (see the article by Mr. Manohar Lal in the _Allahabad Economic Journal_ for April, 1916, and also the paper by Mr. Patro, of Madras, read in a meeting presided over by the Governor of Madras). For the latest British testimony on the point, see an article on Indian Industrial Development by Mr. Moreland, C.S.I., C.I.E., in the _Quarterly Review_ for April, 1917, in the course of which he remarks: "It is a matter of common knowledge that the standard of life in India is undesirably low; that while the masses of the people are provided with the bare necessities of life of a bare existence [Are they?--L. R.] they are in far too many cases badly housed and badly clothed, badly doctored and badly taught, often overworked and often underfed; and that the present income, even if it were equitably distributed, would not suffice to provide the population with even the most indispensable elements of a reasonable life."

A careful study of the Reports on Prices and Wages discloses that the real living wage in the case of the vast bulk of agricultural laborers has considerably diminished, and this in spite of the absurd conclusion of the Prices Commission appointed by your Government a few years ago. No one knows better than you, Mr. David Lloyd George, that big buildings in cities, mostly owned by foreign capitalists exploiting the country; big trade carried on by foreign exporters and importers; railway mileage and receipts of Government revenue do not mean prosperity. Even the importation of treasure secured by capitalists in payment for exports does not indicate better conditions of the masses. If the masses are so prosperous, as your officers say, why cannot you tax the people for purposes of education and sanitation? Why is the death rate so high (over 30 per thousand)? Why can't you force the local bodies to spend money on education and sanitation? Why do your finance ministers say that there is no room for further taxes? Most of your agents in India know the real condition of the people but they have to conceal it from the British public as well as the world, as that enables them and their kin to continue in the enjoyment of that power which means so much to them.

In reply, you might well ask, why then is India loyal? Why do the people put up with all this? Why don't they rebel? Because they have been emasculated, and emasculated so completely, that they are absolutely helpless against your organized brigandage. They are weak, ignorant and incompetent. Sixty-four years ago they were not so helpless. But now they are completely demoralized and penniless. Your system has ground them into dust. They cannot even protect themselves from wild beasts. You have completely disarmed them. No Indian can possess a firearm except under a license from your magistrates, which is only rarely granted. You have completely hypnotized them by your professions of disinterested liberalism and altruism. The truth has, after all, dawned on them that you are the worst harpies they ever have had and if they could they would overthrow you without a scruple. You know that you are safe in their helplessness. When the war came they deluded themselves with the hope that in your hour of need you might accord them a better treatment, but by this time they have found their mistake and have concluded that, just as a lion may die of sheer exhaustion when attacked by an enemy rather than willingly loosen his grip on his prey so long as there is breath in his body, so a nation holding another in subjection might endanger her own existence without loosening her grip on her victim.

When the war broke out in August, 1914, I, with other Indian publicists, thought that however badly you had treated us in the past we had nothing to gain by German victory and the best thing, under the circumstances, was for us to stand by you and establish our claim to better treatment. The Princes and people of India therefore stood by you. You and your colleagues have been singing their praises and extolling their loyalty, but nothing has been done so far to give them even the elementary political rights of a free people. Verily, we have had a deluge of fine words but not an iota of deeds. On the other hand, you have imposed fresh burdens on us. While doing an "act of justice" about the cotton duties you have committed a wrong which wipes away the little good that might otherwise have been expected to accrue therefrom. Your courts and officers in India have taken away what little freedom the people enjoyed before. In cases of alleged sedition the sentences inflicted have been quite on a par with the doings of the Romanoffs in Russia. This time even women have felt your steel.

You knew as well as anyone else does, how the German government has been trying to win the good will of the Indians. It cannot be denied that the temptation was alluring. If, then, we have withstood it, it was not because we were in love with your Government in India, but on different grounds. Personally, I do not believe that any liberty is worth having which we cannot win ourselves, because liberty won by the aid of another places us at the mercy of that other. European diplomacy is so crooked that it is futile to place faith in the promises of any of them.

I would esteem German friendship as much as British or American or that of the Japanese or the Chinese; I would gratefully accept any help anybody would render in educating and fitting our young men for the coming task, but I would not do anything that would cause useless bloodshed in India. I am not afraid of blood. Blood will have to be shed if we are to gain our freedom. I am not afraid of failures and defeats. Failures and defeats are sometimes the necessary steps to victory. I do not believe in peace at any price; nor pacificism at any cost. I do not believe that "they also serve who only stand and wait." I am for a manly assertion of our rights, even though blood may have to be spilled in asserting or defending them; yet I would consider it highly improper to encourage bloodshed where there is not a ghost of a chance of success. That, in my eyes, is sheer lunacy and I have never made a secret of it. So I protested against my people attempting to stir up revolt in India, under the instigation of a foreign government. It was due to my horror of useless bloodshed. I have no doubt that _agents provocateur_ played an important part in instigating those whom your courts have found guilty and sent to the gallows. I believe that the men who have been sacrificed should have lived and worked for the movement for which they have died. So that, in a nutshell, gives you my attitude towards foreign help. Remember, please, sir, that I do not presume to pronounce any judgment on those who think differently and have acted in the light of their consciences. I simply state my opinion and my attitude.

This time the movement has failed. It was bound to fail. But the experience which the Indians engaged in the cause have gained is not lost. Next time, and who knows, the chance may come at no distant date, they will profit by the experience thus gained. The world is not in love with you, sir. There are a dozen peoples in the world who will be glad to see your downfall and help in bringing it about. They will not support the Indian Nationalist and the Indian Revolutionist openly, but they will encourage him in every way they can, without bringing about diplomatic complications. So the Indian will not be altogether friendless when the next opportunity to strike comes. By that time the country also will be better prepared to do something more definite and more spectacular.

Under the circumstances, the question that I wish to put to you is: "Would you do nothing to avert it?" It is in your power to act if you will. The Indians are very easily satisfied. They abhor bloodshed. They do not like revolution. They will gladly remain in the Empire, if permitted to do so on terms of self-respect and honor. Their needs are few. Their life is simple. They care more for spiritual values than for worldly goods. They envy nobody's property. They have no ambition to start on a career of exploitation. All they want is to be let to live and think as they will. At present they are let _to exist_, but not to live. More than 100 million are insufficiently fed. At least 60 millions do not get two meals a day. More than 80% of the boys receive no schooling, and more than 90% of the girls. They work and toil and sweat primarily in the interests of the British capitalist and secondarily in the interests of his Indian colleague. The latter only gets the leavings of the former. The ships, the railways, the leading banking houses, the big insurance offices, the tea plantations, one-half of the cotton mills, about all the woollen mills, most of the paper mills, all jute mills are owned by the former; a few by the latter. The profits of agriculture are divided between your Government and the big landlords. The pressure on land has reduced the size of the ryots' holdings, while the number of mouths requiring food and the number of bodies requiring clothing has increased.

Your Government encourages drinking, speculating and gambling in a way never before conceived. If you have any pity in your heart, sir; if you are a good father and a good husband, I would beseech you to devote but an hour's time to the wages tables printed by your Government in their Report on Prices and Wages (1915). I give a few samples below: