Part 2
Mr. Gandhi wrote his book in 1908 after a visit to England when the Liberal and the Labour parties were carrying on their great campaign in favour of the working men and against the capitalists and Lloyd George was about to launch his great land campaign. He seems to have been impressed with the horrors of the condition of the wage earners which was then portrayed in dark colours in order to support that campaign. His mind, emotional and ill balanced, seems to have been entirely upset by the descriptions that he had then read. He is on the fringe of a large question about which he seems to have been singularly ill informed. In England there is not at this time and there was not when he wrote, any question of the destruction of machinery which is a necessary adjunct to the industrial system. The questions under debate are the conditions of labour and the distribution of the wealth created by machinery between capitalists and labour. These questions have been under consideration now for some years; the condition of the labourers is being slowly improved, a minimum wage has been introduced and there is a prospect of a still more equitable distribution of the proceeds between capital and labour. Mr. Gandhi says that he has read Dutt's book on the decline of Indian industries but he does not seem to have learnt the lesson inculcated therein--that it is necessary to improve our industries not only to meet the needs of the people of the country, find employment for our labouring population, but also not to force them to compete with the cultivating classes. In India the same problem as in England awaits us. We have to see that the condition of the labourers in the mills and in the other industries is improved. In asking for the ruin of all our manufacturing industries Mr. Gandhi is only playing into the hands of our opponents. He will find strong support in this respect from Lancashire who will, according to some Indian publicists, only be too willing to take any steps to effect the destruction of our competing industries. If he had directed half the energy of his non-co-operation campaign to improving the conditions of the workmen in all our industries he might possibly have succeeded in getting rid of many of those evils which in his opinion require elimination of all machinery and of all industrial undertakings. The other reason for the deplorable condition of the industrial workmen in England is the congestion and overcrowding, in the industrial centres. This is due to a great extent to the action of the landlords who will not allow any expansion of those industrial centres in order to increase the value of their land and thus to exploit the community. In India we have not got that trouble. There is ample room for extension except in Bombay, in all the industrial centres and even in Bombay the difficulty is not due, so far as I am informed to the action of landlords but to natural conditions arising out of the geography of Bombay. Machinery is essential to the creation of wealth by manufacturing industries. The evils that have been portrayed by Mr. Gandhi can be and are being removed by patient effort. His tirade against machinery and mill industries on account of the evils he has witnessed in the West, is due to his ignorance; a little knowledge in his case has proved a dangerous thing. It is this feeling which has led him to advocate the universal use of spinning wheel in India. This might be useful as a cottage or home industry. It might find work for some who would otherwise be idle. But he is living in a fool's paradise if he considers it a substitute for or will supplant, machinery.
It is unnecessary to say that he hates Parliaments:--
"The condition of England at present is pitiable. I pray to God that India may never be in that plight. That which you consider to be Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute. Both these are harsh terms, but exactly fit the case. That Parliament has not yet of its own accord done a single good thing; hence I have compared it to a sterile woman. The natural condition of that Parliament is such that without out-side pressure it can do nothing. It is like a prostitute because it is under the control of ministers who change from time to time. To-day it is under Mr. Asquith; tomorrow it may be under Mr. Balfour."
"If the money and the time wasted by Parliament were entrusted to a few good men, the English nation would be occupying to-day a much higher platform. The Parliament is simply a costly toy of the nation. These views are by no means peculiar to me. Some great English thinkers have expressed them.
"That you cannot accept my views at once is only right. If you will read the literature on this subject, you will have some idea of it. The Parliament is without a real master, under the Prime Minister, its movement is not steady, but it is buffeted about like a prostitute. The Prime Minister is more concerned about his power than about the welfare of the Parliament. His energy is concentrated upon securing the success of his party. His care is not always that the Parliament shall do right. Prime Ministers are known to have made the Parliament do things merely for party advantage. All this is worth thinking over."
It is no wonder that he called upon all his followers to boycott the Indian Councils. I shall deal with this when dealing with the boycott question.
After all this one would naturally think that if we expel the English from India we would be happy. Not a bit, says Mr. Gandhi whose views about independence are peculiar. Look, he says, at Italy. He thinks that Italy has not gained anything by independence of Austrian domination. He adds:--
"If you believe that because Italians hold Italy, the Italian nation is happy, you are groping in darkness. What substantial gain did Italy obtain after the withdrawal of the Austrian troops? The gain is only nominal. You do not want therefore to reproduce the same conditions in India. India to gain her independence can fight like Italy only when she has arms and in order to gain her independence India has to be armed and to arm India on a large scale is to Europeanise it. Then her condition will be just as pitiable as that of Europe. This means in short, that India must accept European civilisation ... but the fact is that the Indian nation will not adopt arms and it is well that she does not."
She must not therefore use force to fight the English.
But what is it she has to do. She must obtain Swaraj or Home Rule by 'soul force'. What is it?:--
"When we are slaves we think that the whole universe is enslaved. Because we are in an abject condition, we think that the whole of India is in that condition. As a matter of fact, it is not so, but it is as well to impute our slavery to the whole of India. But if we bear in mind the above fact we can see that if we become free, India is free. And in this thought you have definition of 'swaraj.' It is 'swaraj' when we earn to rule ourselves. It is therefore in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this 'swaraj' to be like a dream. Hence there is no idea of sitting still. The 'swaraj' that I wish to picture before you and me is such that, after we have once realised it, we will endeavour to the end of our lifetime to persuade others to do likewise. But such 'swaraj' has to be experienced by each one for himself."
The assumption made by a few persons that Mr. Gandhi is only condemning parliamentary government for its inutility is unfounded. The extracts already given might lend some colour to that view. But such is not the fact. In England Parliamentary government is denounced by certain persons on the ground that it will always be under the influence of a capitalist Press and therefore unable to redress the evils from which the people of the country other than the capitalists are suffering. Mr. Gandhi's objection is not based on any such ground; he is against not only Parliamentary Government but practically against any Government in any form as is apparent from the extracts given above. The doctrine that Governments have very little to do with our happiness which depends upon self-control or 'soul force' has many advocates, but to deduce it as a doctrine from the alleged failure of Parliamentary Government in England is ludicrous. I shall not stop here to justify Parliamentary government which has justified itself by its results; it is only ignorance of the work that has been done which is responsible for opinions like those to which Mr. Gandhi has given expression.
Towards the end of the book he says:--
Before I leave you, I will take the liberty of repeating:--
1. Real Home Rule is Self Rule or control;
2. The way to it is Passive Resistance; that is soul force or love force.
In my opinion, we have used the term "Swaraj" without understanding its real significance. I have endeavoured to explain it as I understand it, and my conscience testifies that _my life henceforth is dedicated to its attainment_.
Such is the real Gandhi. Railways, lawyers, courts, doctors, education on Western lines, machinery of every kind or manufacturing industries, parliamentary government should disappear. He is singularly ill informed on every one of the questions he has discussed. 'Soul force' alone should be relied upon. No resistance should be offered to violence. No resistance should be offered to robbery and the robbers are to be left to cut one another's throats. No resistance to be offered to murderers or to those who might want to enslave you. Briefly, no protection is to be given by laws and their administrators to person and property.
There is no harm perhaps as long as such fantastic visionaries restrict the application of these principles to themselves, to their own persons or properties. But it becomes a serious matter when their general application is sought for.
These are the sentiments he expressed in 1908, and it was with these sentiments that he came to India. As it is well to be definite and clear, I will quote from a letter addressed by him in 1909 to a friend in India:--
"Bombay, Calcutta and the other chief cities of India are the real plague spots".
"If British rule were replaced tomorrow by Indian rule based on modern methods, India would be no better, except that she would be able then to retain some of the money that is drained away to England; but then India would only become a second or fifth nation of Europe or America".
"Medical science is the concentrated essence of black magic. Quackery is infinitely preferable to what passes for high medical skill".
"Hospitals are the instruments that the devil has been using for his own purpose, in order to keep his hold on his kingdom. They perpetuate vice, misery and degradation and real slavery".
"India's salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and such like have all to go, and so called upper classes have to learn to live consciously and religiously and deliberately the simple peasant life, knowing it to be a life giving true happiness".
But he soon found that it was hopeless to carry out his theories in the face of the determination of the people of India to attain Home Rule preached by the Indian National Congress and the Indian politicians. He had accordingly to put on a new garb. Therefore, in 1917, the year of the famous declaration made by the British Government about the progressive realisation of self government, he found it necessary, to obtain a hearing, to accept the Home Rule programme. In his Presidential address at the First Gujarat Political Conference in 1917 he said that without going into the merits of the scheme of reforms approved by the Congress and the Muslim League he will do all that is necessary to get it accepted and enforced. Though the scheme itself is not 'swaraj', he admitted it was a great step towards 'swaraj'. At the same time he said that though he is acting on the propriety of the current trend of thought it does not appear to him to be tending altogether in the right direction as the 'swaraj' put forward is one of Western type. Nevertheless as India is being governed in accordance with the Western system and without Parliament we should be nowhere, he does not hesitate to take part in the Parliamentary swaraj movement and the programme that he sketched out for himself may be described thus in his own words written in 1921:--
"But I would warn the reader against thinking that I am to-day aiming at the Swaraj therein (spiritual swaraj as described in his 'Indian Home Rule'), I know that India is not ripe for it. It may seem an impertinence to say so. But such is my conviction. I am individually working for the self-rule pictured therein. But to-day my corporate activity is undoubtedly devoted to the attainment of Parliamentary Swaraj in accordance with the wishes of the people of India. I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction. Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of a high and pure civilisation. At best they are a necessary evil. Neither adds one inch to the moral stature of a nation. Nor am I aiming at a permanent destruction of law courts, much as I regard it as 'a consummation devoutly to be wished for,' still less am I trying to destroy all machinery and mills. It requires a higher simplicity and renunciation than the people are to-day prepared for".
He also admitted that his acceptance of Parliamentary Swaraj required some modification of his theory of using violence or force. He admitted that though there is no scope for violence or force in spiritual swaraj, and military training is intended only for those who do not believe in it, he was prepared to accept the view that the whole of India will never accept Satyagraha. He added:--
"Not to defend the weak is an entirely effeminate idea, everywhere to be rejected. In order to protect our innocent sister from the brutal designs of a man we ought to offer ourselves a willing sacrifice and by the force of Love conquer the brute in the man. But if we have not attained that power, we would certainly use up all our bodily strength in order to frustrate those designs. The votaries of soul force and brute force are both soldiers. The latter, bereft of his arms, acknowledges defeat, the former does not know what defeat is".
It was a consequence of this acceptance of Parliamentary Swaraj that he should try to work the Montagu Chelmsford Council reforms. Though these reforms may be inadequate yet for one who accepts the goal of Parliamentary Government it was his bounden duty to avail himself of the available Parliamentary scheme to carry out those reforms which were then possible and to take the necessary steps to enlarge the scope of the scheme to carry out the further reforms that might be needed. Accordingly at the Amritsar Congress in December 1919, he resolved to co-operate with the country in working the Reform Scheme.
I have already pointed out that he entirely disagreed with the system of Parliamentary government and his acceptance was one of necessity. At the earliest opportunity at the special sessions of the Indian National Congress held at Calcutta in September 1920 and at the National Congress held at Nagpur in December 1920 he took steps to destroy the Montagu Reform Scheme of Parliamentary Swaraj and everything else to which he had given a reluctant assent and to bring the country to adopt his wild theories already stated by me and in order to do so, he brought into prominence forces entirely opposed to his own principles which he proved himself unable to control with disastrous consequences and had to resort willingly or unwillingly to dishonest methods.
What was the reason for his throwing overboard the Montagu Reform Scheme? The following resolution which at his insistence was passed by the National Congress at Calcutta and practically re-affirmed at Nagpur will explain the situation as then developed.
THE NON-CO-OPERATION RESOLUTION
"In view of the fact that on the Khilafat question both the Indian and Imperial Governments have signally failed in their duty towards the Musalmans of India, and the Prime Minister has deliberately broken his pledged word given to them, and that it is the duty of every non-Moslem Indian in every legitimate manner to assist his Musalman brother in his attempt to remove the religious calamity that has over taken him:--
"And in view of the fact that in the matter of the events of the April 1919 both the said Governments have grossly neglected or failed to protect the innocent people of the Punjab and punish officers guilty of unsoldierly and barbarous behaviour towards them and have exonerated Sir Michael O'Dwyer who proved himself directly or indirectly responsible for the most official crimes and callous to the sufferings of the people placed under his administration, and that the debate in the House of Lords betrayed a woeful lack of sympathy with the people of India and showed virtual support of the systematic terrorism and frightfulness adopted in the Punjab and that the latest Viceregal pronouncement is proof of entire absence of repentance in the matters of the Khilafat and the Punjab.
"This Congress is of opinion that there can be no contentment in India without redress of the two afore-mentioned wrongs, and that the only effectual means to vindicate national honour and to prevent a repetition of similar wrongs in future is the establishment of Swarajya. This Congress is further of opinion that there is no course left open for the people of India but to approve of and adopt the policy of progressive non-violent non-co-operation until the said wrongs are righted and Swarajya is established.
"And inasmuch as a beginning should be made by the classes who have hitherto moulded and represented opinion and inasmuch as Government consolidates its power through titles and honours bestowed on the people, through schools controlled by it, its law courts and its legislative councils, and inasmuch as it is desirable in the prosecution of the movement to take the minimum risk and to call for the least sacrifice compatible with the attainment of the desired object, this Congress earnestly advises:--
(_a_) surrender of titles and honorary offices and resignation from nominated seats in local bodies;
(_b_) refusal to attend Government Levees, Durbars and other official and semi-official functions held by Government officials or in their honour;
(_c_) gradual withdrawal of children from Schools and colleges owned, aided or controlled by Government and in place of such schools and colleges in the establishment of National Schools and Colleges in the various Provinces;
(_d_) gradual boycott of British Courts by lawyers and litigants and establishment of private arbitration courts by their aid for the settlement of private disputes;
(_e_) refusal on the part of the military, clerical and labouring classes to offer themselves as recruits for service in Mesopotamia;
(_f_) withdrawal by candidates of their candidature for election to the Reformed Councils and refusal on the part of the voters for any candidate who may despite the Congress advice offer himself for election; and
(_g_) the boycott of foreign goods.
"And inasmuch as non-co-operation has been conceived of as a measure of discipline and self-sacrifice without which no nation can make real progress, and inasmuch as an opportunity should be given in the very first stage of non-co-operation to every man, woman and child, for such discipline and self-sacrifice, this Congress advises adoption of Swadeshi in piece goods on a vast scale, and inasmuch as the existing mills of India with indigenous capital and control do not manufacture sufficient yarn and sufficient cloth for the requirements of the nation, and are not likely to do so for a long time to come this Congress advises immediate stimulation of further manufacture on a large scale by means of reviving hand-spinning in every home and hand weaving on the part of the millions of weavers who have abandoned their ancient and honourable calling for want of encouragement."
The Khilafat question first, the Punjab wrongs next are given as the two grounds for discarding the Reform Scheme and demanding Swarajya or immediate Home Rule for the prevention of similar wrongs in future. For the attainment of such Swarajya or immediate Home Rule a policy of what is called non-violent non-co-operation is advocated and as a beginning the people are advised to take certain steps which are therein referred to. Though discarding the Montagu Chelmsford Reform Scheme of Home Rule by certain stages, Mr. Gandhi says he is working for immediate Home Rule in accordance with the Resolution, to me it seems clear what he is really aiming at is not Home Rule of any kind or form _i.e._ Parliamentary Government with absolute powers, but Swarajya or Home Rule, as he himself has outlined it in his Indian Home Rule, the purport of which I have briefly given above, _i.e._ anarchy and soul force. I shall now attempt to show that there were no adequate reasons to discard the Reform Scheme of Home Rule for a scheme of immediate Home Rule and that the steps proposed to be taken are not calculated to attain Home Rule of any kind or form but are steps intended for Gandhi Swarajya which means anarchy or soul force.
In considering these questions the object of this movement must not be lost sight of. In Mr. Gandhi's own words "Non-co-operation though a religious and strictly moral movement deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government." Prima facie therefore all steps taken in pursuance of this resolution are intended for this purpose.
I propose first of all to take up the Khilafat question which stands first in the Resolution.
THE KHILAFAT QUESTION
With reference to this Khilafat agitation it is important to bear this in mind. After the armistice of 1918, there were two memorials presented on behalf of Turkey by the Muslim residents in England, one in January 1919 soon after the armistice, which included the names of His Highness the Aga Khan, Abbas Ali Baig, Rt. Hon. Ameer Ali, Messrs: Yusaf Ali, H. K. Kidwai etc.; and one at the end of the year in December 1919, the signatories thereof included such Mahomedans as the following: H. H. Aga Khan, Rt. Hon. Ameer Ali, Hon. Mr. Bhurgi, Mr. M. H. Kidwai. Both included many non-Mahomedans, some of them of great influence and position. They claimed for Turkey, Constantinople, Thrace, Anatolia including Smyrna. There was no claim for the countries occupied by those who were not Turks.
The Indian Mahomedan claim went much further. By the deputation to the Viceroy towards the end of that year and by the subsequent deputation to the Prime Minister and others the claim was advanced for the restoration of Turkey to the pre-war state, giving Home Rule if necessary to the Armenians or the Arabs etc. under Turkish sovereignty. This of course was an impossible demand. The Arabs are entitled to as much consideration as the Turks. Mahomad Ali and Shaukat Ali are really responsible for this claim.
Another claim advocated in the Council of State in India was to let Turkey have Anatolia and Thrace; full independence be given to the Arabs and the countries inhabited by them without any control by any non-muslim power. Whether the evacuation of Aden is included in this, I am unable to say.