BRITAIN’S PERIL IN INDIA.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3113, 17 April 1922, Page 2

BRITAIN’S PERIL IN INDIA.

The horror of an India left by the cowardice of Great Britain to- its own bitter dissensions must be averted at any cost,, say some English writers in approving tlie policy of stern repression inaugurated to cope with the Non-Co-operative leader Gandhi, who it is said is working hand in glove with the Moslem rebels. His work must be stopped at once, for he can “no longer plead that he does not intend bloodshed,” writes one British correspondent in India,' and the Government of that country is “right at least in dealing with him as an avowed and dangerous rebel committed to> a policy of forcible expulsion of the English from this land.” The first sign of Britain’s strong arm, we are told, was the order of the Indian Government for the arrest of Mahatma K. Gandhi, because, as the India Office stated in an official commnncation to the London press, ol his “campaign of civil disobedience” and his recent manifesto which “no government could discuss, much less accept.” Yet India is gradually to take her place as a partner in the British commonwealth of nations, probably as a federation of provinces, we read in cabled reports-of a. speech by the Secretary for India, E ,S. Montagu, who is quoted further as saying:— “We are in favor of swaraj.’ as they call it, within the Empire. We will lead them there in the only way we believe they can he successfully led there. It i s pathetic that those disturbing the peace in India to-day hear on the forefront of their banner the demand for precisely the same ‘swaraj,’ or self-government, but they think they can get it faster by revolution. It is by evolution, not revolution, that progress is possible; therefore there is no way of dealing wiQi their efforts except by the rigorous enforcement of the law and the severe repression of those seeking to disturb it.”

Meanwhile, American newspapers publish a statement issued hy Dr Sarat Mukerji, National Executive Secretary of the Friends of Freedom for India (New York), in which we read: — “Indian Nationalists are enrolling themselves hy thousands as volunteers as a challenge to the British Government’s threat of stern repression. Mr Gandhi’s terms of peace, which include the evacuation of Syria by the French, and of Egypt „ the British, and of the immediate departure of the entire British army from India, were considered impossible by the British Government. As a result the entire programme of Non-Co-operation. including boycott of British goods, civil disobedience and 1 non-payment of taxes is put into force among the masses.” Additional evidence of the gravity of the situation in India appears in a .speech delivered by the 1 British Governor of Bengal, and reported in an Indian dispatch to the London Daily Chronicle, in clinch he said: —“It would be the height of unwisdom to close one’si eyes to the gravity of the situation with which not the Government only but society in the widest meaning of that term is.now faced. It seems desirable to l call attention to- this because there still appear to be quite a. number of people who in spite of all that has happened, in spite of the resort to violence which has characterised the Non-Co-operation movement in Malabar, Nalegaon, Giridih, Aligarh, Bombay, and many other places, have not yet grasped the seriousness or nearness of the danger with which the country is threatened.” The Daily Chronicle’s correspondent, who writes from the Prince of W ales’ camp, at Gwalior, India., declares it Is •infortunate that “up to the_ present the terms employed by both sides in this contest of law against anarchy have been either cumbersome or misleading.” Nothing has helped the cause of Gandhi more in England, this correspondent avers, than the apparently innocuous air of such words as “volunteers,” and “Non-Co-operators.” We are told that “mass civil disobedience” would be better understood throughout the English-speaking world had the homely word “rebellion” been used from the beginning, and this informant adds: “In future let us call a spade a spade, for only by abandonment of these pernicious euphemisms can the reality of the situation here find its right place among the many crises which now threaten our work and wellbeing in the new constitutions of our imperial life.” But this writer’s dispatch becomes most interesting when he suggests that “only by a final and honorable settlement with Turkey can sedition in India, he crushed out” ; everything he has witnessed during the past year in India tends to confirm this view, and he continues:— “But as: that settlement still suffers postponement after postponement, a second and equally vital need has forced its way to the front —the need so to handle, the Indian situation that when at last friendly relations are established with the chief Moslem Government the opportunity for reaping the benefits of the settlement shall not have passed.

, . . In some respects India is as far away from home as in the days of the East India. Company. In spite of eahles and steamships it takes almost as long as then for those in England to 1 realise the processes which from month to mouth are changing the nature of sedition here. It was true a year ago that Hindu and Moslem agitators were equally pressing their methods of rebellion upon the population of India, and it was true that the particular grievances of each —the Khalifat question and Punjab memories respectively—still hulked largely among the real causes of discontent. To-day, however, from end to end of the peninsula it is to the influence of the Moslems that the authorities look for the prime cause of each succeeding trouble, and it is no longer either guardianship of the holy places or vengeance for Amritsar that stirs deepest antagonism among our enemies. Gandhi l to-day is merely an instrument in the hands of the Mohammedan rebels whom nothing hut express disavowal of their objects and methods by their co-religionists rriendly to Britain can convert, or at least dishearten. Above all, the blind confidence at home that in the long run the present unholy alliance between Hindu ami Moslem must break down needs to be d’stnrhod. 11 will break down, hut without strong action now it will break down foo late.”

This writer goes on to relate that one of Gandhi’s most notorious Al OSlem colleagues confessed to him in person that what the Mohammedan agitators aim at is nothing less than “a sovereign State of India,” and he proceeds:

“‘A Aloha mfiiedan Stale of India?’ 1 queried. ‘Of course,’ said he, I suggested that under any principle of self-determination the Hindus enormously outnumbered the Moslems. ‘The Hindus!’ ho burst out. ‘You leave us to deal with the Hindus. We are a lighting race. AVe have the tradition of empire. AVe have behind us the whole strength of Islam outside India. You leave the Hindus to us.’ “No comment is necessary except that there is not a Moslem in India in whose heart this grandiose scheme, should British rule he removed, does not- find an echo.

“Perhaps it slionld he added that, though Gandhi cannot ho ignorant of this aspiration, ho continues to work with the Mohammedan agitators. The

truth is that each side is firmly convinced that it is making use of the other to pull chestnuts out of the fire, and than this there can be no more certain cause of a fearful clash ‘between the tu#> faiths and an ultimate internecine catastrophe which more, perhaps, than any other imperial disaster wo are in honor bound to prevent.”

A special correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph says that authoritative information shows every effort on the part of the Government in India to meet Moderate opinion, and “where there is any reason for thinking that action has been unnecessarily severe, stops have been taken to remove the cause of complaint, and care used to differentiate between those who are merely tools in the hands of the Extremists and those who are prune movers in any disturbance. jo some exent this policy of “greater discrimination” has had a good fffect, we are told, but “it has not evoked as vet all the support that might have been expected from the Moderates.” Somewhat, different is the view of the Bombay correspondent of the Mane lies ter Guardian, who writes: —“The Moderates were triumphantly aware, of the extent to which the Indian Legislatures had already justified the first instalment of self-government, and frauklv jubilant because they had chosen the better part. The abler and more reasonable Extremists were watching the Moderates’ growing power with a mixture of chagrin and envy. The Kemalist victories- and FrancoTurkish Treaty foreshadowed redress of the Khalifat wrongs and a- change of temper in the British Cabinet. The Xon-Co-operatoi’s had no more cards to throw on the table. Their exchequer, moral and monetary, was bankrupt and a serious schism at the annual Congress imminent. AH these dangers to the movement were averted by the arrests. Suddenly the Executive, .without consulting any party leaders, or the councillors themselves, embarked on a policy of drastic, if legitimate, repression, using as its instrument tlic* Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1908 and Seditions Meetings Act, two measures already condemned by the Repressive Measures Commission, though actually on the statute-book. . . Yet Indians of every shade of opinion rushed into one camp-to attack the Government.”