GERMAN PLOTS IN INDIA

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9608, 14 March 1917, Page 11

GERMAN PLOTS IN INDIA

WHY THE SCHEMES MIS CARRIED.

LONDON, January 6. Sir Charles Cleveland, Director J of .Criminal Intelligence and Secret {Service in India, lias given some interesting particulars of German plots in India to' Reuter’s Agency. “Ever since the war broke out.” he said, “our enemies have published exaggerated accounts of the unrest in India. They hoped that their exaggerations would materialise, and they wished for serious trouble in India so earnestly that they almost thought it was taking place. There has been some trouble, but it has fallen very far short both of the picture drawn in enemy publications and of the enemy desire. The state of India all through the war seems to have exposed a very big miscalculation on the part of the Germans. Ido not think that in India itself much direct German work was carried out before the war. After the war broke out the German Government showed a willingness to spend money lavishly on Indian trouble.

“For the first few mouths of the War tho Germans waited for the Indian storm to come of itself, as they had been led to believe that it would oorac., The Germans based extravagant hopes on Turkey’s intervention, but the. Indian Mohammedans as a whole took this with extraordinary calm and resignation. “Disappointed by these' failures of the Indian trouble to arrive automatically, the Germans attempted direct assistance and turned their attention to the Bengal revolutionary party. They collected together a regular bureau of disaffected Indians in

Germany. ' Under their advice grandiose schemes were evolved on paper for the supply of arms, ammunition, money, and even German soldiers and sailors to the revolutionaries in Bengal and to the disaffected Moslem) fanatics in the, north of India. “The schemes all miscarried hopelessly; remittances had a way of getting themselves intercepted by tho wrong people, .ships on secret Gorman errands kept knocking up against tho Allied warships, and most of tho moves in tho plot were promptly reported to us all along by our own agents. “Professionally, wo are disappointed with the Gorman plots for India. We had hoped) to learn a great deal from their system and methods, but they seem to us to have been clumsy, belated, too theoretical, and based. on a misunderstanding of India, character.”