INDIAN RIOTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 August 1921, Page 4

INDIAN RIOTS.

After centuries of torpor, the East today moves as fast as the West, and one of the phases of this momentum is exemplified in disturbances of a more or less serious nature, due mostly to the spread of sedition and an active propaganda that appeals to the easily inflamed natives. A recent cable gives the details of a riot in the Calicut district, accompanied by the usual destruction of property and the loss of life. This militant outbreak does not appear to have any direct connection with Ghandi‘«s campaign, which is ostensibly one of passive resistance, but is certainly the outcome of that wave of racial hatred which appears to be sweeping over India. The growth of labor troubles has been on an alarming scale. Strikes have been as common and sudden during the last twelve months, and more, as in Britain, though on a smaller scale, many of them being engineered to some extent by political agitators who, in default of responsible labor organisations, still in their infancy, have constituted themselves the champions of all labor grievances. A similar spirit of revolt has been fostered in rural districts, in which the evils of landlordism—and especially absentee landlordism—have been allowed to survive since pre-British times, and in the United Provinces, for instance, serious agrarian troubles occurred some months back, of which legislation may or may not arrest a recurrence. Not only has political, economical and social unrest never been more widespread than of late, but for the first time all the heterogeneous forces to whom, though often on different grounds, the British connection is equally hateful, have found a magnetic leader who knows how to resolve all their dissonances into a harmony of professedly passive and spiritual insurgence against a “Satanic” gov-, ernment and a ‘‘satanie” civilisation. India is passing through a' transition stage, hence the upheavals. It is the Hindu rather than the Mahommedan section of the people that displays this hostility to the Raj. At the Mahomedans have been wholly loyal to their King-Emperor, but force of circumstances or British careless treatment may place them side by side with Hindu seditionist’s—it has even done so already. Britain’s task is beset with difficulties, but the preservation of order must be maintained at all cost.