Essays in Liberalism Part 5

INDIA

BY SIR HAMILTON GRANT

K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E.; Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province, India; Deputy Commissioner of various Frontier districts; Secretary to Frontier Administration; Foreign Secretary, 1914-19; negotiated Peace Treaty with Afghanistan, 1919.

Sir Hamilton Grant said:--I have been asked to address you on the subject of India, that vast, heterogeneous continent, with its varied races, its Babel of languages, its contending creeds. There are many directions in which one might approach so immense a topic, presenting, as it does, all manner of problems, historical, ethnological, linguistic, scientific, political, economic, and strategic. I do not propose, however, to attempt to give you any general survey of those questions, or to offer you in tabloid form a resume of the matters that concern the government of India. I propose to confine my remarks to two main questions which appear to be of paramount importance at the present time, and which, I believe, will be of interest to those here present to-day, namely, the problems of the North-West Frontier, and the question of internal political unrest.

Let me deal first with the North-West Frontier. As very few schoolboys know, we have here a dual boundary--an inner and an outer line. The inner line is the boundary of the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province, the boundary, in fact, of British India proper, and is known as the Administrative border. The outer line is the boundary between the Indian Empire and Afghanistan, and is commonly known as the Durand line, because it was settled by Sir Mortimer Durand and his mission in 1895 with the old Amir Abdur Rahman. These two lines give us three tracts to be dealt with--first, the tract inside the inner line, the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province, inhabited for the most part by st.u.r.dy and somewhat turbulent Pathans; second, the tract between the two lines, that welter of mountains where dwell the hardy brigand hillmen: the tribes of the Black Mountain, of Swat and Bajur, the Mohmands, the Afridis, the Orakzais, the Wazirs, the Mahsuds, and a host of others, whose names from time to time become familiar according as the outrageousness of their misconduct necessitates military operations; third, the country beyond the outer line, "the G.o.d-granted kingdom of Afghanistan and its dependencies."

Now each of these tracts presents its own peculiar problems, though all are intimately inter-connected and react one on the other. In the settled districts we are confronted with the task of maintaining law and order among a backward but very virile people, p.r.o.ne to violence and impregnated with strange but binding ideas of honour, for the most part at variance with the dictates of the Indian Penal Code. For this reason there exists a special law called the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a most valuable enactment enabling us to deal with cases through local Councils of Elders, with the task of providing them with education, medical relief etc., in accordance with their peculiar needs, and above all with the task of affording them protection from the raids and forays of their neighbours from the tribal hills. In the tribal area we are faced with the task of controlling the wild tribesmen. This control varies from practically direct administration as in the Lower Swat and Kurram valleys to the most shadowy political influence, as in the remote highlands of Upper Swat and the Dir Kohistan, where the foot of white man has seldom trod. Our general policy, however, with the tribes is to leave them independent in their internal affairs, so long as they respect British territory and certain sacrosanct tracts beyond the border, such as the Khyber road, the Kurram, and the Tochi. The problem is difficult, because when hardy and well-armed hereditary robbers live in inaccessible mountains which cannot support the inhabitants, overlooking fat plains, the temptation to raid is obviously considerable: and when this inclination to raid is reinforced by fanatical religion, there must be an ever-present likelihood of trouble.

FRONTIER RAIDS

Few people here in England reading of raids on the North-West Frontier in India realise the full horror of these outrages. What generally happens is that in the small hours of the morning, a wretched village is suddenly a.s.sailed by a gang of perhaps 50, perhaps 200, well-armed raiders, who put out sentries, picket the approaches, and conduct the operation on the most skilful lines. The houses of the wealthiest men are attacked and looted; probably several villagers are brutally murdered--and probably one or two unhappy youths or women are carried off to be held up to ransom. Sometimes the raid is on a larger scale, sometimes it is little more than an armed dacoity. But there is nearly always a tale of death and damage. Not infrequently, however, our troops, our militia, our frontier constabulary, our armed police, or the village _chigha_ or hue-and-cry party are successful in repelling and destroying the raiders. Our officers are untiring in their vigilance, and not infrequently the district officers and the officers of their civil forces are out three or four nights a week after raiding gangs.

Statistics in such matters are often misleading and generally dull, but it may be of interest to state that from the 1st April, 1920, to the 31st March, 1921, when the tribal ebullition consequent on the third Afghan war had begun to die down, there were in the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province 391 raids in which 153 British subjects were killed and 157 wounded, in which 310 British subjects were kidnapped and some 20,000 of property looted. These raids are often led by outlaws from British territory; but each tribe is responsible for what emanates from or pa.s.ses through its limits--and when the bill against a tribe has mounted up beyond the possibility of settlement, there is nothing for it but punitive military operations. Hence the large number of military expeditions that have taken place on this border within the last half century.

Now this brings us to the question so often asked by the advocates of what is called the Forward policy: "If the tribes give so much trouble, why not go in and conquer them once and for all and occupy the country up to the Durand line?" It sounds an attractive solution, and it has frequently been urged on paper by expert soldiers. But the truth is that to advance our frontier only means advancing the seat of trouble, and that the occupation of tribal territory by force is a much more formidable undertaking than it sounds. We have at this moment before us a striking proof of the immense difficulty and expense of attempting to tame and occupy even a comparatively small tract of tribal territory in the Waziristan operations. Those operations have been going on for two and a half years. At the start there were ample troops, ample equipment, and no financial stringency. The operations were conducted, if a layman may say so, with skill and determination, and our troops fought gallantly. But what is the upshot? We managed to advance into the heart of the Mahsud country on a single line, subjected and still subject to incessant attacks by the enemy; but we are very little nearer effective occupation than when we started; and now financial stringency has necessitated a material alteration in the whole programme, and we are reverting more or less to the methods whereby we have always controlled the tribes, namely, tribal levies or _kha.s.sadars_ belonging to the tribe itself, frontier militia or other armed civil force, backed by troops behind.

FRONTIER POLICY

And for my own part I believe this is the best solution. We must not expect a millennium on the North-West Frontier. The tribal lion will not lie down beside the district lamb in our time, and we must deal with the problem as best we can in accordance with our means, and to this end my views are briefly as follows:--

(1) We should do everything possible to provide the younger trans-border tribesmen with all honourable employment for which they are suited: service in the army, in the frontier civil forces, and in the Indian police or similar forces overseas, and we should give labour and contracts as far as possible to tribesmen for public works in their vicinity. For the problem is largely economic. Unless the lion gets other food he is bound to cast hungry eyes on the lamb.

(2) We should do all that is possible to establish friendly relations with the tribal elders through selected and sympathetic political officers, to give them, by means of subsidies for service, an interest in controlling the hot-bloods of their tribe, and, where possible, to give them a.s.sistance in education and enlightenment. We must remember that we have duties to the tribes as well as rights against them.

(3) We should extend the _kha.s.sadar_ or levy system; that is, we should pay for tribal corps to police their own borders, arming themselves and providing their own ammunition and equipment. In this way we give honourable employment and secure an effective safeguard against raiders without pouring more arms into tribal territory.

(4) We must have efficient irregular civil forces, militia, frontier constabulary, and police, well paid and contented.

(5) We should revert to the old system of a separate frontier force in the army, specially trained in the work of guarding the marches. Those who remember the magnificent old Punjab frontier force will agree with me in deploring its abolition in pursuance of a scheme of army reorganisation.

(6) We should improve communications, telephones, telegraphs, and lateral M.T. roads.

(7) We should give liberal rewards for the interception and destruction of raiding gangs, and the rounding up of villages from which raids emanate.

(8) We should admit that the Amir of Afghanistani for religious reasons exercises a paramount influence over our tribes, and we should get him to use that influence for the maintenance of peace on our common border.

It has been the practise of our statesmen to adopt the att.i.tude that because the Amir was by treaty precluded from interfering with our tribes, therefore he must have nothing to do with them. This is a short-sighted view. We found during the Great War the late Amir's influence, particularly over the Mahsuds, of the greatest value, when he agreed to use it on our behalf.

(9) Finally, there is a suggestion afoot that the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province should be re-amalgamated with the Punjab. I have shown, I think, clearly, how inseparable are the problems of the districts, the tribal area, and of Afghanistan; and any attempt to place the districts under a separate control could only mean friction, inefficiency, and disaster. The proposal is, indeed, little short of administrative lunacy. There is, however, an underlying method in the madness that has formulated it, namely, the self-interest of a clever minority, which I need not now dissect. I trust that if this proposal should go further it will be stoutly resisted.

AFGHANISTAN

Let me now turn to Afghanistan. Generally speaking, the story of our dealings with that country has been a record of stupid, arrogant muddle.

From the days of the first Afghan war, when an ill-fated army was despatched on its crazy mission to place a puppet king, Shah Shuja, on the throne of Afghanistan, our statesmen have, with some notable exceptions, mishandled the Afghan problem. And yet it is simple enough in itself. For we want very little of Afghanistan, and she does not really want much of us. All we want from the Amir is good-neighbourliness; that he should not allow his country to become the focus of intrigue or aggression against us by Powers hostile to us, and that he should co-operate with us for the maintenance of peace on our common border. All he wants of us is some a.s.sistance in money and munitions for the internal and external safeguarding of his realm, commercial and other facilities, and honourable recognition, for the Afghan, like the Indian, has a craving for self-respect and the respect of others.

Now, where our statesmen have failed is in regarding Afghanistan as a petty little State to be browbeaten and ordered about at our pleasure, without recognising the very valuable cards that the Amir holds against us. He sees his hand and appraises it at its value. He knows, in the first place, that nothing can be more embarra.s.sing to us than the necessity for another Afghan war, and the despatch of a large force to the highlands of Kabul, to sit there possibly for years as an army of occupation, in a desolate country, incapable of affording supplies for the troops, at enormous cost which could never be recovered, and at the expense of much health and life, with no clear-cut policy beyond. He knows, in the second place, that such a war would be the signal for the rising of practically every tribe along our frontier. The cry of _Jehad_ would go forth, as in the third Afghan war, and we should be confronted sooner or later with an outburst from the Black Mountain to Baluchistan--a formidable proposition in these days. He knows, in the third place, that with Moslem feeling strained as it is to-day on the subject of Turkey, there would be sympathy for him in India, and among the Moslem troops of the Indian army. Now these are serious considerations, but I do not suggest that they are so serious as to make us tolerate for a moment an offensive or unreasonable att.i.tude on the part of the Amir. If the necessity should be forced on us, which G.o.d forbid, we should face the position with prompt.i.tude and firmness and hit at once; and apart from an advance into Afghanistan we have a valuable card in the closing of the pa.s.ses and the blockade of that country.

All I suggest is that in negotiating with Afghanistan, we should remember these things and should not attempt to browbeat a proud and sensitive ruler, who, however inferior in the ordinary equipment for regular war, holds such valuable a.s.sets on his side. And my own experience is that the Afghans are not unreasonable. Like every one else, they will "try it on," but if handled courteously, kindly, with geniality, and, above all, with complete candour, they will generally see reason. And remember one thing. In spite of all that has happened, our mistakes, our bl.u.s.ter, our occasional lapses from complete disingenuousness, the Afghans still like us. Moreover, their hereditary mistrust of Russia still inclines them to lean on us. We have lately concluded a treaty with Afghanistan--not by any means a perfect treaty, but the best certainly that could be secured in the circ.u.mstances, and we have sent a Minister to Kabul, Lt.-Colonel Humphrys, who was one of my officers on the frontier. A better man for the post could not, I believe, be found in the Empire. Unless unduly hampered by a hectoring diplomacy from Whitehall, he will succeed in establis.h.i.+ng that goodwill and mutual confidence which between Governments is of more value than all the paper engagements ever signed. One word more of the Afghans.

There is an idea that they are a treacherous and perfidious people.

This, I believe, is wicked slander, so far as the rulers are concerned.

In 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, the Amir Dost Muhammed was true to his bond, when he might have been a thorn in our side; and during the Great War the late Amir Halilullah, in the face of appalling difficulties, maintained the neutrality of his country, as he promised, and was eventually murdered, a martyr to his own good faith to us.

INTERNAL UNREST

Let me now turn to our second question: internal political unrest. In clubs and other places where wise men in arm-chairs lay down the law about affairs of state, one constantly hears expressions of surprise and indignation that there should be any unrest in India at all. "We have,"

say the die-hard wiseacres, "governed India jolly well and jolly honestly, and the Indians ought to be jolly grateful instead of kicking up all this fuss. If that meddlesome Montagu had not put these wicked democratic ideas into their heads, and stirred up all this mud, we should have gone on quite comfortable as before." But if we face the facts squarely, we shall see that the wonder is not that there has been so much, but that there has been so comparatively little unrest, and that India should, on the whole, have waited so patiently for a definite advance towards self-government.

What are the facts? They are these. Partly by commercial enterprise, partly by adroit diplomacy, partly by accident, largely by the valour of our arms, we have obtained dominion over the great continent of India.

We have ruled it for more than a century through the agency of a handful of Englishmen, alien in creed, colour, and custom from the people whom they rule--men who do not even make their permanent homes in the land they administer. Now, however efficient, however honest, however impartial, however disinterested such a rule may be, it cannot obviously be really agreeable to the peoples ruled. This is the fundamental weakness of our position. That our rule on these lines has lasted so long and has been so successful is due not to the fact alone that it has been backed by British bayonets, but rather to the fact that it has been remarkably efficient, honest, just, and disinterested--and, above all, that we have in the past given and secured goodwill.

Superimposed on this underlying irritant, there have been of late years a number of other more direct causes of unrest. Education, which we gave to India and were bound to give, had inevitably bred political aspiration, and an _intelligensia_ had grown up hungry for political rights and powers. Simultaneously the voracious demands of a centralised bureaucracy for reports and returns had left the district officer little leisure for that close touch with the people which in the past meant confidence and goodwill. Political restlessness had already for some years begun to manifest itself in anarchical conspiracies and crimes of violence, when the Great War began. In India, as elsewhere, the reflex action of the war was a disturbing element. High prices, stifled trade, high taxation, nationalist longings and ideas of self-determination and self-government served to reinforce subterranean agitation.

But throughout the war India not only remained calm and restrained, but her actual contribution to the war, in men and material, was colossal and was ungrudgingly given. She had a right to expect in return generous treatment; but what did she get? She got the Rowlatt Bill. Now, of course, there was a great deal of wicked, lying nonsense talked by agitators about the provisions of the Rowlatt Bill, and the people were grossly misled. But the plain fact remains that when India had emerged from the trying ordeal of the war, not only with honour untarnished, but having placed us under a great obligation, our first practical return was to pa.s.s a repressive measure, for fear, forsooth, that if it was not pa.s.sed then it might be pigeon-holed and forgotten. India asked for bread and we gave her a stone--a stupid, blundering act, openly deprecated at the time by all moderate unofficial opinion in India. What was the result? The Punjab disturbances and the preventive ma.s.sacre of the Jallianwala Bagh. I do not propose to dwell on this deplorable and sadly mishandled matter, save to say that so far from cowing agitation, it has left a legacy of hate that it will take years to wipe out; and that the subsequent action of a number of ill-informed persons in raising a very large sum of money for the officer responsible for that ma.s.sacre has further estranged Indians and emphasised in their eyes the brand of their subjection.

THE RISE OF GHANDI

To India, thus seething with bitterness over the Punjab disturbances, there was added the Moslem resentment over the fate of Turkey. I was myself in London and Paris in a humble capacity at the Peace Conference, and I know that our leading statesmen were fully informed of the Moslem att.i.tude and the dangers of unsympathetic and dilatory action in this matter. But an arrogant diplomacy swept all warnings aside and scorned the Moslem menace as a bogey. What was the result? Troubles in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and the Khilifat movement in India.

Hindu agitators were not slow to exploit Moslem bitterness, and for the first time there was a genuine, if very ephemeral, _entente_ between the two great rival creeds.

It was in this electric atmosphere that Ghandi, emerging from his ascetic retirement, found himself an unchallenged leader. Short of stature, frail, with large ears, and a gap in his front teeth, he had none of the outward appearance of dominance. His appeal lay in the simplicity of his life and character, for asceticism is still revered in the East. But his intellectual equipment was mediocre, his political ideas nebulous and impracticable to a degree, his programme archaic and visionary; and from the start he was doomed to fail. The _Hijrat_ movement which he advocated brought ruin to thousands of Moslem homes; his attack on Government educational establishments brought disaster to many youthful careers; non-co-operation fizzled out. Government servants would not resign their appointments, lawyers would not cease to practise, and t.i.tle-holders, with a few insignificant exceptions, would not surrender their t.i.tles; the "back to the spinning-wheel" call did not attract, and the continual failure of Ghandi's predictions of the immediate attainment of complete _Swaraj_ or self-government, which he was careful never to define, like hope deferred turned the heart sick.

From being a demi-G.o.d Ghandi gradually became a bore, and when he was at last arrested, tragic to relate, there was hardly a tremor of resentment through the tired political nerves of India. The arrest was indeed a triumph of wise timing that does credit to the sagacity of the Government of India. Had the arrest been effected when the name of Ghandi was at its zenith, there would have been widespread trouble and bloodshed. As it was, people were only too glad to be rid of a gadfly that merely goaded them into infructuous bogs.

I apologise for this long excursus on the somewhat threadbare subject of the causes of unrest in India. But I want those here present to realise what potent forces have been at work and to believe that the Indian generally is not the ungrateful, black-hearted seditionist he is painted by the reactionary press. India is going through an inevitable stage of political transition, and we must not hastily judge her peoples--for the most part so gallant, so kindly, so law-abiding, so lovable--by the pa.s.sing tantrums of political p.u.b.erty.

THE PRESENT SITUATION

As things stand at present, there is a remarkable lull. It would be futile to predict whether it will last. It is due in part, as I have suggested, to general political weariness, in part to the drastic action taken against the smaller agitating fry, in part to the depletion of the coffers of the extremists, in part to the fact that the extremists are quarrelling amongst themselves as to their future programme. Some are for continuing a boycott of the Councils; others are for capturing all the seats and dominating the legislature; others are for re-beating the dead horse of non-co-operation. Meanwhile, with disunion in the extremist camp, the Councils conduct their business on moderate lines, and, so far as one can judge, with marked temperance and sanity.

The work of the first Councils has indeed been surprisingly good, and augurs well for the future. India has not yet, of course, by any means grasped the full significance of representative government. The party system is still in embryo, although two somewhat vague and nebulous parties calling themselves the "Nationalists" and the "Democrats" do exist. But these parties have no clear-cut programme, and they do not follow the lead of the Ministers, who are regarded, not as representing the elected members of the Council, but as newly-appointed additional members of the official bureaucracy. There will doubtless in time be gradual sorting of politicians into definite groups, but there are two unbridgeable gulfs in the Indian social system which must always militate against the building up of a solid political party system: first, the gulf between Hindu and Moslem, which still yawns as wide as ever, and second, the gulf between the Brahman and the "untouchables"

who, by the way, have found their fears that they would be downtrodden under the new Councils completely baseless.

There are and must be breakers ahead. Some we can see, and there are doubtless others still bigger which we cannot yet glimpse over the welter of troubled waters. What we can see is this: first, there is a danger that unless Government and the Councils together can before the next elections in 1923-24 take definite steps towards the industrial development and the self-defence of India, the extremist party are likely to come in in full force and to create a deadlock in the administration; second, unless the Councils continue to accept a fiscal policy in accordance with the general interests of Great Britain and the Empire, there will be trouble. The fiscal position is obscure, but it is the crux, for the Councils can indirectly stultify any policy distasteful to them, and this too may mean a deadlock; third, there is a danger that the Indianisation of the Services will advance much more rapidly than was ever contemplated, or than is desirable in the interests of India for many years to come, for the simple reason that capable young Englishmen of the right stamp will not, without adequate guarantees for their future, accept employment in India. Those guarantees can be given satisfactorily by one authority alone, and that is by the Indian Legislatures voicing popular opinion. For a complex administration bristling with technical questions, administrative, political, and economic, it is essential that India should have for many years to come the a.s.sistance of highly-educated Britons with the tradition of administration in their blood. The Councils will be wise to recognise this and make conditions which will secure for them in the future as in the past the best stamp of adventurous Briton.

Finally, the Montagu-Chelmsford scheme, though a capable and conscientious endeavour to give gradual effect to a wise and generous policy, has of necessity its weak points. The system of diarchy--of allotting certain matters to the bureaucratic authority of the Viceroy and of the Provincial Governors and other matters to the representatives of the people--is obviously a stop-gap, which is already moribund. The attempt to fix definite periods at which further advances towards self-government can be considered is bound to fail: you cannot give political concessions by a stop-watch; the advance will either be much more rapid or much slower than the scheme antic.i.p.ates. Again, the present basis of election is absurdly small, but any attempt to broaden it must tend towards adult suffrage, which in itself would appear impracticable with a population of over 200 millions.

OUR DUTY TO INDIA

It is a mistake, however, in politics to look too far ahead. Sufficient unto the day. For the time being we may be certain of one thing, and that is that we cannot break the Indian connection and leave India. Both our interests and our obligations demand that we should remain at the helm of Indian affairs for many years to come. That being so, let us accept our part cheerfully and with goodwill as in the past. Let us try to give India of our best, as we have done heretofore. Let us regive and regain, above all things, goodwill. Let us not resent the loss of past privilege, the changes in our individual status, and let us face the position in a practical and good-humoured spirit. Let us abandon all talk of holding India by the sword, as we won it by the sword--because both propositions are fundamentally false. Let us realise that we have held India by integrity, justice, disinterested efficiency--and, above all, by goodwill--and let us continue to co-operate with India in India for India on these same lines.