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Facts and Opinions Volume I – Nov. 6, 1909 – Number 18 Mahomedan Representation
The question of separate representation for the Mahomedan community is one of those momentous issues raised in haste by a statesman unable to appreciate the forces with which he is dealing, which bear fruit no man expected and least of all the ill-advised Frankenstein who was first responsible for its creation. The common belief among Hindus is that the Government have decided to depress the Hindu element in the Indian people by raising the Mahomedan element, and ensure a perpetual preponderance in their own favour by leaning on a Mahomedan vote purchased by a system of preference. The denials of high-placed officials, who declare that it is only out of a careful consideration for the rights and interests of minorities that they have made special Mahomedan representation an essential feature of the Reform Scheme, have not convinced a single Hindu mind; for the obvious retort is that it is only one minority which is specially cared for and this special care is extended to it even in provinces where it is in a large majority. No provision at all has been made for the safe-guarding of Hindu minorities, for the Parsis, the Sikhs, the Christians and other sections which may reasonably declare that they too are Indians and citizens of the Empire no less than the Mahomedans. The workings of this belief in the mind of the premier community in India cannot at present be gauged. It is not till the details of the Reform Scheme are published, elections over, the councils working and the preponderance of the pro-government vote visible, that those workings can assume a definite shape. At present irritation, heart-burning, a sullen gloom and a growing resolve to assert and organise their separate existence and work for their own hand are the first results of the separatist policy. How far Sir Pherozshah and his valiant band will be able to fight this growing discontent, remains to be seen. It is quite possible that the pro-
Page – 245 Mahomedanism of the Reform Scheme may lead to a Hindu upheaval all over India, as fervent and momentous as the convulsion in Bengal, Madras and Maharashtra which followed Lord Curzon’s Partition blunder. How far it will advantage the Mahomedans to be in active opposition to an irritated and revolted Hindu community throughout the country they live in, is a question for Mahomedans to consider. A certain section with Syed Hyder Reza at their head, have considered it and are against the separate representation altogether. Another section represented by Mr. Ali Imam are for a compromise between the full Moslem demand for separate electorates and the Hindu demand for equal treatment of all communities. Unfortunately, this compromise is merely the Government scheme which Hindu sentiment has almost unanimously condemned as unfair and partial. The only section of Hindus in its favour is the dwindling minority which follows the great Twin Brethren of Bombay; and the support given by Mr. Gokhale and Sir Pherozshah to the separate representation idea is likely to cost them their influence with the moderate Hindu community everywhere outside the narrow radius of their personal influence. A third section rejoicing in the leadership of Mr. Amir Ali, are the irreconcilables of militant Islam aspiring to hold India under the British aegis as heirs of the Mogul and keepers of the gateway of India. The Reform Scheme is the second act of insanity which has germinated from the unsound policy of the bureaucracy. It will cast all India into the melting-pot and complete the work of the Partition. Our own attitude is clear. We will have no part or lot in reforms which give no popular majority, no substantive control, no opportunity for Indian capacity and statesmanship, no seed of democratic expansion. We will not for a moment accept separate electorates or separate representation, not because we are opposed to a large Mahomedan influence in popular assemblies when they come but because we will be no party to a distinction which recognises Hindu and Mahomedan as permanently separate political units and thus precludes the growth of a single and indivisible Indian nation. We oppose any such attempt at division whether it comes from an embarrassed Government seeking for political support or from an embittered
Page – 246 Hindu community allowing the passions of the moment to obscure their vision of the future.
The article on young Turkey and its military strength, extracted in our columns this week from the Indian Daily News, is one of great interest. Behind the deprecation of Turkish Chauvinism and Militarism we hear the first note of European alarm at the rise of a second Asiatic Power able to strike as well as to defend its honour and integrity against European aggression. The fact that it is the army in Turkey which stands for free institutions, is the greatest guarantee that could be given of the permanence of the new Turkey, for it assures a time of internal quiet while the country goes through the delicate and dangerous process of readjusting its whole machinery and ways of public thought and action from the habits of an irresponsible autocratic administration to those which suit free institutions and democratic ideas. No doubt, the support of the army veils a Dictatorship. But that is an inevitable stage in a great and sudden transition of this kind, and suits Asiatic countries, however perilous it may have been in other times to European countries when men could not be trusted not to misuse power for their own purposes to the detriment of their country. In Europe the present high standard of public spirit, duty, and honour was the slow creation of free institutions. To Asiatics, not yet corrupted, as many of us in India have been by the worst part of European individualism and an unnatural education divorced from morality and patriotism, a high standard of public spirit, duty and honour comes with the first awakenings of a freer life; for the Asiatic discipline has always been largely one of self-effacement, the subordination of the individual to a community and the scrupulous adhesion to principle at the cost of personal predilection and happiness. As in Turkey now, so in Japan, it was a few strong men who, winning control of the country by the strength of great ideas backed by the sword, right supported by might, held the land safe and quiet while they revolutionised the ideas and insti-
Page – 247 tutions of the whole nation, forged a strength by sea and land no enemy could despise and secured from the gratitude of their race for their wisdom, selflessness and high nobility of purpose that implicit following which at first they compelled by force. The complaint that the young Turks ignore the necessity of civil reorganisation, commerce and education is a complaint without wisdom, if not without knowledge. The circumstances of Turkey demand that the first attention of her statesmen should be given to military and naval efficiency. The Revolution plucked her from the verge of an abyss of disintegration. The desperate diplomacy and cunning of Sultan Abdul Hamid had stayed her long on that verge, but she was beginning to slip slowly over when the stronger hand of Mahmud Shevket Pasha seized her and drew her back. Even so, the deposition of the cunning and skilful diplomatist of Yildiz Palace might have been the signal for a general spoliation of Turkey. Austria began a rush for the Balkans, Greece tried to hurry a crisis in Crete. The shaking of the Turkish sword in the face of the Greek and the rapid and efficient reorganisation of army and navy against Europe were both vitally necessary to the safety of the Empire. They were the calculated steps not of Chauvinism but of a defensive statesmanship.
The circle of constitutionally governed Asiatic countries increases. To Turkey, Persia and Japan, China is added. Towards the close of the ten years set apart in the Chinese programme for the preparation of self-government, the Chinese Government has kept its promise to grant a constitution. Provincial Assemblies have been established, are working and have shown their reality and independence by opposing government demands. The electoral basis of an Imperial Assembly has been provided. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the steady, resolute, methodical Chinese, with their unrivalled genius for organisation, will make a success of the constitutional experiment. In all Asia now, with the exception of Siam and Afghanistan, the only countries which are denied a constitutional Government are
Page – 248 those which have not vindicated their national freedom. Even in Afghanistan the first ineffective stirrings of life have been and will grow to something formidable before many years are over. We wonder whether Lord Morley and his advisers really believe that when they are surrounded by a free and democratic Asia, the great Indian race can be kept in a state of tutelage and snail-paced advancement, much less put off to a future age in the dim mists of a millennial futurity to which the penetrating vision of the noble and Radical Lord cannot pierce. The worst opponents of Indian freedom know well what this Asiatic constitutionalism means, and therefore the Englishman struggles, in the face of continual disappointment, to foresee the speedy collapse of Nationalism and Parliamentary Government in Persia, Turkey and even Japan as the inevitable fate of an institution foreign to the Asiatic genius, which is popularly supposed to recoil from freedom and hug most lovingly the heaviest chains.
For some time past the Native States of Rajputana and Punjab have been vying with each other in promulgations and legislations of a drastic character against sedition and conspiracy. The object of these edicts seems to be to stifle all agitation or semblance of any political thought and activity that may be directed against the existing state of things not in the States themselves but in British India. Otherwise, it is impossible to account for the Draconian severity of the language and substance of these ukases or the foolish thoroughness of some of the measures adopted, such as the prohibition of entry even to colourless papers like the Bengalee. The exponents of Anglo-Indian opinion point triumphantly to these measures both as a proof of aristocratic loyalty to British officialdom and as an index of the severity with which the agitation would be visited if, instead of the misplaced leniency of British bureaucrats, we were exposed to the ruthlessness of an indigenous government. As every Indian knows, these self-gratulations are insincere and meaningless. The majority of Native States are wholly under the thumb of the
Page – 249 Resident and, with the exception of one or two independent princes, like the Gaekwar, neither Maharaja nor Council of Administration can call their souls their own. On all this comes the commotion in Patiala. The Patiala conspiracy has yet to be proved to be more real than the Midnapur specimen. But, if all is true that is being asserted in the Punjab press as to the refusal of the most ordinary privileges of defence to the numerous accused and the amazing and successful defiance of High Court orders by Mr. Warburton, the police are not going the best way to convince the public opinion on this point. The facts stated amount to a gross and shameless denial of justice. We do not blame the young Maharaja for his inability to interfere in favour of the oppressed victims of police rule. We know how helpless the princes are in the face of an Anglo-Indian Resident or employee and we wholly discredit the newspaper assertion that these strange proceedings were initiated or are willingly countenanced by him. It was first asserted that — as usual ! — the police had full evidence and information in their hands. The present delay and sufferings entailed prove sufficiently that they had nothing of the kind — again, as usual. The arrested Arya Samajists may be innocent or guilty, but the procedure used against them would be tolerated in no country where law and equity were supreme.
The extraordinary story from Daulatpur of a dacoity by young men of good family, sons of Government servants, is the strangest that has yet been handled by the detective ability of a very active police — more active, if not successful, we are afraid, in cases of this kind than those in which the dacoits are of a less interesting character. The details as first published read more like a somewhat gruesome comic opera, than anything else. Dacoits who wear gold watches and gold spectacles on their hazardous expeditions, dacoits who talk English so as to give a clue to their identity, dacoits who turn up at a railway station wearing gold watches, bare-footed and stained with mud, dacoits
Page – 250 who carry in their pockets bloodcurdling oaths neatly written out for the police to read in case they are caught, are creatures of so novel and eccentric a character that they must have either come out of a farcical opera or escaped from the nearest lunatic asylum. The later accounts modify some of the more startling features of the first, but until the story for the prosecution is laid before the Courts, thoroughly known and thoroughly tested, sensational headlines and graphic details are apt to mislead.
The elevation of Mr. Krishnaswamy Aiyar to the Bench some short time ago was the occasion for some comments from the Moderate Press highly eulogistic of the man and the choice. Mr. Aiyar was a successful lawyer and a capable man and we have no doubt his elevation was justified. But the curious habit of ultra-Moderate politicians gravitating to the Bench is a survival of those idyllic times when a judgeship or a seat in the Legislative Council was the natural goal of the political leader who rose by opposing the Government. This harmony between place and patriotism, opposition and preferment was natural to those times for whose return the lovers of the peaceful past sigh in vain. Mr. Krishnaswamy Aiyar belonged to the old school and his final consummation is natural and laudable. But our object in writing is not so much to praise Mr. Aiyar as to suggest to the Government that, if they would similarly promote Sir Pherozshah Mehta, they would be rewarding a loyal champion and at the same time conferring a boon on the country. Farther, if only done in time, it might save the Convention from going to pieces.
Dr. U. N. Mukherji recently published a very interesting brochure in which he tried to prove that the Hindus were a dying race and would do well to imitate the social freedom and equality of the still increasing Mahomedans. Srijut Kishorilal Sarcar
Page – 251 has gone one better and proves to us by equally cogent statistics that not only the Hindus but the Mahomedans are a dying race, — even if the Hindus be in some places a little more rapid in the race for extinction than the followers of Islam. With all respect to the earnestness of these two gentlemen we think it would have been well if they had been less strenuous in their discouraging interpretations and chosen a less positive title. The real truth is that, owing to an immense transition being effected under peculiarly unfavourable conditions, both communities, but chiefly the more progressive Hindu, are in a critical stage in which various deep-seated maladies have come to the surface, with effects of an inevitable though lamentable character. None of these maladies is mortal and the race is not dying. But the knife of the surgeon is needed and it is to the remedy rather than the diagnosis that attention should be pointedly directed. The mere decline in the rate of increase is in itself nothing. It is a phenomenon which one now sees becoming more and more marked all the world over and it is only countries backward in development and education which keep up the old rate of increase. The unfit tend to multiply, the fit to be limited in propagation. This is an abnormal state of things which indicates something wrong in modern civilisation. But, whatever the malady is, it is not peculiar to Hindus or to India, but a world-wide disease.
The extraordinary commotion in Europe over the execution of the enthusiast and idealist Ferrer, — a judicial murder committed by Court Martial, — has revealed a force in Europe with which statesmen and Governments will have very soon to deal on pain of extinction. We have no sympathy with the philosophy or practice of Anarchism, holding, as we do, that the Anarchist philosophy is some millenniums ahead of the present possible evolution of humanity and the Anarchist practice some millenniums behind. But Señor Francisco Ferrer was no mere Anarchist. He was a man of high enthusiasms and ideas, engaged, at great sacrifice and, as it turns out, risk to himself, in freeing the Page – 252 Spanish mind by education from the fetters of that bigoted Clericalism which has been the ruin of Spain. For a man of this kind — a man of eminent culture and unstained character, the friend and fellow worker of distinguished men all over the occidental world, — to be shot without any reputable evidence by a military tribunal regardless of universal protest, was an outrage on civilisation and an insult to European culture. Such an incident, however, might have happened formerly with no result but a few indignant articles in the Continental Liberal Press. This time it has awakened a demonstration all over the Western world which is, we think, unprecedented in history. The solidarity and deep feeling in that demonstration means that the huge inert Leviathan, on whose patient back the aristocratic and middle class of Europe have built the structure of their polity and society, is about to move. When he really uplifts his giant bulk, what will become of the structure ? Will it not tumble into pieces off his back and be swallowed up in the waters of a world-wide revolution ?
It is curious that England, which was, a little while ago, the most conservative and individualistic of nations, the least forward in the race towards socialism, should now be the foremost. The socialistic Radical, the forerunner of insurgent Leviathan, is in the Cabinet and has framed a Budget. The Budget is the pivot on which English progress has turned from the beginning. The power of the purse in the hands of the Commons has been the chief lever for the gradual erection of a limited democracy. The same power is now being used for the gradual introduction of a modified socialism, and, by a curious provision of Fate, seems destined to be also the occasion for the final destruction of one at least of the two remaining restrictions on democracy, the veto of the Lords and the limitation of the suffrage. The Lords were bound to oppose the Budget, for the triumph of socialism means the destruction of the aristocracy. The Lords, therefore, have either to fight or to fall; and the pathos of their situation is that,
Page – 253 in all probability, the choice is not theirs and that, whether they fight or not, they cannot but fall. The Lords have only continued to exist because they were discreet enough to lie low and give a minimum of trouble. As for the limitation of the suffrage, it is not at all unlikely that the daring and unscrupulous campaign of the suffragettes may end in the concession of universal suffrage. For, if women are given the vote, the proletariate will not be content to remain without it. They too can lift crowbars and hammers and break glass roofs !
The end of the great struggle between the last representative of European autocracy and the insurgent Demos, is not yet. At present the Czar holds the winning cards. The mismanagement of the Revolution by a people unaccustomed to political action has put advantages into his hands to which he has no right. But it is significant that the revolution still smoulders. As Carlyle wrote of the French Revolution, it is unquenchable and cannot be stamped down, for the fire-spouts that burst out are no slight surface conflagration but the flames of the pit of Tophet. Murder and hatred rising from below to strike at murder and tyranny striking from above, that is the Russian Revolution. Had another man than a Romanoff, the race obstinate and unteachable, sat on the throne at St. Petersburg, the victory of the autocracy after such imminent and deadly peril would have been surely used to prevent, by healing measures and perfectly spontaneous concessions, a repetition of the sanguinary struggle. It is probably the last opportunity Fate will concede to the Czar Nicholas and it is a great opportunity. But he will not take it and in the shadow forces are again gathering which are likely in the end to destroy him. The Czarina is sleepless in deadly anxiety for the safety of her child; the Czar, leaving her behind, enters Italy and is guarded by an army. In Russia the Ministry balances itself on the top of a frail edifice crowning the volcano that still sputters below. One wonders why they should think it worth their while to bolster up sanguinary injustice for a season at so huge a cost.
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Again the powers that be have committed a blunder. If any of the wise men who weave the tangled web of Anglo-Indian statesmanship at Simla, had a little common sense to salt their superior wisdom, they would never have allowed the strong feeling against the removal of Buddha’s ashes to vent itself so long in public expression without an assurance at least of favourable consideration. We have waited long for that simple and natural act of statesmanship, but in vain. It is such a trivial matter in itself, concession would be so graceful, natural and easy; yet the harm done by perverseness and churlishness is so immense ! We wonder whether our official Governors ever think. It is very easy. What would they feel if the bones of a great Englishman, say, the Duke of Wellington, were so treated ! But the diseased attachment to prestige and the reputation of an assured wisdom and an inflexible power have sealed up the eyes of those in high places.
All India and especially Bengal owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Hassan Imam for his strong, manly and sensible remarks on the vexed question of students and politics as President of the Beharee Students Conference at Gaya. Contrast this honest utterance and robust recognition of unalterable facts with the fencings, refinements and unreal distinctions of Mr. Gokhale’s utterance. The difference is between a man with an eye and a clear practical sense and a mere intellectual, a man of books and words and borrowed thoughts, proud of his gift of speech and subtlety of logic, but unable to penetrate a fact even when he sees it. With Mr. Hassan Imam a strong personal force enters the field of politics.
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