-16_Mr Mackarness Bill.htm

WE FIND in India to hand by mail last week the full text of Mr. Mackarness’ speech in introducing the Bill by which he proposes to amend the Regulation of 1818 and safeguard the liberties of the subject in India. We are by no means enamoured of the step which Mr. Mackarness has taken. We could have understood a proposal to abolish the regulation entirely and disclaim the necessity or permissibility of coercion in India. This would be a sound Liberal position to take, but it would not have the slightest chance of success in England and would be no more than an emphatic form of protest not expected or intended to go farther. British Liberalism is and has always been self-regarding, liberal at home, hankering after benevolent despotism and its inevitable consummation in dependencies. To ask Liberal England to give up the use of coercion in emergencies would be to ask it to contradict a deep-rooted instinct. We could have understood, again, a Bill which while leaving the Government powers of an extraordinary nature to deport the subject, under careful safeguards, in unusual and well-defined circumstances and for no more than a fixed period, would yet leave the aggrieved subject an opportunity after his release of vindicating his character and, if it appeared that he had been deported unwarrantably and without due inquiry or in spite of complete innocence, of obtaining fitting compensation. Such an act would meet both the considerations of State and the considerations of justice. It would leave the Government ample power in emergencies but would take from it the freedom to deport out of caprice, panic or unscrupulous reactionism. Deportation would then be a rare act of State necessity, not an autocratic lettre de cachet used to bolster up injustice or crush all opposition to the continuance of autocratic absolutism. Mr. Mackarness’ Bill seems to us to leave the essence of deportation just where it was

Page-96

before. The changes made are purely palliative and palliative not of the unjust, irritating and odious character of the measure but of the apparent monstrosity of deporting a man without even letting him or his friends or the world know what charge lay against him or whether any charge lay against him. It is this which gives an ultra-Russian character to the Regulation and makes the Liberal conscience queasy. The proposed changes are a salve to that conscience, not a benefit to the victim of deportation. It makes his position, if anything, worse. It is bad to be punished without any charge, it is worse to be punished on a charge which you are debarred to all time from disproving.

There are three changes which the Bill contemplates. Instead of being able to confine a man until farther orders the Viceroy has to renew his sanction every three months, a change which may have some deterrent effect on a Viceroy with a Liberal conscience but to others will mean merely a quarterly expenditure of a drop of ink and a few strokes of the pen. Another and more important change is the provision that, to qualify for deportation, “a British subject must be reasonably suspected of having been guilty of treasonable practices or of a crime punishable by law, being an act of violence or intimidation and tending to interfere with or disturb the maintenance of law and order”. “That” thinks Mr. Mackarness “insures in the first place that a man must have been guilty of some definite offence. At any rate it is intended to provide for that.” Unfortunately the intention is all, there is no real provision for carrying it out, except the clause that the warrant shall contain a definite statement of the character of the crime. How will this clause help the alleged intention of the Bill? It is only the character of the crime that has to be defined and, if the authorities relying on a Mazarul Haq or a Rakhal Laha frame a charge say against Srijut Surendranath Banerji of waging war or abetting or conspiring to wage war or financing unlawful assemblies and incontinently deport him, would the Liberal conscience be satisfied? Or would it be possible for the Moderate leader to meet this charge, however definite in character? It is evident that to carry out the “intention” of the Bill it would be necessary to name the specific act or acts which constitute the

Page-97

offence and the time and circumstances of commission, for it is only a precise accusation that can be met. Even if the charge be precise in its terms, Mr. Mackarness’ Bill provides no redress to the deportee. All that he can do is to submit a “representation” to the officials who have deported him. Those who know the ways of the bureaucrat can tell beforehand the inevitable answer to such representations, “The Government have considered your representation and see no cause to alter the conclusions they had arrived at upon sufficient and reliable information.” So the deportation will stand, the charge will stand and the last condition of the deportee will be worse than his first. The only advantage the Bill will secure is the greater opportunities for effective heckling in the House of Commons if facts can be secured which throw doubt on the charge; but the Government has always the answer that its evidence is reliable and conclusive but for reasons of State policy it is not advisable to disclose either its nature or its sources, and the relics of the Liberal conscience will be satisfied. As things stand the deportations have made even some Imperialistic consciences uneasy and that advantage will be lost under the new Bill.

Mr. Mackarness has admitted that the regulations are absolutely hateful and he would prefer to propose their entire abolition if such a proposal had any chance of acceptance by a British House of Commons. His amendments will not make them less hateful, they will only make them less calmly absurd. That is a gain to the Government, not to us or to justice. The only provisions that would make deportation a reasonable though still autocratic measure of State would be to allow the Viceroy to deport a person, stating the charge against him, for a period of not more than six months and oblige the Government to provide the deportee on release with full particulars as to the nature of the information on which he was deported, so that he might seek redress against malicious slander by individuals or, if it were considered impolitic to disclose the sources of information, for wanton and arbitrary imprisonment by the authorities. The measure would still be oppressive but it would then give some chance to an aggrieved and innocent man, so

Page-98

long as a sense of justice and some tradition of independence still linger in the higher tribunals of the land. Such a measure would have been a moderate measure and would have left the essential absolutism of Government in India unchanged. But even to this the Bill does not rise. It is noticeable that the only Irish Nationalist whose name was on the Bill repudiated it as soon as he heard Mr. Mackarness’ speech, on the ground that he had been under the impression that the Bill went much farther than was now stated. The other names were those of British Liberals or Conservatives. This is significant of the difference between the sympathy we may expect even from conscientious English Liberals and the real fellow-feeling of a Nationalist who has himself known what it is to live under the conditions of bureaucratic coercion. Mr. Mackarness has fought the cause of the deportees in the spirit of genuine Liberalism, but his Bill is a concession to that watery British substitute for it which is only Imperialism afraid of its convictions.

——————

OTHER WRITINGS BY SRI AUROBINDO IN THIS ISSUE