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Art. 9.-THE OUTLOOK IN INDIA.

THE lurid manifestations of the Non-Cooperation movement have sensibly abated during the last two or three months, and flaring headlines about India have vanished from our newspapers. With other 'sensations' to turn to, people in this country are inclined to assume that, Gandhi having been arrested and Mr Montagu dismissed from the India Office-though there was no connexion whatever between the two events-the dark clouds which had gathered on the Indian horizon have happily dispersed, and that nothing more than a continuance of 'firm' government is required to restore the Indian people to a proper mood of placid contentment.

The surface waters are certainly less stormy. The belief had begun to gain ground in India, just as before the Mutiny, that the days of the British raj were numbered. When Lord Reading went out, he had more to learn than he was perhaps aware of. He promptly invited the apostle of Non-Cooperation to Simla and parleyed with him for a week, the one visible result being, not that the Viceroy had definitely prescribed to Gandhi the limits within which Non-Cooperation could be tolerated, but that Gandhi openly proclaimed a boycott of the Prince of Wales' visit as soon as it was officially announced. The rebuff to Lord Reading was all the more marked in that the visit was known to have been sanctioned from home on the Viceroy's insistent advice. Lord Reading was just as openly flouted by the Ali brothers, who for a time escaped prosecution by his acceptance of obviously fallacious 'assurances' of which they promptly demonstrated the futility by importing greater violence than ever into their Caliphate propaganda, until it culminated in the Moplah rising and the appalling outburst of Mohamedan fanaticism, of which the defenceless Hindus of the Malabar coast, who had never heard of the Treaty of Sèvres, had to bear the brunt. Gandhi's Swaraj propaganda, which appealed more to the Hindus than to the Mohamedans, permeated the peasantry, who were taught to believe-and how could they refuse to believe so saintly an ascetic?—that, with the advent of Swaraj, of which he eluded any precise definition, they would, if tenants, no longer have to

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pay any rents; if they were landless labourers, they would be able to help themselves to their employers' lands; if they were small ryotwari landowners, there would be no more land-tax. To the turbulent badmash element which has always existed in every Indian town, Swaraj meant simply the promise of all the most delectable forms of lawlessness. The local Non-Cooperation leaders set up their own organisations with their own bodies of Volunteers,' roughly disciplined and armed, and often wielded more effective authority than the District Officers and the small police force at their disposal. In some parts of the United Provinces, for instance, agrarian discontent, based, it must be admitted, on many legitimate grievances too long unredressed, broke out into widespread disturbances and the wanton burning of large tracts of State forests. In the Madras Presidency whole villages were worked up to refuse payment of land-tax. Curiously symptomatic was in some places the renewed resistance to vaccination and the refusal of customary local transport to all officials, even for the most urgent measures against cholera. Labour troubles and especially railway strikes assumed menacing proportions, and were clearly directed to subversive and not to economic ends. A general revolt against every form of authority was in the air.

Warnings from provincial governments to their local officers produced little effect at Delhi or Simla, until the Government of India was confronted with riots or threats of riots in many places scheduled for the Prince's tour. Such ghastly occurrences as those at Chauri-Chaura could not be hushed up; but very little news has been allowed to leak out of the less glaring instances of lawlessness and terrorism to which, for months together, Non-Cooperators subjected not only isolated European communities but all law-abiding Indians, too, who refused to toe the Swaraj-cum-Caliphate line.

friend, not usually an alarmist, wrote to me some six months ago: Things are coming here to much the same pass as in Russia during the Kerensky stage of the Revolution, and if nothing is done to arrest the disintegration of all authority, we may very soon slide down into Bolshevism.' The Prince's visit, however, compelled Government to tighten the reins if only, in

the first place, to avert a repetition of the disgraceful scenes which marred his arrival in Bombay, and in a less degree in Madras. It was gradually driven to realise that the first duty of a Government-whether composed entirely of Europeans as it was formerly, or partly of Europeans and partly of Indians as it is now, or entirely of Indians as it may be when India has attained Dominion self-government-is to govern, i.e. to secure law and order and safety for every peaceful citizen from intimidation and violence. A sustained endeavour has now been made to set the law in motion, not only against obscure offenders who were often merely the ignorant tools of the leading agitators, but against the latter as well. Large numbers have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted, and most of the local organisations and their 'Volunteer' corps broken up, and, in the worst districts, considerable bodies of troops have been marched through the country as an ocular demonstration to the unruly masses that constitutional changes do not mean the abdication of the Raj.

These drastic measures have been effective. Gandhi's arrest, when the Viceroy, who had long been given a free hand, at last authorised it, created little excitement. But it was none the less a definite set-back to the Swaraj wing of Non-Cooperation, which was left, for the time being at least, without any leader to wear his mantle. The rump of the Indian National Congress, which only a few months ago was ready to invest him with the powers of a dictator, still whistles to keep up its courage, but it is clearly disintegrating; and those who traded upon his saintliness in the hope of precipitating a great political upheaval, are realising that, like many other short cuts, Non-Cooperation as a short cut to revolution has been a failure. Not so, however, the Caliphate or Mohamedan wing of the Non-Cooperation movement. It has the satisfaction of having seen a large part of its programme.in connexion with the Turkish settlement endorsed by the Government of India and the Secretary of State; and, if Mr Montagu stumbled into a pitfall for his pains, Lord Reading, who had, of course quite unwittingly, helped to push him into it, remained to uphold the policy which the Secretary of State was dismissed for having ventured to make public in a manner

repugnant to the canons of Cabinet procedure. An agitation which can boast such a large measure of success in shaping the policy of the British Government on a great international issue is not likely to die down because it has been shorn of some of its leaders and, if the Ali brothers' career was cut short even before Gandhi's, they got off-such are the mysterious uncertainties of the law--with a much shorter term of imprisonment than Gandhi did a few months later, though he, at any rate, is an honest, if very mischievous, dreamer, and always professed, however paradoxically, to abhor violence. If any stay-at-home Englishman wants to realise the white heat to which Mohamedan passion has been worked up, let him read Mr Edmund Candler's last book 'Abdication,' a grim study from life of the psychology of present-day racial hatred in India, and of the methods by which the Caliphate leaders disseminated the virus-stories eagerly swallowed of 'the Mohamedan sepoy who fell at Ctesiphon, and whose face became as the snout of a pig,' or of the English soldiers remaining in Baghdad and Jerusalem, 'swilling wine, defiling the House of God, violating Moslem women,' whilst Indian Mohamedans were sent forward 'to slay their Turkish brothers,' and, as a constant refrain for Hindus as well as for Mohamedans, the tale of Jullianwala, ghastly enough in itself, and distorted and loaded with a nauseating wealth of imaginary details.

Less elaborate, but not less forcible, than Mr Candler's picture of the Caliphate campaign, was Sir William Vincent's indictment of its leaders in the National Assembly at Delhi when he was goaded, a few weeks ago, into blurting out the truth by a Mohamedan member who ventured to move for the release of Mohamed and Shaukat Ali. The language of the Home Member of the Government of India is worth quoting in full:

'When I think of the treasonable practices of these two men [the Ali brothers] during the Great War when the fate of the Empire was at stake; when I think of the secret support and encouragement they gave to the King's enemies when hundreds of thousands of British and Indian soldiers were daily risking and sacrificing their lives; when I think of the poor Muhajirin [Mohamedans whom the Ali brothers persuaded to emigrate en masse out of an "Infidel "-ruled India

into Afghanistan] whose bones are lying about the Khyber and on the road to Kabul because they listened to these two men who themselves never did a Hijrat [pilgrimage] further than Paris and London; when I think of the money extorted from the poor Mohamedans of this country and squandered in Europe and elsewhere of which no recorded account has ever been published up to this day; when I think lastly of the unfortunate Hindus dishonoured and killed in Malabar, and the Moplahs themselves, innocent in a way because misled, driven to death and ruin at the instigation of Mohamed Ali, Shaukat Ali, and those who think with them, I marvel at the gross ignorance and folly of the Moslem population that recognises such men as leaders.'

One may marvel equally that, knowing this, or most of this, Viceroys should have accepted Mohamed Ali as the acknowledged spokesman of the Moslem population of India, and have allowed him to come to Europe and address British Ministers as the head of an All-Indian Caliphate Deputation. Imprisonment has not yet divested these men of the baneful authority which they were so long allowed to assume with impunity over their Indian co-religionists. The spirit which they infused into the Caliphate agitation still breathes to-day as fiercely as ever in their principal newspapers, which declare more loudly than ever that it is not the Paris proposals, but Angora's treaties with Soviet Russia which will secure Turkey's real independence, and that Islam can never be appeased until every trace of British authority, civil and military, has been swept out of all the Arab lands which were its cradle and the supremacy of the Caliph Sultan restored throughout them. That there are more sober elements amongst Indian Mohamedans who, without concealing a natural sympathy with their Turkish coreligionists, deplore the power wielded by such firebrands, and who doubt the wisdom of identifying the cause of Islam with that of Turkey, need not be denied. But their voice is seldom heard, and only in timid and uncertain accents. Sir William Vincent reduced his opponent to silence in the Delhi Assembly, and very few Mohamedan members in any of the Indian Legislatures have ever cared to associate themselves closely with the Caliphate movement. But still fewer have emulated the courage of one Mohamedan deputy who frankly

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