1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  During those tumultuous times, there was a great unrest in the masses as the British despotic rule had exhausted their forbearance and patience; they could not accept a foreign power taking over their life & liberty. Until then, the foreign raiders were simply viewed as ‘birds of passage’ and the people tolerated them; but the British had stayed too long. The Indians tolerated their presence for so long because their culture was built on patience and non-violence.

  The Mutiny of 1857 was a warning sign to Britain that their rule was despotic and that they had lost the trust of the population. Instead, they decided to rule by force which galvanized the native resolve further to drive the British out of the country. On the other hand, in pursuit of wealth and good times, the British hubris ignored the warning signs; they were skeptical of the native resolve and stayed detached from the reality. They did not think that the natives could do much harm to the entrenched regime. The natives viewed the exploitation of India’s vast resources by a foreign power, as an attack on their nationalism. The dual between the British and the natives was fully set and there was no going back. The dual was full of contrasts, on the one hand was an imperial power not answerable to any one, and basking in the glow of victories and unparalleled prosperity. On the other hand were the natives, who had suffered with unimaginable poverty, hunger, chronic shortages, famines and deprivations. It was an unequal match and in that political climate, the first meeting of the Indian National Congress was held at Bombay in 1885, seeking freedom from the foreign rule. The formation of a political party itself was a singular achievement in itself because no political activity of any kind was tolerated by the British.

  India was being ruled by a unipolar power and they did not tolerate any challenge to their rule. The British bureaucracy did not take it well, they thought it was sedition. For Congress the meeting was a modest start but it caught the imagination of the country. People saw hope in their future where there was none, it invigorated the masses and yearning for freedom got intensified and political activity spread rapidly throughout the country. By 1900, the Congress was able to organize itself all over the country politically. The Congress told the British that it had fastened a colonial economy on their nation, which had impoverished the country. Initially, the British reacted violently and to curb the political activity, they partitioned the province of Bengal. Bengal was the seat of power of the British Presidency, people were politically challenged and they took that challenge seriously. The British used their age old tactic of divide and rule but the old strategy proved ineffective and the opposition to their rule became a raging political storm. The British could not have done worse in fanning the flames of political dissent and revolt.

  They then tried to build up alliances with the rich and the educated, which were a small number compared to the three hundred fifty million strong native populations. They were appeasing the Indian aristocracy on the fallacious assumption that the masses, the humbler classes, will follow them. Sensing the weakness in Indians for prestige and power, they started dolling out lofty sounding titles to their toddies and lackeys. The British also stoked the vanity of many Nawabs and Rajas by calling them Maharajas. The British instituted the Order of the Star of India (with Queen Victoria as its Sovereign and the Viceroy as the grand Master) and held huge Durbars (Imperial Assembly) to which the princes were invited. India fascinated Queen Victoria; she called her the jewel in the crown for all the money the British were raking in. It was in fact the whole diamond mine. She hired the Indian servants; India was her largest colony, which provided the country with power, prestige and prosperity. It fascinated the British populace too.

  In 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed the Empress of India. India was swallowed by the British and India became British India. In 1903 Edward VII was proclaimed the Emperor and in 1911, King George V and Queen Mary visited India to underline the majesty, pomp and authority of the British Crown and to put a stamp on their Indian ownership. The British nation now owned India and Queen Victoria proclaimed that all her subjects would be treated equally but she could not match her high-flying rhetoric with her low flying governance. Her rule offered little hope or inspiration and could not dispel native anxieties, nor the natives saw any improvement in their lives. Those self-serving declarations only stoked the fears of revolt. The contempt of the British, both racially & culturally, towards the Indians was wide spread and those statements sounded hypocritical and without merit. The test came when the Ilbert Bill, putting the Indian judges at par with the British, inflamed the racial tensions and the British bureaucracy and the commercial community exploded in anger as the British refused to fall for the hypocrisy of their own government.

  They thought that the greed and misjudgments, call it imperial hubris, would defy the law of politics and it blinded them to the fact that they had outlived their welcome. In pursuit of commercial, economic and pecuniary interests, the British devastated the local economy and people were living a life of bare existence, they got paid just enough to subsist, night after night, and nothing else and they held the British responsible for their misery. In response, the British adopted a dual policy of force and negotiations and the negotiations were stage managed on their terms with no result. The British rule became a despotic regime; they brought in sepoys’ from the ranks of Gurkhas, Baluchis and the rest from the South to exploit the regional hatreds and differences. The North India, where the freedom movement was concentrated, suffered daily at the hands of the military force. Typically, those ‘sepoys’ were commanded by a single white soldier, called ‘Tommy’, and every day scores of peaceful citizens were shot to death in different parts of the country and peaceful protests were met with brute force without any warning. The freedom fighters were jailed daily and some were flogged and banished from the country and exiled to Burma or the Andaman Islands which served as the British penal colony. In those days, the British authority prevailed, there were no human rights commissions or the United Nations or other watch dogs and there was no spot light on the British rule, with the result that they were able to get away with all kind of brutalities. Britain acted both the judge and the jury and the natives had no recourse to justice. It was a helpless and a hopeless situation.

  The period before the First world war and the decades between the two world wars were economically depressed times and the British knew that the Second World War was on the horizon, so they resorted to repatriating as much capital out of India as possible. The money went out of India in the form of capital and profits, revenue streams, salaries and pensions of civil and military personnel who were given exorbitant salaries bearing no relation to the local economy, dumped British manufactured goods and took money out of India to provide for the army. At the same time, they stopped spending any money, even for the bare essentials, such as on education, infrastructure and social needs, while the population was increasing. Birkenhead, the Secretary of State for India (1924-28) emphatically stated that ‘he believed that if Britain lost India it would be a tragedy of inconceivable magnitude’. Under those circumstances, there was little room for mutual trust and progress and the stage was set for a collision of an all-powerful ruler and the teeming millions who were totally impoverished.

  At the end of First World War, the British administration conscious of the atrocities they committed in India, resorted to preventive mass arrests on the fear that the returning soldiers might join the freedom movement. The soldiers particularly alarmed the British and they started prosecuting them and the natives on false suspicion of violence and sedition. People felt used, they had spilled blood trying to protect the British nation and not only that they were ungrateful but deceitful and devoid of morality. Over a million had served in the battlefield where sixty thousand made the ultimate sacrifice and instead of being welcomed as heroes they were being put in the slammer on the British false fear of sedition. The British curbed the movement of prominent natives so that their influence on the youth was neutralized. The daily lives of the natives beca
me increasingly unbearable and in that climate, they staged strikes, hartals (business closure), meetings and processions. Gandhi had just appeared on the Indian political scene. His movements were controlled and on April 13, 1919 the British committed a very heinous crime. It was a day of celebration and merry making, when the natives were celebrating their Baisakhi festival. Baisakhi was a day of joy after the crops were harvested, when people put on their best clothes and danced in their fields late in the night to the tune of drum beats, they danced their famous bangra dances and the rhythm and the melodies captivated the family gatherings of the young and the old. On that Sunday of festivities, they assembled in a garden, a private property of Sardar Himmat Singh, who was a noble in the Court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It was a community meeting to express their concern of the British brutality of mass arrests and ingratitude. That garden, soon became a crime scene of horrible proportions and that incident’ became known as Jallianwala Bagh ‘massacre’.

  Brig.General Dyer of the British army wanted to teach the natives a lesson possibly on orders of Birkenhead; the British Secretary of State for India, whose job it was to ensure that the British nation did not lose India. Soon after the meeting started, Dyer appeared on the scene with a force of fifty Gurkhs and Baluchi soldiers with a machine gun in its tow. Dyer brought the Gurkhas because they were Nepalese and not Indians and the Baluchis belonged to the lawless region of India ruled by war lords, which is the case even today. Dyer wanted to make sure that his orders will not be disobeyed. The garden was an enclosed property with high walls and one gate for exit. The gate was blocked with the machine gun and Dyer ordered the soldiers to open fire and aim to kill. One thousand six hundred and fifty rounds were fired and they mowed down men, women and children. One thousand people lost their lives, in an assembly of some fifteen thousand people and five hundred were critically wounded. Other than raising the issue in the native Legislative Assembly, the natives had no recourse and after a brief inquiry in London, General Dyer was totally exonerated. After all he was carrying out the orders of his superior. There was no criminal court in Hague those days and the British got away with a lot of atrocities. That incident continued to reverberate in shaping the response of the natives to their freedom struggle and it was a live issue throughout their remaining regime. In a very perverse way the British kick started the India’s freedom movement because the natives were really in sensed over that massacre, particularly the Sikhs who had helped the British regain Delhi during the Mutiny. Baisakhi was to a large measure a Sikh festival in Punjab and they also formed a large contingent of the forces returning after the First World War and upon returning home they were prosecuted on phony trumpted charges. The glass really cracked for Britain over the massacre and there was no going back and the trust between the natives and the British was over.

  One of the first nationalist to challenge the British rhetoric was Lala Lajpat Rai (1865- 1928), a lawyer by profession, who rose up to oppose the British colonial rule. In 1905, during their general elections, he went to England, to appraise the British masses about the plight of the Indians under the British colonial rule. Lajpat Rai was naïve, he believed in what the British preached and went through a rude awakening. He did not find any sympathetic ear nor did he find that anyone was outraged. For them it was a choice whether a black man made the money or the white and that was no choice for them. He came to the realization that the British people were no different from their government, that their slogan of justice and fair play were just slogans, that the British justice was just a phony rhetoric, that they were united in action and that they had improved their lot at the expense of the Indian masses. On return from England in 1907, he was prosecuted, arrested and deported to Mandalay, Burma to remove him from the scene. The British did not want the contagion to spread. Lajpat Rai went through several arrests and incarcerations but the people were fascinated over his message and he became a leader in the freedom movement. In a protest meeting in 1928, over the arrival of the Simon Commission from England, he was beaten by a white constable and a few days later he succumbed to the injuries.

  In their delaying tactics, the British started sending delegations to India to study political reforms or they held conferences in London and sent missions to India with little result. Simon Commission was sent to India in 1927 to study the constitutional reforms and consisted of seven members of the British Parliament. People in India were outraged, that a commission which was constituted to study the future of India did not have a single Indian member. The Indian National Congress decided to boycott the Commission. The Commission Members arrived in Lahore on October 30, 1928, Lajpat Rai moved a resolution against the commission and in the ‘Lathi Charge’ (Lathi was a six foot long wooden pole, about three inches in diameter, with metal sleeves on both ends) to disperse the crowds, he received fatal blows on his head and succumbed to his injuries on Nov17, 1928. On his deathbed he declared “that the blows that fell on my head today were the last nails in the coffin of the British Imperialism”. His death bed message summed up the hatred the natives felt for the British. What a legacy after two hundred years of buccaneering rule.

  Such incidents created total mistrust and lack of faith in the British rule and any reconciliation slipped further and further away. The British made many ambivalent statements with numerous conditions and qualifications that it was impossible to determine whether they were serious at all. The British priorities were totally different from those of the natives. The British had come to India to enrich their nation, which they did very successfully and their aim was to maintain the status quo whereas the Indians wanted the freedom from their rule. Both the ‘Jallianwala Bag ‘incident and the death of Lala Lajpat Rai stirred up the emotions of the masses and particularly the youth in the state of Punjab, which was at the center of the Freedom Movement. They wanted to avenge the deaths and the humiliation and they started organizing a revolutionary movement.

  The Indian masses were also struggling to fashion a fitting response to the British brutality and for sometime, it appeared that the militant section of the population would take over the freedom movement. The youths in Punjab and Bengal States started organizing revolt groups and they adopted a radical approach to the freedom movement and that change in the political climate towards violent activities was solely the result of the British behavior towards the natives. A group of three freedom fighters did avenge the death of Lajpat Rai, but paid with their lives. Three freedom fighters, Rajguru, Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev were hanged by the British due to the death of a British police officer, during a demonstration protesting the Simon Commission.

  Gandhi at that time was promoting his non-violent movement, accompanied by civil disobedience. To underline his commitment to that goal, he set out for his Dundee March in October 1930, symbolizing his defiance of the British by making salt in India. People soon realized that a militant path would be self defeating and soon accepted the course laid down by Mahatma Gandhi. There after, the freedom struggle became peaceful as Gandhi relied mostly on peaceful protest and non-cooperation movement.

  The British also sent a very powerful message that they were not going anywhere by accelerating the construction of a brand new city, what today is called New Delhi. The British started indulging in architectural extravagance at the expense of India’s taxpayers. Put it differently, they were feeling very secure and had no plans to leave. The Royal Durbar was held on the northern outskirts of Old Delhi, the city of Mughal Emperors, where the King-Emperor announced that the capital of India would be transferred to Delhi, its historic center, from Calcutta. They were trying to put their rule in India in historic terms; they were trying to obliterate the buccaneering days of the British East India Company. It took some time to select the site in Delhi. Eventually, they picked the Raisina village, between Shahjahanabad and the Qutab Minar in South Delhi. Two famous architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, were engaged to building the city.

  Looking back if anyone had pred
icted then that the British rule would end in 1947, the person would have been considered insane. They built a brand new City, they built the Viceroy’s House (now called Rashtrapati Bhavan), they built another Whitehall, the North and South Block Secretariat to run the Imperial Empire and they built the great circular, colonnaded edifice where sit the two houses of the Indian Parliament. The construction started in 1911 and it was finished in 1932. One wondered whether they were secretly building the winter Whitehall in India, the tropical heaven during the mild Delhi weather. They also built Simla, the summer capital of the British India at 7000-ft elevation in the Himalayan Mountains and laid railroad tracks in the winding mountains. What a sight; one could see the winding tracks a thousand feet below in the valley; the train laboring the 60 miles in about six hours; the third toothed rail provided the safety. It was safe to say that they were planning to stay there forever. The new city was a sight to see, fancy bungalows, with multiple outhouses for servants, manicured lawns, gated driveways. They named the streets like Queen’s Way, The semi circle outside the Viceroy’s House was called the Willingdon Crescent, and the shopping area was called the Connaught Circle. Their Country Club was named Chelmsford Club. On the Secretariat wall, they put the following Imperial inscription: