‘Reserved’ categories included finance, law and order, justice, development of mineral resources, factories, and the control/censorship of books, films and newspapers. Thus, in practice, every major economic and political subject was under the direct control of the governor and his advisers. ‘Transferred’ categories included health and education, agriculture and fisheries, and such fields as ‘weights and measures; libraries, museums, and zoological gardens’.6
The franchise on which the members of provincial legislatures would be elected was based on a property and income qualification, which excluded the vast majority of the population. For example, of the 42 million residents of the Madras Presidency, only half a million would be voters; of the 20 million in the Punjab, a mere 237,000. Prosperous Bombay was slightly better served—with about 650,000 voters in a population of 21 million (this still less than 4 per cent). Women were excluded altogether, since the government felt that ‘the social conditions of India’ made it ‘premature’ to extend the franchise to them. (Women in Britain had only just been permitted to vote.)
Montagu’s scheme for self-government was massively watered down by the viceroy and his council. His daring, even revolutionary, proposal to elevate Sir S.P. Sinha to his own post was not accepted by the prime minister. Instead, Sinha was appointed undersecretary of state for India, serving as Montagu’s deputy so that it remained clear to all concerned (not least Montagu) that Indians needed guidance and direction from above.
II
In October 1917, the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia. This increased the already intense paranoia of the Government of India. In December, it appointed a committee to inquire into ‘the nature and extent of the criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement in India’, and to advise on the legislation needed to deal effectively with the (real or imaginary) threat this movement posed.
These revolutionaries were most active in Bengal, where young Hindus, devoted to Goddess Kali and to a cult of sacrifice, had formed secret societies where they manufactured bombs and plotted murders of colonial officials. Their activities achieved mixed success: although many acts were planned, few were successfully carried out.7
The new committee was to be chaired by Justice Sidney Rowlatt, a high court justice in England. It had four other members, two British, two Indian. Edwin Montagu was in Bombay when Justice Rowlatt’s ship landed. When they met, the liberal politician explained to the judge that ‘government by means of internment and police was naturally a delightful method which built up only trouble for our successors, and that I hoped he would remember what was parliamentarily defensible in listening to the plan which had been prepared for him by the Government’.8
The advice was disregarded. In April 1918, Justice Rowlatt submitted his report to the Government of India. The first part, replete with charts and tables, documented acts of violence such as assassinations, murders, dacoities and bomb attacks. There was one chapter apiece on revolutionary activities in Bombay, Madras, the United Provinces and the Punjab, but five chapters on Bengal alone.
The evidence assembled by his committee, said Justice Rowlatt, showed ‘that the intentions of the revolutionaries were eventually to subvert by violent means British rule in India, and meanwhile to assassinate Government officials, to obtain such help as might be obtainable from the Indian army, and to finance their enterprises by plundering their fellow-countrymen’.
Until the outbreak of the World War, the troublemakers had all been Hindus. However, when the War found Turkey and Britain on opposite sides, some Muslims also became disaffected with the Raj. Now, ‘Muhammadan fanatics’ were working ‘to provoke first sedition and then rebellion in India’.
The second part of the Rowlatt report outlined ways to tame and defeat revolutionary terrorism. Noting ‘the remarkable length of trials in India’, Justice Rowlatt recommended that seditious crimes be tried by a three-judge bench without juries. ‘It is of the utmost importance,’ he argued, ‘that punishment or acquittal should be speedy, both in order to secure the moral effect which punishment should produce and also to prevent the prolongation of the excitement which the proceedings may set up.’ His committee suggested that all trials be held in camera; that the press and the public be excluded; and that no part of the proceedings be disclosed.9
When a copy of the report reached Edwin Montagu in London, he was dismayed. ‘There is much in its recommendations which is most repugnant to my mind,’ he wrote to the viceroy. During the War, the government had promulgated a Defence of India Act which mandated restricted liberties and strict censorship; why, asked Montagu, had Rowlatt retained these harsh provisions even though the War was coming to an end? Invoking by name two of the more reactionary governors in India (of Madras and Punjab), Montagu said he would ‘hate to give the Pentlands of this world and the O’Dwyers the chance of locking a man up without trial’.
The viceroy wrote back defending the report. In ‘the face of the Bengal anarchic movement’, he said, ‘it would be impossible for my Government to do otherwise than come forward with legislation carrying out the [Rowlatt] Committee’s recommendations’. He hoped the secretary of state would assent to the proposed legislation, which was required (in his view) ‘to defend our friends in India from the criminal few’.10
III
In the first months of 1918, Gandhi was active in the Kheda and Ahmedabad satyagrahas. At the time, he was apparently not aware of the Rowlatt Committee. The committee’s report was for restricted circulation; while Montagu got a copy, Gandhi and other Indian leaders would not have been sent one.
Gandhi spent the second half of 1918 mostly in his ashram in Ahmedabad. He had a bad bout of dysentery, and did not recover in time to attend the 1918 Congress, held in December in Calcutta. The following month, Gandhi went to Bombay to be operated on for piles. He was sedated, and slept fitfully. Mahadev Desai, by his hospital bedside, heard him speaking in his sleep. Mahadev, characteristically, began to take notes. We thus know that ‘the last outburst during [Gandhi’s] delirium was very significant: “These two things are a ‘must’ for the Government. It has to annul the Salt Tax and nationalize the milk industry. It passes my understanding how such a cruel tax as this on salt was meekly accepted by the people. The whole country could have been inflamed to revolt against the Government at the time the law was passed. How could there be a tax on salt so indispensable to human life?”’11
From Bombay, Gandhi proceeded to Ahmedabad for a month of rest and recuperation. While he was there, the government published two bills based on the recommendations of the Rowlatt Committee. Now that the bills were public, Gandhi immediately recognized the opportunity for popular mobilization that they represented. His dream in Bombay seemed to convey a desire to take up a cause that would affect all of India. The Salt Act could wait: why not inflame the country to revolt against this new bill instead?
In South Africa, Gandhi had often challenged particular laws: a law which mandated that Indians carried passes, a law that disallowed Hindu and Muslim marriages, a law that made every Indian labourer pay a tax. In India itself, he had conducted three localized satyagrahas: with indigo farmers in Champaran; peasants in Kaira; and workers in Ahmedabad. However, like the Salt Tax, the Rowlatt Act affected not one particular district but the whole of British India. A movement against it would allow Gandhi to define—or redefine—himself as a national leader.
On 8 February 1919, Gandhi wrote to Madan Mohan Malaviya proposing a countrywide agitation against the ‘obnoxious’ Rowlatt Bills if they were not withdrawn. The next day he told Srinivasa Sastri that Malaviya and he should resign from the Imperial Legislative Council in protest. The Rowlatt Bills, said Gandhi, were ‘evidence of a determined policy of repression’; therefore, ‘civil disobedience seems to be a duty imposed upon every lover of personal and public liberty’. The same day he wrote to a South African friend: ‘The Rowlatt Bills have agitated me very much. It se
ems I shall have to fight the greatest battle of my life.’12
In the last week of February, Gandhi convened a meeting in his ashram in Ahmedabad. Those in attendance included Vallabhbhai Patel, Sarojini Naidu, the Bombay merchant Umar Sobani and B.G. Horniman, the British-born, India-loving editor of the nationalist newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle. At this meeting a ‘Satyagraha Pledge’ was drawn up, whose signatories would court arrest unless the Rowlatt Bills were withdrawn.
Also at this meeting was Jamnadas Dwarkadas, a young protégé of Annie Besant’s who was gradually being drawn towards Gandhi. Mrs Besant herself was sceptical of the uses of satyagraha, resting her faith instead in meetings, speeches, books, newspaper articles and petitions. Her protégé now tried to explain the merits of Gandhi’s method to her. In satyagraha, wrote Dwarkadas,
There is no hatred, no bitterness of any kind. The government’s action [in bringing about the Rowlatt Bills] shows that their conscience is sleeping, so the satyagrahi tries to awaken the conscience of the government…by civilly disobeying some laws and inviting punishment on himself. A number of people doing that will make the rulers realize that they have done a grievous wrong, and ultimately will have to give in. Gandhi thinks that this is a weapon patent to India, and will teach a lesson not to our rulers only, but to the world, and will enable us to proclaim ourselves as supreme teachers of spirituality.13
IV
From his South African days, Gandhi had followed a standard procedure: threaten a movement against an unfair or unjust law, but not begin the protests before giving the authorities the chance to withdraw it. Here, too, he wrote to the viceroy after the 24 February meeting, asking him to withdraw the bills, since even the ‘most autocratic’ government ‘finally owes its power to the will of the governed’.
Lord Chelmsford did not respond, so Gandhi travelled to Delhi to seek an interview in person. They met on 5 March, with Gandhi writing later to his son Devadas that ‘the talk was extremely cordial and friendly. I got the impression that both of us understand each other, but neither succeeded in convincing the other. An Englishman will not be argued into yielding; he yields only under compulsion of events.’14
From Delhi, Gandhi visited Lucknow and Allahabad, taking soundings and having meetings on the Rowlatt Bills. In Allahabad he stayed with Motilal Nehru, a prominent local lawyer active in Congress circles, who had supported Gandhi’s movement in South Africa. Motilal’s son, Jawaharlal, had studied science at Cambridge and later qualified as a lawyer too. Practice at the Allahabad Bar bored him; now, with Gandhi staying at their home, the younger Nehru began contemplating a career in nationalist politics. Motilal was lukewarm about Gandhi’s plans for civil disobedience, whereas his son Jawaharlal was ‘afire with enthusiasm and wanted to join the Satyagraha Sabha immediately’.15
From the United Provinces Gandhi returned to Bombay, giving more speeches on the Rowlatt Bills. By mid-March, there were 600 signatories to the Satyagraha Pledge in the Bombay Presidency. ‘The younger generation appears to be catching on very enthusiastically,’ said an intelligence report, ‘and the cloth merchants have determined to follow Gandhi through thick and thin.’16
Meanwhile, the government had passed one of the Rowlatt Bills into law. This prompted several Indian members to resign from the Imperial Legislative Council. They included Jinnah who, in a powerful speech, called the Acts ‘admittedly obnoxious and decidedly coercive’. In his opinion, ‘the Government that passes or sanctions such a law in times of peace, forfeits its claim to be called a civilized Government…’17
The government remained intransigent. On the other side, funds were pouring in for Gandhi’s movement, mostly from cotton merchants and wealthy lawyers. The money was used for the printing of posters, and the travel and board of leaders.18
In early March, Gandhi received an invitation to visit Madras. The invitation came from C. Rajagopalachari, a brilliant, self-made lawyer who had for some time admired Gandhi. Rajagopalachari had sent money to support Gandhi’s work in South Africa, translated his writings into Tamil, and written articles about him in the Madras press.
Gandhi had a deep fondness for the people of the Tamil country. They had sustained his struggle in Natal and the Transvaal; perhaps they would do the same now? He left Bombay on 16 March, reaching Madras two days later. Shortly after his arrival, he learnt that the Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi had passed the second Rowlatt Bill.
Gandhi spent five days in Madras. He gave several public talks, these translated into Tamil by Rajagopalachari. In the evenings the two had long conversations about the meanings of satyagraha. Gandhi was impressed by the lawyer’s intelligence, and by his willingness to abandon his career to court arrest.19
Gandhi proceeded next to the temple towns of Tanjore and Madurai, carrying on to Tuticorin, Trichy and Nagapattinam. To bring the audiences to his side, he spoke of the Tamils who had sacrificed their livelihood, their properties and even their lives in the struggles led by him in South Africa.
Speaking in Tuticorin on 28 March, Gandhi announced that Sunday, 6 April, would witness a nationwide statement of protest against the Rowlatt Bills. People were asked to observe a day-long fast, and hold public meetings demanding that the secretary of state for India repeal the legislation.20
It was in early February that Gandhi first thought of launching an agitation against the Rowlatt Act. Within a month, he had garnered support from across the country. He was helped by one enormous stroke of luck: Bal Gangadhar Tilak was away in England, fighting a court case. Tilak was a militant who had in the past taken to the streets. He also had a much longer record of public service than Gandhi, and was much better known (and more widely admired) across India. Had Tilak been around, Gandhi might not have acted so swiftly and autonomously. Tilak’s absence allowed Gandhi to set himself up as the leader of a mass movement against a law that in theory threatened every Indian.
V
Gandhi had called for an all-India hartal to be observed on Sunday, 6 April 1919. But some eager nationalists in Delhi decided to observe it on the previous Sunday itself. On 30 March, young men moved around the streets of the capital of British India, shouting slogans in praise of Gandhi and in condemnation of the Rowlatt Act. In the narrow, densely crowded streets of the Old City, the protesters clashed with the police. The conflict escalated, and a detachment of infantrymen was sent to restore order. Tear gas and rubber bullets were answered by sticks and stones. Finally, the troops fired live bullets, killing at least eight people and injuring many others.21
On 3 April, the prominent Bengali Moderate Surendranath Banerjee wrote to the ‘home member’ of the viceroy’s council, suggesting that a commission be appointed to inquire into the incident in Delhi, and Gandhi be made a member. ‘Such a committee would help to soothe public feeling and the appointment of Mr. Gandhi would serve to deepen the favourable impression,’ he wrote. Besides, putting Gandhi to committee work would ‘take him away from the work of agitation in which he is over engaged’.22
The home member rejected Banerjee’s suggestion, leaving Gandhi free to go ahead with his planned day of protest on 6 April.
Gandhi had decided to lead the hartal in Bombay. He arrived at the Chowpatty beach by 6.30 a.m. People bathed in the sea and then came and sat around him. By 8 a.m. a ‘huge mass of people’ had assembled. One reporter estimated that 150,000 were present—‘Mahomedans, Hindus, Parsis, etc., and one Englishman’. In his speech, Gandhi referred to the recent police firing on the satyagrahis in Delhi, and then asked the crowd to endorse the resolutions asking the viceroy to withdraw the Rowlatt Act. Reminding the crowd of the sacrifice ‘of the innocents of Delhi’, he asked them to ‘promise that we shall continue to suffer by civil disobedience till the hearts of the rulers are softened’.23
An Urdu weekly published in Bombay termed the hartal against the Rowlatt Act a ‘splendid success’. The government’s passing of the bills
had ‘united the Hindus and the Musalmans like sugar and water, although these two communities once stood apart from one another owing to the long-standing differences between them’. This was a genuine mass upsurge, wrote the weekly, and ‘it is wrong to suppose that Mahatma Gandhi or any other person is the originator of the movement. Hundreds of Gandhis will be produced from the soil of India.’24
Other cities and towns also observed the hartal called by Gandhi on 6 April, and likewise in the spirit of inter-religious solidarity. Karachi, one local newspaper reported, ‘closed its shops and centres of business: when did such a stupendous thing happen before in the history of the city?…One was impressed at yesterday’s function with one soul-stirring fact—the disappearance of communal, parochial and sectarian impulses. They were “Hindus”, “Muhammadans”, “Parsis”, “Khojas”, “Jains”, yesterday; but they all felt they belonged to one community—the Indian; they all felt there was the One Religion in various religions, the Religion of Self-respect, the Religion of guarding India’s rights for the service of Humanity.’25
In Patna, capital of Bihar, ‘nearly all shops closed’ on 6 April, and a mass meeting in the evening was attended by more than 10,000 people. Orissa was largely quiet, but Bengal was not—with shops closing in the towns of Dacca, Murshidabad and Midnapore, as well as the great city of Calcutta. Madras observed a complete hartal, with close to 100,000 people congregating on the beach in the evening. Other towns in the Presidency—Tanjore, Madurai, Kumbakonam, Chittoor—also responded to Gandhi’s call.26
In the days after 6 April, Gandhi had printed a series of leaflets for satyagrahis. One listed a series of books/booklets prohibited by the censor—such as a life of the Egyptian patriot Mustafa Kemal Pasha and Gandhi’s own Hind Swaraj. By printing and distributing these banned works, the satyagrahis could court arrest. (Under a provision of the new bill, anyone carrying a ‘prohibited’ publication could be sent to jail for two years.) A second leaflet asked the satyagrahis to take a ‘swadeshi’ vow committing themselves to wearing clothes of cotton, grown, spun and woven in India. A third asked nationalists to take this pledge:
Gandhi Page 10
