Conclusion: Civilizing the Civilizer
What on earth is a British Commission to find out in India in regard to whether Indians should rule in their own country, any more than if you had the impudence to send a Commission to France tomorrow to see whether that country should be run by Frenchmen or whether the British should go there to take care of the minorities in Alsace–Lorraine?
Shapurji Saklatvala
Let us return, in closing, to Saklatvala’s fierce, indeed frequently rebarbative, parliamentary interventions on the Simon Commission, after his return from India. In a lengthy, unsparing, brutally condemnatory speech in November 1927, Saklatvala laid out (and into) the multiple hypocrisies, elisions, falsehoods and sleights of hand that comprised official British discourse on India. The speech was a testament to Saklatvala’s sense of a necessarily cross-national representational responsibility. He began by noting that he preferred, when expressing the feelings of those who were ‘crushed’ and ‘oppressed’, to use plain speech.130 The emptiness of parliamentary language, the tendency to ‘weigh and choose words which mean nothing’, was a recurrent theme with him. Almost at once, however, Saklatvala insisted that he spoke not from a ‘narrow nationalist point of view’ with regard to India, but as a British MP ‘representing the vital interests of the workers of this country, who show sufficient confidence in me, not one electorate alone, but all over England, Scotland, Wales and even Ireland’.131 For Saklatvala, at times, the pronoun ‘us’ could simultaneously refer to both Indians and Britons. He would repeatedly return in this speech, as in others, to the assertion that an ‘injury’ upon the Indians was also ‘treachery’ to British workers. The speech was also a sustained attack on justifications for colonial rule based on a ‘hideous picture’ of the colonized and a ‘virtuous picture’ of colonizers – particularly the familiar claim that India was full of chaos and division, which necessitated a unifying British presence. Saklatvala’s point of comparison was well chosen: ‘There was the Kaiser in Europe. He also felt the same thing, namely, that among the European communities there was such a welter and chaos that one strong man was required to rule the whole of Europe. He also felt like coming forward as the trustee and guardian of the small nationalities in Europe.’132 The claims of the German Kaiser and the British imperial Kaisers were ‘equally preposterous from the ethical standpoint and the point of view of national rights’. British rule in India, far from making ‘less religions’, would ‘only make one more’ – hardly a basis for ‘trusteeship’.
Saklatvala was scathing about the ‘bunkum and nonsense’ justifications for the Raj which claimed that its raison d’être was the safeguarding of minority rights. Exposing these claims as at once internally incoherent, hypocritical and simply untrue, he spoke of his own experience in being prevented as a young man from entering a white club in Bombay: ‘Yet a representative of that race to-day talks nonsense about the untouchability among the Hindus.’133 As we have already seen, Saklatvala was not denying the existence of untouchability, but noting that, apart from the fact that the British practised their own form of deep discrimination in India, they had also done materially little for the rights of oppressed Indians and minority communities. Indeed, the British Empire sought refuge in a hands-off relativism when it came to such matters: ‘What is this Commission going to do? If it was going out tomorrow to abolish untouchability I would assist it, but the Government say, “No, that is not our business.” Then why keep on “chewing this rag” about untouchability and depressed classes?’134 Even more damningly, these were sections of society in India that remained politically disenfranchised and illiterate, precisely on the basis of a pernicious relativism: ‘They are an Asiatic people, full of religious superstition.’ In fact, it was not religion or religious customs that constituted the problem: ‘What is wrong is the presence of British rule, which prevents the introduction of modern thought, modern evolution, modern education and scientific methods of evolving a people’s political, economic and social rights.’135 For Saklatvala, imperialism was not a party political affair, and Labour’s accord with their political opponents on the Empire was ‘disastrous to the Labour movement, although it may be all right in a Parliamentary Debate’.136 Comrade Sak reiterated here a point he had made throughout his parliamentary career: that British workers were adversely affected by ‘that abominable competition of exploited labour in the East by British Imperialism’.137 It is why both the colonized and the British working classes were at the receiving end of ruling-class paternalism, a connection the latter needed to see:
The leaders of the Labour movement say to the Indians and the Chinese, ‘We are ruling you; we are sending Commissions to your countries because you are less experienced and we are more experienced, and we want to be kind to you and tell you how you should live your lives.’ That is exactly what the capitalist masters and bosses are saying to the workers in this country. They say to them, ‘We are more experienced in directing industry than you are, and we keep an Army, a Navy, and an Air Force to protect you, because you are less experienced than we are.’138
Over the course of his hundreds of interventions in parliament, Comrade Sak succeeded in articulating a full-fledged critique of empire and imperialism which covered cultural, psychological, economic and political terrain. He invited Britons who espoused a sentimental attachment to the Union Jack to think about the effect that same flag had on those who saw it as one with ‘an alien, historical, religious and social condition attached to it’. Many of his speeches laid out at great length the specific economic consequences for both the Indian poor and the British working classes of cheap labour toiling in India for British capital:
So long as British financiers open coalpits in other parts of the Empire and compel miners to work at 8d. per day, so long will the British miners and their Continental competitors be driven downwards and downwards … so long as this slave labour exists in the Empire, so long the economic position of the British miner will be one of continual danger.139
Attacking the idea that correctives could be provided from within empire, Saklatvala had already brought together the literal and the metaphorical in a trenchant image, saying that it made no sense ‘to create a death rate and then to appoint doctors to cure it’.140 He turned civilizational discourse on its head, suggesting (to much mockery from some of his listeners) not just that the ‘great civilising revolution in Russia’ should be the model to follow, but also that it was only with the end of empire that ‘a great advanced movement for the civilisation’ of Britain and Europe could be imagined. This, of course, earned him opprobrium, one MP charging him with violating ‘the hospitality of this country’ and showing his ingratitude by doing everything he could to bring ‘red ruin’.141
Although Saklatvala lost his parliamentary seat at the 1929 elections, he continued to write and give speeches, returning repeatedly to the parallel questions of democratizing India by making the concerns of labour more central to anticolonialism and internationalizing the British labour movement in specifically anticolonial directions. In an election address delivered when he contested a by-election in 1930, he noted that the ‘hypocritical promises’ of the Labour government concealed a reality in which British workers were still facing violence, while also pointing out that he had supported anticolonial struggles everywhere, including in Ireland, ‘for whom alone in the House, I did not fail to expose the fraud of the Irish Free State Treaty instead of a genuine Irish Workers Republic’.142 He grew increasingly critical of the mainstream of Indian nationalism as well. As Gandhi arrived in London for the Second Round Table Conference in 1931, the veteran communist reminded his readers that many in the Indian National Congress would be quite happy to have conservative rule by the feudal and capitalist elites of India; their objection was not to plutocracy, but to diarchy or sharing rule with the British elites. The conference itself, he wrote, returning to the theme of ‘voice’, would aim ‘to give a megaphonic expression to the right of privileges and inter
ests’ while the ‘completely ignored majority’ continued to face down bombs, bullets, bayonets and poison gas.143 Much like British Labour leaders who ‘had so successfully let down the 1926 General Strike’ (during which Saklatvala was arrested and imprisoned for two months on charges of making a ‘seditious’ speech at Hyde Park), the Congress leadership hoped to neutralize the Indian masses, persuading them that they could be led to ‘national independence one fine day without molesting the millowners or landowners or Indian princes’.144 Saklatvala was correct to note that extraordinary state violence had been exercised against a populace exhorted not to retaliate: ‘Almost ten thousand of the common people have been shot and killed, eighty thousand have been batoned and incarcerated, the brave Gharwalli troops and heroic Trade Union leaders are in gaol, young brave lads have been executed or imprisoned.’145 These were people, he acknowledged, whose ‘legitimate militancy’ had indeed come together under the Congress flag, for better or for worse, but whose spirit and determination were in the cause of goals that were much more radical than that of their leadership.146 In Gandhism, he insisted, ‘I still see the prolongation of British imperialism and I will continue to say so even though many of my best friends in the Congress camp get angry with me for so doing’.147 In the decade he had left before he died suddenly in 1936, Saklatvala’s most prominent work was firmly internationalist in tenor, as he participated in campaigns and movements that sought to bring together radical anticolonialists from across the world, and to put liberation movements in dialogue with each other. Two of these – the Meerut Defence Campaign and the League against Imperialism – are the subject of the next chapter.
6
The Revolt of the Oppressed World:
British Internationalism from Meerut
to the League against Imperialism
On our platform in Hyde Park we must remember that three English comrades are among the thirty-one prisoners of British Imperialism now awaiting trial in Meerut in India. These British and Indian comrades are threatened with twenty years’ imprisonment in barbarous conditions, for no more heinous a crime than that of openly and legally organising workers and peasants in India … Let May Day be a pledge of our determination to rid the world of Imperialism, breeder of war, poverty and pestilence.
Shapurji Saklatvala, May Day speech in Hyde Park, 1929
On the morning of 20 March 1929, the young British journalist and labour organizer Lester Hutchinson was disturbed twice: the first time, as usual, by his tiresome milkman, and then by ‘a posse of armed police headed by a European inspector and an Anglo-Indian sergeant in occupation of my front garden’.1 Hutchinson, who would shortly become editor of the left-wing journal the New Spark, after the Indian editor of its predecessor, The Spark, was arrested that day, only had his house searched that morning – an experience he described as a rather romantic one; he too would be arrested a few months later. But, that same morning, no fewer than thirty-one labour activists were detained and imprisoned across half a dozen towns in British India, as the Warwickshire Regiment spread out all over Bombay – where the majority resided – to avert any trouble. They included twenty-nine Indians and two Britons, Philip Spratt and Ben Bradley. All were transferred to a jurisdiction none of them resided in, and twenty-four of them had never even been to: the cantonment town of Meerut, which would lend its name to the most infamous colonial ‘conspiracy case’ of the time. Charged under Section 121A of the Indian Penal Code with conspiring to ‘deprive the King of the sovereignty of British India’, the detainees would controversially be refused bail and subjected to trial without jury.2 In addition, Section 121A carried a proviso whereby no actual illegal act had to take place in order for a conspiracy charge to be levied.3
The arrests had been in planning for several months, as a rattled imperial government assessed the threat of the Soviet Union to the British Empire and attempted to stem intensifying waves of labour unrest and increased violence by groups such as the Hindustan Republican Association (modelled on the IRA). Early in 1929, protesting the Public Safety Act and the Trades Disputes Bill, the association’s Bhagat Singh and two accomplices threw bombs onto the floor of the Indian Legislative Assembly; he would be caught and hanged, becoming a shaheed, or martyr.4 The Public Safety Act would have also prevented foreign communists from coming to India and working there with Indian labour organizers. Part of a wave of colonial repression, the arrests of the Meerut defendants also took place – not by accident – as the government braced for the release of the Fawcett Report, commissioned in the wake of the Bombay General Strike of 1928, which was expected to be unfavourable to worker demands, and therefore to generate more militancy and strikes. As Saklatvala had been warning in his parliamentary speeches, ‘reforms’ as a response to genteel petitioning were no longer going to staunch the colonial wound. Indeed, a note to senior government officials, sent in June 1927, warned that among ‘the lower classes in India’, both in town and rural areas, post-war inflation had ‘induced a feeling of restlessness, making them discontented with conditions which previously they bore patiently’.5 In turn, repressive legislation which had been put in place to pre-empt and punish resistance was routinely invoked – and wound up producing the long-running international drama that became the Meerut Trials, described by one prisoner as ‘a war of attrition, a trial of endurance’.6 Their aim was to staunch the spread of communism in India – certainly a major contributing factor to the strikes in the textile mills; the Girni Kamgar Union for millworkers was a hugely successful communist-led endeavour, and the Millowners’ Association had petitioned the British government ‘to rid them of the nuisance’.7
News of the arrests spread immediately, and the ensuing protests encompassed work stoppages in fourteen Bombay textile mills, public meetings, demonstrations, and processions which resulted in clashes with the police. Many Indian leaders – eight of the accused also held posts in the Indian National Congress – spoke up immediately against the arrests, arguing quite rightly that the real motive of the colonial government was to kill the labour movement at an early stage, and so obstruct the growing momentum towards full independence.8 Rather than attempt to make the case for the existence of an actual conspiracy, in his lengthy opening statement prosecutor Langford James notoriously dwelt on the dangers of the Russian Revolution, Soviet politics, the perniciousness of communism, and the manifold problems with Marxism, using his readings of various general left-wing texts as ‘evidence’ against the accused. James averred that these were relevant to those in the dock because their object was ‘to replace the Government of His Majesty King George in India, and in its place to put the Government of the Third Communist International’.9 Irrespective of whether Bolshevism was ‘a cruel and tyrannous autocracy’ or ‘a paradise on earth’, James claimed: ‘The hard fact still remains that if Bolshevism and that system is to be introduced into India the government of His Majesty must as a preliminary be smashed in pieces. There is no room for both of them’.10 The incompatibility between capitalism and communism – on which the defendants agreed with the prosecution – was in itself deemed to prove ‘conspiracy’ on the part of the accused, who criticized capitalism. Partly to drive a wedge between the defendants and the mainstream nationalist movement, James would later insist that his problem was with ‘perpetual revolution’ and not with ‘a national revolution’. The defendants, he pointed out with alacrity, were in fact deeply critical of the ‘leaders of Nationalist thought in India’, and ‘stigmatised’ the Indian National Congress ‘as a misguided bourgeois body’.11 The first half of his speech took great pains to insist that ‘there is no question of their being nationalists’; the professed internationalism of the defendants was, in effect, anti-nationalism.12 As the Bolsheviks he deemed them to be, they shared certain characteristics: ‘You do not love your country, you are anti-country, you are anti-God, and you are anti-family.’13 Meanwhile, the magistrate, R. Milner-White, argued that those nationalists who sought to petition the king through the �
��usual civil channels’ to ‘give independence to India’ were not, unlike the defendants, in breach of Section 121A, which only punished those who would forcibly deprive the monarch of sovereignty.14 Mendicancy was acceptable; even imagining alternative possibilities, on the other hand, was punishable. Most Indian nationalists were not, however, fooled, or easily available for sowing dissension on this basis – at least not immediately. Gandhi – no communist sympathizer and himself the frequent subject of communist criticism – was prompted to note that the ‘farce of a trial’ had exposed the British colonial government’s ‘red claws which usually remain under cover’.15 Nehru, who would become involved in the international Meerut campaign, observed trenchantly: ‘this cry of communism is meant to cover a multitude of sins of the Government’.16 Hutchinson noted that serious riots broke out, and that ‘the peasants became restive and began to demand the initiation of a movement for refusing to pay rents and taxes, a movement that would have changed the whole basis of Indian nationalism’.17
What had perhaps not been anticipated, however, was the scale of the negative reaction to the trials in Britain itself over the course of a case that lasted four years – one defendant, D. R. Thengdi, even dying in jail over that needlessly protracted period. (The accused endured especially uncomfortable conditions, including nine hours of manual labour a day.) The Meerut episode served to amplify and embody the two points that Saklatvala had repeatedly been making in and out of parliament: that there was serious resistance to the Raj, and that it was being crushed on a regular basis. It therefore provided the first major interwar colonial flashpoint around which efforts to mobilize criticism of empire more widely in Britain were undertaken – criticism based on solidarity with protests rather than on paternalism. It was also, of course, a test case for international anticolonial alliances in more than one sense. With three Britons among those targeted by the prosecution, the dragnet of state persecution had been deliberately thrown around ‘those who linked India with a wider world and with solidarities beyond the boundaries of India or the British Empire’.18 The dogged judicial persecution of the Meerut defendants also constituted, of course, official recognition that anticolonial networks were spreading beyond the boundaries of specific colonies. With the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party often, though not always, on board, the League against Imperialism (LAI) and the Meerut Defence Committee organized hundreds of public meetings and demonstrations. Saklatvala spoke at many of these, using the occasion – as the defendants also did – to stage ‘a form of political theater’.19 If the Meerut Conspiracy Case was an attack on left-wing internationalism from the perspective of the state, it paradoxically provided internationalists with a real opportunity to organize and proselytize in the cause of making cross-border alliances against imperialism. In that sense, the Meerut Defence Committee and allied activities mark an important moment in the history both of British anticolonialism and of internationalism more broadly. In more systematic and illustrative ways than in the past, perhaps, it allowed for the case to be made that what happened to British subjects in the colonies – punishment for ordinary activities like trade unionism and demands for labour rights – could boomerang, and have equally sinister consequences at home. This chapter explores one significant episode in the internationalizing of British anticolonialism – that of the global defence campaign for the Meerut prisoners – and an important institution in the history of internationalism – the League against Imperialism – which participated in the Meerut campaign. Both were part of the ongoing unlearning of paternalism as an anticolonial disposition in favour of constructing working solidarities.
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