Cover of Romain Rolland’s pamphlet for the Meerut case
Ultimately, Rolland pronounces, the Meerut Conspiracy Case – not least because of the fierce attacks on it by the accused – had ended up becoming ‘the trial of the system of government which has passed judgement on them’.56 Meerut was also a call to British workers to stop being passive accomplices in the oppression of Indian workers:
They are for us the living symbol of those thousands of victims in the great combat which to-day is being fought throughout the world to break the yoke of imperialism. All those victims make a victory, for they bear witness to the iniquity which is crushing them, and to the irresistible rising of the new revolutionary forces which are awakening mankind.57
In the end, the Meerut Conspiracy Case, with its protracted unfolding, volumes of testimony, and draconian sentences followed by commutation, resulted not in the extinguishing of either protest or communism in India, but a greater surge in both, ‘a sudden revival of interest and activity’, as one police report in 1934 put it.58 It certainly provided both a national and an international platform for the articulation of anticolonial views – which was openly used as such by the defendants.59 ‘What had been intended as propaganda against communism’, observed Hutchinson, ‘had turned into propaganda for communism’, the government of India not playing the role of saviour it had hoped for, but rather ‘unexpectedly [finding] itself actually playing the part of the villain of the piece amid hisses and boos of the audience’.60 Whether it made clear to a British public the truth that ‘the whole of Asia was seething with revolt’, the Meerut case clearly brought home the fact of imperialism being challenged, as the prisoners’ general statement put it, ‘from the dock’.61
Like Saklatvala, many of those involved in the Meerut Conspiracy Case were deeply influenced by the seismic impact of the October Revolution in 1917; the testimonies of the Meerut accused make clear how compelling it was to find a language of emancipation that both enabled a critique of empire and offered a vision for restructuring decolonizing societies in radically egalitarian ways. We also know that communists in Britain brought to ‘metropolitan anti-imperialism a level of commitment, intellectual consideration and organisation that it had usually lacked, even if this fell considerably short of the task and their own ambition’.62 British communists like Bradley and Spratt, among the Meerut accused, were less successful as organizers in India faced with a political terrain of enormous and shifting complexity, a radically unfamiliar social order in which the agrarian was key, and a repressive colonial administration.
Nonetheless, it is necessary to situate the moment of Meerut in relation to the specifically communist idea of a revolutionary international alliance against both capitalism and imperialism. It was an idea that caught on, laden with the ‘contagion’ dreamed of by Ernest Jones and denounced by the Meerut prosecutors, exercising enormous power and imaginative reach not always fully realized in organizational efforts. Founded in March 1919 with the aim of fomenting world revolution, the Comintern, before it fell into notorious disarray, ‘was a significant force in inter-war politics, able to command the loyalty of millions of militants and sympathisers’.63 The aim, as Lenin put it, was ‘a repetition, on an international scale, of what has taken place in our country’.64 The First Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in 1920 in Baku, brought together representatives of Asian communist parties with Soviet leaders; acknowledging the upsurge of anticolonial struggles across Asia, it would assert the need for ‘united action against British imperialism’.65 As has been noted by others, the ‘unprincipled zigzags of Soviet and Comintern policy’ (see Chapter 9) should not entail a wider forgetting of the latter’s many accomplishments before it was disbanded.66 Even when it took the form of dissent and disagreement, anticolonialism in the interwar period was ineluctably shaped by dialogues, real and imagined, with communist internationalism. At the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1922, Lenin and M. N. Roy famously debated colonialism, resulting in the ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Questions’, which incorporated the latter’s ‘Supplementary Theses’ as amendments.67 Roy succeeded in enshrining the analysis that the fight against colonialism was key to ‘the downfall of the capitalist order in Europe’ not least because the ‘super-profits’ from colonialism enabled the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the metropole to be given concessions.68 In essence, then, the Comintern committed to extending its field of activity through alliances with ‘revolutionary liberation movements’ in the colonies while keeping in view the need to organize peasants and workers ‘in common revolutionary struggle to overthrow the landowners and bourgeoisie’. Although Lenin’s theses were modified by Roy so that the Comintern was urged to support ‘revolutionary movements of liberation’ rather than ‘bourgeois-democratic liberation movements’, in practice, uncertainties and differences on this question would emerge periodically.
In trying to contain the implications of the Meerut case, colonial officials frequently described events in terms of machinations of Western communists causing trouble where there would otherwise have been none.69 In fact, it was often the other way around, as Hutchinson’s lively and witty memoir attests:
I had come to India five years before full of romantic illusions and a novice in the game of life. I had lost these illusions, but had gained many things in their stead. I had been caught in a wild current of conflicting forces and had managed to keep my head above water; I had been given the opportunity to study India from a new angle; and I had shared the misfortunes and slavery of a great people. And all my experiences are the grim realities of the everyday life of a vast and oppressed population … Experience provides a certain cure, and as we learn by experience to face and even to appreciate realities, the further we are away from the self-deception of romanticism. I was leaving India definitely cured.70
One of the insights that Hutchinson, the son of communists who was not himself a party member, had gleaned from witnessing both resistance and repression in various contexts was that imperialism had perforce to use different tactics in Britain and India, even though the ‘same oligarchy’ ran both countries: ‘But this oligarchy employs methods in India, which it does not dare employ as yet in Britain’.71 The latter elicited greater open brutality, ‘white terror’, because of what was at stake: ‘A single spark in India may cause a conflagration which might well be the end of Imperialism altogether’.72 With the Meerut Conspiracy Case, the oligarchy’s ways had been exposed in India, where it was forced to make use not just of fraud and deception, as it did in Britain, but also of ‘the Iron First of open terrorism’.73 Given that young men were in jail ‘for doing nothing more than holding opinions distasteful to the Executive’, asks Hutchinson, in what respects did ‘the legislation of British Imperialism differ from that of Fascist Terrorism in Italy?’ His answer is bald: ‘In no respect.’74
British communists like Robin Page Arnot were among those who observed that the severity of the Meerut sentences had more than a little to do with the fact that the activities and beliefs of the defendants betokened a degree of class-political solidarity between empire and metropole, breaching a racial cleavage that usually benefited colonial rule. Arnot, clearly drawing on Roy’s Supplementary Theses, also noted in his essay on the Meerut sentences that the Indian working classes, being themselves the ‘source of super-profits’, could not be ‘bribed as were sections of the English working class in the later nineteenth century by crumbs from the rich man’s banquet’.75 In some sense, the Indian working classes, as an organized force, were thus British imperialism’s ‘deadliest enemy’.76 Arnot was scathing about those elements of the British trade union movement who, he claimed, ‘would not raise a finger to release the men who were organising trade unions in India’.77 He may have been making a point that was familiar not least from Saklatvala’s parliamentary speeches, but it was one on which the Meerut campaign based its call for solidarity:
Not only is it true that a nation that oppresses another canno
t itself be free; but the same Imperialist class that is oppressing India, is oppressing and robbing the workers of this country by wagecuts and speed-up, tariffs and taxes, is taking the bread out of the mouths of the workers’ children, depriving them of the benefits of education, insurance and all other social services, and casting into gaol Tom Mann or any other leader of working-class revolt. The railwaymen facing a wage-cut, the busmen on strike against speed-up, the Lancashire workers suffering under the Midland Agreement, are fighting the same class that would deny the Indian workers the right to organise.78
This is perhaps the real significance of the Meerut controversy as it played out it in Britain. Pointing to Englishmen and Indians standing in the dock together and all articulating vehement critiques of both capitalism and imperialism, it was possible, as Arnot did, to call time on ‘the jingo picture of “black men” versus “white men,” of “Asiatics against Europeans” ’ which worked in favour of the powerful who peddled it.79 This would, as it turned out, be no simple matter in the face of tenacious cleavages. But attempts would be made from this point on to organize across racial and national boundaries, and it is to one such attempt that I now turn.
‘A parliament of mankind’: The League against Imperialism
It was attended by delegates from all over the world, who comprised a sticky conglomeration of Hindoo students and intellectuals, American ‘parlour’ Bolsheviks, Chinese Nationalist Generals, British Socialists and Communists, discontented French bourgeois, German professors, coloured agitators from all parts of Africa, and Mexican and South American nationalists.
John Baker White, president of the anti-socialist Economic League, in a letter to the Morning Post
While I was in Berlin, I came into contact with the Head Office of the League Against Imperialism. I did not, as the Prosecution allege, do any work for the League nor was I a member of it. I was merely there as a sympathetic observer, because I realised that the League Against Imperialism – which, by the way, is not a Communist body – was doing splendid work on behalf of the oppressed millions in the colonial and semi-colonial countries.
Lester Hutchinson, Meerut, 1929–1932
The end of the Meerut trials, and the handing down of ‘savage sentences of transportation’ for what were essentially thought crimes deemed a ‘conspiracy’, had the effect of disquieting more than a few in the mainstream of British politics and opinion-making.80 For some on the British left, however, it came as bitter vindication of an analysis they had been advocating for some time. The Communist Party of Great Britain’s organ, the Daily Worker, opined that, while the punishment of hurling the convicted into ‘living death’ by transportation to a penal island was clearly intended to squash the ongoing labour unrest, it had generated a ‘wave of indignation’ among British workers that would lead to a sense of common struggle.81 Whether or not that was the case, the unease around the Meerut sentences certainly enabled the case for joining the cause to be made more widely in Britain. One of the organizations most active in campaigning for the Meerut prisoners was the British Section of a recently formed international organization known as the League against Imperialism (LAI), which had published the pamphlets discussed in the previous chapter. In an interview with the Daily Worker, Reginald Bridgeman, who was one of the LAI’s principal organizers in Britain and who in 1922 spent some time in India, where he would have witnessed labour unrest, explained that the LAI in Britain would, in its campaigning work on behalf of the Meerut prisoners, ‘couple the arrest of the leaders of the unemployed in Britain with the conviction of the workers and peasants on India’.82 He wrote to the German communist Willi Münzenberg, who promised ‘a large campaign … in support of the arrested in Europe while London would be the centre for campaigning’.83 Sunday 19 April 1931 was designated ‘Meerut Day’. Demonstrations were organized across Britain, and money raised for the Prisoner Relief Fund; a demonstration was also made in the House of Commons on 4 May 1931, from which one demonstrator was ejected.84 Questions were prepared for the House of Commons, and MPs associated with the LAI, including Fenner Brockway, posed them from the floor.85
A member of the Labour Party who would be expelled from it in 1930 for working with the LAI – though he would later rejoin – Bridgeman had fought tenaciously, if unsuccessfully, to get the party’s rank and file to oppose the Labour government’s complicity in the Meerut prosecution as vigorously as they might oppose Labour ‘effecting national economies at the expense of the unemployed’.86 ‘The British people’, Bridgeman wrote in an open letter to party members, ‘were given to understand that the régime of brutal exploitation of the colonial peoples would cease with the assumption of office by a Labour Government in 1929’; in fact, repression, with ‘the buckshot, the batonings and the deliberate destruction of food and private property’, had worsened.87 Throughout the Meerut campaign, Bridgeman addressed meetings, lobbied the influential, wrote frequent letters in the press, and collected material support for the prisoners.
The League against Imperialism canvassing at Trafalgar Square in London in August 1931
We do not know very much about Reginald Francis Orlando Bridgeman, or what led to his conversion to passionate and lifelong anticolonialism. The grandson of an aristocrat, with aristocratic cousins who were high-level Tory politicians, Bridgeman, like Wilfrid Blunt (with whom he also apparently shared sartorial panache – ‘the greatest dandy in Europe’, sniffed the Evening Standard, which also described him as ‘Byronesque’), started off as a diplomat, and conducted his career on traditional lines, becoming known as a ‘glutton for work’.88 According to John Saville, the author of Bridgeman’s entry in the Dictionary of Labour Biography, while it is unclear what brought about his conversion to left-wing socialism, the change appears to have taken place between 1919 and 1922 – a period which saw him posted in the British embassy in Tehran and visiting India, Muscat, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq.89 During this period, in the heady wake of the 1917 October Revolution, Bridgeman, already drawn to socialism during his time in Vienna, maintained friendly relations with the Russians, much to the disapproval of his Foreign Office superiors. Recalled from Tehran, Bridgeman was retired on 1 July 1923. Getting involved in local Labour politics, and later standing unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for Uxbridge, Bridgeman (who had been a Gold Staff Officer at the Coronation of George V in 1911) excited a certain amount of interest in the British press not least because of his aristocratic political family connections; his cousin, Viscount Bridgeman of Leigh, was a dedicated empire man serving as personal secretary to the secretary for the colonies, Lord Knutsford. Much was made of Bridgeman’s personal style – ‘His tastes are decidedly aesthetic’, pronounced the Star, while the Daily Record and Daily Mail claimed that he wore red gloves as a political signifier.90 Bridgeman also engaged with Chinese affairs through the London Trades Council and the Chinese Information Bureau, which investigated working-class conditions in East Asia. While never himself a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and emphatic, as were many others, that the LAI was not affiliated to them, Bridgeman did not tend to voice public criticism of the Comintern or the CPGB, though he did occasionally challenge officials on specific strategies. Bridgeman’s activities around Meerut were quite clearly the most impactful of his career with the LAI, while later on he would become a vigorous critic of Zionism and an advocate of justice for the Palestinian Arabs; he would be re-admitted to the Labour Party after the LAI folded in 1937.
Any engagement with Britain and anticolonialism must necessarily pause on the LAI, a relatively short-lived but symbolically important formation which signalled, in one sense, the formal institution of a collective politics of solidarity between European (including British) and colonial critics of empire, as well as between various anticolonial movements.91 Bridgeman’s writings and notes, now preserved at the University of Hull, make clear that he had come to understand anticolonialism as a shared enterprise with the common interests of both colonial and metro
politan people at its heart, rather than one of philanthropic humanitarianism. (Bridgeman’s personal copy of Stafford Cripps’s Empire, issued by the India League, underlines with a question mark the phrase ‘whereby a true trusteeship of such colonial territories is carried out during their minority’.)92 He would also write to Labour MPs like Philip Noel-Baker expressing concerns that the party was supporting the implementation of the Mandatory system in India and Burma without the consent of those who would be subject to it.93 Both personally and in his capacity as secretary to the British Section of the league, he would attempt to disseminate such anticolonial insights more widely. Bridgeman himself gave a prodigious number of talks on a variety of topics, including empire and anticolonialism, in forums as diverse as the St Clements Political and Social Council, the Marx Memorial Library, the St Michael Men’s Discussion Group (‘The Empire – Whose Responsibility?’), the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen, the St Albans Labour Party, the Hendon Central Women’s Co-operative Guild and the 4th Harrow Rover Crew.94 The recognition that the principle of ‘tutelage’ had to be erased on the left as much as in the mainstream was also articulated by Clemens Dutt, the British communist who had been active in the Meerut campaign and was a member of the LAI. Dutt vociferously criticized the Labour and Socialist Second International’s own reformist paternalism: ‘A large section of the colonial peoples are not considered to have “reached the standard” for self-government, they are not fit to be free and they must be educated and led for their benefit by the kindly tutelage of the superior civilising imperialist power.’95 As resistance was met by ‘bloody repression, hangings, shootings and air-bombings’ in places such as Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Samoa and New Guinea, it was possible to assess ‘what an invaluable experience in imperialist tutelage their inhabitants are receiving’.96
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