To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Desultory communications between Kabul and Berlin were relayed through Kermanshah. An emissary from the Emir arrived in December, but with no powers to negotiate. A forward German base was maintained in Herat until October 1917, but by then its members had heard nothing from Germany for eight months and they decided to leave. The Central Powers’ representation in Kabul devolved onto the Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war who had escaped Russian captivity. They had formed the potential nucleus of Niedermayer’s fantasy army, but their real desire was to avoid the war and marry the local women. Their amorous inclinations posed sufficient threat to the domestic order of an Islamic society to result in their internment.

  Both Pratap and Barkatullah remained in Afghanistan. Despite the impeccability of their pan-Islamic credentials, Habibullah remained the servant of Realpolitik and not of religious idealism. He nonetheless tolerated the declaration, on 1 December 1915, of a provisional government of India, Pratap being named as life president and Barkatullah as prime minister. The letters which Pratap bore from Bethmann Hollweg to the princes of India were entrusted to Harish Chandra. On arrival in the subcontinent Chandra promptly became a British agent, revealing much about the intentions both of German propaganda and of Indian nationalism. The provisional government claimed as adherents fifteen Muslim students who had quitted Lahore and Christian rule for Kabul and Islamic government, and half-a-dozen Afridi deserters from the Indian army. With this unpromising nucleus the provisional government hoped to exploit the frontier tribes and fuse invasion from Afghanistan with uprising in India.

  INDIA

  For much of the nineteenth century the economic strength of Britain’s overseas position rested not on ‘formal’ but ‘informal’ empire. Its status as the world’s first industrialized nation enabled its goods to penetrate world markets by virtue of their quality and uniqueness. Without effective competition, free trade constituted its own imperialism. But in the last quarter of the century the industrialization of the continental powers, and the advantages which they derived from coming later into the field, challenged the ability of British exports to dominate the world’s commerce. The debate on free trade, and particularly the split over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, had shaped the thought and composition of both the Liberal and Conservative parties. The political past, therefore, determined the response to economic change: protection was rejected. Instead, Britain adopted two alternative strategies. First, London became the centre of the world’s banking, shipping, and insurance markets: invisible exports compensated for the relative decline in sales of manufactured goods. Secondly, formal empire supplemented informal. The colonies became significant markets for British goods, and in turn themselves became exporters of commodities and raw materials. In 1850 much of the empire was a network of ports and trading stations, giving access to a hinterland over which direct control was unnecessary. By 1900 that hinterland had itself been brought within the pale of empire. And at the heart of the formal empire was India.

  In 1914 India took 16.1 per cent of all British exports. Most importantly, India bought 42 per cent of Britain’s textiles at a time when cotton goods constituted a quarter of all British exports and the cotton industry employed a tenth of all workers in manufacturing. India paid for this not by its exports to Britain but by its earnings in other industrialized countries, so gaining foreign exchange for London and financing two-fifths of Britain’s deficits.194 Nor was the relationship simply economic. The fabric of imperial defence, at least in military if not naval terms, was constructed around the sub-continent. The security of the route to India had determined many of the campaigns of the late nineteenth century; the stability of South Africa, Egypt and the Sudan had all been related to the question of imperial communications.195 Secondly, India was the principal garrison of the Empire. In 1914 76,953 British troops served in India, and the Indian army itself totalled a further 239,561 (of which 159,134 were active). The beauty of the arrangement was that the cost was borne by the taxpayers of India and not of Britain. In 1902 it was agreed that the Indian government should be responsible for financing military operations in Afghanistan, Persia, the Gulf, and as far as the Suez Canal. By 1914 the Indian army provided garrisons for Egypt, Singapore, and China.196

  But to say that the task of the Indian army had become the mounting of imperial expeditionary forces is to exaggerate. India did provide battalions for service in China, Abyssinia, and the Sudan after 1861. It continued and confirmed the trend in 1914. Five Indian Expeditionary Forces were sent abroad, A to Europe, B and C to East Africa, D to Mesopotamia, and E to Egypt. However, none of these can be considered a contribution commensurate with the Indian army’s size. The major operations from 1815—the Crimean War, the Boer War, and (in effect) the Western front in the First World War—were left to British units; most colonial wars fought beyond India’s own immediate frontiers between these dates did not involve Indian troops. The primary job of Indian soldiers was the defence of India, both on its north-west frontier and, within its borders, against internal sedition. Furthermore, the dispatch of Indian Expeditionary Force A apart, its overseas operations both before and during the First World War were extensions of, rather than divergences from, this primary task. Indian troops in the Persian Gulf and even on the Suez Canal were engaged in forward defence. They took over the task of garrisoning the route to India from British units, so releasing the latter from imperial duties for continental ones.

  Nonetheless, the effect of the outbreak of war was to leave India itself remarkably exposed in military terms. By late 1914 the British garrison had tumbled to 15,000 men. In March 1915 all eight regular battalions still in India were stationed on the north-west frontier. In the course of the year territorial battalions came out to replace the regulars. But the British numbers remained, in relative terms, exiguous. In June 1918 the British troops in India mustered 93,670 compared to 388,599 Indian soldiers. In 1922, when the Indian population totalled 315 million, the British official presence (troops apart) embraced 1,200 in the Indian civil service, 700 policemen, and 600 medical officers.197 For a group for whom the memory of the mutiny of 1857 remained traumatic, the inability to balance Indian troops with British was indeed worrying. Hardinge, who remained remarkably phlegmatic throughout, still observed in August 1914: ‘after all it is the Native troops that present the greatest danger so, say I, the more that go to the war the less danger there is at home.’198

  Hardinge himself was the target of an abortive bomb attack in 1912. Terrorism flourished, particularly in Bengal. Curzon, as viceroy from 1899 to 1905, had both ridiculed and radicalized Indian nationalism. His final gesture, the partition of Bengal, had fuelled Hindu fire and had been interpreted as an effort to divide Bengali sentiment. British policing, anxious not to alienate moderate opinion, lagged behind the growth of political crime. Its efforts were concentrated in the cities, not the countryside, and its officers too often could not speak Bengali. Its opponents were organized in self-contained cells, their only obvious centre being the French enclave of Chandernagore. The reunification of Bengal in 1911 did not curb the problem. On 26 August 1914 the Bengali revolutionaries seized fifty pistols and 46,000 rounds from a Calcutta arms dealer. Thus armed, the terrorists committed twice as many atrocities in 1915 as in the previous year (thirty-six to seventeen). Perhaps because they themselves were from educated and comparatively prosperous backgrounds, they failed to raise active popular support. But witnesses were reluctant to testify against them. Twenty-five incidents in the first half of 1916 culminated in the murder of a Bengali policeman in broad daylight in a Calcutta street. Nobody would come forward to give evidence. Now at last the Government of India was prepared to use the powers accorded it by London under the Defence of India act in March 1915. The act gave the criminal intelligence department powers of surveillance. Between August 1916 and June 1917 705 people were placed under house arrest and a further ninety-nine imprisoned without trial. Furthermore, the outbreak of war brought French co-operation
in Chandernagore. Only nine outrages were committed in 1917.199

  The conspiracy to attack Hardinge had only one root in Calcutta, the department of criminal intelligence established in February 1914. Many of the major activists in the Indian revolutionary movement were no longer in India but in Europe and North America.

  In 1905 Shyamaji Krishnavarma had opened a house in London which became a focus for westernized middle-class intellectuals studying in the capital. Inspired by Mazzini, and encouraged by British socialists and by Irish and Egyptian nationalists, the exiled Indians moved from boycotts and the hope of autonomy within the empire to terrorism and complete independence. In 1908 V. D. Savarkar, the author of what was seen as a subversive history of the Indian mutiny, tried to organize the collection of arms outside India and the creation of revolutionary cells within the country, and specifically the army. On 1 July 1909 the political aide-de-camp to the secretary of state for India, Sir Curzon Wyllie, was assassinated in London. Suppression both in the metropolis and in the subcontinent forced Shyamaji’s group to disperse. Although the effect was to divide the movement, it also augmented the difficulties confronted by British counter-intelligence. The Indians were no longer concentrated in one place, and they ceased to be resident within British jurisdiction. Many went initially to Paris, France being seen as a natural home for advocates of liberty and nationalism. But European responses were not all that the Indians might have hoped for. The international socialists took the chicken-and-egg view that, as India possessed no indigenous socialist party, it could not be represented at their conferences. With the outbreak of war France showed itself prepared to intern Indian revolutionaries. Most decamped across the Atlantic to the New World’s haven of democratic ideals.200

  The result of the move was to give a small group of intellectuals, anarchists, and nationalists a popular base. The Pacific coast of North America was short of labour in relation to the land available. Indians, particularly Punjabis, emigrated in search of work, establishing themselves around the rim of the Pacific, in China as well as in British Columbia and California. However, their arrival provoked racial animosity. Labour movements in Canada, Australia and the United States emphasised the rights of whites. Australia excluded Indians. Between 1904 and 1908 about 5,000 Indians arrived in Canada. In the latter year, Canada ruled that only those who had travelled direct from India (there were no regular direct sailings) and possessed $200 would be admitted. What infuriated the Indians was that they too were citizens of the empire, but London did not intervene, preferring to leave such a thorny issue to the Dominions themselves. The Government of India did not check emigration; Canada became increasingly opposed to immigration. Those Sikhs who left but failed to secure entry gravitated to other points on the Pacific littoral. Some looked to Japan, a hero of Asian resistance after the defeat of Russia and the victim also of white exclusion. They found that Tokyo protested more strongly on their behalf than did Delhi. Others moved across the American border, although here too they encountered racial discrimination.201

  America, like Europe, had its share of small Indian intellectual groups. But the Punjab emigrants provided the basis for mass support. In 1911 the revolutionaries in Paris asked Lal Har Dayal, recently appointed to a post at Stanford University, to co-ordinate the activities of the Sikh groups on the Pacific coast. Har Dayal aimed to unite both students and labourers, and to turn the movement from assassination and anarchy to full-scale revolution. To him was attributed a key role in the Hardinge bomb attack. In 1913 his work led to the establishment of a joint organization for the pre-existing societies, best known by the name of its newspaper Ghadr (’mutiny’). From its headquarters in San Francisco copies of Ghadr made their way all round the Pacific. It banned religious discussion, arguing that divisions of faith should not prejudice the achievement of national unity and independence. Its aim was to overthrow British rule in India through armed revolution and in its stead to establish a democratic republic. The alliance between the intellectuals, predominantly Bengali and high-caste Hindus, and the labourers, mostly Punjabi and Sikh, was cemented with the voyage of the Komagata Maru. Chartered to carry Indian immigrants direct to Canada, she was turned away at Vancouver, refused entry in Hong Kong but admitted to Kobe, and eventually returned to Calcutta on 26 September 1914. Her disappointed passengers had been educated in the ideas of Ghadr on their voyage. Those who arrived back in India marched into Calcutta, and in the ensuing struggle twenty-six died.

  The Punjabis on Komagata Maru may well have been the dupes of a conspiracy designed by Ghadr to create a revolutionary core in India. Certainly that was the effect. On 15 August 1914 Ghadr concluded that the time had come for open war with Britain and that, in its bid to establish a sovereign republic, the organization would accept help from whatever quarter it was offered. The Punjabi peasantry not only constituted the majority among Indian emigrants, it also provided the core of the Indian army. Having remained loyal in 1857, the Sikhs were seen as pre-eminent among the ‘martial races’ of India. About half the soldiers sent overseas in 1914–15 were Punjabis: many who served on the Western front were appalled by the conditions of modern war and urged their kinsmen not to enlist. Ghadr’s aim, therefore, was to build on the Komagata Maru incident, to win over units of the army, and so compensate for its own lack of arms. Between 500 and 1,000 agitators returned to India in the autumn of 1914. Turkey’s entry into the war enhanced the possibility that Muslims would join Sikhs and Hindus in the conspiracy. Among the revolutionaries a false optimism grew. The extent of nationalist feeling was exaggerated, wishful thinking substituted for money, arms, and leadership.

  British counter-intelligence had recovered from its earlier setbacks. In London the police had lacked the expertise to penetrate Shyamaji Krishnavarma’s organization. The Indian criminal investigation department had therefore taken on the task. By 1910 a network of agents was being established in Europe. On the Pacific coast, a former Indian policeman employed by the Vancouver immigration department established sufficiently good links with the San Francisco authorities to penetrate the Ghadr organization. In March 1914 Har Dayal was charged with anarchism and deported from the United States. The return of the Komagata Maru was carefully monitored, and many of the revolutionaries were interned on arrival in India.202 The British knew from a Sikh soldier, Kirpal Singh, that Rash Behari Bose planned to trigger the revolution with a mutiny of the 23rd Cavalry in Lahore on 21 February 1915. Bose suspected a leak and brought the rising forward to the 19th. But the 23rd Cavalry was paraded for the entire day, so thwarting the conspiracy. The police raided the Ghadr headquarters; what violence followed was sporadic and isolated; most of the country, including Bengal, remained quiet. Bose escaped to Japan. Empowered by the Defence of India act of 17 March 1915 to try by tribunal rather than by the normal judicial procedures, the government arraigned 291 individuals on charges of conspiracy. Forty-two were condemned to death, 114 were transported for life, and ninety-three were imprisoned. The army took its own measures against the 12th Cavalry, which had been provoked into mutiny on 23 February: twelve out of the eighteen men sentenced to death were executed. In the Punjab the lieutenant-governor, Michael O’Dwyer, imprisoned 400 people and confined a further 2,500 to their villages. He balanced his harshness by his success in enlisting rural notables to prop up the British administration at the local level and so sustain recruiting: landowners and gentry continued to look to the Raj for preferment, and they were abetted by Sikh religious leaders who condemned Ghadr as apostasy.203

  The coincident ripples in the Indian army outside India seem in reality to have had little association with the revolutionary movement. Mutiny in the 130th Baluchis in Rangoon was headed off in January 1915. More serious was the rising of the 5th Light Infantry in Singapore. The battalion (unusually) was entirely Muslim. No evidence exists to support the argument that two members of Ghadr played a leading role, and, although elements of another Indian-recruited regiment, the Malay States Guides, were affecte
d, the 36th Sikhs, also in Singapore, were not. Thus, if the mutiny is to be set in any general context it should be that of pan-Islam, not of Indian nationalism. But the real problems were specific to the regiment. The commanding officer was incompetent and distrusted by the other officers. Poor leadership allowed lesser issues to fester— the promotion prospects of the NCOs, inadequate rations, the uncertainty as to the regiment’s eventual destination. The battalion planned to mutiny on 17 February, the day before its embarkation for what it feared would be a fight with the Turks. In the event, the sailing was brought forward and action was improvised on the 15th. Outwardly, the situation was serious. There were only 231 European regular troops on the island to face as many as 800 mutineers. Thirty-two British soldiers and civilians were killed. In practice, the danger was past almost as soon as it had begun. A landing party from HMS Cadmus checked the mutineers from advancing into Singapore, and by the morning of 16 February an improvised force had relieved the 5th Light Infantry’s commanding officer, besieged in his bungalow. The rising collapsed from within. The right wing of the battalion, who were Rajputs, initiated the mutiny, but were at odds with the left wing, who were Pathans, and with each other. The German prisoners of war on the island, whom it had been planned to release and arm, were in the main less inspired by the Indians than frightened by them. Those few Germans who did act preferred to take the opportunity to escape rather than to prosecute the war. From 16 February onwards flight was the main preoccupation of the mutineers also. In the subsequent days the arrival of French, Russian, and (most significantly) Japanese sailors made little contribution to the restoration of order, but did underline Britain’s military and naval weakness in the Far East. In the subsequent courts martial 213 men were tried, of whom all except one were convicted; forty-seven were executed.204