To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The activities of the Khuddam-i-Kaaba, and of Al-Hilal and similar publications, contained sufficient inflammatory material to give British alarmism good grounds. But in reality the Indian Muslims were too deeply divided amongst themselves to provide a coherent threat to the Raj. The Muslim League was founded in 1906 as a counter to Hindu dominance in the Indian National Congress. Its aim was not political activism but quietism. It feared constitutional reform as the path to Hindu domination. It reckoned that the best future for Islamic interests would be secured by education; this would qualify professional Muslims for office in collaboration with the British. Increasingly, too, it saw its task as directing the enthusiasms of the younger, more radical group into legitimate channels. But the divisions were not simply generational. They were also bounded by language, literacy, and wealth. Those Muslims who constituted a majority in their area saw the future of India differently from those who did not. The issues of pan-Islam and of religious fundamentalism were embraced less as ends in themselves than as rallying cries. They enabled the western-educated professional elite to broaden its appeal to traditionalists and to the peasantry. The substance was not the war and its outcome, but the quest for political influence within India.214

  Thus, the move from rhetoric to revolution was embraced by very few. The key figures were Mahmudul Hasan and his pupil Obeidullah Sindhi, a convert from Sikhism. Hasan used his seminary at Deoband as a base for arguing that British government cut across religious freedom. He taught that it was the duty of Muslims to go to a country under Muslim rule, and he was the inspiration to the fifteen students who left Lahore in 1915 to join the Turkish army via Kabul. Hasan and his pupils agitated among the tribes of the north-west frontier, particularly the Wahabi communities in Buner.

  The Wahabi numbered at most 800 fighting men. In the estimation of the British the key to the behaviour of the frontier tribes was the Afridi. They divided the restless Mohmands, north of Peshawar and adjacent to Buner, from the Mahsuds in Kurram and Waziristan. The allowances paid by India to the Afridi were doubled in February 1915. But of the 2,500 Afridi serving with the Indian army, over 600 had deserted by June. Moreover, across the border Habibullah’s authority in Khost was weak. Raids from Khost into the Tochi valley in 1915 and five attacks in the Peshawar region were described by Hardinge as the most serious frontier operations since 1897. Operations against the Mohmands, numbered by the British in tens of thousands, extended throughout the summer. But in 1916 they were quieter until later in the year, and were then contained by a network of blockhouses. In these operations the British used both aircraft and armoured cars in the North-West Frontier Province for the first time. The nominal strength of the forces in the area—three infantry divisions, one cavalry brigade, and three frontier force brigades—remained unchanged throughout the war, but the quality declined. Thus the application of new technology, combined with the opening of a mountain warfare school in May 1916, offset the worst deficiencies in training and experience. Crucially, Waziristan remained quiet until 1917, with the result that each clash on the north-west frontier remained isolated rather than part of a general rising. The bulk of the Afridi remained loyal; the Khans in Chitral, the Swat valley, and the Khyber aided the government.215

  In August 1915 Obeidullah and three other mujahedin left the tribes for Kabul. He was rewarded with the home portfolio in Pratap’s provisional government. However, his major creative effort went into the organization of the ‘army of God’. He dubbed the Wahabis the ‘Hindustani fanatics’ and saw them as the advance guard in a general Muslim rising in India. To support them there would be an Islamic army with its headquarters in Medina, and branches in Constantinople, Teheran, and Kabul. He seems to have been more concerned with the distribution of senior rank than with the operational effectiveness of the ‘army of God’. Both he and Hasan were to be generals; he named the Sherif of Mecca, who by the time he penned this ridiculous farrago in July 1916 was already on the other side, a field marshal.

  Hasan himself had gone to the Hejaz in September 1915, ostensibly as a pilgrim, in reality to organize the Turkish end of Obeidullah’s scheme. The Turks were wary; they recognized that ultimately Indian nationalism and pan-Islam were incompatible. Moreover, the capricious and unsympathetic behaviour of Har Dayal had resulted in a fragmentation of the Berlin Committee’s efforts in the Ottoman empire. Har Dayal had initially imagined that Enver was supportive of the Hindus, and that Muslim religious feeling could therefore be subordinated to Indian nationalism. But he also concluded that the Indian middle class was effete, and therefore preferred to answer directly to the German foreign office than to the Berlin Committee. Thus, although Har Dayal was co-ordinating Indian propaganda in Damascus, he inflamed both Turks and Indians.216 Similarly, a proposal to raise an Indian legion from the prisoners of war captured in Mesopotamia foundered, caught between the Turks’ wish to incorporate only Muslims in the Ottoman army and the Berlin Committee’s fantasies of an Indian national army.

  The governor of the Hejaz, therefore, received Hasan with politeness, but suggested he might be better advised to work on the revolutionary organization within India. Hasan declined to return himself, but sent two of his acolytes. In Persia two of the Lahore students entrusted with the task of opening overland contact between Obeidullah and Constantinople were interned in May 1916 and handed over to India. Obeidullah himself wrote a long account of what had so far been achieved, the so-called ‘silk letters’, which he entrusted to an emissary to take to Hasan in Arabia. The messenger promptly handed them over to the commissioner of police in Multan, and on the basis of his evidence and of the ‘childish rot’ (the police’s description) in the letters, Obeidullah’s Indian associates were exposed. Hasan was arrested in Jedda in December 1916.217

  The intrigues of the mujahidin and of the Turkish agents among the frontier tribes, abetted by Nasrullah, had results only marginally less feeble. In June 1916 a Turkish colonel and a former Indian army NCO rallied about 400 Afridi in Tirah. But in September they were ousted by the pro-British faction and in June 1917 the Turks returned to Afghanistan. The Mohmands were stirred into activity between October 1916 and July 1917, but then settled with the British. And to the south the Mahsuds became gradually bolder in the area beyond the Indus. In 1917 a punitive expedition was organized in Waziristan and the Mahsuds were subdued. The ambivalence of Afghanistan, the tendency of the Turkish agents to agitate in the winter when the Afridi looked to move into the lower ground, and the British use of aeroplanes rather than troops all contributed to curtail the seriousness of the frontier threat.218

  The schemes of Pratap, Barkatullah, Obeidullah, and Hasan were as riddled with fissures as those of Ghadr. Obeidullah pledged his allegiance to a provisional government of India, and even established a branch of the Indian National Congress in Kabul. But his own commitment was to Islam, not to India, and he was using the latter to advance the cause of the former. These contradictions would only have been more evident had the hare-brained schemes which underpinned them been more successful. An Afghan invasion, as the Germans recognized, stood in direct opposition to the achievement of Indian independence. To the westernized and professional elites of the Indian cities the tribes of the frontier represented backwardness, not advance.

  The hopes for revolutionizing India, whether Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim, depended on long-range thrusts delivered from outside. Never was there an internal movement of sufficient robustness to overcome the splits within Indian society and to rally mass support.

  Although the divisions—of race, religion, caste, language—were the most obvious feature of Indian political life in 1914, the latter’s small base was equally important. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, and was accepted as an effective spokesman for Indian demands. But its activities did not reflect the preoccupations of the bulk of the Indian population. Whole swathes of territory, including the Punjab, the Central Provinces, and the United Provinces, were barely represented. The kernel of Congre
ss was the high-caste Hindu of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal. British rule relied on collaboration, and western education became the means by which the professional classes could ensure their places in the civil service and in municipal self-government. Congress, therefore, directed its attention not to the politicization of the masses but to securing the power-base of its own members. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 introduced communal electorates. The indications were that co-operation with the British—moderation, not extremism— would expand the influence of the western-educated Indian elite. In 1914 the Indian politician, however radical he might sound, was committed to change through constitutional methods and to co-operation with the Raj.219

  The impact of the war did affect the tempo of political life, principally because of the economic and social change engendered by the war effort. But the consequences of rising prices, of major recruiting efforts, and of shortages of imported foods were manifest in 1917–18, not earlier. In 1914 the Government of India was agreeably surprised by the level of popular support for Britain’s entry to the war. In September the legislative council agreed to India bearing the normal costs of Indian Expeditionary Force A while it was in France. Enlistment, which had averaged 1,250 men a month in peacetime, reached 10,000 a month by the end of 1915. Two divisions in Egypt had been earmarked for dispatch to India in the event of a major rising on the north-west frontier or of invasion from Afghanistan. But in late 1916 the commander-in-chief in India was confident he could meet such a threat from his own resources. In March 1917, as war-weariness manifested itself, India set a target of 17,500 recruits a month, and in fact enlisted 276,000 in the course of the year 1917–18, more than twice its total for 1916–17. All these were voluntary engagements, even if disproportionately from the Punjab. Moreover, in another indication of popular support for the imperial war effort, war loans were successfully floated in India in 1917 and 1918.220 The Government of India never felt sufficiently challenged to extend its control of the press to censorship before publication or to central direction; active propaganda in favour of Britain remained local and self-generated until 1918.221

  Nonetheless, in 1916 Congress recognized that the war was a good moment to press the British for constitutional concessions. Moreover, they could use the threat of their own extremists and of the young Muslims to argue that without reform the viability of moderation would be under severe challenge. Congress accepted that there should be separate Muslim electorates, and proposed that no bill would be passed if it was opposed by 75 per cent of any one community. In December 1916 the Muslim League responded to this package by joining Congress in calling for change. In a striking, though still limited, departure from previous political behaviour, two Home Rule Leagues were formed to carry the demand for self-government into areas and castes that previously had remained unpoliticized.

  Two factors prevented this movement becoming the internal focus for a radical Indian nationalism which the revolutionaries abroad hoped to establish. The first was that British policy was rooted in moderation and concession, and therefore kept the professional and educated classes within its thrall. And the second was that the unity of 1916 was only apparent. The Muslim League did not represent the Muslim community of India.

  The idea that India’s contribution to the war should be repaid by voluntary concessions had already been embraced by Hardinge in 1915. In November 1916 his successor, Lord Chelmsford, reflected the views of the provincial governors when he advised that a measure of political reform be granted as soon as possible. By setting self-government as the ultimate, if long-term, objective he hoped to pre-empt India’s home-rule movement, and by broadening the franchise he planned to undermine the dominance of the legal profession on the local and imperial legislative councils. The Government of India’s proposals were sent to London on 24 November 1916, and were thus temporarily submerged by the death throes of Asquith’s coalition government. However, the secretary of state for India, Austen Chamberlain, survived the reshuffle. As the son of Joseph, whose career had been defined by Ireland, he was persuaded that extremism was best avoided by the early concession of home rule, freely and ungrudgingly given. The Lucknow Declaration threatened Chamberlain and Chelmsford with the loss of initiative, and on 20 March 1917 the Council of India too favoured swift action, cautioning against ‘a formula of political progress, hedged with restrictions that nullify its meaning’.222 India was accorded membership of the Imperial War Conference, despite the opposition or indifference of the white Dominions, and thus acquired de facto Dominion status. But Conservative resistance delayed any further announcement. In June the publication of the report of the Mesopotamian commission lambasted the Government of India, and Chamberlain by implication. Chamberlain resigned.

  At this stage there was still little sense, particularly in London, of a long-term progression towards British withdrawal or even Indian self-government. Curzon, who was now lord president and a member of the war cabinet, saw self-government to mean ‘responsible government’, not parliamentary democracy. Any suggestion that India should be rewarded for its contribution to the war effort was therefore laughable, for, as he roundly declared on 27 June 1917: ‘The classes to whom it is now proposed to offer additional concessions [i.e. the educated, professional middle class] have no right to claim them on the ground of war service, for they have rendered no such war service.’223

  But he was outflanked by the appointment of E. S. Montagu as Chamberlain’s successor. The Conservatives were not the only ones to be appalled; Asquith, who admittedly felt that Montagu had robbed him of Venetia Stanley, tersely observed that ‘a Jew was not a fit person to attempt to govern India’.224 Only weeks before Montagu had used the debate on the Mesopotamian commission to argue that the inflexibility of the Government of India and the circumlocution of the India Office might be corrected by the establishment of more representative institutions. In August 1917 he publicly promised that India could aspire eventually to become a self-governing Dominion. By himself visiting India and by producing with Chelmsford a joint report on the self-government of the country, published in July 1918, he identified himself with the ideas of decentralization and popular participation. But his aim was as much expedience as any commitment to liberalism. He was anxious to ward off political extremism. Like Chamberlain, he used Ireland as a cautionary tale, but for that very reason had regarded his predecessor as a man ‘intent on mending the lavatory tap when the house is on fire’. The real reason for political reform was ‘to fit Indian organisation to a part of the world war’.225 Montagu and Chelmsford wanted to provide the underpinnings for India’s war effort, for the expansion of the Indian army, and continued withdrawal of British troops.

  Montagu’s declaration was a pragmatic recognition that during the war years British rule had come to rest even more on the co-operation of the moderates. Its effect was to justify their reliance on Britain. It confirmed the Indian view of Britain as an enlightened and impartial ruler. But the proposals themselves were not as extensive as such Indians might have expected. The moderates did not want to criticize for fear of wrecking what had been gained; equally, they could not appear to praise them for fear of alienating potential supporters. In the 1918 Congress, which attacked the proposals, the moderates abstained. Furthermore, the new constitution continued specifically to recognize the interests of minority groups. What, therefore, Montagu had also done was to reopen the divisions which had apparently begun to close in 1916.

  But the 1917 declaration was also the agent of political and social change, as well as its reflection. The combination of the economic strains now evident in 1917–18, and the expansion of political awareness generated as Indian politicians fought for their power-base and for their interests in the new conditions, all helped nudge India towards a political system that rested on mass support. The politician who would most obviously profit from this in the immediate post-war era was Mahatma Gandhi. But in the conditions of 1918 his influence served to divide yet further India’s body
politic. Although himself the product of India’s westernization, and although building his plans for India on British co-operation, he broke with the political styles of the professional classes. He used the Hindu heritage of India, the ashram, to build his following; he urged his followers to use objects made in India and so indirectly reverted to a peasant economy; and his advocacy of passive resistance created a political technique that allowed mass political mobilization. But while traditional in some ways, he sought alliance with the Muslims and worked with low-caste Hindus. From this Gandhi was to fashion Indian nationalism. But its effect in 1918 was to divide Indian politics in yet another direction. And even when Indian nationalism gained momentum it remained more dependent on British co-operation than directed at revolution.226