Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Instead of getting more freedom at the end of the war in 1918, the Indians got less. The conservative group pushed through the Rowlatt Act in March 1919. This continued most of the wartime restrictions on civil liberties in India, to be used to control nationalist agitations. Gandhi called for civil disobedience and a series of scattered local general strikes (hartels) in protest. These actions led to violence, especially to Indian attacks on the British. Gandhi bewailed this violence, and inflicted a seventy-two-hour fast on himself as penance.

In Amritsar an Englishwoman was attacked in the street (April 10, 1919). The Congress Party leaders in the city were deported, and Brigadier R. E. H. Dyer was sent to restore order. On arrival he prohibited all processions and meetings; then, without waiting for the order to be publicized, went with fifty men to disperse with gunfire a meeting already in progress (April 13, 1919). He fired 1,650 bullets into a dense crowd packed in a square with inadequate exits, inflicting 1,516 casualties, of which 379 met death. Leaving the wounded untended on the ground, General Dyer returned to his office and issued an order that all Indians passing through the street where the Englishwoman had been assaulted a week before must do so by crawling on hands and knees. There is no doubt that General Dyer was looking for trouble. In his own words: “I had made up my mind I would do all men to death.... It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab.”

The situation might still have been saved from Dyer’s barbarity but the Hunter Committee, which investigated the atrocity, refused to condemn Dyer except for “a grave error of judgment” and “an honest but mistaken conception of duty.” A majority of the House of Lords approved his action by refusing to censure him, and, when the government forced him to resign from the army, his admirers in England presented him with a sword and a purse of £ 20,000.

At this point Gandhi committed a grave error of judgment. In order to solidify the alliance of Hindu and Muslim which had been in existence since 1917, he supported the Khilafat movement of Indian Muslims to obtain a lenient peace treaty for the Turkish sultan (and caliph) following World War I. Gandhi suggested that the Khilafat adopt “noncooperation” against Britain to enforce its demands. This would have involved a boycott of British goods, schools, law courts, offices, honors, and of all goods subject to British taxes (such as alcohol). This was an error of judgment because the sultan was soon overthrown by his own people organized in a Turkish Nationalist movement and seeking a secularized Turkish state, in spite of all Britain was already doing (both in public and in private) to support him. Thus, the Khilafat movement was seeking to force Britain to do something it already wanted to do and was not able to do. Moreover, by bringing up “noncooperation” as a weapon against the British, Gandhi had opened a number of doors he had no desire to open, with very bad consequences for India.

At the Indian National Congress of December, 1919, Tilak and Gandhi were the leading figures. Both were willing to accept the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, Tilak because he believed this would be the best way to prove that they were not adequate. But on August 1, 1920, Gandhi proclaimed “noncooperation” in behalf of the Khilafat movement. On the same day Tilak died, leaving Gandhi as undisputed leader of the Congress. At the 1920 meeting he won unanimous approval for “non-cooperation,” and then moved a resolution for sivaraj (self-rule) either within or outside the British Empire. The Muslims in Congress, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, refused to accept an independent India outside the British Empire because this would subject the Muslims to a Hindu majority without Britain’s protecting restraint. As a result, from that point, many Muslims left the Congress.

Noncooperation was a great public success. But it did not get self-rule for India, and made the country less fitted for self-rule by making it impossible for Indians to get experience in government under the Act of 1919. Thousands of Indians gave up medals and honors, gave up the practice of law in British courts, left the British schools, and burned British goods. Gandhi held great mass meetings at which thousands of persons stripped themselves of their foreign clothing to throw it on raging bonfires. This did not, however, give them training in government. It merely roused nationalist violence. On February 1, 1922, Gandhi informed the viceroy that he was about to begin mass civil disobedience, in one district at a time, beginning in Bardoli near Bombay. Civil disobedience, including refusal to pay taxes or obey the laws, was a step beyond noncooperation, since it involved illegal acts rather than legal ones. On February 5, 1922, a Hindu mob attacked twenty-two police constables and killed them by burning the police station down over their heads. In horror Gandhi canceled the campaign against Britain. He was at once arrested and condemned to six years in prison for sedition.

Very great damage had been done by the events of 1919-1922. Britain and India were alienated to the point where they no longer trusted one another. The Congress Party itself had been split, the moderates forming a new group called the Indian Liberal Federation. The Muslims had also left the Congress Party to a large extent and gone to strengthen the Muslim League. From this point onward, Muslim-Hindu riots were annual occurrences in India. And finally the boycott had crippled the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, almost two-thirds of the eligible voters refusing to vote in the Councils elections of November, 1920.

IRELAND TO 1939

While the Indian crisis was at its height in 1919-1922, an even more violent crisis was raging in Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century Ireland had been agitated by grievances of long standing. The three major problems were agrarian, religious, and political. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the seventeenth century had transferred much Irish land, as plunder of war, to absentee English landlords. In consequence high rents, insecure tenure, lack of improvements, and legalized economic exploitation, supported by English judges and English soldiers, gave rise to violent agrarian unrest and rural atrocities against English lives and properties.

Beginning with Gladstone’s Land Act of 1870, the agrarian problems were slowly alleviated and, by 1914, were well in hand. The religious problem arose from the fact that Ireland was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and resented being ruled by persons of a different religion. Moreover, until the Irish (Episcopal) Church was disestablished in 1869, Irish Catholics had to support a structure of Anglican clergy and bishops, most of whom had few or no parishioners in Ireland and resided in England, supported by incomes from Ireland. Finally, the Act of Union of 1801 had made Ireland a part of the United Kingdom, with representatives in the Parliament at Westminster.

By 1871 those representatives who were opposed to union with England formed the Irish Home Rule Party. It sought to obtain separation by obstructing the functions of Parliament and disrupting its proceedings. At times this group exercised considerable influence in Parliament by holding a balance of power between Liberals and Conservatives. The Gladstone Liberals were willing to give Ireland Home Rule, with no representatives at Westminster; the Conservatives (with the support of a majority of Englishmen) were opposed to Home Rule; the Rhodes-Milner group wanted self-government for the Irish in their home affairs with Irish representatives retained at Westminster for foreign and imperial matters. The Liberal government of 1906-1916 tried to enact a Home Rule bill with continued Irish representation in the House of Commons, but was repeatedly blocked by the opposition of the House of Lords; the bill did not become law until September, 1914.