Did Mahatma Gandhi want India to become independent? He was the leader of the Indian National Congress which was making that demand. But, what he himself was saying, at the Second Round Table Conference, was that India could not feed, defend or administer itself. His own plan for India was to ensure that this should continue to be the case for the vast majority of Indians.
At any rate, that is the impression he conveys, in the speech he gave at Chatham House in 1931
SPEECH AT CHATHAM HOUSE MEETING1 LONDON, October 20, 1931 You were good enough to say that I have spared from my busy time a few moments to address a gathering under the auspices of this Institute. I must confess that I seize every opportunity I can of coming into touch with British public opinion and putting before them the purpose of my mission. I have therefore come before you quite selfishly, and I hope that the words I speak to you this evening will find a lodgment in your hearts.
Were those words 'give India independence'? Transfer power to an elected central legislature?' No. What Gandhi had to say was that most Indians lived in the villages and were too fucking poor to afford or be much affected by the British administration or Western medicine or education. But this also meant that Gandhi's program- which was to make the villages self-sufficient- was like Tagore's program and could be implemented without any 'freedom struggle' or demand for representative government or Dominion status.
If this were so, why was Gandhi in London? Come to that, why had Tagore paraded around the world? The answer is that making the Indian village self-sufficient required lots of money and the assistance of White people who would come to one to two of those villages to work there in a suitably chastened and charitable spirit.
What neither Gandhi nor Tagore acknowledged was that there were richer parts of India which had benefitted from the Raj. It was those richer Indians- not starving peasants- who paid for the protection provided by the British Navy and the Army and the apparatus of the Raj with its schools and hospitals and courts of law and legislative councils. For these Indians, Gandhi had no plan. He proposed to get half starved agricultural workers to spin or weave coarse cotton. Sadly, the calories consumed by those engaged in such spinning or weaving were more expensive to procure than the coal consumed by steam or electricity powered machines doing the same job. In other words, Gandhi's panacea was unworkable. Equally, the proposal to revive indigenous schools and medical practices was doomed because its product had been so utterly shit that India had been easy to conquer. Moreover, if caste was a curse, it was a product of indigenous poverty, shite education, shite medicine and shite politics all of which Gandhi wanted to revive to replace what the Brits had put in their place. What would be the result? India would become incapable of sending troops to distant battlefields. But, it also would be incapable of defending its own borders. It would not be able to protect itself from invaders or insurrectionists. It would become prey to famine and war-lordism till some new Imperial power- perhaps the Japanese- took it over.
At the end of what I have to say I should like you to cross-examine me and ask me any questions you may like to put. I have found by experience that that is the only way of removing the mists of misunderstanding. I have noticed that the greatest stumbling-block in my way is the hopeless ignorance of the true facts of the situation, through no fault of yours;
England knew that India had been able to supply troops and money during the Great War on a not insignificant scale. It knew that Indian troops were needed in the MENA as well as South East Asia. But it could get Indian mercenaries the same way that it got Nepalese Gurkhas- i.e. just by paying them. There was no need to administer the country or keep it safe.
you belong to one of the busiest nations in the world,
Britain had risen and risen by continually raising productivity in all sorts of different fields. Gandhi's financiers had grown rich importing British capital goods and British or American managers for their Mills or other industrial units, but Indian productivity was still a small fraction of that of England. Thus, using the very same machines, the Indian worker produced less per capita. It was estimated that an Indian man, employed by a Textile mill, did three effective hours of work a day, whereas the Lancashire lass did eight hours worth of work.
you have your own problems, and at the present moment this great island of yours is going through a crisis such as you have never had to face within living memory.
Britain could export capital goods to India under Imperial preference. Some arrangement like what would become the Mody-Lees agreement would bring cheer to the City and be mutually beneficial. Longer term, India and other Dominions would need to be building their own ships and air-planes, thus strengthening the economic and military might of the Commonwealth. The onset of the Great Depression meant that both England and India had a mutual interest to foster trade between them (which was still quite sizable at that time).
My whole heart goes out to you in your troubles, and I hope that you will soon be able, with your marvellous energy, to cut a way out of them. No wonder, however, that, preoccupied as you are, you find no time to study the problems that affect a distant land like India.
The Brits had done so to such good effect that, in the rest of this speech, Gandhi will rely entirely upon British authorities- even for his own crack-pot ideas and schemes.
It is therefore a matter of keen pleasure to me that so many of you have found time to come here and listen to what I may have to say. I only feel grieved that many of you who are listening to my voice are unable to find accommodation in this room. With these preliminary words, I plunge into my subject. In order to give you a description of the future of India as I conceive it, I shall tell you in as few words as possible what India is at present.
Whatever it was, it was the product of British enterprise.
India is a sub- continent by itself, nineteen hundred miles long, fifteen hundred miles wide, with a population of roughly 350 millions.
It was a collection of Kingdoms, Princedoms and semi-feudal estates united under British paramountcy. Never had the region had an Emperor who united so much of its territory and kept the peace for so prolonged a period. India had become a member of the League of Nations under British auspices. Its soldiers had fought in Europe and the MENA. An Indian, the Maharaja of Bikaner, a member of the Imperial War Cabinet, had signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of India. This was the very time a 'coloured man' had been treated by the great powers of Europe as an equal. Ganga Singh had fought in China, during the Boxer Rebellion, and in France and the Middle East. His entire nation was honoured for the martial power they had projected on distant shores.
Of these about 210 millions are Hindus, 70 millions are Mussalmans, 3 millions are Sikhs; there is also a fairly large Indian Christian population, and a very small European or, more correctly speaking, English population. Numerically it is insignificant, but, as you know, it enjoys a position of privilege and influence unsurpassed, belonging as it does to the ruling race.
The Brits had created the India Gandhi spoke of. They had used their 'privilege and influence' in a manner which had greatly helped Gandhi and his financiers.
We have within this population our own Hindu-MuslimSikh problem, or, as it is called, the problem of minorities.
Gandhi himself had exacerbated that problem. The Kanpur riots, seven months previously, had taken 400 lives. Muslim shopkeepers did not want to shut their shops in obedience to the hartal called by Congress.
I will not go into the problem as it affects other minorities, nor will I take up your time by airing my views with regard to these minorities, but one minority I may not omit, the unhappy untouchables, a word which is a standing reproach to the Hindus of India who form the majority of the population.
It was a product of poverty and ignorance and lack of proper medicine which contributed to a primitive type of 'pathogen avoidance' behaviour. Korea had untouchability and a prejudice against widow remarriage just like India. But social or religious reform, as recommended by Choe Je-u, a proponent of 'Eastern Wisdom', could not save it from Japanese imperialism. Indeed, Japan had just begun its invasion of Manchuria a month or two before Gandhi gave this speech.
Untouchability is a curse upon Hinduism, and I have no hesitation in saying that, if untouchability is not rooted out of Hinduism, Hinduism must perish.
Untouchability existed where Hinduism had not. Bali has Brahmins but no Untouchables. Japan and Korea had untouchability but no Brahmins.
The time has come when any system, no matter how hoary and ancient it may be, must stand the light of day, must be able to stand fierce criticism, and if Hinduism harbours untouchability, it has no place on this earth.
But hand spinning and hand weaving (of coarse cloth) were hoary and ancient and had to perish. It was pointless wasting money subsidizing the thing.
I am glad to tell you that Congress has made the removal of untouchability an integral part of its programme,
because of British pushing and prodding. The Census established by the Raj was itself a factor. Around the time Gandhi was born, WR Cornish & CF Magrath, were using empirical evidence to highlight the fictitious nature of the fourfold 'chaturvarna' caste theory and revealing the numerical strength of what would later be called the 'backward' and 'depressed' classes. Congress came late to a party even when compared to some of the Princes of India. Gandhi himself, in the course of the question and answer session, creates the impression that Congress is a Brahmin party and that Brahmins were digging wells for untouchables so as to atone for the sins of their ancestors.
and under the inspiration of Congress there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Hindu reformers who have dedicated their lives to the removal of this blot upon Hinduism and upon India.
What removes ignorance bred of poverty, is being less fucking poor.
These young men and women are reaching a hand to these untouchables in a variety of ways. We are digging wells for them, opening schools for them, building new temples for them and opening up old temples for them.
Because the Brits were running things. If they weren't Gandhi & Co would not be secure enough to do anything by way of charity- no matter how useless.
We are giving to twenty-five thousand untouchable women, if not more, work in their own homes. We have introduced them to spinning-wheels.
The Brits had spinning wheels. They got rid of them because human labour can't compete with wind or water or steam power.
We have found for several thousand untouchables their old occupation of rough weaving, which had died out owing to the competition of modern manufactured cloth.
Why not find for them the old occupation of being hunter gatherers who hadn't been able to compete with settled agriculture?
This meant that they had taken either to scavenging or to some other occupation, because of their inability to earn their livelihood from this noble hereditary occupation of weaving.
That wasn't their hereditary occupation. If Gandhi had said 'we are encouraging Hindus to kill cattle so that more leather will be available for hereditary leather-workers' people might have thought he wanted to help India to advance. But Gandhi believed in cow protection.
Thanks to God and to the efforts of these young reformers, several thousand untouchables have thus recovered their old occupation of rough weaving. There are several families who were heavily indebted and who now are not only free from debts but have laid by a decent sum.
Because the thing was subsidized.
One family I can recollect has laid by what is in India a very respectable sum for a poor family-two thousand rupees. This family is in demand all over India as teachers,
because of the Congress subsidy
because both husband and wife are accomplished weavers and conscientious and skilled workers.
i.e. they were paid and promoted by Gandhi & his party. On the other hand, skilled weavers of luxury cloth could make a good living. But they wanted fine quality imported yarn. Gandhi wanted to shut down their lucrative business because he had got it into his head that workers should themselves consume what they produce.
You can imagine how much self-respect they must have gained, owing to their being wanted as teachers and not as scavengers and treated almost as a plague.
Mad people who believe they are the Emperor Napoleon have even more self-respect. Gandhi himself was no slouch in this department.
That is a very important minority, important in the sense that it deserves all the sympathy and all the aid that can be given to it. I have not a shadow of doubt that this untouchability is going very fast, and if, through God's grace, India comes to her own as a result of the deliberations of the Round Table Conference or otherwise, you will find that untouchability has gone for ever.
Not if there is affirmative action for it. Then it will increase.
But I have not yet finished my description of India as It is. What is this 350 million population doing? More than eightyfive per cent of this population is engaged in agriculture
A.O Hulme, founder of the INC, wrote a book on how to raise productivity in Indian agriculture towards the end of the 1870s. Gandhi hadn't read it. He knew nothing of agronomy.
and is living in seven hundred thousand villages, dotted over the vast surface that I have described. There are some villages in India which have a population of not more than a hundred souls; there are, again, villages which have a population of as many as five thousand. Now Indian agriculture depends very largely—it has to—upon its precarious rainfall.
Is Gandhi going to talk of how his party will expand the canal irrigation which had made the Punjab prosperous? Nope. He neither knew nor cared about any such thing.
In parts of that subcontinent, like 1Cherapunji, you have a deluge of rain, as much as 600 inches. In other parts, like Sind and Central India, for example, you have hardly 5 inches. And then, often, it is not equally distributed.
Irrigation projects can pay for themselves as the Punjab had shown. Indeed, that province was exporting food and soldiers during the First World War while Persia was starving and occupied by foreign powers. Why was Gandhi not talking about how Congress could extend to other provinces the type of prosperity which the British had brought to the Punjab? Consider what people named Gandhi and Nehru have done to it. First there was Partition, then under Indira, terrorism and pogroms. Both the demand for Pakistan and Khalistan were made as a response to Congress's policies. Still, it must be said, the Mahatma did not intend Hulme's INC to become a dynastic vehicle for amateur politicians with little political, and no economic, nous.
Agricultural holdings are anything between one acre, or threequarters of an acre, and two and a half acres.
Which is why there had to be urbanization and industrialization so that farms could become large enough to be financially viable.
I think, taking province by province, in no province are the holdings, on the average, more than two and a half or three acres per head. I am open to correction, but I think I am not far out, and there are thousands upon thousands who have less than one acre, and again tens of thousands who are absolutely landless, and who are therefore living in India as serfs, one might almost say as slaves.
India needed to urbanize and industrialize. What Gandhi was describing was Malthusian involution.
It cannot be called a state of legal slavery,
Hereditary bonded labour was slavery. Congress did not mention the problem till the Nineteen Seventies.
but it is really a state bordering on slavery. This population, because all the rainfall is concentrated within two, three, four or five months at the outside, lives without any continuous occupation for nearly six months of the year.
The landlords lived without any occupation all year.
In some places where there are double crops, the absence of occupation extends over a period of four months, but, roughly speaking, you may say that these agriculturists of India are without any constant occupation for half the year. That being so, there is deep and ever-deepening poverty among the masses.
Indians weren't getting enough to eat because agricultural productivity was so low. A.O Hulme's program for Indian agriculture was taken forward by Sir Albert Howard and his wife and her sister. Gandhi had visited Howard's institute and was taken by the Indore process for composting. It must be said, Howard had learnt much from Indian farmers. Specific castes- e.g. the Phules- broadcast new techniques and introduced new crops. Barristers- even if they had studied Botany, like Jawaharlal- were useless.
The average income of the people for the whole of India is two pence per day.
Because their productivity was low. Gandhi thought it should be lower still.
If the average income of these 350 million people is two pence a day-and in calculating this average the wealth of a few millionaires is included-you will have no difficulty in understanding that there are tens of thousands of people who do not even earn two pence per day. The result is that nearly one-tenth of the population is living in a condition of semi-starvation.
The Brits had introduced famine relief measures- e.g. food for work. Indians weren't happy having to pay taxes towards this end. Nehru's solution was to beg Uncle Sam for food aid.
They have no more than one meal per day, consisting of stale chapati and a pinch of dirty salt. There is no such thing as bread. They do not know from year's end to year's end what milk is, or even skimmed milk; they do not know what butter is; they do not know what oil is; they never get green vegetables.
Which is why they ate fish and meat- which Gandhi was against.
That is the condition of the vast mass of sunken humanity in India.
Britishers eat beef. How far they have sunk!
I have now to tell you what should be, and, if the Congress had its way, would be the future state of India.
It would become less able to feed and defend itself.
I have not filled in the picture with the cities because the cities do not make India; it is the villages which make India.
Villages had once made up Britain. Urbanization and industrialization had made it so rich and powerful that it could rule a large portion of the globe.
Nor have I put in the Princes; the Princes also have a portion of these villages, and the life of the villagers in British India.
If so, so did Zamindars like the Tagores. The difference was that the Brits, not Congress, promoted progressive zamindars- like the Nawab of Chhatari- while honouring Princes who improved the welfare of their subjects.
If there is any difference, and there is some, it is a difference of degree and in no sense a difference of kind. Princes will come and Princes will go,
The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is refusing to just fucking fuck off and die already. Still, assassination is a great curb on autocracy.
empires will come and empires will go, but this India living in her villages will remain just as it is.
Unless it did sensible things and focussed on raising productivity rather than talking bollocks.
Sir Henry Maine
who spent 7 years in India on the Viceroy's council. Gandhi had spent longer in India but has to quote Maine.
has left a monograph, The Village Communities of India, in which you will find the author saying that all these villages were at one time, and are to a certain extent now, self-contained "little republics".
Which were often unable to feed themselves- forget about collective defence.
They have their own culture, mode of life, and method of protecting themselves,
which was utterly shit.
their own village schoolmaster, their own priest, carpenter, barber, in fact everything that a village could want.
If it wanted to remain utterly shitty.
There is certainly today no kind of government to be seen in the villages, but whatever their life is, these villages are self-contained, and if you went there, you would find that there is a kind of agreement under which they are built. From these villages has perhaps arisen what you call the iron rule of caste.
But there were plenty of villages without the thing. The plain fact is, there were agricultural villages before there was caste or class.
Caste has been a blight on India, but it has also acted as a sort of protecting shield for these masses.
The Brits were India's protective shield. But Brits don't have a caste system.
But I must not take you into the intricacies of this caste system.
Which Gandhi did not know.
What I am trying to give you is as faithful a picture as possible of India as it is at present.
See above.
I must also not detain you with the impress that British rule has left on India, what that rule is today and what it accounts for. I have dwelt upon that at other meetings and you have some of the literature; but you have no literature on the future of India.
This is the crux of the matter. Did Congress have a plan to make India more productive? If not, their rule would make the country less able to feed itself, defend itself, or keep minorities safe. This was the actual outcome. In 1930, undivided India had 6.7 percent of World GNP. By 1980, India's figure was 1.7 percent. Now it is about eight percent. Congress had to decline for India to rise.
I could not possibly have given you a picture of the future unless I had given you this background.
Gandhi gives a good enough picture of India's future- it would be shitty.
If I tell you more about this peasantry of India, you will not now be surprised. The Congress has made it an article of faith that the test of its work and its progress shall be the measure of its becoming a predominantly peasant organization, and we have set for ourselves this rule, that we shall not consider any interest in India which is in conflict with the fundamental well-being of this eighty per cent of the population.
In which case, Congress must be an anti-landlord party, right? Moreover, it should prioritize the cotton farmer over the Mill owner. Yet, the reverse was the case.
Then, what should the government of that population be? The foremost thing that the future State of India would look after would be the economic welfare of these masses.
How? The country was too poor to have much State capacity. Moreover, the State had to extract resources to support itself.
You will therefore have no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that, then, this Government is going to find some occupation for these idle six months of the year for the peasant.
With what money? Even a wooden spinning wheel cost money. Gandhi estimated this to be Rs 3. But, according to his own calculation, spinning all day would only net one anna (one sixteenth of a Rupee) per day. Assuming, spinners work 180 days a year, this yields 11 Rupees extra income. That gives a capital output ratio of 4. Sadly, for machine yarn, the figure was at least 10. The problem, at least in Bombay, was that workers only did about three hours of work. Indian work ethic and practices were poor. Some blame weak management, others blame worker militancy. Perhaps, if girls from the villages could have been brought into factory dormitories, things may have been different. Gandhi thought 90 million spinners were needed to supply India's demand for cloth. So, a capital outlay of 270 million Rs.- which was half the 'home charge' (i.e. the Government of India's payment to the UK)- would, according to Gandhi, save a large percentage from the Indian population from utter penury. Sadly, there was no truth to this whatsoever. When Congress administrations were formed in 1937, they soon discovered that khaddar was a money pit. The yarn produced by the chakri was seldom usable. A British school teacher volunteering in Gandhi's 'Nai Talim' schools suggested that such yarn be bought by the Government and used to scrub blackboards! The other problem was that the teachers of spinning could not feed themselves by following that vocation. The calories needed to do that monotonous work were more expensive to procure than the sale price of the yarn. This was assuming that the spinning was done carefully enough to produce usable yarn. Sadly, this was seldom the case.
That should really be the primary concern of any person who undertakes this gigantic task. By a process of elimination we have come to the conclusion that for this homogeneous population you must have one predominant occupation.
Gandhi was against specialization and the division of labour. Sadly, this means very low productivity. History shows that nations with low productivity lose territory to those with higher productivity. That is why India kept its Western style army and even went in for missiles and nukes.
You must have an easy occupation; you must have tools for that occupation that can easily be made in the villages, and the product of the village industry must be capable of being consumed by the villagers.
All of these things already existed in the villages. Did villagers really need a crazy ex-barrister to come and tell them about the spinning wheel and composting and refraining from eating their own shit?
If you can give some occupation which will answer all these tests, you will have a process of production and distribution, self-contained and without any other intermediary having to be resorted to. Such an occupation was the ancient occupation of hand-spinning and hand-weaving.
Which had existed in Britain. But it was uneconomic. Wind power and water power and steam power had removed the need for that boring type of labour.
I will not now take you through the history of how it was destroyed.
The price of cloth fell relative to the price of food. This meant people had more clothes to wear. They also had more food to eat because productivity in agriculture too had increased. As for cars and planes and radios- they too represented increases in productivity. Gandhi was against all that.
But you find that, due to the Congress, the Spinners' Association is penetrating as quickly as it can the thousands of villages of India. We have in this manner penetrated two thousand villages.
Indian Mill owners financed this in exchange for getting protective tariffs. In 1933, they made the Mody-Lees pact with Lancashire.
This occupation has nearly doubled the income of the villagers.
If this were true, then the thing would have spread like wild-fire. No State action would be required. What Gandhi is not saying is that you can double the income of a person by squandering five times that amount.
You will understand what two pence added to two pence means to a poor man; it means, I suggest, a fortune.
So, collect five pence in charitable contributions. Retain one penny for yourself. Piss two against a wall and then pay two pennies to the very poor to engage in a highly inefficient and monotonous type of work. Those you give this charity will feel 'self-respect'- right?
You will then take all the occupations necessary in connection with cotton, from hand-spinning and hand-weaving to printing, dyeing and washing. When you take into consideration all these occupations, it does govern the income of the people, and when we have done that, we have given these people a little bit of hope and courage and have put a little lustre into their eyes.
You would put more lustre into those eyes by just handing over cash rather than forcing people to spin for it.
If you walked with me in the villages of Orissa, you would see walking death throughout the length and breadth of that thrice-afflicted land.
As a cotton producer, Orissa had a lot of weaving and spinning and therefore was poor. Still, a marketing board for high-value added woven stuff and handicrafts would have paid for itself.
You see specimens of humanity, not voluntarily but compulsorily, mere skin and bone without any flesh on their limbs.
Weavers frequently starved to death. This was because villages fed weavers their surplus and in return got high value to weight commodities to trade. If there was a food availability deficit, weavers and artisans and 'service' castes needed to relocate quickly or else starve.
If we give them this occupation, we put into them new life and new hope.
Nope. That hope failed long ago. Coarse cloth was much more cheaply produced by steam powered mills.
But the activity of the new State will not stop there. These people are living in utter ignorance of sanitation
Gandhi was equally ignorant. He did not believe the germ theory of disease. More worrying was his support for the Chirala/Pirala agitation. The locals didn't want to pay higher local rates so that sewers and dispensaries and schools could be set up. Gandhi suggested that sewers were not needed. People should just carry a small spade and cover up their faeces. Also, you don't need hospitals and dispensaries. Just use naturopathy. If you have a tummy ache, take some mud and apply it to your stomach. As for schools, fuck that! Just teach kids how to spin and tell them never to have sex. That always works- right?
and we have to look after the hygienic conditions. So we try to introduce the hygienic methods of Dr. Poor,
a White dude. Anything a White dude says must be right- right?
who has written a volume on village hygiene. Briefly speaking, it consists of turning human excreta into manure. The Chinese people are the greatest people of the earth in the knowledge of the use of these human excreta, and Dr. Poor says the Chinese were his teachers in discovering this economic treatment.
The Chinese disagreed. They have had a 'toilet revolution' since 1993.
We are trying to do two things—to add to the wealth of the nation
by focusing on shit.
and to the health of the nation—
Health is related to wealth which is related to productivity- or, in Gandhi's case, having lots of rich donors and a personal Doctor in permanent attendance.
and if we teach the people this method of treating human excreta, the result will be that we shall rid ourselves somewhat of the plague of flies, and sterilize to some extent the poisonous mosquito—not fully, I know, but it is in the right direction.
Coz Dr. Poor said so and Dr. Poor is White and thus must be right- right?
Then we must give them some medical assistance in this malaria ridden country.
Nobel Laureate Ronald Ross, of the Indian Medical Service, was one of the first people to develop a mathematical theory of epidemiology. Gandhi, it must be said, did take quinine when he came down with malaria.
India suffers from many diseases, but malaria is essentially a disease induced by want.
No it isn't. That's why rich people get it.
It is not to be driven away by simply giving the villagers packets of quinine. Quinine is essential, but it is useless unless you can give them some milk or some fruit, as their digestive apparatus is not capable of taking anything else.
The Brits had been drinking tonic water- made palatable with a dash of Gin- long before Gandhi was born. Apparently the Spanish learnt of quinine from the indigenous people of Latin America.
So we are trying to give them some simple medical aid where we can. I am not trying to give you an idea that we have already done this, but I am talking of the future State, not as a visionary but as a practical man.
Much less practical than guys who had worked in the Indian Medical Service.
We have tried this on a small scale, and if I can multiply this activity through the aid of the future State, you will understand what India can be without a vast outlay.
But Indians were too lazy or stupid to bother.
We give this medical aid, not through the very expensive methods that the Western doctors teach us, but we revive our own ancient treatment.
Quinine was from South America. India's 'ancient treatment' had already failed in ancient times.
Every village once had its own medical man.
Who was shit. On the other hand, the local wizard really could turn mud into gold.
You may say he was a quack and that he was extremely ignorant of the elementary principles which govern this little body of ours; all which is very true. But all the same he was a man who could give them some comfort,
a puppy dog can give you comfort. Also, it will lick your face.
and, the occupation being hereditary, where he was not a dishonest man, he really served an efficient purpose.
No he didn't.
If you give him this elementary knowledge of hygiene,
which Gandhi lacked
which is preventive medicine, and teach him this simple way of curing the people of malaria,
which Gandhi didn't have
you have gone a very long way.
No. You have wasted everybody's time.
What I am telling you today is a thing that was approved by the Surgeon-General of the Bombay Presidency.
Since he was White- he must have been right- right?
When he came to see me whilst I was lying in the Sassoon Hospital,
Gandhi had to take frequent recourse to Western medicine because his fondness for Ayurveda and Naturopathy and incessant enemas made him very ill.
he was discussing it with me, and I told him, "Your English methods are too expensive for this poor country, and if you want to treat a village through your method, it would take two or three centuries." He agreed and said, "What would you do?"
Hooton knew that Tilak had gained popular support by opposing public health measures taken by his predecessors. But Gandhi & his pal Dr. Pranjivan, too, were anti-vaxxers. Interestingly, Lord Lothian- who played a big role in Indian politics at that time- had converted to Christian Science and thus did not believe in medicine. This probably shortened his life.
So I told him my plan.
It was shit. The solution was to raise productivity so 'English methods' would become affordable. There are economies of scope and scale in medicine
That does not finish the picture. We have the education of this future State. I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago,
Gandhi's wife was illiterate. About 96 percent of the population was in 1870. This proportion had fallen.
and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India,
which they conquered very easily because Indian literacy had made literate Indians stupider than would otherwise have been. Being able to read is a disadvantage if what is available to read is ignorant shite.
instead of taking hold of things as they were,
the took hold of large parts of the country and made a lot of money
began to root them out.
Gandhi wanted to root out Western medicine and Western education and return India to the idiocy of rural life.
They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.
It was a shit tree. That's how come the Brits ended up ruling the soil which it had disfigured.
The village schools were not good enough for the British administrator,
The Brits didn't care what Indians did with their kids. It was Indian lobbying which induced them to oversee a school and College system presided over by the Indian Education Service. Since Indians hate education- look at me-we got rid of it soon enough. On the other hand, we still have a Salt Service. Liaquat Ali Khan got rid of the salt tax against which Gandhi protested. Then he and Jinnah got the Pakistan they wanted and fucked off. Under Nehru, the salt tax was brought back.
so he came out with his programme. Every school must have so much paraphernalia, building, and so forth.
Which is why Indians could not swindle the Government by setting up bogus schools. India has made much progress in this matter since Independence.
Well, there were no such schools at all. There are statistics left by a British administrator which show that, in places where they have carried out a survey, ancient schools have gone by the board, because there was no recognition for these schools,
People did not send their kids to imaginary schools or ones which made them more stupid and ignorant than would otherwise be the case. British should have 'recognized' imaginary schools and imaginary education and imaginary health and imaginary wealth created by spinning cotton. Why were British so mean? The answer is obvious. They ate meat. They drank wine. Some even had sex! Indians should do none of these things.
and the schools established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people, and therefore they could not possibly overtake the thing.
The only way to get universal school attendance was to pay poor parents to send their kids to school. This subsidy could be phased out after the thing had become normative. Gandhi's great appeal lay in his suggestion that kids could 'earn while they learned' thus sparing the tax-payer. Indeed, he had given fathers all over India an excuse not to pay school fees and exam fees and pay for 'text books'. All such things are irreligious as is the notion that you should pay a Doctor if your wife falls ill.
I defy anybody to fulfil a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century.
Baroda had failed at this. Travancore had succeeded. Why? The latter initially paid poor parents to send their kids to school. Still, Gandhi was right. Landlords and 'intermediaries', usurers etc., did not want the peasant to be able to read the pieces of stamped paper to which he attached his thumb-print.
This very poor country of mine is ill able to sustain such an expensive method of education.
It can educate itself because it can't feed itself, defend itself, rule itself, or dispose of its own faeces in a hygienic manner unless Dr. Poor, or some other White dude, wrote a book about it.
Our State would revive the old village schoolmaster and dot every village with a school both for boys and girls.
We know Gandhi was wrong. Congress didn't give a shit about primary education.
Then, although British people have spent millions in completing some irrigation works,
which raised productivity. Farmers were willing to pay for such water. The Punjab began to rise in this manner.
we claim that their progress in that work has not been as quick as it might have been.
Because Indians are Indians, not fucking Englishmen.
The military railways, which have done some good, no doubt, in transporting goods from one place to another, have done nothing of what irrigation would have done.
Gandhi was happy enough to pay to travel by train. Still, I suppose he felt trains might be used to prevent invaders from overrunning the country. India's ancient tradition, after all, was to get conquered.
These irrigation schemes were and are really too expensive to cover the whole of India.
i.e. Indians won't pay for them.
We have, however, our own ancient method of irrigation: deep-well irrigation in some parts, in other parts well irrigation that is not deep well.
Some wells are deep. Others aren't.
I must confess my ignorance of this, but an Englishman,
because Indians are shit, ignorant Indians like Gandhi had to rely on Englishmen
who is trying experiments in intensive agriculture, and who is now here, was telling me that he had been working in the poet Tagore's village.
Tagore had sent his son and son-in-law to study Agronomy in America. Sadly, when they tried to use their knowledge in Sriniketan, they came down with malaria. Elmhirst had studied Agronomy in America and had worked with the YMCA in India. His wife was a Whitney heiress. With her money, Elmhirst turned Sriniketan into something approaching the sort of agricultural institute the Brits had already set up. But nothing much came of it and, anyway, Elmhirst had his own experimental school to run in England.
It was Mr. Elmhurst who really gave life to that village experiment,
though Tagore's son and son-in-law were just as well qualified and were some ten years older than him.
and owing to it they were opening canal irrigation works which did not require any skill other than that produced in the villages.
No they weren't. What kept Sriniketan afloat was Whitney & Quaker money.
He tells me they have compelled the Government to recognize the superiority of this method.
The Government was cool with wealthy Americans or Quakers financing stuff in the villages. The Pusa Institute was set up with money from an American millionaire who had been a guest of Lord Curzon.
I am simply giving you the evidence that this man gave to me about this canal irrigation, but I do know that there are ancient methods of irrigation compatible with the capacity of the people. I have told you what we would do constructively, but we should have to do something destructive also. Otherwise we should not be able to carry on, because this India today is ill able to afford the revenue that is being forced from it from year's end to year's end in order to support an insupportable weight of military and civil expenditure.
Which was value for money because Indians trusted the Brits but not each other.
The military expenditure takes 62 crores-an enormous sum for this country whose average income is two pence a day.
The result was Pax Britannica. Consider Gandhi's own ancestors. They had been minor revenue officials whereas the 'Diwan' of a Prince (even a Princeling) had to be a military man. Once the Brits pacified the country, Gandhi's grandfather and father could be promoted. But the latter only had a basic 'Indian' education and so his State was relegated to third class status. The hope was Gandhi could return from England to take over that job.
Compare that with the military expenditure of any country on earth, and you will find that India is groaning under a weight that is insupportable.
No. You will find that India was spending a lot less, per capita, than China. Consider the plight of Persia during the Great War. It suffered a terrible famine while foreign armies occupied much of its territory. Brigadier Dyer successfully led Indian soldiers there- the first time Indian troops were on Persian soil rather than the other way around- before beating the Afghan invaders in1919. Incidentally, it was during the Second Round Table Conference that there was a revolt in Poonch. The Hindu Maharaja appealed for British troop. The same thing was to happen again 16 years later. Gandhi supported the Indian military action in Kashmir.
We should immediately set about restoring the scales, and if I could possibly have my way, we should get rid of three-quarters of the military expenditure.
So as to make it easier for Japan to overrun the country.
If we really succeed in demonstrating that we have won our freedom through non-violent means, the people of India will not require much argument to convince them that non-violence will also enable them to retain their freedom.
In which case, they would lose that independence quickly enough.
Congress does not fear the bugbear of Afghan invasion,
because Dyer, fresh from Jallianwallah bagh, put the Afghans to rout in 1919
or invasion from Japan,
which actually took place 10 years later
certainly not invasion from Bolshevik Russia.
nor, sadly, Communist China. Nehru was as stupid as Gandhi.
Congress has no such fear whatever,
Indians did not fear being conquered by the Brits. They welcomed it.
and if we understand the lesson of non-violent non-cooperation, then no nation on earth can bend us to its will.
But successive Viceroys had bent and would continue to bend Gandhi & Co to Westminster's will.
If the nation simply learns one single English word - and we have a similar expression in our Indian languages also - we can simply say, "No", and it is finished for any invader who casts hungry eyes on India.
Indians had been saying 'Yes!' to Turks and Europeans. What they needed to do was to say 'No' to nonsense.
We are convinced that we do not need the arms that India is carrying. For civil expenditure I must give an instance which I have given at several meetings. Here the Prime Minister gets fifty times the average income; the Viceroy in India gets five thousand times the average income.
The Viceroy represented the King whose income was much more than the P.M. But many Indian Princes and Zamindars had far bigger incomes than the Viceroy.
From this one example you can work out for yourselves what this civil expenditure also means to India.
It was a drop in the ocean.
India cannot support this service, however efficient and able it may be.
India could support it. Sadly, once the Brits refused to supply it, the relevant expense went up greatly.
It is quite likely that, if I could send medical experts to every village in India, we should have no disease whatever,
There was disease even in Harley Street and amongst 'medical experts'. Gandhi was as stupid as shit.
but since we cannot afford medical experts for every village in India, we have to be satisfied with quacks that we can get in our own villages.
Gandhi was a quack. He was very self-satisfied indeed.
No country on earth can possibly live beyond its means;
Every country can raise productivity
it can only take such services as it can afford to pay for. If I want strawberries and cream for every villager, I know it is a daydream and I should be an idiot if I wished to give them to every villager.
Nonsense! Raise productivity in the relevant sector and the thing would happen by itself.
Well, I tell you that this military and civil expenditure is strawberries and cream.
No it isn't. Without such expenditure, there is invasion or insurrection and endless internecine strife. Productivity falls. So does the population.
I cannot possibly deal out this food for my people.
You can't do shit because you have shit for brains.
I have very nearly finished my picture; if you find vacant spots, please remind me and I shall fill them by answering your questions.
Q. Would not Mr. Gandhi admit that within living memory the resisting power of the rural masses to the economic breakdown produced by a failure of crops had been enormously increased, and that the famine codes in India had been brought to a high degree of perfection at a time when the increased prosperity of the masses had rendered them unnecessary ?
Gandhi would admit it if he were truthful. But he wasn't truthful.
Mr. Gandhi replied that his experience was that the resisting power of the people had not increased, but that railway transport enabled people to get grain from other places which they had not formerly been able to obtain.
Thus railways were useful.
SIR PHILIP HARTOG: Would Mr. Gandhi give his authority for the statement that literacy had diminished in India during the last fifty years?
No.
Mr. Gandhi replied that his authority was the Punjab Administration Reports, and said that he had published in Young India a study of the Punjab educational statistics.
But Punjab was only a small part of India. Still, literacy rate for men over 20 had risen about three-fold between 1900 and 1930. Anyway, the fact is, Independent India abandoned Gandhi's 'Nai Talim' in favour of something like the Sargent scheme, though, obviously, Congress had no interest in actually implementing it.
SIR PHILIP HARTOG: Would Mr. Gandhi explain why the literacy figure was fourteen per cent of the men and only two per cent of the women, and why illiteracy was higher in Kashmir and Hyderabad than in British India?
Why is your wife illiterate? It is because women are stooooopid. Don't have sex with them. They only stick around because they yearn for your jizz. Don't give it to them. If they get jizz, they become uppity.
Mr. Gandhi replied that the women's education had been neglected,
by men
to the shame of the men.
Gandhi was shameless.
He could only conjecture, with regard to the figures for Kashmir, that if illiteracy was greater there, it was due to the negligence of the ruler or because the population was predominantly Mohammedan, but he thought that, as a matter of fact, it was six of the one and half a dozen of the other.
Gandhi had a low opinion of Muslims.
Q. Were the Brahmins in Congress helping the untouchables? If so, why was it necessary to dig wells for the untouchables? Could they not use the Brahmin wells? Was it not the Salvation Army and the missionaries who did most of the work among the untouchables?
White people dig wells. Indians talk about digging wells.
Mr. Gandhi replied that he had given the reason why the untouchables could not use the Brahmin wells when he said it was the curse of Hinduism.
Imposed by God. Don't fight God. He will fuck you up.
If all the Brahmins had been reformed there would be no difficulty, but the majority of the workers engaged in digging wells and performing other services for the untouchables were themselves Brahmins,
also Brahmins were wiping the arses of Dalits who, obviously, were too stupid to do any such thing for themselves. Sadly, no nice white dude had written a book on proper methodology for Dalit arse-wiping.
who considered they were doing some measure of penance for the suffering which their fellow-castemen had imposed on the untouchables. The work of the Salvation Army and the missionaries was of a different character from that done by the Hindu reformers, and he did not wish to go into that issue on that occasion.
Brahmins weren't digging wells for untouchables because they did not have the muscles for the job.
Q. What effect would the proposed reforms have on the population of India? If better hygiene was introduced, it would lower the death rate and Increase the population, and if a better standard of living was attained through individual industry and economy of public expenditure, was there anything which would hold back the birth-rate from again rising to keep the population hard up against subsistence level? Was not permanent improvement prevented without restriction of the birth-rate?
Will you back birth-control? Nope. That would upset the orthodox.
Mr. Gandhi replied that this problem was not a monopoly of India; it was a modern superstition.
Did you know that in ancient times nobody had sex? The thing was invented by Copernicus or Newton or some other such White Devil.
He did not regard a normal increase in birthrate as an evil, and he would congratulate the Congress workers if they could show that, as a result of their hygienic and other reforms, the birth-rate of India had increased. He was not afraid of an increase of poverty if the birth-rate did increase. They were trying to inculcate among themselves the kind of life which regarded a normal increase in birth-rate as one thing and animal indulgence resulting in birth-rate as another,
Animals, too, should give up sex if only so as to set an example to our wives.
and there could not be too much stress laid upon education of that character. He had undertaken a prayerful study of the question and was in correspondence with Western thinkers all over Europe and America on the subject, and he had come definitely to the conclusion that the methods of birth-control suggested by modern reformers would be found upon experience to have been death-traps.
If you don't have sex, you won't die. Sperm retention is the secret of immortality. Didn't Sir John Woodroffe write something about this?
Even though it might be proved that in England, Holland, France, other parts of Europe and some parts of America, this method of controlling birth-rate might have done some good, it could only do immeasurable harm in India, where it was not possible to give these remedies to the people. It was wicked for anybody to suggest these remedies for India when India could not understand these methods in any shape or form.
Because Indians are as stupid as shit. You might as well tell your dog to wear a condom.
Q. Would Mr. Gandhi state briefly on what principle a strong, stable Executive could be framed for India?
Gandhi was saying 'hand over power- especially control of the Army- to my party.
Mr. Gandhi replied that a strong, stable Executive Government could best be framed by getting strong, stable hearts, and there was no dearth of such hearts in India. He had not dwelt on the political side, because the future of India as he had been picturing it, did not admit of much political treatment.
Thus, the Round Table Conference didn't matter. The Indians didn't really care about politics. They wanted to focus their minds on how to heartily shit in a manner beneficial to various plants.
The cure of the disease of economic misery was economic, but he was dabbling in politics because it was impossible to deal with economics unless he also dealt with politics.
So, his shit economics compelled him to be a shitty politician.
He had given his political faith from many platforms, and had taken it for granted that the audience knew the principles which guided Congress, but he was willing to give his political faith again if desired. He believed with Tolstoy
he means Thoreau
that that country was best governed which was governed the least,
this is conventionally attributed to Jefferson. But it is also the definition of a laissez faire economy. Gandhi's party wanted tariff protection.
and if Congress had its way, the politician would not be allowed to invade the privacy and sanctity of the home, but would be called upon to keep his place.
Gandhi was a politician and kept invading that privacy.
Q. How far was the very honourable attitude of the Brahmin reformers shared by caste Hindus throughout the country?
Brahmin reformers wanted to rid Brahmins of various restrictions which reduced their productivity. But Kayastha reformers wanted the same thing for Kayasths and Jats for Jats and so forth.
Mr. Gandhi said the attitude was very largely shared by those who called themselves Congressmen, but there was very great headway to make. The harvest was ripe, but the labourers were undoubtedly few.
India has too few coolies. Let us import some from Switzerland.
There were a few thousand, whilst tens of thousands were needed in order to get rid of the corruption which had injured the fibre of the nation.
Congress corruption and nepotism fucked up that fibre
He could say with assurance that untouchability was going fast, because some had given up their lives, and counted them of no cost, in order to remove that curse. Either Hinduism would be broken to bits or untouchability would disappear before many years were past.
Churchill picked up on this. Ambedkar worked with the Brits in the hope that a Dalit-Muslim coalition would render Caste Hindus a permanent minority. Sadly, Muslims hate Dalits more than they hate High Caste Hindus.
The Chairman then asked Mr. Gandhi if he would be good enough to say something more about the political situation. Mr. Gandhi said that the Congress wanted nothing short of complete political independence, and therefore complete control over the army, foreign relations and finance.
This was true. The problem here is that Congress had sent Gandhi to the Conference and everything else he was saying was that he personally didn't want there to be an army or 'foreign relations' or finance of any type. Villages should be autarkic. Cities should be abandoned.
The other point is, once Gandhi said 'hand over the Army to me', all the non-Congress Indians at the Conference united against him.
The easiest method of getting at Congress mentality was to step into Indian shoes and imagine the English transported on to India
there were such Englishmen in India. They ruled the country.
and Indians inhabiting Great Britain. If the Indian inhabitants of the British Isles then said, "You are not fit to govern yourselves; we shall have to see whether you can handle your army or defend yourselves from the hordes that will descend on you from China, Tibet, Afghanistan or Russia," the British would say, "We can take care of ourselves, or at any rate we shall try."
Only if this were true. The Brits tend to be be straightforward in such matters. That is one reason they refuse to recognize me as their rightful Queen.
The most that could happen would be that the Indians, as a nation, would be wiped out of existence.
Hinduism would. Islam- not so much.
The iron had entered the souls of thousands of Indians who were determined to throw off the foreign yoke at any cost, however much the British Lion might put out his claws and defy the civil disobedience that India might offer.
Gandhi & Co might sulk in jail for a year or two before surrendering, but surrender they would.
Great Britain had tremendous financial interests in India, estimated by Lord Rothermere at a thousand million pounds. Those interests would be protected by Indians,
who couldn't protect themselves
if they were legitimate interests, for the battle was not one of vengeance but for the exercise of the Indian's birthright.
to be, like Gandhi, either British subjects or British protected subjects
The Indians were not as armed as the British; they did not know the science of fighting; they were called a gentle race, and he was glad to belong to a gentle race. But weakness of body did not matter when they had stout hearts.
Sadly, Gandhi & his bunch of sulky surrender-monkeys had hearts of shit.
Indian women had stout hearts, and had received lathi blows with breasts forward, not turning their backs as if they were escaping villagers who had received no education from English schools,
which 'English school' had his wife attended?
and the greatest heroine among them was a woman who could hardly read a letter in her own mother tongue.
Did you know that Indian women defeated Alexander the Great and Timur the lame and Nadir Shah?
They acted like this in order that they might gain liberty for their country. The masses in India were awakening, and it was too late to persuade them that good alien rule was better than bad indigenous rule.
It was easy to persuade them that getting paid to beat Congress-wallahs was better than getting beaten for no pay.
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had said that good government was no substitute for self-government.
In the context of South Africa. He let Smuts kick Gandhi's black ass.
The British were past-masters in the art of making mistakes,
Backing Smuts was not a mistake. He was a good soldier- though a barrister by training.
and Lord Salisbury said they knew the art of blundering through to success. Why should the British deprive the Indians of their right to make mistakes?
Because rich Indians paid them so as to deprive stupid Indians of their right to create a ruckus.
India was impatient of the control which denied her that right. Although his creed was non-violence, he would risk the calamity to which Sir Henry Gidney had referred. But what mistakes could they make? The minorities should all have protection,
Sixteen years later, Gandhi and Nehru gave them none.
but there were ways and ways of granting it. India must regain the freedom which she had lost so long, with British help if it were given, without it if it were withheld. He appealed not only to the British but to the whole of humanity that this nation, which was trying an experiment in non-violence on a scale unknown to history,
but which failed again and again and again.
should receive its full measure of support from the nations of the world. Did the British know whether they had conferred benefit on India, or did the Indians know? Would the British be judged by their own testimony or by the testimony of men like Dadabhai Naoroji, Ranade, Gokhale, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta—men who doted on England and were proud of the Western civilization, who said that, although Englishmen meant well, their rule had on the whole been harmful to India because they left an emasculated nation?
But all four had only risen up because of the Brits. Otherwise, the two Parsis would have been carpenters or small shopkeepers while Ranade and Gokhale (who were Chitpavan) would have been ostracized by their own communities for their unorthodox views. It was Britain which had made men of them.
If after a century of British rule the result of withdrawing was expected to be fighting amongst Indians themselves, who was to blame?
Indians. They were also to blame for getting invaded incessantly.
British rule had left them utterly helpless.
If they hadn't already been helpless, there could have been no British, or Turkish or other foreign rule.
He recognized that they were helpless, and he wanted British help, but on his terms;
everybody wants help on their own terms. If you want to help me find Religion, first send your daughter to my bedroom.
India could not afford to have door-keepers who demanded such high wages.
India had had no fucking doors. That's why the Brits, Turks, etc. had waltzed in.
If India paid them seventy-five per cent of her earnings, how could she keep body and soul together on the remaining twenty-five per cent?
But India did no such thing.
It was a matter of simple arithmetic. nation was impoverished by the many burdens under which it was groaning, and as he had travelled incessantly all over India from 1916 to 1931, except for the periods when he was in prison, he could claim to know the condition of the villages better than any British officer.
He knew less than any British or Indian District officer. He hadn't the education, the intelligence, or the interest in acquiring alethic information of any type.
He was prepared to evolve his own Constitution,
No he wasn't. He never offered any such thing. Bits of the Nehru report did get included in the Indian Constitution. But two thirds of it was lifted from the Tory 1935 Act.
and when the minorities question was flung into his face, his patience was exhausted. What was this bugbear of the minority problem?
Gandhi came from a Hindu majority province. He didn't give a fuck about Hindu, Sikh & Buddhist minorities elsewhere.
Congress was not merely one of the many political organizations. It was predominantly the one organization that had given battle and had suffered.
Some of its members did sulk in jail from time to time. But forming an orderly queue to get hit on the head and sent to jail isn't doing battle. It is the adult equivalent of a child's temper tantrum.
Hundreds of villages were oppressed, their crops were destroyed and thousands of rupees' worth of land confiscated and sold.
to Indians.
This suffering was voluntarily gone through at the bidding of the Congress. Who would go through that suffering for a mess of pottage?
Indians. They like pottage (daal).
He had come to plead with what was finest in the British character and to tell them the whole truth.
In his own fashion, he had indeed done so. Indians were stupid and Congress was utterly shitty. Don't leave.
If, at the end of that chapter, he was told that nothing could be done unless he could close with the Moslems and everybody else, then he would go, but the British would have committed another blunder.
The Brits kept blundering and blundering till they acquired not just Burma but Aden and Singapore and Hong Kong and Malaya.
They must remember that the Round Table Conference delegates were all nominated by the Prime Minister, not elected by the members of the House of Commons whom no one could remove.
They could be expelled.
They represented no one but the will of the Prime Minister.
Nonsense! MacDonald headed a coalition government. He was scarcely a dictator.
The Congress was the only organization representing the whole of India.
Gandhi managed to unite all the other parties- including Sikhs, Dalits and Madrasi non-Brahmins- against the INC.
Those who fought and went to gaols were not all Hindus. They had several thousand Mussalmans amongst them, and Sikhs and Christians too. The Congress might be called a majority community if they liked, and the Congress had its own scheme of solving the minorities problem. The scheme presented for acceptance was an organic scheme in the cause of unity. The Congress majority did not speak as Hindus; Hindus could be reduced to a minority. The Constitution to be framed was for Indians, not for Hindus. How could the Congress parcel out India among several sections of Hindus, and several sections of Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and the rest? Imagine the whole nation vivisected and torn to pieces; how could it be made into a nation with all these divided groups? That was what the minorities wanted. These minorities had a perfect right to full civil, social and religious liberty, and they could appeal to the electorate for election in the open field. Why did they want special electorates? Why did the Anglo-Indians fear to trust to the general mass of the electorate? Not because they were Anglo-Indians, but because they had not served India.
In other words, they hadn't served Gandhi. Congress must serve him and all Indians must serve Congress. Why? Because Congress had a dictator- Gandhi himself. A few years later, the Congress Premier of India's largest province would describe Gandhi as the Il Duce and Fuhrer of India.
The Parsees did not want any special reservations, simply because they
were too few. But, by then, most Parsees were pro-British. They didn't like being beaten up by Gandhi's goons.
had served India, and were sure to be represented by right of service. The grand-daughters of Dadabhai Naoroji,
both of whom studied in Paris
brought up in the lap of luxury, had so served India that no one could deny them the right to represent the people.
Except the people. It was obvious that these two exotic blooms lived in a fantasy world.
If members of other minorities entered by the open door and served India,
i.e. Gandhi himself
they also would be elected.
Nope. In 1937, Nehru chose Hindus for the posts of Premiers, not Muslims or Parsis.
There was no room for those who wanted to maintain special privileges. It was a shame that Englishmen should claim privileges in so poor a country and special seats on a poor people's legislature.
It was a shame that stupid barristers should claim to represent poor Indians.
Why should they not depend on the vote of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and everyone to enter the legislature? They need not want to enter by the vote of a handful of Englishmen. The English still had power enough. The Indians still needed their unrivalled skill and faculty for organization, probably their capital; why did they fear for their security?
Because Gandhi was either a fraud or a lunatic.
They could live in India in perfect safety.
Muslims in Delhi couldn't when Nehru became PM.
If they asked for a passport of safety, he could understand, but if they asked for a special privilege to enter the legislature, he would not be a party to that guilt.
What he was a party to was Partition.
There were not two millions of them. It was a claim that would be rejected before any tribunal of judges. At any rate he would in no case be party to the vivisection of a whole nation.
Yet, 15 years later, that was the outcome. In childhood, Gandhi's mother told him that if, by accident, a Dalit touched him, he should immediately touch a Muslim so that the contagion would be transferred to him. Gandhian politics is nothing but this game of tag. But, it didn't fool either Jinnah or Ambedkar. What it did do was make fools of those who thought Indians educated in England would want to keep and improve on their inheritance from Britain.
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