Modern India

Front matter

o o

COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN, 16, King Street, W.C.2.

A

Preface to the English Edition . 0

Chapter

I A Statement of the Problem . 27

II Imperialism in India — The Old Basis . 30

1. British Rule Before the War . 31

2. Marx and the British Social Revolution in

India 36

3. The Overpressure on Agriculture . 42

4. The Discouragement of Industry . 45

5. The Secret of Indian Poverty . 47

III Modern Imperialism in India . 52

1. The Modern Basis of Imperialism in India... 52

2. The Industrialisation of India . 57

3. British Capital as the Predominant Partner 62

4. The Political Reflex of the New System-

Dyarchy and Dominion Status . 65

5. The Task of Indian Emancipation . 67

IV The Nationalist Movement . 69

1. The Role of Gandhi . 71

2. The Role of the Swaraj Party . 82

3. The Congress and the Masses ... ... 88

V The Peasants, the Workers and the Nationalist

Qp

Movement . aa

1. The Peasant Question and the Nationalist

Movement .

2. Labour and the Nationalist Movement ... 100

VI Religious and Racial Questions . 106

CONTENTS

Page

VII The Aim of the National Struggle . 116

1. Independence from Imperialist Domination 117

2. The Fallacy of Dominion Status . 119

3. What Must be the Form of “ Swaraj ”? ... 125

VIII What Must Be Done . 129

1. A Programme for the National Movement ... 130

(a) Civil Rights N . 130

(&) The Land . 131

(c) Taxation . 136

(d) Labour Conditions . ... 138

(e) Health and Social Conditions .. ... 141

(/) Education . 143

2. Questions of Organisation . 145

IX Labour Organisation . 151

1. The Role of the Working Class . 151

2. The Working Class as the Future Leader in

India 153

3. Working Class Independence — The Working

Class and Politics 157

X India and the International Working Class ... 164

1. The World Struggle Against Imperialism ... 164

2. India and the British Working Class ... 168

Preface to the English Edition

The present book was originally written for an Indian publisher, and published in India in the spring of 1926. The text has been revised for the present edition, and notes on certain points of in¬ formation added which might be useful for English readers.

The subjection of India is one of the strongest bases of English capitalism. Of the 450 millions of the British Empire, 320 millions are Indian. Historically, the plunder of India during the seven¬ teenth and eighteenth centuries was one of the principal sources of primitive accumulation which made the development of capitalism in Britain and the industrial revolution possible. In the nine¬ teenth century India was the principal market for British manufactures. In the twentieth century India is becoming rapidly industrialised under the control of British capital, which, with the aid of a gigantic irresponsible bureaucratic machine, un¬ paralleled since Tsarist Russia, and semi-slave con¬ ditions of labour, is finding more profitable fields of exploitation than at home. To-day one-tenth of the British export trade goes to India — more than to any other country — and representing 70 per cent, of Indian imports, although already a diminishing

IO amount owing to the development of manufactures in India. British investments in India are esti¬ mated at one thousand million pounds, or more than the total in all the Dominions put together. This role of India in British capitalist economy is relatively increasing, in proportion as the control of the Dominions and hold on foreign countries are weakening. The control of India is the keystone of British Imperialism.

The importance of the Indian national struggle in the world fight against Imperialism is thus suffi¬ ciently obvious. It is not only a question of three hundred millions, or one-fifth of the human race, struggling for freedom from foreign domination, which is the necessary first step to social freedom. It is also the question that here in India and in China are the two decisive areas of the national struggle against world Imperialism, and that in the present epoch the international working class cannot free itself by purely local struggles in the home territory without at the same time overthrow¬ ing the Imperialist domination of subject nations which is to-day the strongest basis of modern capitalism. For this reason the fortunes of the Indian national struggle are of vital concern to the international working class.

At the present day, for the British working class, Indian developments — always in fact dosely linked up with their fortunes — have come to the front as of vivid and immediate concern for an additional reason. Previously, the subjection and poverty of the Indian masses was one of the concealed bases of the higher standards of the British workers. To-day an opposite process is developing with ii extreme rapidity. The industrialisation of India tinder British control — to-day India is officially classified as one of the eight leading industrial nations of the world — means that British capital, in proportion as the home position becomes difficult, is using its control of cheap labour in India to open up enterprises there and undercut the British workers, and then on the basis of this competition to lower wages at home. This process began in the jute industry, the greater part of which has been transferred from Dundee to India during the past half century ; signs of similar tendencies are visible in iron and steel, engineering and other directions. In consequence, the hastening of Indian emancipa¬ tion and the weakening of British dominion in India have become an urgent and immediate concern for the British working class ; and every day this alliance of interest is becoming more widely under¬ stood.

To understand the problems of the Indian national struggle, it is necessary to understand something of the essential conditions of the situa¬ tion. The mass of the Indian people, the peasants and industrial workers, constituting nine-tenths of the population, are held at present under a double yoke. There is first the imperialist domination of the British bourgeoisie, who control the apparatus of government ancT subject the people to the exploi¬ tation of large-scale British capital through the mechanism of taxation, finance and banking, loans and debt, the ownership of the railways, of the greater part of the industrial enterprises, of the plantations and mines, and the operations of the large importing companies. Then in addition there are the Indian landlords and bourgeoisie.

ruling princes, merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, small traders and moneylenders, who prey upon the people under the aegis of the British Govern¬ ment and exact their share of the spoils. From this double yoke, arresting social development, follows the intense poverty and misery of the mass of the Indian people, who have been reduced to the lowest level of any country in the world.

The imperialist domination holds autocratic control of the whole apparatus of government. The Viceroy and his Council are appointed by the British Government and are responsible only to the British Parliament ; the one day a year debate devoted to Indian affairs in the British Parliament is a notorious farce, in which all parties (including nowadays the official Labour Party) combine in declaring their approval of the beneficence of British rule in India ; thus the effective rule is the unchecked rule of the Indian Civil Service, an allpowerful bureaucracy beyond appeal, working under the general leadership of the Imperialist Government in London.

Since the war there have been introduced “ Con¬ stitutional Reforms ” which are intended to throw dust in the eyes. There is a “ Legislative Assembly ” without any power; legislation which it passes can be vetoed through the bureaucratically nominated “ Council of State ” ; measures which it refuses to pass, whether of financial or other char¬ acter, can be “certified” by the Government as ne¬ cessary for “peace, order and good government” ; one-third of this Assembly is officially nominated ; the remaining two-thirds are elected by an electorate of property owners and university graduates, numbering less than one million or 0.3 per cent, of the population. In the provinces there are Pro¬ vincial Assemblies with puppet “ Ministers ” in certain special subjects, such as health and educa¬ tion, where the odium of official parsimony can thus be transferred to Indian shoulders, while all financial and executive power is retained in official hands (this is the system described as “ Dyarchy ” or the “ sharing of rule ”). It will be seen that all this camouflage of so-called “ progressive self-government ” is of no concern to the masses of the Indian people, and represents only a very cautious attempt of the British bureaucracy to draw in an infinitesimal upper stratum of the Indian popula¬ tion into the tasks of British administration.

The Indian upper classes, the ruling princes, landlords and bourgeoisie, exist under the protec¬ tion of the British bourgeoisie as subordinate sharers in the spoil. The ruling princes are puppets, surviving from a decaying feudal order, and artificially maintained by the British as buttresses of reaction. With rare exceptions, they are reactionary, parasitic, devoted to their British masters and hostile to all Indian aspirations. The ' landlords have been in large part created as a class by the British, who in the past established a land¬ lord system where there was none, in order to provide a basis for their rule. The Indian bour¬ geoisie, of merchants and manufacturers, have risen more recently on a larger basis, and at first in opposition to the British to whom they were rivals ; but they have been increasingly drawn closer to the British bourgeoisie, both by the attractive power of large capital, and by the need of governmental pro¬ tection against mass discontent. It is from these upper classes that are drawn the rich Indian para-

H sites who come to spend their wealth in Europe, or play the flunkey at royal functions and Imperial Conferences, and who by their wealth and extrava¬ gance blind the eyes of the British workers to the grinding misery of the Indian peasants and workers.

This is the double exploitation which is the root cause of the intense poverty of the mass of the Indian people. A horde of witnesses, official and unofficial, has given evidence of this poverty and misery without parallel, and the literally starved condition of millions upon millions and even the majority of the population. Occasional startling occurrences, like the influenza epidemic after the war, which carried off thirteen million lives, reveal the general physical condition. It is revealed no less in letters of fire in the mortality statistics : in the highest death-rate in the world ; the average expectation of life of the Indian is twenty-two years, as compared with the Japanese forty-four years and the Englishman’s fifty-three years. All these conditions have actually worsened during the most recent period of British rule : the death-rate has risen from 24 per thousand in 1882 to 31 in 1921, and the expectation of life diminished in the same period from 30 to 22 years. Thus the “ progressive ” capitalist advance of the most recent period has resulted in intensified exploitation and misery. Starvation, overcrowding, debt, illiteracy, lack of health facilities, child-labour— these are the slave conditions of the Indian people.

The conventional explanations of this poverty _

the explanations of " over-population ” and' so forth— are completely false, when examined in relation to the facts. This is dealt with in the early chapters of the present book, where the real reasons of Indian poverty under imperialist domina¬ tion are considered.

This double yoke under which the Indian people are held makes also the exceptional difficulty of their fight to free themselves. They have to fight both the imperialist exploiters and their own exploiters, and in fact increasingly a united front of both. To free themselves, they have first to over¬ throw the imperialist exploiters who hold the power of government. This struggle against imperialist rule is the “ national ” struggle or struggle for national liberation. (The common argument that India is “not a nation” is a play on words. The single imperialist domination makes the single national struggle for the Indian people. The fact of divers races and religions is only part of the diffi¬ culties conditioning this struggle, but not rendering it unnecessary, any more than the divisions of colour and language of the workers in the United States makes the unity of the American working class unnecessary. In point of fact, the imperialist centralised rule and capitalist unification have created the inevitable social conditions of Indian unity.)

But in this national struggle arises the problem of the role of the Indian bourgeoisie. The Indian bourgeoisie has played a double role. On the one hand they naturally grudge the lion’s share of the imperialist exploiters and their own inferior posi¬ tion ; and would not be averse to securing the whole spoils themselves, if that were possible, or at any rate to making use of popular agitation to secure a better bargain for themselves. On the other hand, if there is any sign of a popular movement really i6 developing, such as would inevitably endanger also their own privileges and position, they at once draw in their horns and hasten to the side of the im¬ perialist bourgeoisie and to its guns for protection. Thus the Indian bourgeoisie step forward on the one hand as the true spokesmen and representatives of the national cause, calling on the people to follow them in the name of national unity and freedom and forget all class distinctions. But as soon as a crisis comes and their property is endangered, they speedily sacrifice the national cause to their class interests, and line up with the imperialists in a common counter-revolutionary front. This trea¬ cherous role of the Indian bourgeoisie gives rise to the essential problem of the Indian national move¬ ment at the present point.

The Indian Nationalist Movement has up to the present been led by the bourgeoisie, by lawyers and wealthy men representing the merchants and mill-owners, and financed from these ; although the bulk of the movement has consisted rather of petty bour¬ geois elements, clerks, journalists, schoolmasters, small traders, students and unemployed literates, all with a much stronger sense of grievance against British rule, but without an effective outlet. Up to the war the Nationalist movement was never very strong ; but in the years after the war gigantic mass unrest developed throughout India which swept forward the national struggle (ten millions joined the National Congress ; tens of thousands went to prison). Peasant movements and industrial strikes were widespread. For a while the fate of the Em¬ pire was in the balance ; the Government feared to arrest the leaders of the movement, although these were openly calling to revolt. The mass movement followed with devotion, confidence and trust the Nationalist leadership, represented by Gandhi, who at this time denounced the Empire as “satanic,” called on his followers to revolt and break its laws, and promised them Swaraj (or Self-Rule) in twelve months. But the movement rapidly passed beyond the bounds endeavoured to be set it, and showed its social character : not only w7ere British rule and the police attacked, but rent was refused to be paid to the landlords and strikes developed against the capitalist employers. At this the Nationalist leadership publicly called a stop the whole move¬ ment, by the famous Bardoli decisions of February, 1922. This calling off, which is comparable in Indian national history to the calling off of the General Strike in May, 1926, in British working class history, was declared to be in the name of “ non-violence” ; but a closer examination of the facts surrounding the decision soon shows that the plea of “ non-violence” was in reality a very thin disguise for the class interests of the property owners. This historic treachery of the Indian bour¬ geoisie broke the back of the national revolt after the war. From the moment of the calling off, the Government struck without mercy, and since then reaction and terrorist repression have raged un¬ checked in India.

From that time the whole Nationalist movement has been in collapse. The Indian bourgeoisie is to¬ day a counter-revolutionary force : they fear the social revolution that would follow on national independence more than they desire independence ; and therefore they have made their terms with the imperialists and are all supporters of the Empire. The imperialists have baited the hook with tariffs,

B i8 industrial development and promises of gradual constitutional reforms. The Swaraj Party? which has inherited the dwindling remains of the old Nationalist movement, to-day advocates Dominion status within the Empire, practically confines its activities to the narrow limits of the Legislative Assembly, and draws closer and closer to open co¬ operation with the Government. Its leadership is broken up : and group after group passes over to open co-operation with the Government, to sub¬ mergence in the pro-Government “Liberal Party” or “ Independent ” groups, or to the formation of new “ Responsive Co-operation ” groups and parties. The rank and file is left bewildered and discouraged ; occasional Provincial Conferences which have carried repudiations of the leadership and demands for a programme of full independence and an active policy, have revealed the discontent ; but it has not yet found an outlet ; and membership and agitation are at a low ebb. The mass forces of unrest, still powerful below the surface, have been canalised off into self-destructive and senseless communal (inter-religious) strife, deliberately fomented — despite hypocritical expressions of dis¬ approval — by both the British Government and the bourgeois Nationalist leaders. Such is the unhappy condition of Indian politics to-day.

From this stagnation and decay, only a new National movement, based on the workers and the peasants, and with a political and social programme expressing the interests of the masses, can bring new life. The conditions for this are ripe. The exposure of the Indian bourgeoisie and their impotence for national leadership is complete. The discontent of the petty bourgeois elements,

PREFACE 19

at present stifling for expression, will inevitably find their scope and expression in union with the masses of the people. Working class organisation and struggle has begun and developed with extreme rapidity during the past half dozen years. Episodes such as the North-Western Railway Strike and the Bombay Mill Lock-out last year have shown the strength, sacrifice, militant courage and solidarity of the Indian working class. The Indian workers (there are already two million industrial wage workers, and their number is quickly increasing, and they are concentrated above all in large industry in a few big towns and centres) are rapidly showing themselves the lead¬ ing political force of the coming stage in India. It is they who, in alliance with the peasants, will build up the Indian Commonwealth of the future.

The Chinese example, and the great advance of the Chinese national struggle during the past two years, should help to show the way forward for India. It is true that the bourgeoisie in China, being brought into direct rivalry with the foreign interests by the unequal treaties, is more ready up to the present to adopt a militant role, and elements of it are in direct sympathy with the national strug¬ gle. But the strength of the Kuomintang, the Chinese National Party, lies in the extent to which it bases itself on the masses, on the workers, the peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie (it is a federal body, gathering within its ranks working class organisations — including the Communist Partypeasant organisations, students’ groups, etc.) , and on a progressive social programme expressing the interests of the mases. The triumphant success of the Kuomintang in China carries a great lesson for India which will not be lost.

With such a mass national movement the British working class movement can and should act in alliance. For this purpose a great change is needed in British working class policy in relation to India. The present official Labour policy is in practice on the side of the Imperialists. It needs to be brought on to the side of the Indian people.

The record of the official leadership of the British Labour Movement in relation to India has not been a good one. The policy of Imperialism has ruled here as elsewhere. British rule in India is accepted as a kind of divine right which no Indian may gainsay (“the right of British statesmen, public servants^ merchants and industrialists to be in India to-day is the fact that they have made the India of to-day” — so Lord Olivier, the “ Labour” Secretary for India in the House of Lords, on February 26th, 1924). Indian unrest is met with the unconcealed brandishing of the mailed fist (“No party in Great Britain will be cowed by threats of force” — MacDonald’s message to India at the outset of his Premiership, a message which received the praise of Chamberlain as worthy of the old Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury). The Indian masses, struggling desperately for the barest means of existence, and faced with an iron despotism, are solemnly adjured by the National Joint Council of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, at the very height of the crisis in the beginning of 1922, to take their grievances to those “Parliamentary institutions recently con¬ ferred on India, by means of which grievances should be ventilated and wrongs redressed ” — these “Parliamentary institutions” being the mockery of a Legislative Assembly without power based on an electorate of the one three-hundredth uppermost stratum of the population, which is actually held out to the masses as their hope by a “Labour” committee !

It will be seen that in all these expressions India is simply seen through Tory official spectacles, and the Indian masses do not come into the picture. The British Labour statesmen completely identify themselves with British capitalist interests in India ; they adjure the masses to be patient and docile, and not to think of independence ; if they are good, they may receive reforms at' their masters’ pleasure ; if not, there is the prison cell and the machine gun to hold them under. This complete unity with the bureaucracy produced its inevitable result in the record of the Labour Government in India in 1924.

The Labour Government, instead of using every effort to help forward the struggle of the Indian masses acted instead as the spokesman of the bureaucracy against them, and even introduced new measures of repression. By the Cawnpore Trial, the Communists in India were sentenced to heavy terms of penal servitude, not even for Com¬ munist propaganda, but simply for advocating Indian independence — in the words of the Labour Under-Secretary, “to deprive the King of the sovereignty of British India.” In the Bombay strikes, the strikers were left to die of starvation (deaths of strikers from starvation were admitted by the semi-official “Times of India”), and the police were used to fire on the strikers, resulting in killed and wounded. Above all, the Labour Government is remembered in India for its intro¬ duction of the Bengal Special Ordinances, establishing the old Tsarist system of the arrest and imprisonment of political offenders without charge and without trial. It was for this measure that the succeeding Conservative Indian Secretary, Lord Birkenhead, declared that “the whole country, and indeed the Empire, owed a considerable debt to the Labour Government” for its “courage” in intro¬ ducing it.

Since the Labour Government, the official policy of the British Labour Movement in relation to India has followed even closer lines of unity with the Tory policy. Indian affairs in Parliament are now becoming treated, like foreign policy, as “above party” ; so much so, that the present Tory Under-Secretary for India can declare in the House of Commons : “There is really very little differ¬ ence of opinion between His Majesty’s Government and the leaders, at any rate, of the Party opposite.”

It is inevitable that the result of this in India has been to create a widespread distrust in the Indian National Movement of the British Labour Party and the British Labour Movement. Evidence of this is abundant in the Indian Press.

The timid approval of “progressive self-govern¬ ment within the Empire” for India, does not in any way diminish the reactionary and bureaucratic character of the whole policy. For this aim of “progressive self-government within the Empire” is exactly identical with the official Government policy, as laid down by the Montagu-Chelmsford Report. . The complete emptiness of this policy consists in the fact that, first the actual policy, pending the supposed stages of self-government, is one of coercion and police terrorism, which is given official Labour approval ; and second, that the so-called “self-government within the Empire” does not mean any real independence for India and holds out no hope for the masses of India. This is most clearly seen when the actual form of this supposed “self-government” is considered. The form officially approved by the Labour Party is set out most typically and strikingly in the “Common¬ wealth of India Bill” which is now before Parlia¬ ment. This Commonwealth of India Bill was originated by the Imperialist group in India around Mrs. Besant, and has now been officially sponsored by the Labour Party. This Bill would not only leave effective power (foreign policy and military control) in the hands of British Imperialism, but would establish a reactionary constitution with a second chamber and a high property qualification for the electorate of the legislative assembly.

A complete transformation of British working class policy iu relation to India is necessary. The existing official Labour policy runs directly counter to every Socialist or working class principle, and for the matter of that even to any democratic prin¬ ciple in the most elementary sense, since it defends the maintenance by force of rule over a subject people, upholds the use of police and military ter¬ rorism against this people, and for reform proposes a reactionary constitution which would enfranchise only the upper class one per cent. Such a policy does not represent the real outlook or the real interests of the British working class. It is neces¬ sary to break with the Imperialist rule and exploitation as representing the interests and policy of the class enemies of the British workers ; and to break also with the reactionary upper class Nationalists with whom alone so far the Labour

2 4 leaders have established relations ; and to build instead a real working class policy on the basis of the masses of the Indian people.

In the first place, the British Labour Movement should clearly declare its unqualified recognition of the right of the Indian people to govern them¬ selves, and its opposition to any policy of armed force to hold them in subjection. No other policy is compatible with international Socialism. This involves recognition of the right of the Indians to absolute independence, if they wish it. Arguments of an “economic” pseudo-Socialist character are sometimes advanced against this, that it is not in the interests of Socialism to “break up” large-scale economic combinations, that the connection of the British and Indian peoples can be developed on mutually advantageous lines, that it is capable of Socialist development, etc. It is not realised that these arguments are being actually used in favour of a system of capitalist domination and exploita¬ tion maintained by military force, and that those who use these “Socialist” arguments are voting for the machine guns to hold down the Indian people. Real productive relations cannot be built on a basis of exploitation, which can only lead to increasing antagonism and conflict. The produc¬ tive relations of the future can only be built up when the basis of exploitation and domination by armed force is removed.

In the second place, the British Labour Move¬ ment should support and help forward the political and social organisation of the Indian masses. It is customary already to speak of the necessity of assisting trade union and labour organisation in fndia, though very little has yet been done in practice to carry out these promises with any real help. But there is here a very great danger against which it is necessary to be on guard. This is the danger of regarding the aim of trade union and labour organisation as confined to immediate social and economic reforms within the Imperialist system, and ignoring the supreme political aim of the con¬ quest of power and independence, and the estabishment of a free social republic. Assistance towards an emasculated form of trade union and labour organisation, whose aim is confined to economic objectives “within the Empire,” is simply a species of veiled Imperialist propaganda. The British Labour Movement should support and help forward the political and social organisation of the Indian masses, not merely on a programme of limited economic aims, but on a programme of full social and political freedom.

In the third place, the British Labour Movement should fight for full rights of organisation and propaganda for the Indians. The seat of power over India lies in Britain ; the responsibility for repression lies there ; the fight against repression must take place there. The British Labour Move¬ ment should demand the release of all political prisoners, and the abolition of repressive legislation and police rule. They should demand the abolition of the censorship of the Press, of the shackling of the trade unions, and of the vetoing of genuine socialist and communist organisation. They should demand the withdrawal of the military forces in India. And they should carry on an active agitation for these ends throughout Britain.

Only by such a programme and policy, cutting completely separate from the existing Imperialist domination, can the British workers establish real unity with the Indian people.