The Times of Monday draws attention to a very awkward
and disagreeable question which has arisen over the treatment of British Indian subjects by the Transvaal. Certain natives of India—many of them connected with important Mussulman firms in Bombay—have petitioned the Home Government, alleging that they are being deprived of rights to which all sub- jects of the Queen are entitled under international law. The Transvaal Government attempts to treat these " Mussulman and upper-caste Hindoo traders" like the Kaffirs, and speaks of them as coolies and "Aborigines of Asia." The grounds given for treating the Indian traders as degraded savages are the dangers to which the community is exposed by " diseases engendered by the filthy habits and immoral practices of these people." This is, of course, utterly absurd, and the clean- liness and good conduct of the Indians in South Africa is attested not only by medical testimony, but by a memorial signed by 1,340 European merchants, and by a petition signed by 484 Dutch burghers. The real objection to the Indian traders is that they compete with the white man. It must not be supposed that the question is an unimportant one. There are in the South African Republic two hundred firms of British-Indian subjects, with an aggregate capital of about £100,000; about two thousand petty traders and box-wallahs of the same nationality ; and about fifteen hundred British. Indian subjects employed as shop-assistants, servants, labourers, and in other capacities. The petition on which the Times bases its article, states that it is proposed to compel many of them to give up their present houses and places of business, and to pen them together, like the Jews of mediaeval Europe, in ghettos assigned to them.
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