INDIA IN TRANSITION : IV. COLD TEA
By RICHARD FREUND
" y REALISE," said Mr. Rajagopalachari, " that we can no longer take things by storm. The tea has got cold." Mr. Rajagopalachari is the Premier of Madras, the best man in the Congress team, and a seasoned hand at politics. A few months ago, when Congress had just taken office and the people were shouting that " something must be done," he rushed his first hurdle with a Prohibition Bill which, though tamer than it looked, aroused much enthusiasm. Now he proposes to cancel or consolidate rural debts, and public opinion is up in arms against him. This means two things : first, not only the new authorities but the public that put them into power are losing some of their revolutionary fervour ; and secondly, Congress is discovering that it is not so easy to harmonise the interests of its component parts. As the party has for some years past concentrated on gaining the support of the rural and urban masses, its ideology has become heavily charged with revolutionary content. But the awakening of the masses, though doubtless beginning, proceeds slowly ; and meanwhile the mercantile middle classes, the small landlords, and others who have for so long been the mainstay of the Congress movement are stoutly resisting any attack on their pockets. All this involves much sorting out. In almost every province the new governments, after bustling through a series of emergency measures, are pausing to enquire, to readjust, and to take bearings. They have found themselves with far wider powers than they had expected to obtain under provincial autonomy. They are tasting the power of patron- age.. And they realise that, restricted though their financial resources are, they have considerable opportunities for con- structive reform.
In short, the new system seems to be settling in. If by the mercy of Allah and the restraint of Congress the Punjab remains quiet, there is some hope that the new provincial governments may serve out the five years of their term. This, view I put to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru when I met him again in. Allahabad a fortnight before Christmas. He disagreed. " I admit," he said, " that the experiment of taking office in the provinces has been to some extent justified, because it offers opportunities of rousing the masses. We shall certainly not provoke any quarrel that might end the experiment, but the clash will come all the same. These constitutional developments only touch the surface of things. Our struggle is not a constitutional one. What matters is the pressure of the impoverished and exploited masses against the prevailing system, and that is bound to lead to an explosion sooner or later."
The F resident of the Congress is noted more for his élan and his sincerity than for the correctness of his political estimates. His statement suggests that the movement has already,. in two or three years of intensive campaigning, persuaded three hundred million illiterate, oppressed, fatal- istic peasants to stand up for their rights. That is rather more than is apparent to the casual observer, though the strength of Congress in the villages is certainly growing fast. In any case, the automatic working out of the revolu- tionary process can be relied upon, according to the book of words, only in a country which can boast of a " revolu- tionary situation." In pre-War Russia, and more recently in Spain, such situations existed : a vast mass of landless serfs and a small ruling class of property-owners, with little middle-class between them to act as a shock absorber. But India—apart from the United Provinces, where Jawaharlal lives—has everywhere a large class of peasant-proprietors and an extremely powerful middle-class. Moreover, the owners of wealth are not the wielders of political power. The case against the British as economic exploiters of the country is weak ; India swarms with indigenous exploiters who pay no income-tax, fleece the poor, and obstruct social progress. No, it is not easy to see how the " pressure" from below can lead to an explosion for some time to come. The Socialists—some of them very clever young men trained in Germany—have done much rousing of masses ; but whenever the masses do rise, they do not know what to do with them, and tell them to sit down again. Jawaharlal Nehru himself has lately been busy admonishing workers not to strike and students to maintain discipline. At Meerut the other day a demonstration carried banners with the saddening motto : " Down with Jawaharlal, the tool of British Imperialism ! "
The problem of controlling the " forces of disorder "— Mr. Gandhi's words—has worried Congress a good deal lately. The Mahatma has told the Congress governments rather sharply to keep order or to get out. On the whole they are more likely to keep order than to get out. Agitators have been arrested ; riots have been suppressed with the help of firearms. The special powers to deal with disorders, which were so strongly condemned only a short time ago, have been retained. And though the Bengal government— not a Congress government—has released over a thousand terrorist Menus after Mr. Gandhi had made himself respon- sible for their good behaviour in the future, it is quite certain that any provincial Ministry would jump heavily on the slightest attempt to revive terrorist activities. The temper of the provinces, though growing more anti-British every day, is also becoming more conservative. Moreover, the special problems of each province are diverting much attention from matters of All-India concern.
This decentralisation of Indian nationalism is the hope of the British authorities and the fear of Congress. The British point of view, to put it gently, is that a lot of hot air will be cleared away if the provinces settle down each to its own job. The Congress view is that the national move- ment would be weakened by any slackening of Central control. There is more than a suggestion that the provincial autonomy was granted for this very purpose ; but Congress leaders have no intention of allowing the movement to be bogged in piecemeal efforts before the great goal of independ- ence is reached. Mr. Gandhi, of course, always manages to hold the party together, and anyone who doubts that he is the most powerful man in India does not know what is going on. But new men are coming to the foreground and gaining power, and the separatist tendencies will soon take a good deal of checking. The Mahatma is assisted by a group of " zonal dictators " who are trying, with fair success, to guide and control the policies of the seven pro- vincial Congress governments. At the meeting of the Congress committee at Calcutta the struggle was brought into the open, and the " provincialists " obtained a decision that Congress Ministries should in future not be criticised by the party as long as they were honestly trying to carry out the general Congress policy. In their own spheres the provincial governments are not doing badly. They are grappling with some of the chief problems of the country, such as rural indebtedness and land- ownership. It is perhaps unfortunate that with so much scope for social reform before them they should have started with Prohibition, which, even if it should succeed, would cripple their slender resources for years. But other matters are not altogether neglected. In the United Provinces and Bihar, where great feudal landlords, with the help of thousands of sub-landlords and middlemen, draw unfair rents from an impoverished tenantry, arrears of rent have been cancelled, and proposals for a tax on agricultural income are nearing the legislating stage. In Madras a moratorium on agricultural debts has been declared. In Bombay an enquiry into wages and conditions of work in the mills is proceeding. All the time the new Ministries appear to appreciate the merits of " sound finance," and so far they have carefully avoided butting in on British interests. The Governors, for their part, are said to be moderately optimistic regarding the prospects of provincial self-government. All the rumours of clashes between Governors and their Ministries of which I heard, turned out, on investigation, to be unfounded.
Testily but smoothly things are moving forward. Yet there are dangers ahead. Quite apart from the growing spirit of violence among the young, and the ever-present possibility of a communal explosion, the constitutional road itself is by no means clear. The present stage is an inter- mediate one ; provincial autonomy cannot be long main- tained without its counterpart, the strengthening of the Central government. And it is clear that the scheme of an All-India Federation as laid down by the India Ad of 1935 is supported by few and opposed by many. The inevitable attempt to impose Federation upon a largely unwilling country is going to produce repercussions which only the closest com- bination of firmness and tact can prevent from growing into a crisis. It is disquieting to note that firmness and tact do not appear to be present in the most promising proportions.
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