A HINDOO NOBLE ON DEMOCRACY.*
IT is a pleasure to read a pamphlet written in English by a Hindoo which expresses Hindoo sentiments, and is not a mere reflex of European Radical ideas. Rajah Oday Pertap Singh, of Bhinga, is the head of a Rajpoot family which has settled in Oude, and acquired a great estate there ; and he has felt im- pelled to address "the martial races of India, and his Rajpoot brothers in particular," in deprecation of the ideas put forward in the so-called Indian "National" Congress. He writes admirable English, not in the least like that of the ordinary "educated native," but real English, like that of Sir Henry Maine or Mr. Morley, with the sentences crisp, and the thoughts all locked together. He disbelieves utterly in the whole scheme of the National Congress, and in any other scheme the object of which is to subject India to representa- tive government, a method which he thinks utterly unsuited to the condition, the wants, and the wishes of the peninsula. He maintains, to begin with, that India is not a nation at all, but a continent full of nations as separate as those of E urope :— " In all history there is no instance of popular government being successfully introduced into a country so vast as India and peopled with so many different races and tribes separated by so profound religious and social divisions. It is exactly as if it were proposed that the Continent of Europe should be persuaded to sink its innumerable differences, to get rid of its great dynasties and hereditary chiefs, call itself a 'nation' and submit to the rule of a Parliament sitting at Paris or Berlin. The obvious truth that India consists not of one 'nation' but of many, has been often insisted on, but has been so much misunderstood that it seems necessary to show clearly its precise bearing upon the problem. It has already been pointed out in the first chapter that all popular institutions presuppose at least so much popular unity as this, that the ` national ' objects, or those which all divisions of the com- munity have in common, should be conspicuously more highly valued and more strongly pursued than their separate and mutually exclusive objects. The absence of this condition means the reproduction on an enormous scale of all the difficulties in- volved by the inclusion of Irish with English and Scotch repre- sentatives in the House of Commons. It is the essence of Parliamentary government that the voice of the majority shall be supreme ; and where particular sections of the community are at once permanently separated from the rest, and permanently in a minority, the result is endless discord and difficulty. How would the case stand in India ? It would be impossible to devise any system of representation which would at the same time conform to the principle of government by the numerical majority, and give reasonable satisfaction to the great permanent minorities."
In a sense, it may be alleged that the Hindoos form a nation—though in practice it is not so, the Hindoos being cloven by deep fissures of race and feeling—and that the Mahommedans form a nation ; but granting that, what • Democracy Not Suited to India, By the Rajah of Blainga. Allahabad: the Pioneer Press, would be the result of representative government ? The permanent government of the Mahommedan "nation," which comprises fifty millions, by the Hindoos, who are two hundred millions, a government to which the Moslems would submit, under extremely favourable circumstances, for just as many days as it took them to arrange an insurrection en masse. The Mahommedans know that perfectly well, and their leaders are almost unanimously opposed to the project, so that at the last Congress the Mahommedans, who ought to have been one-fourth of the whole, were only 79 to 528 non- Mahommedans; and of these 79, only nine came from Bombay and Scinde, only one from the Punjab, only seven from the North-West and Oude, and only one from Bengal Proper. The Mussulmans of fighting India were, in fact, not repre- sented at all, any more than the Sikhs were, though the latter, of all the Hindoo tribes, would, if the English were away, have the most to say in the future government of the continent :— "The entire Mahomedan community was represented by almost exactly the same number of persons as the non-Mussulmans of the Lower Provinces of Bengal. The entire Mahomedan community outside Madras was represented by 21 persons as against 224 non- Mussulman delegates ; that is to say, in a proportion of about one-eleventh. The Mahomedans of the Lower Provinces were represented by a gentleman named Mr. Syed Mahomed Hussain Ghouse, described as 'Health Officer, Turkish Government, Bagdad, and Medical Practitioner.' So that a nationality which, as Sir William Hunter is good enough to remind us, numbers half the entire population of Bengal, enjoys -hth, or considerably less than 2 per cent, of the representation of that Province. The Bombay Mussulmans are represented in the proportion of one to eleven : the Punjab, in the proportion of one to eight. It must never be forgotten that the real strength of India lies in Upper India, and that compared with Oudh and the North-West, the political importance of Madras is small. There were at the Congress 21 Christian delegates from the Madras Presidency : exactly as many as the entire number of Mahomedan delegates from all India outside Madras. The Christian delegates from Bengal were four to the Mahomedan one."
It may be objected, says the Rajah, that the members of the Congress do not intend to count heads, and that if the culti- vated only are permitted to elect representatives, the disparity of numbers might be rectified ; but then, what becomes of the principle of representative government ? As the Rajah him- self puts it, in language which no English politician would disown :— "The answer commonly attempted to this argument is singularly irrelevant and weak. It is that there is no desire on the part of the Congress or its advocates to entrust ignorant peasants with political power, and that no more is desired than the representa- tion of the thinking and comparatively educated classes who alone deserve to have a voice in the government of the country. But the dilemma is that if the Indian peasantry are not repre- sented and have no share in political power, it is idle to talk of representative institutions or the application of democratic principles ; while if they are represented and exercise power in proportion, it is idle to expect efficient administration or rational legislation. Representative institutions do not necessarily imply universal suffrage : they do not mean that every member of the community directly exercises some degree of political power through an appointed agent. But there are two things which they do imply : that the classes directly represented by means of election form a numerically large proportion of the entire com- munity; and that the community is so homogeneous that the delegate of one class indirectly represents the interests and opinions of others. Where the first condition is not satisfied, it is inaccurate and misleading to talk of representative institutions : where the second is not satisfied, there are representative institu- tions, but the representation is so imperfect as to involve all the evils of a non-representative system."
India, in fact, under such a system, would be governed by a caste which the warrior races ii one year's campaigning would, without the slightest trouble or hesitation, slaughter out. But they would be protected by the British Army? There is no known force which would induce the British Army to obey baboos, even if such obedience were ordered from England, which it would not be, for the British Parlia- ment, as the Rajah points out, would not have ordered the measures to be enforced, but the native Parliament. In other words, the British people would be using the strength of their civilisation in order to enforce laws passed by a Hindoo majority upon a Mahommedan minority laws,—which might be conceived in the very spirit of religious intolerance. In so doing—that is, in fact, in sanctioning endless massacres—the English would not have the satisfaction even of obeying the popular will, for, says the Rajah :— "The simplest and most conclusive reason why popular govern- ment should not be introduced into India is that the people of India, as distinguished from a small though noisy section, have
never shown the smallest desire for it. All that they wish for is to be let alone, to be governed in the manner which they under- stand and to which they are accustomed, and to reap the full benefit of the peace and security which, after centuries of misrule, they now enjoy. The supporters of the Congress hardly deny, when they are pressed, that this is, in fact, the common attitude. They think it their duty, however, in the interests of the people, to persuade them that they are wrong; that the peace and security which they enjoy should be risked in the attempt to substitute a new and complicated system for that which is familiar to them, and which they, on the whole, appreciate. All the most deep- seated feelings and habits of thought are to be rooted up, not for the sake of any distinct practical gain or to satisfy any real want, but on account of a theory, wholly contradicted by the facts, that no good government is possible, except one founded on popular institutions."
So well aware are the instigators of the movement of this truth, that, as the Rajah points out, the proposal to allow the whole population to bear arms was rejected even in this Con- gress, the members knowing perfectly well that the result would be universal anarchy. Moreover, the Congress avowedly thrust aside all projects of social reform as "too delicate" for the interference of strangers,—that is, they admitted that on all questions of real importance the " nation " could not act as a nation, but each creed and race and tribe must make its own laws. The Rajah entirely agrees in this opinion, and goes further, protesting against the intrusion into one province of natives taken from another, so that Bengalees are frequently set to govern Hindostanees, an arrangement as popular as one would be under which Neapolitans were selected to administer Prussia :— "In connection with the public service there is no more pressing necessity than the reservation of the bulk of appointments in each Province to its own inhabitants, and the exclusion of persons who are as much foreigners to the people as if they were Europeans, but whom English ignorance lumps indiscriminately under the general description of natives.' People in England do not realise the discontent caused by the present anomalous system of a double foreign administration : the English, for example, governing -Upper India to a considerable extent through an agency imported from the Lower Provinces."
The Rajah, who writes throughout like a man saying what he thinks, and not what others would like to hear, does not disguise his aristocratic feeling. He wishes to see India administered by her great families under the British Crown ; but failing that, he desires the existing system, which, he says, though not representative, produces good government.
The other side is so noisy, that we wish politicians who take an interest in India would read this pamphlet, of which we have reproduced only the skeleton. When they have read it, perhaps they will be able to explain what to us, after thirty years of observation of the facts, remains an insoluble per- plexity,—namely, why a minority of those Indians who learn English master it so perfectly. They think in tongues which have no relation to English, and in which thoughts follow a totally different sequence ; yet no Frenchman, or Italian, or even German, can write such English as they do. The Rajah of Bhinga is in a way exceptional, because his clear thoughts give clearness to his style ; but there are hundreds who write English nearly as well as he does,—that is, a great deal better than most Englishmen do. What gives them the power of acquiring not merely the words, but the very current of thought, of a race with which they have absolutely nothing in common, and which they at heart believe, with much justice, to be less subtle of thought than themselves ?
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