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From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 27, 15 April 1922, p. 203.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2020). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
The arrest of Gandhi and the abrupt resignation (or dismissal) of Mr. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, following upon his publication of the telegram from the Indian government urging revision of the Treaty of Sèvres, may have come to the uninitiated as two surprising, but quite distinct shocks. In reality, they were phenomena closely related to one another, and may be designated as twin efforts of a single cause – the present political crisis in England and throughout the British Empire.
India, Ireland, Egypt, the hydra-headed monster that guards the golden apples of British Imperialism caught the fever of world unrest and, forgetting its mission, threatened to upset the nice adjustment of world power by predetermined and concerted revolt. Coming at a time when British Capitalism found itself hard put to maintain itself at home, these nationalist upheavals gained in strength from the weakness of the enemy, like a modern Hercules, Mr. Lloyd George devised a means of beheading the monster that threatened the golden treasure and charming the British public into retaining him as their leader. Seizing the Hydra in his brawny arms and holding it in mid-air, he soliloquized:
“Ireland is an obstreperous beast too notorious abroad to be tampered with. It will pay to compromise without losing the essentials of power. Egypt can be placated with a modicum of concession; what do we care? After all, a Protectorate by any other name will smell as sweet, and Public Opinion will Be edified by such a demonstration of British justice and fair play. As for India, the other two disposed of, we shall have a free hand. There can be no trifling with the granaries of Empire. Tanks, machine-guns and bombing-plans will soon put an end to this prattle about Swaraj. Dead men tell no tales.”
The astute Prime Minister did not deceive himself. In the midst of the general rejoicing over the Irish Free State and the Egyptian Treaty, the groans of unhappy India fell unheeded upon the ears of indifferent world. The decencies had been complied with; British ability to compromise stood vindicated. There must be something wrong with those brown devils in remote India who reach so clamorously for things beyond their grasp and ken. The arrest of prominent leaders and of thousands of obscure patriots, their sentences of long-term imprisonments, the daily calling out of troops to shoot down the striking workers who combined political demands for freedom with their please for economic redress, was almost smothered beneath the flowery tributes of the sycophants who followed the triumphal progress of the Prince of Wales from Bombay to Calcutta, from Madras to Lahore. The outer world did not know, and if it knew, cared not that these trailing sycophants were the puppets and victims of British Imperialism – dummy princes, Junker landlords, bondholders and capitalists, who danced to Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned. Beneath the superficial rejoicing reigned pandemonium; the vast mass of three hundred million toiling peasants and exploited workers who had lain passive for centuries beneath a foreign yoke, had awakened to the tune of quite another piper – the strange, half-mystic call to Religion, Country and People uttered by the gentle prophet of Non-Resistance, Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience, Mahatma Gandhi. It signalized the re-birth of many peoples into a single nation, whose poor and exploited masses drew together for the first time across the barriers of race, speech, religion and caste to fight together for a common Swaraj, a common millennium under the banner of a universally adored prophet.
Mr. Lloyd George, who seeks to revive the legendary exploits of the heroes of Greek epic in his modern political career, resembles an impudent child juggling with the forces of natural law. Like a cheap political harlequin, he must dance to the tune of his strongest constituents. Ireland and Egypt were the glittering toys to dazzle the eyes of Liberals and Labor; India is the bone he throws to the growling dogs of conservatism. The noble lords must somehow be placated; they too, in the cynical eyes of a political juggler, have their price. A strong hand in India, with Lord Reading at the helm, and in England, a lord swapped for a liberal in the high office of Indian Secretary of State, is a good bargain and good politics at the same stroke. “Montagu and Gandhi must go together,” said the Morning Post. Lloyd George assented; Mr. Montagu had to go, just as Mr. Gandhi had to go, but neither must he be done to death
prematurely. The House of Peers was howling for their blood, but then, in India and throughout the Empire more disturbing howls had rent the air for self-determination, independence, freedom. The quaking Empire must first be steadied ere the noble lords could taste their blood. The Irish Free State and “Independent” Egypt calmed the heaving Empire; the massing of troops, the enlistment of Civil Guards and recruiting of armed police solved the Indian situation. Only then was the little brown prophet of Non-Resistance, of home-spun Khaddar and the homely Charka, staunch denunciator of satanic governments, clapped into jail and sentenced to six years’ rigorous imprisonment before the astonished gaze of India’s adoring millions, who waited dumbly like the Florentines before their martyred Savonarola, and cried for “a miracle, a miracle!”
And only then was Mr. Montagu deprived of his office, as candy is taken from a baby, because forsooth, the naive infant forbore to consult the Cabinet before the publication of that transcendent telegram from the Government of India demanding, on behalf of Indian Mohammedans, “the evacuation of Constantinople, the suzerainty of the Sultan over the Holy Places, and the restoration of Ottoman Thrace”. Quite as though Indian Mohammedans were inured, during the past few years, to see their lightest whims catered to; and as though Mr. Montagu, a seasonal diplomat if not a politician, on the very eve of the Allied Greco-Turkish Conference in Paris, would dare (without previous sanction) to come out of his corner like little Jack Horner after sticking his thumb in the political plum, and cry “What a good boy am I!”
Amid such a display of political imbecility, intended to camouflage the most profound political sagacity, one can only enquire sotto voce, of that modern Hercules, Mr. Lloyd George:
Moscow, March 22, 1922
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