We are serializing a letter written by the great Sikh intellectual Puran Singh to Sir John Simon (of the famous commission) in 1928. The conclusions of that great mind for what would happen to India have been coming painfully home to many so called Indians particularly the minorities. This letter of advice, which was also ignored, will be given to our readers in 4 weekly installments. By giving the Mont ford Reforms you took away all the noblesse oblige of the “Steel frame” services which did work like irresponsible autocrats but in a spirit of the services demoralise. The past cannot be brought back and future cannot be assured, neither as you might wish nor as they might desire. It has become no one’s business for example, to look after the costs of the Government.
You have tried for the last hundred years to teach us and to make us into a free nation as you say, but, unlike the Afghans who are much less civilized than ourselves in spite of your intentions, we, as people, are but a set of women who can just dangle their bangles on their wrists and pose beautiful. America threw your tea into the sea and Washington led and then was the Constitution drafted. One can understand Abraham Lincoln proclaiming from the house tops his grand political maximum the government of the people, by the people for the people. That was some culture some education which grew restless and effectively restless for its freedom. But a trained statesman must laugh in his sleeves at the impotence of men like Gandhi and Moti Lal Nehru who wish to be Abraham Lincolns of India without the substance which entitles the people on this earth with human nature as constituted, to liberty. I have said you have tried a hundred years to educate us and look at this great and disappointing intellectual disaster. There is not one Amanullah in this whole country of India, there is not one Kamal Pasha. This fundamental problem of education which you also have taken into your hands is such as cannot be solved by systems but by me.
If you really wish to lead India to independence or Dominion status which practically means independence with an empty and courteous bow to England, I say, I do not give the poor people of India, Constitutions, do not define their rights. Let all these things come later, but give us say a real Dictator to train at least one province, say the Punjab at the cost of the whole of India and make it really independent and see incidentally with what sport other provinces bear this world concentration for the sake of the uplift of their brothers of blood of the Punjab. So far, either you have not done your best to educate us or you are unfit to organise nations to freedom. You must confess either unwillingness to make us men, free men, or the utter incompetence of your system and men or the utter incompetence of your system and men as you have so far given us. The education of our Universities are giving is the imitation of that luxurious academic training which you give to your youths to enable them to run the Empire and its Embassies. Of what use is it to us? Afghans have arsenals aero planes, but we are rendered so impotent that our youths cannot earn their living!! We get mere crumbs that fall from the Olympian Tables. All, in India, must overwork to death to have one meal a day or die of starvation. We the farmers are crushed under steel heels. On your side, there are suspicions against us. If your arm us, we may revolt and be free. Of course if you had meant to give us independence you might have taken that risk, but you did not and naturally you would not.
The general man strength of this country is getting low every day in various ways. Defective education, slow and systematic economic drain, and want of opportunity for our being made armed soldiers for the defense of this country are a few amongst many. Dadabhai Narojee and William Digby say that India is being bled white. Lord Curzon supports them in the contention that India is the poorest country in the world. Imagine if this country belonged to you in another sense, you would have secured long ago her economic independence. That indeed must be your first concern even if for doing it, you have to make India an English colony like Australia. Why has Australia grown into a power in such a short time? The Indian thinkers should have given up their case for her political independence even in their class rooms of these mockeries of Legislative Assemblies, had they not come to the grim conclusion that because of our being helpless dependents, ground by your system of drainage of our wealth and consequently of strength, we cannot possibly secure our economic independence till we get rid of you.
It is the irony of fate that there may be prosperity in our budgets and in the trade statistics, but the masses are growing weaker and weaker for want of food. We the tillers of the soil are famishing. Millions there are who scarcely get one full meal a day. They are good soil for the growth of plague germs, malarial parasites, Kalazar and consumption. Man and woman material is fast decaying. This is the fundamental indictment against your policy of drift. Closely connected with this policy is the academic knowledge being imparted to the youths of the country by our Universities? This knowledge falsely stimulates the intellects. The stimulated intellect wishes to surround itself with higher standards of life than the productive capacity of the country can permit or its undeveloped resources can afford. What is that strange system that does not change for the good of the people, aye for keeping them alive? As I will show later, this has given birth to an artificial prosperous middle class in the country mainly made up of the variety of Government services. I, therefore, appeal to you to realize this situation as it is in reality, and do something substantial to avert this disaster. What use indeed are those ponderous unwieldy Royal Commissions on Industry and Agriculture that came and went. You will see that the Agriculture Commission has clearly left the problem as it was. Their conclusions and suggestions are mere more yawns of an exhausted listener who has been made to hear so much volume of vague and vaporous opinions. It was not necessary that they should have come all the way and gone through all that travail to tell His Excellency the Viceroy of India that the Economic condition of the Indian farmer needs immediate looking after. The Commission on Industries came to the ridiculous conclusions of two more Imperial Services! You must admit that this is not how living nations are doing their business of development now, nor how the Japanese would tackle a life and death problem like this.
Provision of cheap and good food to the millions of Indian farmers is more important than the declarations of the rights of the people. Much is being side shunted for purposes of political show. Allow me to put a little suggestion here. Mahatma Gandhi for example, thinks that we men should spin like women and he repeats the gospel of khaddar as I have said like genius gone mad when thinking on the complex problem of Indian freedom. Thus he wishes to give useful employment to the farmers to clothe themselves, but what use is clothing to men who are starving and have no strength for any extra employment? Why is the dairy industry dying all over? It is a preeminently agricultural occupation. There are no pastures provided. For example, government. Sells land in the Punjab colonies by auction to raise as much money as possible. This is helping the capitalist and killing the farmer. No lands have been reserved by the Government as open pastures for each village. Consequently it has become uneconomical to keep herds of milk cattle.
II A few imaginings
Let me indulge, while face to face with the witches, in some imaginings, if, perchance, some stray flight of the ‘flying horse of the Arabian Nights might take me and you out of this ghostly darkness. Ah! Could nature send its Holt from the blue and break this huge peninsula into small little islands! Ah! Could the engineer divide it by many a Panama Canal. Failing this geographical division, could India be cut up and divided a new to make more harmonious Presidencies with the population of the Hindu with his various castes that in practical life form many small nations in themselves and the Moslem, equally balanced in the practical exercise of political power that the British might give them out of their great mercy for fallen nations!!
I put it down merely for making the impossible possible. Suppose, as one of the suggestions, Gujarat, Kathiawar, a portion of C.P, the Sind, the Punjab and the North Western Frontier are made into one Presidency a portion of Bombay goes with Madras as a second Presidency and half of Madras is lumped up with Bengal as the third, Behar and U.P and a portion of C.P constitutes the fourth Presidency.
The Hindus in this division of India can be treated as many diverse communities. Because the differences between the Brahman and Non Brahman are as acute as between the Hindu and the Moslem, between the Hindu and the Sikh. And these new Harmony Presidencies of India could be conveniently subdivided into small independent States governed by one Presidency Legislative Council and one Governor. To give the latter to small Provinces would be ruinously costly. On the other hand to have large Harmony Presidencies would be too unwieldy for administration of justice etc., if they are not cut up into small autonomous States. This administrative cutting up of India would set in process for the development of India into the future independent United States of Asia. You are asked to hand India over to us by the Nehru Committee. Failing the revision of India into New Harmony Presidencies, it would be a much better feat of far sighted statesmanship to hand it over to a benevolent dictatorship of some kind.
Perhaps you will say I am wasting your time, but I assure you, you and your friends will be equally wasting your time if you, only as constitutional lawyers, sitting down like Pandit Moti Lal Nehru and the men of his mind, write Constitutions for this India where the witch’s cauldron is boiling and Walpurgis Night is on. Any constitution coming in here like this essentially means the domination of one community over all others which must be kept in a permanent state of suspended animation. All progress under such constitution shall be one communal and not multi communal. It would no more be dyarchy but it would be a form of civil anarchy in administration run by an autocratic and communal majority. The herd and it vote does not really matter. The whole district is run by an autocratic and communal majority. The herd and its vote does not really matter. The whole District is run by a few officers. They are not chosen by the people. They are the real autocrats. And if the services are corrupted by communal bias, it is the more powerful community that shall drive the others in practical details of administration. The Hindu if he is in the chair would tease the Moslem mass and if the Moslem is in authority he would injure the Hindu mass. Votes for electing a truly representative Legislative body under such conditions of communal tension in securing the monopoly of authority under any such system as adumbrated by the Nehru Committee shall for all times, be wholly impotent and Ns in
III. A bit of brutal frankness
Coming to practical problems which I am afraid the more you think about, the more theoretical and unpractical they grow, you would see some great minds become mad while thinking of India. The sign of madness is that they go on preaching but one fad. You must agree with me that if we were a people and we had any power or if we were less civilized and more manly with some ground under out feet, you would not have entered our house and said: ‘Now boys be quiet, we run your home for your good.” You must admit that your proclamations are only political speeches which mean very little, because if you really wanted, you would have by these hundred years and more made us men fit for self-government. As have already pointed out, if this is not correct then you as a nation are hopelessly unfit for organizing people to their political freedom. Hence we think you only know how to run the Government and utilize the country in your own way for your own good. Whatever may be the case, our suspicion is that you did not and perhaps do not mean to help us to freedom.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 3, 1990
