India And The Simon Report

INDIA AND THE SIMON REPORT G. F. ANDREWS NEW YORK THE MAGMILLAN COMPANY 1930 DKDICATED WITH GRATITUDE ATTO AFFECTION TO HORACE AND OLIVE ALEXANDER PREFACE This book is not intended to deal with the technical political details of the Simon Report, but rather to consider the causes of the resentment in India to-day against Great Britain which have led up to the present deadlock. For this resentment exists very widely among the educated classes, and it is growing deeper. The Commissioners have done painstaking work, but they have failed to meet Indian public opinion on its most sensitive side. The main reason for this lies in their not clearly appreciating what the National Movement has already accomplished under the inspi ration of Mahatma Gandhi. For the awakening of the masses under his leadership has brought about a new India which is seeking by its own inner urge to find self-expression. It can never be forced back into an outworn and discarded mould. To fail to deal ade quately with such a national upheaval as this, affecting millions of human lives, is almost like acting the play of Hamlet with the character of Hamlet left out. For, now at last, this new force is coming in like a flood, not only in India but all over Asia and those who fail to reckon with it are like children building castles on the sand which will be washed away by the next tide. During the last twelve years of the history of modern India, Mahatma Gandhi has been by far the greatest personality dominating the situation. In his political 9 INDIA AND THE SIMON REPORT ideas he is the strange figure of a moral revolutionary essentially non-violent in character. By his own temperament and imaginative outlook he ispeculiarly conservative. He idealizes the past rather than the present. His whole heart is with the village folk, and he loves to call himself a farmer and weaver. His aim is the simplification of human existence rather than its development along new avenues opened up by the use of the machine. He will have nothing to do with the latter except for the fulfilment of the most primitive needs of weaving and ploughing. His extraordinary power to move men cannot be understood without a realization of liis supreme trust in God to inspire and guide every action that he takes. He is a man of faith and prayer, humbly dependent upon divine aid and seeking by divine grace to keep an inner heart of purity and love, unstained by sin. To find God and to be found by Him is the one goal that is set before him. In many of these aspects he is poles apart from Lenin, with whom he has been compared as the awakener of a whole rural people and the creator of a new national being. The one remarkable likeness between them lies in their volcanic energy of person ality surging up from the very depths of their nature with ever new creative urge. They have both been able to fashion millions of human lives according to their will. Sun Yat-Sen in China had the inner power to do the same, but not to the same degree. It is remark-10 PREFACE able that the three village areas of the world India, China, Russia have each been remoulded by the revolutionary force of a great personality in one and the same generation. Such an event, on a scale so immense, has probably never happened in the history of the human race before. It reveals the greatness of the present epoch. Man is truly spirit. It is the spirit that quickens.Mahatma Gandhi has been able to appeal directly to the living spirit in man. How this has happened in India will be shown in outline throughout the chapters which follow. During the greater part of his life he had ardently supported the British Government whether in India or in South Africa. He believed that it stood for racial equality and racial justice. Only after Amritsar was this faith shaken. 1 Even to-day, while non-co-operating with the British administra tion in India, he continues to pay high tribute to British personal character...