THE PROBLEM OF INDIA

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 144, 14 March 1921, Page 9

THE PROBLEM OF INDIA

ESSENTIALS OF DEMOCRATIC REFORM

ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR RAMSAY MUIR

Professor Ram«ay Muir gave an address on Indian affairs before members of the Ancoats Brotherßwxl in Manchester last month. To-day, he said, we were launching in India one of the most immense and daring political experiments in human history by setting up an approxi-mation-intended soon to become complete —towards the parliamentary system of government. It was not by any means certain of success. Even in this and other Western lands there wag widespread dissatisfaction with the parliamentary system of government, although, on the whole, it was the best device for public co-operation in the control of public affairs that the human race had yet arrived at. It had never succeeded completely in any land where three conditions were not already existing. A certain limitation of size in the country, a certain degree of widely diffused self-educa-tion in the political sphere through the practice of co-operative work, and a population more or less homogeneous, seemed almost indispensable to success. The root reason of the difficulty of the •political problem in Ireland was the lack of homogeneity there. If all Ireland were Ulsterite, or Roman Catholic, the difficulty would disappear to-morrow. On tho surface, at any rate, India seemed to lack all these conditions which made for the success of a parliamentary system of government. India, geographically, was the size of Europe with Russia left out, and han a population forming one-fifth of the total population of tho world. Thus, the problem of creating a system of parliamentary government for India was as large and complex os that of creating a single parliamentary system for all Europe with Russia left out. In their village communities the Indian peoples had for many centuries _ given themselves, up to a certain point, an admirable degree of training in the working of their village institutions for certain limited purposes. But the co-opera-tion of tho community in the conduct of the administration on a more or less Western pattern, the working of the municipalities and district boards, which had been in existence in India for nearly half a century, had 'been disappointing. This vast community of India, indeed, was the most heterogeneous, the most extraordinarily varied and complex in the world. In all other countries the people had arisen from a mixture of a variety of races, but the outstanding feature of India was that its social system of uncounted centuries bad prevented the blending of races and had kept them absolutely distinct from one another, so that we saw, as in no other region of the world, peoples existing side by side in the most extraordinarily different stages of civilisation, ranging from the highlycultivated mon of the literary castes down to men of almost tho lowest grades.

Problems of Language and Religion. In Europe to-day the diversities of language were among the greatest obstacles towards the making of a real sense of unity. There were 65 languages spoken in Europe. But they all belonged to one of two of the main families. and the great majority all belonged to one. In India there were 173 different languages drawn from no fewer than nine different families, and to that confusion of tongues was to be added tho further confusion that arose from the fact that a large number of those languages used different alphabets. In one school he found a teacher speaking English because the children in his class spoke ten different languages. In that wav the use of English in the educational machinery of the country was proving a means of unifying the Indian people. Religious differences, too, were a very serious source of conflict and disunity. The Mohammedans formed a seventh of the total population, and tho Hindus two-thirds, but perpetually in the mind of the Mohammedans was tho memory that before the coming of the British they were the conquerors and masters of all India. Fundamentally, the distinction between those two religions was more profound than that between any two other faiths in the world. When a man became a Mohammedan he became the equal of all the rest of the Faithful. They helped one another, but none but the Faithful had any rights except by indulgence. The one thing essential to Hinduism, on the other hand, was the doctrine and practice of caste—the fundamental conception that one man was essentially, inherently, and unalterably for all time the inferior of another. This meant that the larger section .of the population of India was divided into innumerable sects, which were forbidden to have any social intercourse with one another, so that the people of high caste Could not have understanding of those of low caste.

With such a structure Hinduism was incompatible with, and fundamentally hostile to, the very idea of democracy, and if they existed side by side in the same country they must fight to the death. It was because of tho caste system that India had been the perpetual prey of conquering tribes from outside, and it was also because of it that the machinery of civilisation had always gone on working—the castes simply haring to concentrate their minds on performing their own jobs. To-day the caste system was beginning to crumble a little on the surface in India. No more than that could be said. But so far as it did crumble we might confidently say that if or when the next period of anarchy came in India its results would bo proportionately worse than the last. India’s Social Order and the Act. After describing some of the benefits and defects of British rule in India. Professor ’Ramsay Muir said the problem of modern government was to combine the efficiency of a properly-trained and organised bureaucracy with the control and criticism of that bureaucracy by a properly-instructed public opinion and an organ representing that public opinion. How were we to-day to organise n machinery which would make the intelligent mind of India capable of criticising wisely and with effect the working of the bureaucracy there? i The device adopted in the recent Parliamentary reform scheme of Lord Chelmsford and Mr. Montagu seemed to him to bo singularly unadopted to existing conditions in Incßa. No political system would ever work in any country unless' it arose out of, nnd was closely related to, the social order in that country. The social order in India was one that every man of ft Western mind desired to see changed, but. it could not I>e changed in a moment, and to begin on the assumption that it was what we would like it to be was a very dangerous course of action to follow. It was not safe or wise to pretend that caste did not exist. Tim mod regrettable thing nt present in the problem of Indian government was that neither Indians nor Englishmen seemed to bo making any serious attempt to work out the problem of finding n system of government for India that would have a properly. reasonable elastic relation to the Indian social order and that would ensure adequate protection for the "under dog”—the 50 millions of the outcasts and "unteuchab.es who. in so far as they had become vocal, made this strange appeal to tho British power: "The system that you are setting up will hand us over, tied and bound, into the hands of the dominant castes. If implies the undoing of the best thing that, tho British power in India has done in tho last century and a half—the degree of protection it has given to the under dog.” He did not think that was the whole of the truth, but there woe an

element of truth in it. The right answer to give it was: "You shall have representation of the under,castes of the ’untouchables,’ if you like —as such—a communal representation.” Discussing, lastly, the aims of the Moderates and Extremists in India, Professor Ramsay Muir emphasised the danger underlying the "creation of hate campaign of the Extremists. If, he said, the problem could be solved it would be an extraordinary political achievement. But the risks of failure were extremely great. We lived in a very gloomy world to-day, and there were few fields at which he looked with a deeper sense of misgiving than at the future of India. The one hope for it was in the steady, stolid, unchanging conservatism of that ancient and slow-moving land.