The Hindu-Mohammedan Problem in India
A VERY slight acquaintance with Indian affairs will discover the importance of the Hindu-Mohammedan problem. Though there are many different communities in India, with interests and ideals which differ widely from or are even inimical to each other, the HinduMohammedan problem is the communal problem. The words ‘communal tension’ are a sort of technical phrase in India, and mean tension between these two communities. The time is ripe for a close study of this great question, for — as will be seen from this short account, in which I can only hope to indicate its main features — Hindu-Mohammedan rivalry has, during the past few years, shifted its ground from its old base of purely religious fanaticism and unreasoning prejudice to the fields of political and economic struggle.
The scope and gravity of the problem are thus immensely increased, for the old sectarian causes of difference might have yielded to the solvent of education, whereas these new differences can only be multiplied and made more urgent as education spreads among the Indian masses. For it must be remembered that the level of education is far lower among Mohammedans of all classes than among Hindus, and so the wider diffusion of education means the raising up of Mohammedan rivals to the Hindu occupants of places of profit and power in all branches of Indian activity, in many of which the Hindus hold at present a virtual monopoly. Further, — and here its immense gravity is revealed, — the communal problem is perhaps the chief obstacle in India’s path to responsible government, transcending in importance or even including such major problems as that of India’s defense against external foes, and the maintenance of law and order in India itself.
Thus, in examining the HinduMohammedan problem as it is to-day, we must not look exclusively to the fierce riots and the savage crimes against individuals which have disfigured communal relations during the last decade or so, for such things have been with us in India for centuries past. Rather must we inquire into and try to understand the importance of certain developments of the last few years which have given organization and direction to the age-old feuds and hatreds.
I
A cynic has observed that in India there are two answers which are found adequate to dispose of any proposal for change or improvement. These are: ‘ It has never been done so ’ and ‘ It has always been done so.’ Certainly these are the answers which find favor with critics of all attempts at a solution of the devastating rivalry of the two communities, and it must be admitted that past history is on their side. For a thousand years now, India has known Hindus and Mohammedans, sometimes as bitterly hostile armies, more generally as somewhat uneasy neighbors, but never as a homogeneous social unit. Succeeding hordes of invading Mohammedans from A.D. 1000 onward brought with them the fierce proselytizing ideas of Islam, but, after a longer or shorter space of time, marked by cruel massacre and destruction on the one side and ruthless revenge on the other whenever occasion offered, even the sword of Islam found itself powerless to make much impression on the ineffable calm of Hinduism, which is to its devotees more than a religion, or, as it has sometimes been described, ‘a way of living’; it is all of life — life which has been in the past, is in the present, and will be in the future. To the caste Hindu, life outside Hinduism is not so much wrong as impossible and unthinkable. Practically the only conversions which the Mohammedans made in India were among the depressed classes or pagan tribes. On the great body of the Hindu community of India, with its infinity of castes and divisions, the Mohammedan invasions left no enduring mark save one. That, unfortunately, was one which has had and will still have damaging effects on the whole of Hindu life. I refer to the seclusion of women within the zenana. This has greatly accentuated ideas of the natural inferiority of women, which had already grown up under the Brahmanical system, and it is to this day one of the greatest obstacles to social and religious reforms among the Hindu peoples.
When the first fierce impact of the invading armies had spent its force, Hindus and Mohammedans had to settle down as neighbors, but as neighbors separated from each other in all the intimacies of life by an utterly unbridgeable gulf. Intermarriage and even most of the ordinary amenities of social life, such as dining together and meeting each other’s families in friendly intercourse, were impossible. Generally, peace between the two communities was observed because the people of the one knew better than to raise their heads when their prince belonged to the other religion. But the persecutions of Aurungzeb and the fierce revolt of Shivaji of the Mahrattas reveal the strength of the animosity which existed under this forced restraint.
It has sometimes been said that Hindu-Mohammedan antagonism has become more formidable under the rule of the British than it was before their time. The charge has even been made that the British have encouraged communal rivalry on the principle of ‘divide and rule.’ This, of course, is demonstrably false, if only for the reason that, as we have seen, the rivalry is so deeply rooted and the numbers of the rivals are so enormous — two hundred and fifty million Hindus and sixtysix million Mohammedans — that any such encouragement by the paramount power would have led to an explosion utterly beyond its ability to control. The truth is that the British principle of not interfering in religious matters has allowed both communities to observe their religious ceremonies in practical immunity, even in the very strongholds of the rival religion. Naturally there have been many breaches of the peace, but, save in a very few cases to be noted later, these affairs have not been worse than many election riots or many of the clashes between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast or Liverpool.
Only in one way has British rule contributed to the exacerbation of HinduMoslem feeling, and that contribution was inevitable under any rule which, like that of the British, is based first and last on law. The Mohammedan rural population, by far the greater part of the whole, has undoubtedly suffered from the operation of the law of contract, which, until the legislation of 1900 made it impossible for land to be alienated to men of nonagricultural classes, even had the effect in some places of expropriating large numbers of Mohammedan cultivators from their ancestral holdings. Very many Mohammedans are by nature of a reckless and spendthrift disposition, and the Hindu money-lending classes took full advantage of this fact to batten on their less sophisticated neighbors. So the annals of crime in British India are marked by many brutal murders of money-lenders and many savage riots, which now and again, as in the Southwestern Panjab in the early part of 1915, have attained the character of general risings of the Mohammedan peasantry against their Hindu neighbors.
II
This, in broad outline, was the state of Hindu-Mohammedan relations before 1914, the general economic and educational position of the Mohammedans steadily falling relatively to that of the Hindus. From time to time, attempts were made by leading Mohammedans to open the eyes of their fellows to the disabilities of their condition. The great Mohammedan leader of mid-Victorian days, Sir Syed Ahmad, to whose exertions the existence of the Mohammedan University at Aligarh is mainly due, was the most notable of these reformers. Again, during the stir of opinion and feeling in the India of Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty, in the early eighties of the last century, the quest ion of Mohammedan education was again raised, and for a time the establishment of a Mohammedan university at Hyderabad was well within the range of practical politics. But the enthusiasm died down without having accomplished anything of note, and it is broadly true to say that the maulvis, the Mohammedan priests, frowned on the extension of secular education as being likely to turn the students into skeptics or even atheists. The education given at mosque schools and at Deoband, the Maynooth of Mohammedan India, was purely religious and traditional, and aimed at nothing more than the provision of a supply of priests for the villages and country towns.
As the twentieth century advanced and it became increasingly clear, even in India, that the unorganized and the unqualified had to go to the wall, leading Mohammedans once more took up the duty of rousing their coreligionists to an appreciation of the danger of their position. And as before, during Lord Ripon’s time, the final urge came from a wave of feeling which had its origin in political grounds. This is not the place to trace the genesis of the great Indian Reforms of 1919, but it will be remembered that the most conspicuous landmark on the road to them is the Morley-Minto Reforms of exactly ten years earlier. Those were preceded by an agitation of unparalleled fierceness in Bengal. This agitation—which arose ostensibly out of the separation of Eastern Bengal from the rest of the province, for the better administration of the backward tracts of the East — had important repercussions in other parts of India, notably in the Panjab, and soon extended its scope far beyond the revocation of the partition of Bengal. The recklessness of the leading agitators and the extent of their pretensions showed to thoughtful Mohammedans, as by a flashlight, the dangers to which they were exposed.
It must be remembered that the Eastern part of Bengal is mainly Mohammedan, that the partition was in accord with Mohammedan sentiment, and that the leading agitators were all Hindus. The extreme claims of the agitators had, of course, no chance of being met, but leading Mohammedans realized that any extension of popular control in the Government of India would put their community still further behind the Hindus, who, from their education and superior social and economic organization, were much better able to push their claims and to occupy and to hold administrative and other appointments. So, in 1906, the AllIndia Moslem League came into being, as the result of a spontaneous and widespread determination on the part of all thoughtful Mohammedans to organize for the protection of their communal interests. The Morley-Minto Reforms were even then under discussion, and the question of separate Mohammedan representation in the legislative councils which were to be set up under the reforms proved a bait attracting large numbers of Mohammedans to the League. Its original objects were the promotion of loyalty to the British connection, the protection of the political and other rights of Mohammedans, and the representation to the Government, by strictly constitutional methods, of the desires and claims of the community. Its scope slowly widened.
Disappointment with the MorleyMinto Reforms grew, and in 1913 the League included within its objects the achievement of self-government for India within the British Empire.
Then came the war. India’s response to the peril of the Empire was prompt, and, save for certain sections of the population, whole-hearted. As the conflict dragged on, and the contrast between the ideals of the Allies — of which self-determination was one of the most important — and those of the Germanic coalition became more pronounced and more easily comprehensible, it became also increasingly evident that changes of a far-reaching kind in the government of India would be made by the British Parliament. In the years 1916 and 1917, when this was fully understood in India, the Moslem League was at the height of its power. It challenged comparison in importance with the other great unofficial organization in India, the Indian Congress, an organization which owed its origin to the stir of Indian feeling in Lord Ripon’s days. Until three or four years ago the annual meeting of the delegates to the Congress from all over India was one of the most important events of the year, and at it the demands and aspirations of Indian Nationalism were frankly and fearlessly put forward. To the leaders both of the Congress and of the League it was obvious that HinduMoslem unity not only was the most important, but was, in fact, an absolutely indispensable preliminary to anything approaching Home Rule for India.
As the prospects of a more liberal constitution for India became more certain, and as the thing itself approached more closely, the clash of interests between Hindus and Mohammedans came nearer home to the members of both communities and showed itself in various ways. The grim events of 1915 in the Southwestern Panjab, followed later by the even more terrible events in Bihar and Orissa, could not be dismissed as petty affairs between ignorant and obscure fanatics. They pointed to a fundamental antagonism of interests — of which religious differences were not the most important part — between Hindus and Mohammedans, interests which neither side could possibly leave to the good feeling or sense of fair play of the other. If there were going to be any extension of Indian control over the Government of India, the Mohammedans, at any rate, meant to see that their interests were safeguarded to the fullest possible extent. So in 1916 the League and the Congress, a mainly Hindu organization, arrived at the so-called ‘Lucknow Pact,’ in which the proportion of seats to be Held by the two communities in the various legislative bodies was settled.
But was such a pact likely to prove acceptable to the masses, or settle any of the outstanding causes of quarrel? The answer is given by certain happenings in the Southwestern Panjab and in Bihar and Orissa, where the clash of the two communities attained the dimensions of local anarchy — before the Pact, in the case of the Panjab; after it, in the case of Bihar and Orissa. In the Panjab, the unusually ignorant and credulous Mohammedan peasantry had swallowed with even more than the usual Oriental gullibility the wildest stories about the prowess of the Germans. In February 1915, the rumor ran around the Jhang and Mozaffargarh districts that a German force had landed at Karachi, led by the Crown Prince in person, and that it was within two days’ march of Multan, the greatest city of that part of the Panjab. At once the ignorant rustics assumed that the British power in India was broken. The Mohammedans immediately — and as by instinct — rose en masse as a sort of Jacquerie, and proceeded to illtreat and pillage the Hindus to their hearts’ content. Villages were sacked; small towns were plundered, and, as in the case of Juggiwala in the Mozaffargarh district, put to the flames. The Hindus were dispersed over the countryside, to make their way as best they could to central points where there were police to protect them. For some days this anarchy went briskly forward, until police reserves could be rushed to the storm centres and restore order after some sharp fighting.
The Bihar and Orissa rising, which was a similar bursting into flame of the pent-up hatreds of years, affected a wider area and greater numbers of people, and called, in the end, for military intervention. The main scene of these disturbances was the district of Shahabad, and for six days law and order disappeared. The Hindus were the vastly stronger party and were the aggressors. In one case the Hindu mob, estimated at twenty-five thousand strong, attacked a village and was driven off only after a hard fight with the police. In a neighboring district over thirty villages were attacked. The mobs were in some cases led by landowners mounted on elephants and horses, and great amounts of loot were taken. The Pact, then, was obviously not binding on the masses of either side.
III
I have gone into these details in order to show the state of feeling which exists between the majorities on the two sides, and to emphasize the point that any amelioration must be preceded by a vast improvement in the economic position and the chronic state of indebtedness of the Mohammedan peasantry. But the amelioration of such a position, which is the result of historic and deep-seated causes, is clearly a matter for long and arduous legislation and for a determined effort toward improvement on the part of the Mohammedans themselves.
Thus it is possible that the Lucknow Pact would have been stillborn, — for the interest which the Indian peasant, of whatever community, takes in politics is still of the very slightest,—had it not been for two very grave features of the situation in India immediately following the war. These were the Noncoöperation movement and the Khilafat agitation. The first of these made a certain appeal to both Hindus and Mohammedans, but the second was of purely Mohammedan interest. The Noncoöperation movement began as a protest against the Indian Government on the ground that undue force had been used in suppressing the fierce and widespread mob uprisings in the Panjab in April 1919, while the Khilafat agitation was frankly a Mohammedan move to secure better terms for the Turks. Certain astute Hindu politicians were quick to identify themselves with this scheme, and a temporary Hindu-Mohammedan entente was thus achieved. Throughout 1920 a good deal was made of this entente, and fraternizing even went to the extent of the admission of Hindus to Mohammedan mosques.
But an entente reared on such foundations could not in any case have been permanent. The terms of the Turkish Peace Treaty and, still more, subsequent events in Turkey would have knocked the bottom out of the Khilafat agitation, while the Noncooperation movement, as events have shown, was a passing emotional phase. Anyhow, the end of the entente virtually came with the bringing into operation in 1921 of the Government of India Act of 1919 — the present reformed constitution of India. For this Act brought both communities up against the solid realities of politics, such as separate communal representation in the legislature, allocation of seats between Hindus and Mohammedans, and the share of each community in the powers and privileges of office. Here were no matters of mere social and religious amenities, but things which affected the future and the welfare of both communities. The Mohammedans see their rivals with a strangle hold on economic affairs and with an overwhelming proportion of administrative posts in their grasp. If they are to add political power to their other advantages, then the outlook of Mohammedans is sorry indeed. Thus Mohammedans argue, and in the light of such considerations the entente vanished like mist in the sun. And so begins the dismal tale of present HinduMohammedan dissensions, of which so many passages are marked in red.
The present stage of intercommunal relations may be said to begin with the fierce Multan riots in September 1922. Followed shortly by riots in Wadhwan, an Indian state on the Bombay side, the old hatred flared up fiercely in the United Provinces over an attempt of the important Hindu proselytizing sect, the Arya Samajists, to reconvert to Hinduism a community known as the Malkana Rajputs, who for centuries now have counted themselves as Mohammedans. Throughout the year 1923 the tide of dissension rose steadily, the Pan jab and the United Provinces in particular being kept in ferment, while every other province in India experienced the contagion to some extent. Cities of prime importance, like Amritsar, Panipat, Agra, Allahabad, Lucknow, Saharanpur, Jubbulpur, Ajmere, and Shahjahanpur, were the scenes of riots, some of them of repeated riots.
Throughout 1924 the situation grew steadily worse. The press on both sides seemed to loose all restraints, and gave way to boundless scurrility. In nearly all provinces there were riots or threats of riots. Delhi, Lucknow, Nagpur, Allahabad, and other important places saw severe fighting between Hindus and Mohammedans, and the tale of casualties mounted. The riot at Gulbarga, in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s dominions, was one of the worst.
This year has seen less actual rioting, but the tone of the press is bad, and the two communities are manifestly drifting further apart. Not long ago the rival factions at Panipat attempted to stage a clash of the first magnitude, some thousands on either side having gathered, and a bloody fight would have ensued but for the skill and staunchness of the local police.
But all these clashes pale beside the stories of Kohat and the Moplah rising. In Kohat terrible riots broke out at the beginning of September 1924, during the course of which about a hundred and fifty persons were killed and wounded, and property estimated at about sixty thousand pounds was stolen. In the end the Hindus evacuated the town, and it was some time before they could be induced to return.
The Moplah outbreak of 1921 was a small war, almost on the scale of some of the frontier expeditions. It was a direct result of the Khilafat agitation, working on the fanatical Mohammedan community of the Moplahs in the Madras Presidency, and from the first it took the form of savage attacks on non-Mohammedans. Many Hindus were murdered or forcibly converted to Islam. Railroads were torn up and communications destroyed. Fighting took place between the Moplahs and the military and police, the scale of which can be judged by the casualties suffered by the government forces: fifty policemen and soldiers were killed and over a hundred and thirty were wounded. The Moplah losses are not accurately known, but they ran into some hundreds. The effects of such happenings as these on the minds and feelings of the two communities in India need no description.
It is not necessary to continue this grim catalogue. The latest affray occurred at Sholapur in the Bombay Presidency, and any day might see similar occurrences in any other province in India. The newspapers of both sides fan the flame, and the one or two leaders who still preach Hindu-Moslem unity are merely paying lip-service to an ideal. The antagonism reaches an incredible extent. I was told the other day by a magistrate that a Mohammedan gentleman came to see him recently and in the course of conversation mentioned that, his son had thought at one time of going up for his M.A. examination. ‘But,’ continued the old gentleman, ‘he discovered that the examiners were all Hindus, so, of course, he had to abandon the idea.’ Again, last summer a rumor started in one of the greatest cities of Northern India to the effect that gangs of Mohammedans were at work kidnaping Hindu children. Though there was not the faintest cause for the rumor, the wildest stories were believed by the Hindus, and there was every likelihood of a serious collision between the two communities until the local district magistrate and the superintendent of police, by wise and timely mediation, exposed the mistake.
At the present moment a bill before the Bombay Legislative Council, introduced by a Mohammedan member, — to make compulsory the registration of marriages before the District Board authorities, which are units of local self-government,—is being bitterly opposed by all Hindus because, they say, the real object of the bill is to make legal the marriage of kidnaped Hindu women to Mohammedans, which means, of course, their conversion to Islam. Such instances as these could be multiplied indefinitely.
Naturally attempts have been made to reconcile the warring interests, but the history of these attempts is, if possible, more melancholy than that of the riots themselves. Congress met in Delhi in 1923 and appointed a committee to draw up a scheme for a national agreement. The scheme, when produced, proved abortive, for it only dealt in a general way with religious differences and made rather ineffective suggestions for arbitration in cases of conflict. Following this, the late leader of the Swarajist Party, Mr. C. R. Das, together with a few friends, drew up an agreement for Bengal, which sought to fix the amount of representation to which the two communities were entitled. It favored Mohammedans unduly, however, and so was rejected by the Hindus.
The most resounding failure of an attempt at compromise remains to be chronicled.
At the beginning of 1925 a subcommittee of both Hindus and Mohammedans was appointed by an All-Parties Conference to try to find a solution of the ancient problem. In February the subcommittee adjourned sine die, as it had failed hopelessly to reach agreement on the practical problems of communal representation in the public services and the various legislative bodies, and on political affairs generally. Of great significance is the following comment on this fiasco by Mr. Gandhi in the issue of his paper, Young India, for March 5: —
‘ The atmosphere for reasonable solution is lacking. Each distrusts the other. In such circumstances there can be no common ground of action. . . . Nor does one notice real anxiety on the part of any of the parties for a solution.’ (The italics are mine.) The Delhi election riots, which occurred shortly after these words appeared in print, gave point and emphasis to them.
So we see how the very first steps toward Home Rule have carried both communities clear of the common ground which they occupied for a brief time during the days of Noncoöperation, and how the ancient feud has widened its scope. From time to time the new trend of Hindu-Mohammedan rivalry is expressed by questions and resolutions in the Indian Legislative Assembly, directed toward ascertaining and trying to increase the numbers of Mohammedans in government service.
IV
We have seen the rise of the Moslem League and how it was eclipsed during the entente which arose out of the Khilafat and Noncoöperation movements. The death of the entente and recent events have now led to a revival of the League. In May 1924 it met again at Lahore under the presidentship of Mr. M. A. Jinnah, the leader of the Independent Party in the Indian Legislative Assembly and perhaps the most important politician in India at the present time. The Lahore meeting reorganized the scattered branches of the League and fixed the regular annual session for December 1924, at Bombay. There its chief objects of interest were the representation of Mohammedans in all legislative and local bodies and in the services. All the signs point to its exercising an increasingly hostile opposition to Hindu pretensions, and it will divert Mohammedan membership from the National Congress. There is, in fact, no reason why the Moslem League should not be the coördinating and guiding authority of all Mohammedan political associations. It must be confessed, however, that this is mostly in the future, for Mohammedan organization is still in the rudimentary stage. Even in the United Provinces and the Panjab, the two provinces where tension is worst, there is little definite Mohammedan organization.
The tanzim — that is, the uplift — movement among the Moslems of the Panjab, which was started nearly two years ago by the well-known Panjab politician, Dr. Saif-ud-Din Kitchlew, was meant to be a movement to organize the whole Mohammedan community. Actually, it has hardly extended beyond the Panjab, and even there it is a somewhat nebulous and incoherent affair. It is difficult to trace any definite organization. Meetings are held and speeches made, but proof that these give rise to any permanent effects is still to seek. But the object of the tanzim movement, as declared by its founder, is clear enough. It is primarily the organization of Mohammedans for economic purposes, for the education of Moslems in industrial, mercantile, and banking operations, so as to break the economic strangle hold of the Hindus on their communal life.
In the United Provinces the tanzim movement has hardly begun, but there are a few nebulous and disjunct Mohammedan organizations there, whose objective is somewhat different from that of the tanzim. A multitude of local societies exist under some such general title as Jamiat-i-tabligh-i-Islam. Their main object is to fight the strong Hindu shuddhi or purification movement, which is directed toward the reconversion to Hinduism of certain more or less recent converts to Islam. In other provinces no recognizable general Mohammedan movements can be perceived; but there are signs that Bengal at any rate will not lack one for long, and the Moslem element in the local Legislative Council is strong and well led.
Turning to the Hindus, we see a very different state of affairs. To begin with, their caste system, while it no doubt makes for division between different classes of Hindus, does at any rate provide the community with a number of strong and natural associations. Then, too, their vastly superior education, their greater subtlety of intellect, and their age-old practice of commercial and financial pursuits have put the Hindus into an immeasurably stronger material position than that occupied by the Mohammedans.
Again, the recent developments have called into being certain organized Hindu movements that are much more definite and effective than the tanzim and other movements of their rivals. Of these the best known is the shuddhi movement, already mentioned, which has its chief centres in the United Provinces. This is really a revival of an old movement for the reconversion to Hinduism of certain tribes who went over to Islam as far back as the reign of Aurungzeb. From 1923 onward, from the year, that is, when communal antagonism touched its highest point in the United Provinces, — the shuddhi movement has taken on a militant aspect, and has solidified Hindu efforts for communal advantage.
Elsewhere in India, Hindu organization has taken the form of the sangathan or unity movement. Sangs or associations are formed, whose objects are to prevent the conversion of Hindus to Christianity or Islam, and to close the ranks of Hinduism itself by healing the differences between Arya and orthodox Hindus, Brahmins and non-Brahmins, and the like. But the sangathan movement has wider aims than the purely religious. It seeks to safeguard Hindu material interests, and is a counterblast to the tanzim movement.
One very significant feature of these recent Hindu movements is the importance attached to physical culture. Some societies make provision for gymnasiums, instruction in wrestling, the use of the singlestick, and so on. There have even been cases of associations laying down as one of the compulsory conditions of membership the possession of a lathi (stave) and the ability to use it efficiently.
All these Hindu associations are meant to culminate in the Mahasabha, the great central meeting of delegates of associations, the last annual conference of which was held in Calcutta last April. It will be interesting to consider its activities for a moment. The outstanding figures were the two well-known Hindu leaders, Pandit Madan Malaviya from the United Provinces, and Lala Lajpat Rai from the Panjab. In the speeches made in the Mahasabha, abundant lip-service was paid to its national, as opposed to its purely communal, character. But nothing can alter the fact that it was a conference of Hindu organizations which have been formed for militant communal purposes, and that communal interests and advancement formed the real business of the session.
The following points from the programme for the Hindu Mahasabha, as laid down in the Mahasabha itself, show conclusively its communal character. The objects of the Mahasabha are: —
1. To organize Hindu Sabhas throughout India.
2. To provide relief to Hindus impoverished on account of communal disturbances.
3. To organize gymnasiums and gymnastic clubs.
4. To represent the communal interests of Hindus in all political controversies.
5. To encourage Hindu boys to take to industrial pursuits.
6. To improve the condition of Hindu women by abolishing purdah, providing educational facilities, and so forth.
7. To reconvert Hindus who have been forcibly converted to Islam.
8. To further the spread of the Hindu tongue.
9. To promote better relations between Hindu agriculturalists and nonagriculturalists.
This, then, is the Hindu counterpart to the Moslem League; and it now remains to consider the effects of all these recent developments, both Hindu and Mohammedan, on Indian politics.
These effects will be important and far-reaching. As one moves from province to province, the same fact is forced upon one’s attention, and that is that everywhere the purely communal organizations — the Hindu Mahasabha and the Moslem League — are taking the place of the Congress. The Mohammedans have already forsaken it; that is clear enough from the proceedings at Belgaum in December 1924; and the Hindus in increasing numbers are beginning to suspect the Congress policy, which they believe has been concerned too much with the placating of Mohammedan jealousies rather than with the safeguarding of Hindu welfare. The signs everywhere are that their hopes and activities will centre more and more in the Hindu Mahasabha.
Nothing could give clearer expression to the completeness of Hindu-Mohammedan alienation in politics than the recent publication of a plan for an Indian Commonwealth which has been devised by Mrs. Besant with the help of a committee. The members of the committee were nearly all Hindus. The result of their labors has evoked no Mohammedan interest, and only the academic interest of the Hindus themselves.
The approaching meetings of Congress and of the Moslem League should provide adequate commentary on the present unfortunate state of communal relations in India.
V
From what has been said in this article it is clear that there is no obvious or easy solution of this great problem. It ranks with the problem of North versus South in Ireland and with the Negro problem in America. Many difficulties and an infinite number of empirical adjustments and mutual concessions will mark its future history. But a student of the problem can at any rate say with confidence that its solution does not lie along the way of pacts between the communal leaders, real or soi-disant, nor will it be found in the issue of manifestoes and pious injunctions to harmony. The nature of the present problem has been stated, and it has been shown that for the present and for some time to come education is likely to be a disruptive rather than a consolidating element in the situation. Where, then, are we to look for the solution?
The problem will have to be approached from several sides. Perhaps the most fruitful line of approach will be by way of the rural side; in particular, any amelioration of the present state of rural Mohammedan indebtedness will greatly soften the asperity of the situation as it affects the most ignorant and excitable part of the Mohammedan community. There are not wanting signs that this side of the problem is about to be tackled in earnest.
Mohammedans, again, must cease to rely entirely on official protection of their interests in the services, and must see that their sons get the education that is necessary to enable them to compete on even terms with Hindus. A good deal of the bitterness of the present situation arises from the consciousness of educational inferiority in the minds of Mohammedans, and, looking only at the thing itself, they overlook its causes, many of which are removable by their own efforts. The decrease of rural indebtedness will greatly help the cause of Mohammedan education by making it possible for parents to afford both elementary and higher education for their children. As we have seen, this will accentuate rivalry, but it is a necessary preliminary to a permanent improvement of the present state of affairs.
And, lastly, some common and absorbing interest must be developed in which both communities can work for a common and worthy end. Such an interest must transcend the partial and hostile interests of each sect, and can be found only in the rise of true political parties in India. So, paradoxically enough, the Reformed Constitution, whose introduction gave rise to the present Hindu-Mohammedan situation, holds also its solution — and a solution, be it noted, such as would have been impossible under any native rule or under the pre-1919 British rule.
Hindu peasants as well as Mohammedans are loaded with debt; there are certain Hindu classes that lack education and material advantages; there is a vast field of social and other legislation for which members of both communities might work whole-heartedly. Exploring all lines of common interest, leading men of bot h sides should try to show their electorates how the new constitution has put power into their hands, and should try to induce them to join forces to gain specific objects of common desire. As long as action proceeds on purely communal lines, so long will the gulf between Hindus and Mohammedans widen under the conditions of the present day, and the coming of Swaraj be delayed indefinitely.
This is not an easy or a complete solution of the problem. The ignorant and fanatical on both sides will not let religious animosities die easily, but the growth of true political parties in which Hindus and Mohammedans can work together whole-heartedly for common aims will be a great and increasing force against fanatical ebullitions. It is in this direction, I am convinced, that the solution of the problem must be sought; and once again I emphasize the vast importance of the rural problem in this respect. The improvement of agricultural methods, the diminution of indebtedness, and the raising of the standard of living in the villages are indispensable preliminaries to the formation of political parties and the establishment of true and abiding Hindu-Mohammedan unity. Here is a tremendous field of work for the leaders and the educated members of both sides, whose active help and sympathy would magnify the effects of government action a hundredfold.