Editorial: British Rule and Indian Misery (1944)

Editorial from the July 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

While Socialists do not share the erroneous belief of some Indian workers that India under the rule of a rapacious Indian capitalist class will be different from India under foreign rule, every British worker who observes the conditions existing in that country must share with his Indian fellow-worker the latter's detestation of British rule. It is about 170 years since Warren Hastings, the first British Governor-General, was impeached for cruelty and extortion; Indians may well hold that cruelty and extortion have marked the activities of all foreign conquerors and foreign capitalists, and that their own breed of princes, landlords and factory owners can hardly be worse.

The evils from which the Indian workers and peasants suffer are no secret; they are far too glaring to be hidden or denied. Let us glance at a few recent disclosures.

On his arrival in India, the new Viceroy Lord Wavell declared that India's slums are "a disgrace to a civilised country" (Manchester Guardian, October 28, 1943); he might well have added that every capitalist country in the world has a similar disgrace, and might have pointed the obvious moral—that capitalism will never solve the problem.

Mr. Amery, Secretary for India, stated in the House of Commons on January 20 of this year that in Bengal in the last five months of 1943 there were about 1,000,000 abnormal deaths due to famine and disease. A month after Mr. Amery’s statement on the famine, the Government was pressed in vain to reverse a recent decision permitting women to be employed in the Indian coal mines. Mr. Sorenson, M.P., who raised the question, stated that, according to official figures, the average wage of Indian miners at a recent date was 21s. per month, about. 1d. an hour (Hansard, February 17, 1944). The President of the Board of Education, Mr. Butler, who defended the Government in the absence of the Secretary for India, admitted that it was not until 1937, nearly 100 years after the employment of women in mines was forbidden in England that a similar prohibition was introduced in India. The prohibition was suspended in 1943 because of a shortage of miners, and there are now 40,000 women miners. The Minister explained that the reversal is only a temporary one. and he made the most of the point that the men who work in the mines like to have their wives with them. He even threw out a sop to the group in this country who are concerned about equal pay for men and women, and said that the Indian women who work in mines "must be paid the same rates as men.” He did not dwell on the fact that the miserable wages of miners, even if increased by 50 per cent. during the war, obviously have much to do with the shortage of mine workers. He did, however, admit, that, the miners had been leaving to get war-time work under the military authorities. "which was well paid and was open to the attraction that husbands and wives could work together."

The Minister gave no answer to Mr. Sorenson’s statement that the All-Indian Trades Union Congress had emphatically condemned the Government’s notion as being retrograde in principle, uncalled for by the circumstances, not calculated to achieve the object aimed at (an increase of production), and involving a breach of international agreement. An ex-miner M.P., Mr. A. Sloan, declared that ”no work of any kind in the mine is suitable for any woman. . ..  I think the thing is so utterly contemptible and horrible that the strongest possible protest should be made. . . .”

After all these years of British rule and the boasting of the benefits it has brought, the Economist (March 25, 1944) declares that “the great majority of Indians have not enough to eat: they are ill clad, badly housed, ridden by disease and poorly educated. Poverty is the fundamental fact of Indian life. . . "

What of the future prospect now that rival groups are planning to develop capitalist industry and trade? The late Lord Brentford declared that "we conquered India as the outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we should hold it.” Now, however, American interests are looking over the Indian market. The Sunday Express (April 9, 1944) publishes a report, that "a scheme to spread more than £7,000 million to capture a large share of the Indian market after the war is being widely discussed in American big business circles.” The scheme's Indian backers (including the Indian millionaire. Mr. G. D Birla, Gandhi’s friend and supporter) promise to industrialise India in 15 years; and raise the standard of living. The American interest in the scheme is that it will provide customers for American goods. Their concern is not that of helping a backward and poverty-stricken country out of human sympathy, but the search for trade, investment and profit. Indian workers should look with suspicion on all such plans and promises, whether they originate abroad or at home, and wake up to the fact that their one hope of emancipation lies in working for Socialism along with the working class of other lands.