The bureaucracy and communal riots

NO saying was commoner during the Great War than that it was intended to make the world safe for democracy. It may similarly be said that the one clear purpose which the disturbances like those that took place in Delhi in connection with the recent Id celebration are likely to serve is to make India safe for the bureaucracy. It is not necessary for our present purposes to enquire whether the bureaucracy itself wants India to be made safe for it in this sense. There is no doubt that there are some among the bureaucrats who resent any such imputation, who honestly believe that whatever may have been the case in the past, at present, at any rate, there is no disposition on the part of the average bureaucrat to divide the people in order to rule them, to foment or encourage racial differences in order to more effectively deal with the warring elements. What is absolutely certain, however, is that the strengthening and consolidation of the power of the bureaucracy is not only the immediate and direct but the one sure consequence of every outbreak of communal fanaticism or racial hatred. Take the case of Delhi. Who thought of the Congress, the Khilafat and other popular organisations, in and through which the desire for Swaraj usually manifests itself, during the fateful days when rioting of a major or minor description was the order of the day at Delhi, except in the sense that everybody felt that this rioting connoted the utter failure of those organisations? Who, indeed thought of anyone or anything else except the bureaucracy and its resources which, apart from the mobs and their victims, were the only thing one saw during the prevalence of the trouble?