Throwing off the mask

THE distinguished signatories to the Commonwealth of India Bill memorandum were wiser than they knew. About the very time when they were putting their names to that document, the Secretary of State for India was making a speech to an English audience which justified their worst apprehensions. In his speech at the Central Indian Society’s dinner, Lord Birkenhead stated his intention in the plainest words he could find. After declaring emphatically that “Britain must continue to sustain the “exclusive responsibility for the protection of India” and that “we should never close our eyes to the realities of the situation,” he added: “The fundamental fact in the Indian situation is that we went to India centuries ago for composing, with the sharp edge of the sword, differences which would have submerged and destroyed Indian civilisation. We went there on that basis and hold it by that charter, and it is true to say today that if we left Indian tomorrow, it will be submerged by the same anarchical and murderous disturbances as in the days of Clive.” Lord Birkenhead’s history need not detain us long. It is the privilege of brilliant men to be colossally ignorant, and Lord Birkenhead is a true representative of his kind. There is not a schoolboy in India but knows that when the British came to India “centuries ago,” they came not to compose differences which would have submerged and destroyed Indian civilisation, but for the much more commonplace object of making money, and that it was primarily and principally for the same object as well as for motives of self-preservation that they appealed to the sword at a later stage.