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PAKISTAN : WEAKENING OF THE DEFENCES
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These data reveal in a striking manner that the fighting forces available for the defence of India mostly come from areas which are to be included in Pakistan. From this it may be argued, that without Pakistan, Hindustan cannot defend itself.
The facts brought out by the Simon Commission are, of course, beyond question. But they cannot be made the basis of a conclusion, such as is suggested by the Simon Commission, namely, that only Pakistan can produce soldiers and that Hindustan cannot. That such a conclusion is quite untenable will be seen from the following considerations.
In the first place, what is regarded by the Simon Commission as something peculiar to India is not quite so peculiar. What appears to be peculiar is not due to any inherent defect in the people. The peculiarity arises because of the policy of recruitment followed by the British Government for years past. The official explanation of this predominance in the Indian Army of the men of the North-West is that they belong to the Martial Classes. But Mr. Chaudhari* has demonstrated, by unimpeachable data, that this explanation is far from being true. He has shown that the predominance in the Army of the men of the North-West took place : as early as the Mutiny of
1857, some 20 years before the theory of Martial and Nonmartial Classes was projected in an indistinct form for the first time in 1879 by the Special Army Committee† appointed in that year, and that their predominance had nothing to do with their alleged fighting qualities but was due to the fact, that they helped the British to suppress the Mutiny in which the Bengal Army was so completely involved. To quote Mr. Chaudhari:
“The pre-Mutiny army of Bengal was essentially a Brahmin and Kshatriya army of the Ganges basin. All the three Presidency Armies of those days, as we have stated in the first part of this article, were in a sense quite representative of the military potentialities of the areas to which they belonged, though, none of them could, strictly speaking, be correctly described as national armies of the provinces concerned,
- See his series of articles on “ The Martial Races of India ” published in the Modern Review for July 1930, September 1930, January 1931 and February 1931.
† The Questionnaire circulated by the Committee included the following question:—
“If an efficient and available reserve of the Indian Army be considered necessary for the safety of the Empire, should it not be recruited and maintained from those parts of the country which give us best soldiers, rather than amongst the weakest and least warlike races of India ?”…….