THE UNTOUCHABLES AND THE PAX BRITANNICA 145
Government which is of the people and is not detached from them can venture on the path of progress, because it is in a position to know where the obedience will end and resistance will begin. But the Indian Executive, not being of the people, could not feel the pulse of the people. The gist of the matter is that the irresponsible Executive which had been in power in India was paralysed between these two limitations on its authority and much of what to make life good was held up. Part of the programme it would not undertake and the other part it could not undertake. That there was some advancement in material progress is not to be denied But no people in the world can long remain contented with the benefits of peace and order, for they are not dumb brutes. It is foolish to suppose that a people will indefinitely favour a bureaucracy because it has improved their roads, constructed canals on more scientific principles, effected their transportation by rail, carried their letters by penny post, flashed their messages by lightening, improved their currency, regulated their weights and measures, corrected their notion of geography, astronomy and medicine and stopped their internal quarrels Any people, however patient, will sooner or later demand a Government that will be more than a mere engine of efficiency.”
People wanted freedom political, economic and social. This the British Government declined to create :—
“As a result of this, so far as the moral and social life of the people was concerned, the change of Government by the Moghuls to a Government by the British was only a change of rulers rather than a change of system. Owing to the adoption of the principle of non-interference partly by preference and partly by necessity by the British ‘the natives of India found themselves under a Government distinguished in no vital respect from those under which they had toiled and worshipped, lived and died through all their weary and forgotten history. From a political standpoint, the change was but the replacement of one despotism by another. It accepted the arrangements as it found them [1 ] and preserved them faithfully in the manner of the Chinese tailor who, when given an old coat as a pattern, produced with pride an exact replica, rents, patches and all.’
This policy of non intervention though understandable, was so far as the Untouchables were concerned, mistaken in its conception and disastrous in its consequences. It may be granted that Untouchables can only be lifted up by the Hindus recognizing his human rights and him as a human being as correct. But that
1 The poll tax has been continued in Burma simply because it was found to exist there on the day of conquest.
- Bernard Houghton, Bureaucratic Government.