Gandhi Before India Read Online Free PDF

back to India.
    Over the next few weeks, three memorials were drafted and dispatched by Gandhi. One was to the Natal Legislative Council; a second to the Secretary of State for the Colonies; the third to the Viceroy of India. The Natalians were asked why it was necessary ‘to make a man pay heavily for being allowed to remain free in the Colony after he has already lived under bondage for 10 years’. The Secretary of State was reminded that it was ‘against the spirit of the British Constitution tocountenance measures that tend to keep men under perpetual bondage’. The Viceroy was told that the ‘special, obnoxious poll-tax’ was designed to ensure that the Indian in Natal
must for ever remain without freedom, without any prospect of ever bettering his condition, without ever even thinking of changing his hut, his meagre allowance and his ragged clothes, for a better house, enjoyable food and respectable clothing. He must not even think of educating his children according to his own taste or comforting his wife with any pleasure or recreation. 14
    A coalition known as the ‘Unionists’ was in power in the United Kingdom, which brought together the Conservatives with Liberals who had left their party over the question of Home Rule for Ireland. In the elections of 1895, Dadabhai Naoroji had failed to win re-election, but an Indian standing as a Unionist, Mancherjee Bhownaggree, was successful in his bid to become an MP. The Birmingham businessman and former Liberal, Joseph Chamberlain, was now Secretary of State for the Colonies. In September 1895, Chamberlain wrote to the Natal Government about the Franchise Bill still awaiting approval. The bill, he said, did not distinguish between the ‘most ignorant and the most enlightened of the Natives of India’. The ‘position and attainments’ of the latter class, he thought, ‘fully qualify them for all the duties and privileges of citizenship’. The Natalians were surely ‘aware that in two cases within the last few years the electors of important constituencies in this country have considered Indian gentlemen worthy not merely to exercise the franchise, but to represent them in the House of Commons’.
    Chamberlain accepted that the ‘destinies of the Colony of Natal shall continue to be shaped by the Anglo-Saxon race, and that the possibility of any preponderant influx of Asiatic voters should be avoided’. Still, like his predecessor, Lord Ripon, he worried about overtly racist legislation. Like Ripon, he sat on the government benches with an Indian colleague – yet in a colony for which he was responsible, Indians were being denied the vote altogether. A bill which ‘involves in a common disability all natives of India without any exception,’ he argued, and which ‘provides no machinery by which an Indian can free himself from this disability, whatever his intelligence, his education, or his stake inthe country … would be an affront upon the people of India such as no British Government could be a party to’.
    In Britain it was assumed that, with guidance and patronage, a select group of Indians could come to keep the company of white men. The rise of Naoroji and Bhownaggree was proof of the success of this kind of liberal paternalism. Such mobility was harder to imagine or achieve in the Colonies. Especially in South Africa, where it was assumed by the ruling race that
all
Coloured people would for
all
time be fixed in a position of cultural and political inferiority.
    Seeking a middle way between the hardliners in the colony and the liberals in London, the Governor of Natal had a clause introduced stating that only those who had representative institutions in their own country would be eligible for the franchise. This ruled out Indians, while enfranchising Englishmen and other Europeans from countries with their own parliaments. Thus was a racial bill formally saved from ‘the naked disenfranchisement’ from which it had previously been marked.