LETTER FROM H.S.L. POLAK November 23, 1939

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09415777229, 094055338

E-mail- [e-mail];[e-mail]

 

 

 

LETTER FROM H.S.L. POLAK November 23, 1939

 

 

  Pyarelal has been good enough to send us news of you and your message of love and affection, for which we are grateful to you and to him. Of course, we understand how busy you must be and how necessary it is for you to deal with immediate matters and correspondence first. We know, too, from old experience, that “the nearest and the dearest” must be prepared to make the hardest sacrifice! It is good to feel that in spite of time and circumstances, we are still included in that category. Indeed, it must have been in our karma that this close link between us, which has remained unbroken for so long, should have been forged. We are three families here (Ship lake, near Henley-on-Thames, Oxon.) in a small house by the river Millie, Celia and I; Leon’s wife, Marie, and the two children (the elder, Rosemary, nearly five, a most energetic, exigent, and eager little girl, and the boy, Peter, aged 21 months, fat, fine, and full of good humor and intelligence); and Millie’s other sister and her husband; not to speak of a maid and two dogs. So you can well imagine how full of domestic activity and responsibility Millie is. Indeed, she is giving all her time to these duties. Her health, despite the fact that she had no holiday this summer, owing to the outbreak of war just after everyone else had one, and that she had a shocking scalding accident when visiting Mater in June (the latter is over 80 and in fairly good health and spirit, at Be hill), is on the whole pretty good, though, naturally, as the strain does not get less, she has spells of fatigue, which affect the nerves and the heart, from time to time.

She shares with you, though in a much less degree, a tendency to blood-pressure. The war is in background of all our lives. When the worst will be reached none can say. But the general determination of the country to try to end the constant pressure of threats, aggression and violence is unmistakable; and so, in spite of an undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty, there is a deeply-ingrained satisfaction that a great effort is being made to establish once more the basis of something more than a nominal peace and a return to a more civilized handling of the problems of life, personal, rational, and international. For ourselves, we are hoping to stay out at Ship Lake till the end of the war. Leon is an Air Raid Protection Warden in charge of his area, near his house in Wimbledon, of some square miles. He comes down whenever possible at weekends, and sometimes instead, Marie goes up to him, to say that the house is still there and in order. Our London flat is closed, pending termination of the lease. For reasons of security, the firm has transferred most of the professional work and the records to new offices at Wimbledon, whilst retaining some of the old offices in the Strand, where we attend two days a week. But, in fact, work has largely dried up and is, at present, confined almost entirely to what was pending at the outbreak of war. How it will end is uncertain.

I go to the office four days a week from Ship lake, and participate at the same time in my various public activities, including writing and lecturing. I am, among other things, the Treasurer of theosophical Society in England. As you will no doubt have surmised, none of these jobs weighs more heavily upon me than our old problems of Indians overseas and, in particular, those of South Africa. So soon as General Hertzog resigned, I wrote to General Smuts and Dr.J.H. Hofmeyr, as you will see from the enclosed correspondence, and received from then the enclosed replies, which I have communicated to Lord Zetland, Mr. Anthony Eden at the Dominions Office (who have both warmly acknowledged them), the Government of India, and the Indian Agent General (Sir B. Rama Rau); and this week I have discussed the situation in an intimate and informal talk with Colonel Deneys Reitz, the Union Minister attending the war conferences here, who was most sympathetic but inclined to be somewhat pessimistic as to any real change of sentiment on race and colour questions in the Union for a long time. I may say too that I have had the most cordial help and appreciation of the importance of these matters from the Dominions Office, under Sir Thomas In skip (now Lord Caldecote, the Lord Chancellor) and the Duke of Devonshire, and Mr. Eden. At the Colonial Office, too, where the reactions in Ken are being watched with anxiety, I have had a good deal of encouragement from Mr. Malcolm Macdonald, your old friend, Ramsay’s son. All this, of course, is for your personal information and not for publication. In view of your great interest in the South African question, I thought you would wish to know how things were being dealt with at this end. I expect that in South Africa, for the time being, things anti-Indian will be at a standstill, especially as Stuttaford is no longer Minister for the Interior and Hofmeyr is again in the cabinet. If Reitz can help in this, I am sure that he will use his influence in the right direction. Pyarelal writes that you are wondering if I get any worthwhile news of Indian developments. Yes, as a journalist, as an old colleague of many public men in India, and as a member of the India Conciliation Group, I get practically all that there is and am kept fully informed of what I may miss by Agatha, who has a watchful eye.

Moreover, after over thirty years of experience of the inside of Indian affairs, fortified by the observations taken during many visits to India since the historic initial one of 1909, it is not difficult for me to set things in something like a reasonable responsible perspective; though I much doubt whether you will approve of or agree with my general conclusions. I am going to be quite frank in telling you there I disagree with what has been happening in India and the background of belief in which it has happened. I know, from old times, how loyally you depend upon colleagues and how you have tended to accept from those whom you have regarded as specialists in their particular line their views of a given situation and the advice thereon that they have offered you. I see this again in your backing of Jawaharlal’s statement of principles against your own better judgement. However much you are prepared to stand alone in affirmation of what you hold to be true, your loyalty (it appears to me from what I have long observed) often betrays you into contrary and contradictory courses.

You took as I hold rightly » the view that, in this tragic crisis, India’s help to the Allied cause in the war should be unconditional. But when Jawaharlal, misled as always, by his ineradicable passion for Leftist ideological phraseology and his blindness to facts that did not square with his intellectual prepossessions (I don’t in the least question his honesty, but only his judgement) carried the Working Committee with him in lying down conditions for collaboration with Britain, you could not or would not stand out in insistence upon India’s taking what you regarded as the one right course. Jawaharlal could not get away from his mantram, “British imperialism” and I see that now you mutter it with equal fervour and iteration, as though it were both true and creative. One reason why I was most anxious for you to come to the Round Table Conference (notwithstanding the conditions which you accepted upon which it was held) was that I wanted you to realize the intense and fundamental changes in public opinion here in the concept of Empire, even the most reactionary circles, which, however, did not and do not truly represent average sentiment in the country. I was deeply disappointed that you steadily averted your mind from any real contact with that sentiment.

But the way in which you appeared before the Conference and the admissions of communal disunity that you were then compelled to confess did infinite harm to the cause of Indian constitutional progress. You knew before you came here » or, if you did not, you must have been living in a world of unreality » that unless communal accord could be reached, the end must be disastrous. Yet, though you could have brought with you a galaxy of talent drawn from Congress-minded Muslims, you left the Mussalman cause to be represented solely by the Muslim communalists, and the Hindu reactionaries at the Conference defeated every reposed solution based upon national interests. You failed publicly to carry the minorities with you, and your stand did not even have the practical consequence of dividing them effectively on the national issue. Later still, the Congress Party, both in and out of office, instead of seeking to draw over to country’s cause the best and most national-minded of the Muslim Leaguers, by getting them to work inside the League and to transform it from within into becoming a sort of Muslim Nationalist wing of the Congress, set about deliberately seeking to undermine its influence in the country, attacking it openly and thus driving it to defend itself by extreme anti-Hindu propaganda, and thus giving to the Mahasabha the very material, without which it was impotent, to stir up communal prejudice and hatred, until communal stir has become more bitter and menacing than at any time in the history of the national movement. You have yourself only recently admitted the danger of the position, from the point of view of the preservation of non-violence and the possibilities of a resort to civil disobedience. Yet, at the same time, in recent statements in India and the British press, you have supported the Congress denial that communal discord has any validity in the present constitutional situation, its assertion that civil disobedience to attain the Congress objectives is not a distant possibility in spite of the probability of its accentuating communal hatreds and its resulting in some parts of the country in civil war; and the assertion that it is only Jawaharlal’s pet bogey, “British imperialism” that prevent India’s achievement of what you once called “the substance of independence”, which you defined for me (and have reiterated and never repudiated) as Dominion Status, as interpreted in the Statute of Westminster.

Both Mr. De Valera and General Hertzog have claimed that this involves the right to secede, and I have seen no authoritative denial of this claim of right. It is unlikely, for good reasons of a very practical character, to be exercised either by Eire or by South Africa. But if it were ever to be exercised, I am confident that no British Government would be found to constrain any Dominion by force to remain in the Empire. That is what “British imperialism” has now come to mean; and India could rid herself of her fears and suspicions, if she could bring herself to understand how a Dominion constitution is brought about and works in practice, if she could agree with reasonable unanimity upon any form of such a constitution, so British Government would be allowed by public opinion here to stand in the way. It would be had for the taking. The Jawaharlal’s and the others, who pretend to speak on these subjects, experts without any real experience and with hardly any theoretical knowledge even of constitution working, are constantly talking of a Constituent Assembly, to which the British Government ought to agree in advance, for the purpose of threshing out a constitution for India. But you ought to know better than anyone else there that that was not how the South Africa Constitution was made. There was no formal or official constituent Assembly. The party leaders in the separate Colonies agreed to meet and discuss. They hammered out a constitution and then presented it to the British Parliament, which passed it substantially unaltered. Even then, in its working out, the South African constitution has since been structurally altered by the will of the South African people without interference from the British Parliament, and reservations made and accepted at the time in all sincerity have disappeared by acts of ill-faith, but without effective objection from here. Similarly with Eire. The fact is that your colleagues do not live in a world of reality but in one of theory and you yourself are so indifferent to constitutional theory, usage, and practice that you accept their declarations though these were based upon anything but vagueness and ignorance of the true spirit of British constitutional history.

The Congress party lives in the past, in a realm of suspicion and fear; not in the present, in one of courage and self-assurance. It cannot convince either of its sincerity or of its understanding of major problems affecting the welfare of the nation large sections of the public. It affects a lofty superiority, whereas, indeed, it manifests quite obviously an inferiority-complex, both at home and abroad. It talks of democracy, but it practices the methods of totalitarianism, often unashamedly and ruthlessly overbearing all opposition because it fears for its prestige if it should modify its policy to meet demand needs or because justice requires it. I should have thought that, when the Allied countries are fighting a life-and death struggle to destroy all that the Hitler regime stands for in brutality, aggression, lying, and violence, you, at least, would have understood that the greater naturally and inevitably includes the less, and that, with the ultimate resort once more to argument, reason, and conciliation in the solution of world problems, the problem of India’s future, once her own leaders were in reasonable agreement as to principles and larger details, would be automatically solved. I remember that old soldier Annie Besant, taking a very different line in 1911 on a subject very near to her heart.

It was at the time of the Coronation of King George V, and the greatest women’s suffrage demonstration ever held took place in London. Millie and I participated in it and marched with the Indian section, I carrying the symbolic elephant and some of the cane chairs! We wound up at the Albert Hall, where a great meeting was addressed by many of the most noteworthy of the feminist leaders. But the most striking speech was that of Annie Besant. She said, in brief (remember the date, 1911): “We have the franchise. That is not today the issue. The question is: How are we going to use it? If not better than the men, it is not worth having.” It was not until years later, after the Great War in which the women contributed magnificently, that the women’s Franchise Act was actually passed. But Annie Besant had vision and understanding. She knew that, in spirit, her cause had already triumphed, though form might yet be lacing for the spirit to inhabit. But the coming of the form was inevitable. And, before she died, she had the same certain vision regarding India’s triumphant emergence to equality of status among the nations. She never doubted but you and your colleagues, whilst profession, except in a purely academic sense, as when a good man may be said to represent all mankind have not this courage, this faith, this certainly. You doubt, you ask for assurances, you question whether there might not even be two kinds of Dominion Status, one white and one brown! which causes people here, who are instinctively aware of the true meaning of the things to smile, as at the pathetic innocence (or ignorance) of the young untutored mind!

Where is the profound wisdom of India, for which the Rishis stood? And where is the true patience that has kept India alive and potent for such things through the centuries? Two things have given me the most intense humiliation. The one is the gravity of the communal feud, inconceivable to me when I look back to conditions prevailing in India when I first went there thirty years ago. The second is the intrigue, the dishonesty the rancour and the dangerous authoritarianism in the Congress circles that has been condemned by none more vigorously than yourself. They display together not the spirit of unity which would, in itself, command successful realization of the national aspiration, but one of tragic internal feud and discord, one of inferiority which, even in the absence (as I firmly believe) of external opposition would suffice to frustrate the fulfillment of India’s hope. And when I hear you echoing Jawaharlal’s endless repetition of the mantram of “British imperialism”, as though this had anything in common, either in theory or in practice, with the calculated bestiality and horror of Nazi torture of the unoffending Jews, or persecution and terrorism of the Czechs and the Poles; when I see you hesitate even for a moment in throwing all the forces of India into the balance in order to destroy for ever a truly “Satanic Government” (to use an old and misapplied term of your own) I am amazed and shocked that either of you, trained in a knowledge of English and the use of language, should put your country to shame by confusing issues and misusing its trust in your guidance! If you had had a drop of Jewish blood in you, you could not have rested until, without hatred and without a desire for vengeance, but from the deepest and holiest sense of duty such as Sri Krishna spoke of to Arjuna, you had done your uttermost to destroy a locust regime that is seeking to devour every beautiful thing that mankind, intuitively realizing its godly nature, has been developing during the ages of its development. But as you are a Hindu by birth, an Indian by choice, and a citizen of the world by aspiration, I do adjure you to reflect once more upon the stupidity and the futility of abstention, even as Sri Krishna adjured Arjuna to remember that even if he were determined to renounce his duty, to resist evil and defend truth, yet his very nature would drive him irresistibly to the task. I sometimes ask myself what changes in the each of us might have resulted had we remained together in common work.

I am sure that I should have been a better man. But, on my part, I would have told you faithfully what others have, in the main, concealed from you; I should have helped you to laugh things into their real proportions; I should have warned you loyally against misinterpreting the honest motives of others who did not agree with you, but whom your won “followers” have prevented from healthy contact with you. You have lately complained about many things that, though only now, apparently revealed to you, have long been known to and condemned by others who have been unscrupulously denounced as in British pay or under British influences, who have been virtually driven out of public life as traitors to the country’s interest. You must accept your full share; it seems to me, of this lamentable state of affairs. And also for the weak and silly policy of withdrawal from the administration of affairs in the Congress Provinces. In India it seems so much easier to refrain, to stand aloof, to non-cooperate, than to join together to get things done, to gain experience, to create and construct and educate and provide opportunities for greater effort and the conquest of disease, poverty and ignorance. I know, of course, all the arguments for non-cooperation. I know, too, how they have been falsified in practice by your repeated admissions. I know all the arguments for positive non-violence. I know, too, how you yourself have been repeatedly deceived by those who have vowed themselves to it and betrayed both you and the ideal that they had sworn to defend. I know how hatred has spread throughout the country until its face has been unrecognizably distorted. Whose hatred was it that did this » that of the British “Imperialists” or the Indian “nationalists”? Will you not reflect again that, in all this denunciation of British’s motives and actions, you might after all, under God, have been wrong, and that what has to be done now is to work together to face the Devil and subdue him? I have tried to write honestly and with restraint, and I am sure you will understand the spirit of love for you and for India with which I have done so.