to a single Dominion that is asked to make an annual sacrifice
comparable to that? Are we not at least entitled to claim that the
Indian tax-payer's money should not be spent merely on the maintenance
of British garrisons that are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and of an
Indian army that is so constituted as to lack all the essentials of a
national army, but should go to the building up of an army really worthy
to take its place on equal terms when India attains to self-government
with the other armies of a commonwealth of free nations?"
The racial issue dominates in a far graver form the whole question of
the status and treatment of Indians in the Dominions and Crown Colonies.
For there it enters a much larger field which extends far beyond India.
In India so far, in speaking of the racial issue, Indians and Europeans
alike have hitherto had in mind chiefly the relations between the ruling
and the subject race. When the rulers all belong to one race and come
from a far distant country not to settle permanently but chiefly to
maintain, each one in his own sphere and during his appointed time, the
continuity of rulership over millions of subjects of another and very
different race with a different civilisation, an additional element of
discord is introduced into their relations. But since Great Britain
achieved dominion over India the main issue between rulers and ruled has
been how far on the one hand British rulers should devolve on to their
Indian subjects a share in the government and administration of the
country, and how far on the other hand their Indian subjects could
hasten such devolution by various forms of pressure. Whatever part any
purely racial antagonism may have played in the controversy, the British
rulers of India have at least since 1833, and still more since the
Queen's Proclamation in 1858, debarred themselves from basing on racial
differences their refusal or reluctance to meet the growing aspirations
of their Indian subjects. They have been content to plead the political
immaturity of the Indian people and the lack of individual
qualifications amongst all but a few Indians, and even these
disabilities they had deliberately undertaken and expressed their
anxiety to remove by the introduction of Western education. Neither
colour nor descent, it was specifically declared, were to constitute
any barrier. It is quite otherwise with the question of the right of
Indians to immigrate into other parts of the Empire, and of the measure
of rights they are to enjoy as settlers there. It brings us face to face
with the racial issue pure and simple and in its widest aspects. There
is an open and declared conflict between the claims of the Dominions to
exclude or to restrict the rights of Indian settlers on grounds of
colour and descent for the avowed purpose of maintaining the paramount
ascendancy of one race over another, and the claims put forward by
Indians as British subjects to have access to all parts of the Empire
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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