he was perhaps bidding for it when soon after a series of interviews with the Viceroy, conducted on both sides with perfect courtesy, he replied to the official announcement of the impending visit of the Prince of Wales to India by proclaiming it to be the duty of Indians to boycott the heir to the Throne in the same way in which he had exhorted them last winter to boycott the Duke of Connaught.  He must certainly have been bidding for it when in the course of a raging and tearing temperance campaign in Bombay he declared, it seems, that liquor shops must be closed even if it cost rivers of blood.  Government has so far wisely shrunk from adding to his halo as a saint that of a “confessor and martyr.”  But he may yet force Government’s hands.[6] For there must be limits to the impunity granted even to a Mahatma who professes and preaches the doctrine of Ahimsa, but whose footsteps are dogged by violence which is the negation of Ahimsa.

FOOTNOTES: 

[5] Later reports promise a far better monsoon than was at first indicated.

[6] Whilst these pages are going through the press, reports are coming in of a Moplah rising on the Malabar coast, far more ominous than any of the disturbances already referred to in this chapter.  The Moplahs are an extremely backward and unruly race, with an infusion of Arab blood, always notorious for their fierce Mahomedan fanaticism, wrought up to a white heat by a recent visit from the two Mahomedan firebrands of “Non-co-operation.”  The murder of Europeans, the burning and looting of Government buildings, the tearing up of railways and telegraphs, recall the worst excesses committed by Indian mobs two years ago in the Punjab.  But on this occasion there has been no Mahomedan-Hindu fraternisation.  The Moplahs have vented their Khilafat fury equally upon the helpless Hindu populations of the whole district, who have been slaughtered and plundered or forcibly converted to Islam as in the earliest days of Mahomedan domination.  Hindu members of the Legislative Assembly, realising that their co-religionists owe their safety only to the military forces which are being rushed up by a Satanic Government to arrest a campaign of sheer murder and rapine, may well ask, as Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas has just done, how long such men as Mahomed and Shaukat Ali are to be allowed to go on preaching the doctrines which the Moplahs have so effectively carried into practice.  However local this outbreak may remain, it is only another and a more sinister symptom of the widespread upheaval against all constituted authority into which “Non-co-operation” has degenerated under the leadership of Mr. Gandhi and his Mahomedan allies.

CHAPTER XVI

THE INDIAN PROBLEM A WORLD PROBLEM