The Foreign Policy of Young India (1921).

1. India's Responses to the World.

Recently there has been founded in Paris an association sociale et commerciale hindoue, the social and commercial association of the Indians (1921).

The Indian merchants of Paris constitute a conspicuous commercial colony in France. Their subscription to the French soldiers' fund has been appreciated by the French government in generous terms.

The Paris Indians have kept touch with India also in almost every phase of her contemporary life. They have contributed financial assistance to the Gurukul at Hardwar, to the Servants of India Society at Poona, to the Amritsar relief fund, to the library, at Bolpur, to the Bose Institute of Calcutta, and to the Tilak Swarâj Treasury. They are going to found two scholarships for postgraduate students of Indian universities tenable in one or other of the industrial colleges of France.

In the United States last year, while merchants and bankers from Delhi, Mysore, Calcutta and Bombay were passing through New York and Chicago, the domiciled "Hindu" traders started the project of something like an Indian Chamber of Commerce. As is well known, the Hindus of the New World have made a name for themselves among the American public in various walks of life,—in engineering establishments, in chemical factories, in the silver market, in academic circles, in the Irish and Catholic world, in journalism, in the federal and state congresses, in labor associations, and also in political prisons for having organized in 1915-16, as was charged by the public prosecutor of San Francisco, the "naval invasion of a dependency of the King of England" and thus having violated the then neutrality of the United States. The impact of this name is already considerable not only on India at home but also on every nation, great and small, from China to Peru.

In Yokohama and Kobe also there are Indian commercial communities of substantial importance. The Hindu merchants of Japan have many good social acquaintances among the Japanese men of light and leading. One of their latest gifts for India has been announced in the papers. It consists of a donation of several thousand rupees to the University of Bombay for founding a scholarship to be granted to women students.

As one surveys facts of this order from the different corners of the two hemispheres, one feels the virility of India's life-force and the magnitude of Indian institutions outside of the geographical limits of India. To the manifold stimuli of the world India is responding in diverse ways. There has occurred a veritable expansion of India.

The country has grown not only intensively but also in extension. The "deepening" of India is being felt today by the tremendous power which our unlettered peasants and working men have been exerting on the intelligentzia and on public life. This is but an aspect of the new democracy which is fast conquering all mankind. But the widening of India is perhaps not yet consciously realized by many. It is, however, already a potent force among the chief spiritual agencies which are steadily internationalizing the world.

2. Greater India.

Wherever on earth there lives an Indian there is an India. We have thus an India in Japan, an India in Fiji, an India in Mauritius, an India in South Africa, an India in the Americas, and an India in every country of Europe. Greater India is made up of these Indias outside of India.

The citizens of this Greater India come from almost every district of India. They speak all Indian dialects and profess all creeds of the South-Asian sub-continent. Among them are to be found manual and intellectual workers of all grades. Farmers, artisans, sailors, chemists, physicians, engineers, journalists, poets, teachers, political agitators, religious preachers, shop-keepers, and captains of industry as well as representatives of commerce, all have contributed to this widening of India's horizon.

What has this Greater India done for mankind? And what does this Greater India seek to achieve for the world?

Greater India is a unit of enlarged experiences and thought-compelling discoveries. The first discovery of India abroad is that not every man among the independent nations is every day discovering the laws of gravitation, radio-activity, or relativity. Its second discovery is that not every woman among the free peoples is a Madame Curie, a Helen Keller, or an Ellen Key.

Not the least noteworthy among Greater India's discoveries in the course of its diversified development are the facts that the governments of the "great powers" are run in responsible positions by persons whose capacity for administration, intellectual and moral, is entirely mediocre, not less so than is that of thousands of present-day Indians who might be invited to occupy the same offices, and that consequently the kind of men who organize the cabinets or manipulate the war-machines or are sent out to take charge of the embassy in foreign lands or to rule subject nations, are even now plentiful in each and every province of India.

Greater India has also discovered through its intimate camaraderie and social intercourse among foreign races that the intrigues, jealousies, meannesses and animosities which form the daily routine of public life in the independent world,—not only as between country and country, but also as between denomination and denomination, party and party, and individual and individual,—are nowhere less deep and less dehumanizing than are any such conflicts as prevail in India today or may have prevailed in the past.

In other words, Greater India has accomplished only one thing. Its experiences and discoveries in the realm of human values have established the equality of Indian men and women with the men and women of the leading races. The life-processes and self-realizations of Greater India have demonstrated that India's sons and daughters are capable of solving the same problems in industry, in arts, in science, and in politics, as are the men and women of Europe, America and Japan.

The moral of this self-consciousness is obvious. "Declare yourself to be a power," says Greater India to India at home, "and you are already a power. Force yourself into the notice of mankind, and mankind will take note of you. Seek the recognition of the world-powers as one of their peers, and they will tend to meet you half-way." The one thing that India needs today is the final great dose of dehypnotization.

As long as there was no Greater India the world was deprived of the free message of one-fifth of the human race. It was the interest of the chauvinists to keep India a "closed question" in interparliamentary discussions. But India's forced isolation was abruptly broken and her teeming millions opened up to the world when in 1905 Young India announced itself born.

Since then the greatest achievement of Young India has consisted in the creation of an "Indian problem" in the civilization of every nation that is worth anything. Every great power has now an "Indian portfolio" as an important section of its foreign affairs. All these "Indian questions" and "Indian interests" of the different peoples are but different phases of one vast, conquering, self-conscious Greater India. And this interpenetration between the world and India bids fair to be the most far-reaching dynamic shakti in the science and life of the coming decades.

3. The World-Test.

Equality between the East and the West,—this then is the message of Greater India.

From a certain standpoint it might be pronounced that international trade is at present perhaps the most important line of work in which India can demonstrate the equality of its methods, merits and achievements with the rest of the world. Every Indian who is successfully maintaining an office in foreign trade centres, in Petrograd, in Berlin, in Rome, in Rio de Janeiro, in New York, in Tokyo, in Paris, is thus automatically rendering one of the greatest services to our motherland.

The world is being taught by the sheer logic of facts, by the very fact of success, that the brains and morals of Indians are made up of the same stuff as are those of the nations who have the privilege of being represented by their armies, navies, air-fleets, and flags. Each and every Indian merchant abroad is the standing advertisement of India's spirit of adventure, of India's ability to compete with foreigners in the race for life's expansion, of India's will to conquer.

The standard of measuring life's values is one and the same for all mankind. The more frequent and varied, therefore, the chances that India obtains to come into unobstructed competition and cooperative intercourse with the creative nations, the more constant will be the opportunities to prove by comparison that India's mettle is of the same worth as that of her rivals.

Such an appraisal by the world-standard Young India has sought to establish in all its functions since the event of 1905. And this evaluation of India by comparative criticism has served, on the one hand, to rectify the erroneous notions which India used to entertain in regard to the world, and on the other, to demolish the superstitions which the world had propagated in regard to India.

In one word, the activities of Young India have been tending to open the eyes of all mankind. Indeed this methodology of objective comparisons is steadily contributing to an epoch-making revolution in the psychology of races.

4. Young India in the International Balance.

What now is this world-test? In what has consisted the breaking up of India's isolation? How has Young India managed to throw itself open to the play of vishva-shakti (World-forces)?

Let us be specific, although it is rather delicate to single out names. But perhaps the names may be taken to stand for types.

India has today a C. V. Raman of Madras whose investigations in the mechanism of musical instruments and in the theory of sound vibrations some times form a feature of the principal physical journals of Great Britain and America. The mathematicians of the world find in a Ganesh Prasad of Benares as good a colleague as do the mechanical engineers ob all nations in a Shankar Abaji Bisey of Poona, inventor of type-casting machines. From Bengal comes a Jnan Chandra Ghosh whose work the world's chemists have honoured by conferring on it the patent of "Ghoshs Law," while the work of Birbal Sahni of Lahore has won as much recognition among botanists as that of Karamchand Bal of Lucknow among investigators in zoology.

Thus has India succeeded in exposing itself to the whirlpool of international currents. The world is not complete without India. And India's claim of equality with the nations is a claim of partnership on a dignified platform of mutual respect and appreciation. It is possible today to advance this claim simply because consciously or unconsciously India has come to be tried in the international balance,—in other words, because of the development of a Greater India or India's interpenetration with the world.

Nobody must have failed to notice that, curiously enough, almost every book written by an Indian, which has been sent out for appraisal in Eur-America, has invariably been able to win the reputation for its author as quite scientific, learned, original, first-rate and so forth. In American estimation a Vaman Govind Kale and a Radha Kamal Mukerjee are no mean economists; in French opinion a Jadu Nath Sarkar is a great historian representing a type of eminent men whom India can count in contemporary science; in the British press a Radha Kumud Mookerji and an S. Krishnaswamy Aiyangar are but specimens of a group of scholars whose critical handling of antiquities leaves hardly anything to be desired. Likewise do the ethnologists of the world value the work of a Sarat Chandra Ray or Rama Prasad Chanda.

It is not a mere Indian test nor a mere Asian examination through which India has been passing these sixteen years. Young India has chosen to submit to a cosmic trial, to a world-test,—the same by which Japan, Germany, Russia, the United States, Italy, England and France are tried. And Young India has been coming out as A. l. in every field it has had a fair chance to attempt.

Take even politics. Come to any country on the surface of the earth, and be convinced by personal experience that one of the most influential foreign elements in the non-official politics of that nation is the young men and women of India who happen to be settled there. Young India by its idealism and heroic resistance to obstacles is enriching the civilization of every important people. The self-sacrifice of Young India is a perpetual object lesson to the youngsters of every race.

The world has come to realize that neither the idealism of Young Germany during the epoch of its War of Liberation in the early years of the nineteenth century nor the Bushido of Young Japan in its self-defence against the Russian avalanche in the early years of the twentieth can stand comparison with the sâdhanâ, the strivings, the devotion to duty, and the undaunted pursuit of mission in the face of monumental difficulties which India's patriots have been exhibiting to the world, heedless of the fruits of their endeavor. Young India is accordingly a spiritual force in international politics and a powerful factor in world-culture.

And of course Young India is a very challenge to the status quo in world-order, to the powers that be. Young India is adored in Japan and admired in Germany. Young India is respected in Russia as it will be respected in Italy, in France, and in every other country which has an interest in the rearrangement of world-forces. And Young India is loved in the United States.

5. The Foreign Affiliations of Indian Politics.

Let us have a bit more of the world-appraisal of India's political might. In the United States, during the war period, all the subject nationalities of Europe used to hold united congresses in order to engineer the world's opinion in behalf of their right to swarâj. On one or two occasions India also happened to get a chance to place her claims before mankind. Her cause was represented by Lajpat Rai.

It was evident to onlookers that Lajpat Rai was not radical enough for Young India. One does not have to be partisan in a political controversy but one is still in a position to report that American statesmen as well as students of international relations from every nook and corner of Europe took no time to realize on the spot that the political propagandists of Poland, Tchecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia or what not, did not present their case more emphatically nor more convincingly than did this people's ambassador from India, albeit a representative of her "moderate" leaders.

Those propagandists, be it noted, are today presidents or councillors of the newly manufactured republics in Central Europe. Mankind is therefore shocked to find that Lajpat Rai must have to vegetate on the banks of the Ravi because in sooth the world's obscurantists have decided that his countrymen are not as fit for sovereignty as are the Poles, the Bohemians, and their cognates! The more Lajpat Rais there are out of India, the greater and the more persistent will be humanity's appreciation of the quality, quantity and variety of India's contemporary achievements.

As is now well circulated throughout the world, last spring in New York City, John Haynes Holmes, a most powerful orator and liberal thinker among the Americans, was lecturing before his congregation at Community Church on the topic that "the greatest man in the world today is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi." One is at liberty to have one's own views in regard to this statement, nor need one ditto every phrase that Gandhi employs. But nobody is senseless enough to ignore that we have here another instance of the kind of world-test to which Young India has become amenable on account of its foreign affiliations.

The recent news about the Tilak Swarâj Treasury, established with the initial amount of ever a crore of rupees, has likewise compelled the attention of the students of war-finance in Europe, America, and Japan to a new phase of India's public life. Free nations, used as they are to "liberty loans," "victory loans," and "war loans," are today amazed to see that the method of organization which the Indian campaign has employed in order to raise the allotted quotas from each district or from each group is none other than what the war-lords of the great powers would advise their financial experts in times of crisis.

The success of the Tilak Swaraj Treasury has served to create Young India's "credit" in the market for international loans. When it becomes necessary to float abroad a loan for India's public purposes this event can reasonably be cited as the first great monument of our organizing ability and economic power. For the first time also since 1905, it need be observed, the commercial communities of India have risen to the height of their responsibility in working shoulder to shoulder with the intelligentsia, a fact the moral of which has not been lost on the world's Kautilyas of "high finance". India must now learn how to make business out of this reputation.

Altogether, it is clear that persons who previous to 1905 would have failed even to point out the place of India on the map of Asia are today seeking the alliance of Indian men and women in the great work of making the world safe from foreign domination. And all this simply because of Young India's kinship, not perhaps always conscious, with vishva-shakti, i.e., owing to the founding of a Greater India.

6. The Foreign Services of Young India.

The time has now come for planning out a conscious programme of India's foreign services. The need is all the greater, after a year of intensive struggle for swaraj, to finally break the barriers of isolation which have been imposed upon us by self-seekers. Our deliberate aim must be henceforth to invite on India and on Indian enterprise the unrestricted competition of the open market.

We have need to submit to this world-test in scientific discoveries, in mechanical inventions, in political idealism, in the creations of painting, sculpture and music, in athletics, in commercial activity, in short, in every function of life. The fields, factories, markets, and schools of India must no longer be dominated by any one system of theories and practices. No more of hegemony or monopoly, no more of "closed doors"—in India's industry, science, politics, and culture. The very declaration of such an aim will forthwith generate the moral support of the leading industrial and cultural powers in behalf of India's sâdhanâ.

The question of a continuous and systematic foreign policy thus assumes a most considerable importance in Young India's activities. India's intimate intercourse with the outside world must have to be provided for in a secure and permanent manner. And the reasons are not merely those of swaraj propaganda but also those of essentially vital interests which affect India's very existence as a unit in modern civilization.

In the first place, mankind is moving very rapidly in industrial technique, cultural synthesis, social engineering, political ideals as well as administrative methods. India can hardly keep pace with the march of world-progress except under certain specially-created favorable conditions. These conditions can be fulfilled only if well-trained Indian men and women are furnished with facilities for studying the latest developments in Europe, America and Japan. Further, there must have to be organized the instrumentalities by which these Indian experts can regularly. communicate the results of their investigation to the responsible persons and institutions at home.

In the second place, the activities of India' during recent years in diverse fields are already quite momentous. As events of con temporary politics and culture they are significant enough to call forth the appointment of qualified persons to interpret them to the world. Our new experiences in public life and our attainments in the arts and sciences will thereby automatically come to be placed in the international balance. Naturally this publicity will have to be conducted in the different languages of the great powers and through the medium of their authoritative institutions.

It must be understood that the problem here set forth is not merely one of sending out Indian students, post-graduate scholars and professors to the chief culture-centres for higher education and research. India has arrived at a stage when bankers, engineers, medical men, labor leaders, museumists, newspaper-men, lawyers, and publicists,—all these of creative experience have to be on the move from country to country and watch the varying conditions in the barometer of human progress.

7. Indian Embassies and Consulates.

Nay, more. If swaraj is not far from being a question of practical politics, the fathers of the Indian Federation of Swarajes should betimes make it a point to station their official representatives in every capital city and in every important port of the world. The ambassadors, ministers, envoys, consuls and delegates of India's Swarâj must be counted as no less valuable office-bearers than are the members employed in the rural, sanitary, industrial, teaching, and other home services. A staff of not less than one hundred persons,—to be recruited from among lawyers, journalists, bankers, engineers, chemists, etc.,—should have to be mobilized immediately to form the nucleus of Young India's accredited diplomatic corps.

The importance of India's having her own embassies and consulates can hardly be overstated. The question has been put off too long. It must be seriously taken up right now.

In foreign countries our merchants, travellers, and students have long been submitting to untold inconveniences, discomforts and losses, not to speak of demoralizing indignities and humiliations, for no other reason but the simple fact that India's own trusted representatives are not to be found exactly where and when they are needed the most. A year or two ago the atrocities of the British Embassy in Washington, D. C., in the two instances of the released Hindu political prisoners and of the Hindu working men, were exposed and condemned by the entire American public opinion. The incidents served to awaken American conscience to the danger to which India is normally exposed owing to the absence of her own ambassadorial authorities. The recent death (June 14, 1921) of Pandit Hariharnath Thulal (of the United Provinces) by suicide at Tokyo, where he had been professor of Hindi at the Foreign Language School since 1916, owing to the cumulative persecution, it is alleged, by the British Embassy in Japan, should arouse the moral sentiment of Young India up to the adequate constructive programme.

Wherever there is a British embassy or consulate there must have to be posted an authoritative Indian delegation to counteract all anti-Indian measures and to look after the development of actual or potential Indian interests. There is nothing in international law or practice to prohibit the establishment of such embassies or consulates as Young India may choose to locate in the different countries of the world.

Delegations, commissions, and travellers of all sorts, permanent as well as occasional, are deputed to foreign peoples as much by the Japanese, the Italians, and the Americans as by the Germans, the French and the Chileans,—of course by each nation to watch its own chances and promote its own interests openly or secretly. And naturally the country which sends out its agents and representatives as experts to investigate foreign movements on the spot or to interpret its own problems and achievements to the foreigners has also to look after their maintenance.

No foreign nation can then be expected to bear the expenses of the emissaries from India. India's representatives abroad will have to be maintained by Indian funds. The financial idealists of India must learn to pay an adequate price for her expansion in the world.

The statesmen of Young India are thus called upon to determine a percentage of their national funds such as may reasonably be ear-marked for keeping the foreign services at the proper level of efficiency.