Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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"Cold English Brains." A British journalist of standing lately revisited India and reported his finding to North American Newspaper Alliance. Journalist Henry Noel Brailsford is a graduate of Glasgow University, where he remained for a time as assistant professor of Logic. Later he was a leading writer of the Carnegie International Commission in the Balkans (1913), and editor of the New Leader (1922-26).
"In India I saw what no one is likely to see again," reported Briton Brailsford. "Bombay obeyed two governments. "To the British government, with all its apparatus of legality and power, there still were loyal the European population, the Indian sepoys, who wear its uniform, a few of the merchant princes, and the older generation of the Moslem minority. "The rest of Bombay's population has transferred its allegiance to one of the British Government's too numerous prisoners: Mahatma Gandhi."
Carefully Briton Brailsford described the system of parallel government in Bombay, whereby members of the Indian National Congress themselves marshal and police their demonstrations. He reported that the Gandhiwomen who picket shops selling British goods, and who fling themselves down to be trodden on by any Indian determined to enter, will stand aside for occidental shoppers. "The shopkeepers themselves signed a requisition to the effect that they made no complaint against this peaceful picketing, and for a time there were few arrests."
In and around Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Benares, Mr. Brailsford examined many Indian men and women bearing "wounds on teh feets or bruises on the stomach, made with the butt end of a rifle . . . one man with a terribly swollen arm, fractured or dislocated, hanging in a sling . . . a woman [with] a badly swollen face caused by a blow."
In the opinion of Briton Brailsford, "cold English brains" devised the system whereby bands of native police, especially in the rural districts, set upon individual Indian men & women and beat them. "The execution [of this plan] was left to hotter heads and rougher hands," notably to Mohuntal Shah, chief Indian official of the Borsad Taluka in Kaira District, who, Mr. Brailsford reports, has not only presided at numerous pouncings and beatings, but also "occasionally assisted with a heavy walking stick."
Individual beatings are applied, in the main, to extort from the victim his land tax. Mr. Brailsford traveled through district after district where the peasants had taken and kept this vow: "We will pay no taxes until Gandhi is released from jail." For Mr.