Vol. 8 · pages 96–100

71 PAKISTAN : WEAKENING OF THE DEFENCES population and revenue, that would result from the exclusion of these districts. One may, however, hazard the guess that so far as the Punjab and Bengal are concerned, their revenues would be halved. What is lost by Pakistan by this exclusion, will of course be gained by Hindustan. To put it in concrete terms, while the revenues of Western and Eastern Pakistan will be 60 crores minus 24 crores, i.e., 36 crores, the revenues of Hindustan will be about 96 crores plus 24 crores, i.e., 120 crores. The study of these figures, in the light of the observations I have made, will show that the resources of Hindustan are far greater than the resources of Pakistan, whether one considers the question in terms of area, population or revenue. There need, therefore, be no apprehension on the score of resources. For, the creation of Pakistan will not leave Hindustan in a weakened condition. III QUESTION OF ARMED FORCES The defence of a country does not depend so much upon its scientific frontier as it does upon its resources. But more than resources does it depend upon the fighting forces available to it. What are the fighting forces available to Pakistan and to Hindustan? The Simon Commission pointed out, as a special feature of the Indian Defence Problem, that there were special areas which alone offered recruits to the Indian Army and that there were other areas which offered none or if at all, very few. The facts revealed in the following table, taken from the Report of the Commission, undoubtedly will come as a most disagreeable surprise to many Indians, who think and care about the defence of India :

72 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES Areas of Recruitment Number of Recruits drawn 1 N.-W. Frontier Province . . 5,600 2 Kashmir . . 6,500 3 Punjab . . 86,000 4 Baluchistan . . 300 5 Nepal . . 19,000 6 United Provinces . . 16,500 7 Rajputana . . 7,000 8 Central India . . 200 9 Bombay . . 7,000 10 Central Provinces . . 100 11 Bihar & Orissa . . 300 12 Bengal . . Nil 13 Assam . . Nil 14 Burma . . 3,000 15 Hyderabad . . 700 16 Mysore . . 100 17 Madras . . 4,000 18 Miscellaneous . . 1,900 Total … 158,200 The Simon Commission found that this state of affairs was natural to India, and in support of it, cited the following figures of recruitment from the different Provinces of India during the Great War especially because “it cannot be suggested that any discouragement was offered to recruitment in any area ” : Province Combatant Recruits Enlisted Non-combatant Recruits Enlisted Total Madras … 51,223 41,117 92,340 Bombay ... 41,272 30,211 71,483 Bengal ... 7,117 51,935 59,052 United Provinces ... 163,578 117,565 281,143 Punjab ... 349,688 97,288 446,976 North-West Frontier ... 32,181 13,050 45,231 Baluchistan ... 1,761 327 2,088 Burma ... 14,094 4,579 18,673 Bihar & Orissa ... 8,576 32,976 41,552 Central Provinces ... 5,376 9,631 15,007 Assam ... 942 14,182 15,124 Ajmer-Merwara ... 7,341 1,632 8,973 Nepal ... 58,904 .. 58,904 Total ... 742,053 414,493 1,156,546

73 PAKISTAN : WEAKENING OF THE DEFENCES These data reveal in a striking manner that the fighting forces available for the defence of India mostly come from areas which are to be included in Pakistan. From this it may be argued, that without Pakistan, Hindustan cannot defend itself. The facts brought out by the Simon Commission are, of course, beyond question. But they cannot be made the basis of a conclusion, such as is suggested by the Simon Commission, namely, that only Pakistan can produce soldiers and that Hindustan cannot. That such a conclusion is quite untenable will be seen from the following considerations. In the first place, what is regarded by the Simon Commission as something peculiar to India is not quite so peculiar. What appears to be peculiar is not due to any inherent defect in the people. The peculiarity arises because of the policy of recruitment followed by the British Government for years past. The official explanation of this predominance in the Indian Army of the men of the North-West is that they belong to the Martial Classes. But Mr. Chaudhari* has demonstrated, by unimpeachable data, that this explanation is far from being true. He has shown that the predominance in the Army of the men of the North-West took place : as early as the Mutiny of 1857, some 20 years before the theory of Martial and Nonmartial Classes was projected in an indistinct form for the first time in 1879 by the Special Army Committee† appointed in that year, and that their predominance had nothing to do with their alleged fighting qualities but was due to the fact, that they helped the British to suppress the Mutiny in which the Bengal Army was so completely involved. To quote Mr. Chaudhari: “The pre-Mutiny army of Bengal was essentially a Brahmin and Kshatriya army of the Ganges basin. All the three Presidency Armies of those days, as we have stated in the first part of this article, were in a sense quite representative of the military potentialities of the areas to which they belonged, though, none of them could, strictly speaking, be correctly described as national armies of the provinces concerned, * See his series of articles on “ The Martial Races of India ” published in the Modern Review for July 1930, September 1930, January 1931 and February 1931. † The Questionnaire circulated by the Committee included the following question:— “If an efficient and available reserve of the Indian Army be considered necessary for the safety of the Empire, should it not be recruited and maintained from those parts of the country which give us best soldiers, rather than amongst the weakest and least warlike races of India ?”…….

74 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES as there was no attempt to draw upon any but the traditional martial elements of the population. But they all got their recruits mainly from their natural areas of recruitment, viz., the Madras Army from the Tamil and Telugu countries, the Bombay Army from Western India, and the Bengal Army from Bihar and U. P. and to a very limited extent from Bengal. There was no official restriction on the enrolment of men of any particular tribe or caste or region, provided they were otherwise eligible. Leaving aside for the moment the practice of the Bombay and the Madras Armies, the only exception to this general rule in the Bengal Army was that which applied to the Punjabis and Sikhs, who, inspite of their magnificent military traditions, were not given a fair representation in the Army of Northern India. Their recruitment, on the contrary, was placed under severe restrictions by an order of the Government, which laid down that ‘the number of Punjabis in a regiment is never to exceed 200, nor are more than 100 of them to be Sikhs’. It was only the revolt of the Hindustani regiments of the Bengal Army that gave an opportunity to the Punjabis to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the British authorities. Till then, they remained suspect and under a ban, and the Bengal Army on the eve of the Mutiny was mainly recruited from Oudh, North and South Bihar, especially the latter, principally Shahabad and Bhojpur, the Doab of the Ganges and Jumna and Rohilkhund. The soldiers recruited from these areas were mostly high-caste men, Brahmins of all denominations, Kshatriyas, Rajputs and Ahirs. The average proportion in which these classes were enrolled in a regiment was:(1) Brahmin 7/24, (2) Rajputs 1/4, (3) Inferior Hindus 1/6, (4) Musalmans 1/6, (5) Punjabis 1/8. “To this army, the area which now-a-days furnishes the greatest number of soldiers—the Punjab, Nepal, N.-W. F. Province, the hill tracts of Kumaon and Garhwal, Rajputana,—furnished very few recruits or none at all. There was practical exclusion in it of all the famous fighting castes of India,—Sikhs, Gurkhas, Punjabi Musalmans, Dogras, Jats, Pathans, Garhwalis, Rajputana Rajputs, Kumaonis, Gujars, all the tribes and sects, in fact, which are looked upon today as a tower of strength of the Indian Army. A single year and a single rebellion was, however, to change all this. The Mutiny, which broke out in 1857, blew up the old Bengal Army and brought into existence a Punjabized and barbarized army, resembling the Indian Army of today in broad lines and general proportions of its composition. “The gaps created by the revolt of the Hindustani regiments (of the Bengal Army) were at once filled up by Sikhs and other Punjabis, and hillmen eager for revenge and for the loot of the cities of Hindustan. They had all been conquered and subjugated by the British with the help of the Hindustani soldiers, and in their ignorance, they regarded the Hindustanis, rather the handful of British, as their

75 PAKISTAN : WEAKENING OF THE DEFENCES real enemies. This enmity was magnificently exploited by the British authorities in suppressing the Mutiny. When the news of the enlistment of Gurkhas reached Lord Dalhousie in England he expressed great satisfaction and wrote to a friend: ‘Against the Oudh Sepoys they may confidently be expected to fight like devils’. And after the Mutiny, General Mansfield, the Chief of the Staff of the Indian Army, wrote about the Sikhs: ‘It was not because they loved us, but because they hated Hindustan and hated the Bengal Army that the Sikhs had flocked to our standard instead of seeking the opportunity to strike again for their freedom. They wanted to revenge themselves and to gain riches by the plunder of Hindustani cities. They were not attracted by mere daily pay, it was rather the prospect of wholesale plunder and stamping on the heads of their enemies. In short, we turned to profit the esprit de corps of the old Khalsa Army of Ranjit Singh, in the manner which for a time would most effectually bind the Sikhs to us as long as the active service against their old enemies may last’. “The relations thus established were in fact, to last much longer. The services rendered by the Sikhs and Gurkhas during the Mutiny were not forgotten and henceforward the Punjab and Nepal had the place of honour in the Indian Army.” That Mr. Chaudhari is right when he says that it was the Mutiny of 1857 which was the real cause of the preponderance in the Indian Army of the men of the North-West is beyond the possibility of doubt. Equally incontrovertible is the view of Mr. Chaudhari that this preponderance of the men of the North-West is not due to their native superiority in fighting qualities, as the same is amply borne out by the figures which he has collected, showing the changes in the composition of the Indian Infantry before and after the Mutiny. CHANGES IN THE COMPOSITION OF THE INDIAN INFANTRY Percentage of men from different Parts Year North-west India North-East India U. P., Bihar South India BurmaPunjab, N.-W. F, Kashmir Nepal, Garhwal, Kumaon 1856 Less than 10 Negligible Not less than 90 . . Nil 1858 47 6 47 . . ” 1883 48 17 35 . . ” 1893 53 24 23 . . ” 1905 47 15 22 16 ” 1919 46 14.8 25.5 12 1.7 1930 58.5 22 11.0 5.5 3