f Turkey and the holy
places of Islam was not likely to be fulfilled. But in spite of the
foreboding and the grave warnings of friends, at the Amritsar Congress
in 1919 I fought for co-operation and working the Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister would redeem his promise to the
Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would be healed and that the
reforms inadequate and unsatisfactory though they were, marked a new era
of hope in the life of India. But all that hope was shattered. The
Khilafat promise was not to be redeemed. The Punjab crime was
white-washed and most culprits went not only unpunished but remained in
service and some continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue, and
in some cases were even rewarded. I saw too that not only did the
reforms not mark a change of heart, but they were only a method of
further draining India of her wealth and of prolonging her servitude.

I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had
made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and
economically. A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any
aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him. So much
is this the case that some of our best men consider that India must take
generations before she can achieve the Dominion status. She has become
so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the
British advent India spun and wove in her millions of cottages just the
supplement she needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources.
The cottage industry, so vital for India's existence, has been ruined by
incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English
witnesses. Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of
Indians are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that
their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work
they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage
are sucked from the masses. Little do they realise that the Government
established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation
of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the
evidence the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have
no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town dwellers of India
will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against
humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. The law its