Authors: Paul Scott
But of course for me the people in the Dibrapur subdivision
were
real. They were bad farmers and poor shopkeepers. It wasn’t their fault. The heyday of the coal mines was pre-Great War, but that heyday denuded part of the land permanently and led to unploughed fields, and the splitting up of families. There were several villages in that area where there were practically no young men. They’d all gone to the mining areas in the adjacent district. You know the sort of thing that happens as well as I do. We made special efforts there—I remember talking to Miss Crane about them once, because she had one of her schools near Dibrapur—but there was a lot of apathy as well as a lot of resentment. The young Indian I had out there in his own subdivisional headquarters was an extremely intelligent and capable man. It was the toughest subdivision in the district. He had a lot of problems but also a lot of nous. The fellow who appointed himself deputy commissioner was one of the local tahsildars who was also a local landowner. My own man had always had a lot of trouble with him. In his account Reid leaves a slight doubt in the reader’s mind about the Indian subdivisional officer’s actual behaviour during the troubles. I know at the time people were going around saying that when it was all over the chap broke down in my office and spent hours crying and asking to be let off. No such thing. We talked the situation out quite unemotionally, and I was satisfied that short of sacrificing his life—which I wouldn’t have expected any sane man to do—the subdivisional officer had made the best of a bad job, managed to restrain the self-appointed deputy commissioner quite a bit, in spite of the fact that as so-called Judge he was more or less kept prisoner. And he certainly saved a sizeable sum of money for the treasury. I expect the rumour about him crying arose from the fact that when we shook hands and parted there
were
tears in his eyes, and people probably noticed them as he left my bungalow. I hadn’t been kind to him, just fair, I hope, but Indians have never been ashamed of responding to fairness in a way an Englishman would be ashamed to.
But that is jumping ahead. I know there was a failure in our intelligence system to pinpoint in advance the men who emerged as local leaders in Dibrapur and succeeded in cutting the town off for several days. I suppose I did use the expression “needles in a haystack” when talking about such people to Reid, but I don’t actually remember doing so. The police in the Dibrapur subdivision were—perhaps not unexpectedly in view of the toughness of their job—of a lower morale than elsewhere. Some ran away, and one or two constables took over and
sided with the rebels. As you will have gathered, everything happened pretty quickly and our police—never numerous—were scattered very thinly in proportion to the area and the size of the population. I agreed to Reid sending troops on the night of the 11th in the hope that their prompt appearance at that particular moment would be as inhibiting as the appearance of troops usually was. Reid rather underplays the attempts made that day by the civil authority to get into Dibrapur with police and magistrates, and says nothing about the road blocks on the
main
road. There were no blown bridges on the main road, but there was a series of felled trees that denied the road to the full use of transport, and the police found that the nearer they got to Dibrapur the less helpful the villagers were in helping them to clear the road. On the night in question the message I had had from Tanpur was to the effect that one truckload of police had “disappeared.” It turned out later that they were locked up in the kotwali in one of the villages near Dibrapur. All the wires were down, of course, between Dibrapur and Tanpur.
The news of the blown bridge on Reid’s flank road was certainly a poser, but I couldn’t help being rather amused because he had made the use of the flank road sound so professional and clever, and suddenly there he was in danger of losing two 3-ton lorries and a 15-cwt truck and his wireless. And he was mad as hell. I hope that my amusement didn’t sway my decision. I requested the withdrawal of the troops on that road because I felt that if the rebels had the initiative and the means to blow a bridge (a fairly harmless occupation in itself, just a matter of destroying a ton or so of brick and mortar!) a meeting of the rebels and troops whose tempers had shortened might result in the very kind of bloody affair I wanted to avoid. I know that my decision is open to question, but I made it, and stand by it, and I think it was right. If there had not then been pressure from above to use troops to the full I should certainly have left Dibrapur to stew even longer than I did. That intelligence officer, Davidson, was right when he suggested to Reid that my idea was for pacification to spread outwards from Mayapore. But Reid was jumping on hot bricks. I don’t offer this as an excuse, although perhaps I do offer it as a contributory factor to any decision of mine that I still have doubts about. When you have a man like Reid constantly at your elbow you do tend to lose your concentration. I think I would have withstood his nagging if the provincial civil authority hadn’t begun to press too. It is difficult actually to recall the real sense of urgency that arose in a few hours when reports were coming in pointing to an uprising that was
getting out of hand. Anyway there was the pressure from Reid, the pressure from provincial headquarters, and the pressure of my own doubts. So I let Reid have his way about Dibrapur. His little battle there was by no means uncontrolled. I have no complaints or accusations on that score. But I don’t think it was accompanied by any
special
restraint, and I still believe, as I believed then, that the deaths of men, women and children in Dibrapur could have been avoided if the town had been allowed to “stew” until the people themselves were of the temper (and it never took long for them to regain it) to make its
realignment
(and that is the proper word) just part of the day’s routine.
Perhaps it was unfair that the action of his troops in Dibrapur (of which he does not give us the benefit of any detailed description in his book) should have been the main cause of the reputation Reid had afterwards for being overcontroversial in the district “during the current phase of pacification.” (The official jargon for “let’s all be friends again.”) My commissioner asked me to comment on Reid, confidentially. Complaints against any of us, civil or military, very quickly reached a high level as you know. I gave it as my opinion that Reid had at no time exceeded his duty and had been, throughout, a constant reassurance to me in the execution of my own. I added that, left to ourselves, and not ordered to make the fullest use of the means available, the force actually used might have been less and the result the same, or even better. I didn’t see why Reid should carry the can back for people who had panicked at provincial headquarters. I don’t think this comment of mine pleased anyone from the commissioner upwards. For a time I expected to be moved myself, but the luck or ill-luck of the game fixed on Reid—unless it were really true that his posting could be put down to the influence of friends of his who thought that following the death of his wife he would be happier if employed in a more active role. It is so easy—particularly when looking for a chosen scapegoat of an action you have taken part in—to hit upon a particular incident as proof that a scapegoat has been found when, in fact, the authorities have simply shrugged their shoulders, and a purely personal consideration has then stepped in and established the expected pattern of offense and punishment.
[6] Thank you for your reply to my written comments on the transcription of our interview. Yes, I do dislike the element of “Yes, you did. No, I didn’t” that all too readily rises to the surface. Reid had his attitudes
and opinions and I had mine. One can’t go on forever justifying one’s own and refuting someone else’s with any kind of passion—but I’m sorry that the points I’ve been making notes of in the past few days in answer to specific statements in Reid’s book don’t come up now except extraneously. May I take one of them, though, and kill any idea Reid might have left that Menen, the District and Sessions Judge, was predisposed towards the rebels? Menen was predisposed towards nothing except the due process of the law which he had no special faith in, God knows, but certainly recognized his sworn duty to. I’m also slightly worried about any impression that could be left of my having either been in collusion with Merrick over—or turned a blind eye to—the treatment of the Bibighar suspects. I feel I should be allowed to say something about this if you are going to publish Vidyasagar’s deposition. Vidyasagar ranks as a self-confessed lawbreaker so that’s neither here nor there.
In his deposition he is noticeably unforthcoming about the names of his associates. So to what extent we can rely on his statement that Hari Kumar was not one of his fellow conspirators, neither of us can judge accurately. The picture we get from Miss Manners’ journal (or rather from that short section of it which you have allowed me to see) is not in itself
evidence
of Kumar’s noncomplicity in the kind of activities Vidyasagar engaged in, and it’s quite possible, reading the deposition, to imagine that Vidyasagar gave Merrick cause
genuinely
to disbelieve him during his interrogation. What worries me is that people should think I at any time, then or afterwards, knew about Merrick’s treatment of the men suspected of the
rape.
He admitted to me that he had “bent the rules,” when dealing with the suspects—in order to frighten them and get them to tell the truth, for example threatened them with caning, and in one case had even had one boy “prepared as if for punishment”—I think his expression was. He
volunteered
this information to me on the morning following the arrests, and when Menen approached me later and said rumours were going round that the boys had been whipped I was able to say how I thought such a rumour had arisen, and that I’d already warned Merrick to “stop playing about.” More serious, in my opinion, was the second rumour, that they had been forced to eat beef. Merrick said he’d look into it, and he told me later that it was quite untrue, but might have been caused by a mistake made in the cells when one of the Muslim constables who was guarding them had his own meal sent in. Reid was quite right when he said that the job of suppressing the riots
distracted our full attention from the boys suspected of rape and made it finally impossible to find any concrete evidence against them in connection with the assault. Menen did pursue the business of the rumours of caning and beef-eating. I gave him permission to have the boys themselves questioned on the matter. He told me that the lawyer whom he sent to talk to them reported that none of the boys, including Kumar, complained of having been either whipped or forced to eat beef. And none of them ever said anything about it to Jack Poulson, who had the job of examining them when we were preparing the political case against them. But all this time after I’m uncomfortably aware of having failed to investigate the rumours more fully. It seems pretty clear that they were ill-treated. However, I don’t think that there was actually a miscarriage of justice. Merrick was obviously acting in the heat of the moment, believing them guilty of attacking a girl he was fond of. It didn’t take long for us to realize that a charge of rape simply wouldn’t stick, but the evidence available about their political activities was sufficient for us to feel justified in seeing whether they couldn’t be dealt with under the Defence of India Rules. The case was referred to the Divisional Commissioner, and actually as high as the Governor. I’ve forgotten the details of the evidence, but it was pretty conclusive. So I still feel that the five boys first arrested were guilty of the kind of offenses the rules were meant to cover. Only Kumar remains a conundrum to me. If he was treated as badly as Vidyasagar’s “informant” said, why didn’t he speak out when Menen’s lawyer talked to him? Why didn’t he complain to Jack Poulson during the official examination? One can appreciate the silence of the other boys if what Vidyasagar says about police threats is true. But Kumar had already suffered—and presumably could prove it, and he was of a different calibre from the other boys surely? Perhaps the parts of Miss Manners’ journal which you haven’t shown me throw some light on this problem?
I suppose it is his silence on this subject that you have in mind when you say in your note to me that “Kumar was a man who felt in the end he had lost everything, even his Englishness, and could then only meet every situation—even the most painful—in silence, in the hope that out of it he would dredge back up some self-respect.”
I quite see, from what you’ve told me about your “reconstruction” of Hari Kumar’s life, and from what I have read in Daphne Manners’ journal, that Kumar might indeed have reacted in this way, but if Vidyasagar’s informant was speaking the truth when he said that on the night
of his arrest Kumar was caned on Merrick’s instructions “until he groaned” I should still have thought Kumar would have seized the opportunity to make charges when Menen’s lawyer interviewed him and asked him point-blank whether it was true. To complain of having been unjustifiably and savagely beaten in the course of interrogation would not itself have been a betrayal of Miss Manners’ request to Kumar to “say nothing.” I mean, isn’t there a limit to the stiffness of
any
upper lip?
But then I expect my objections to your conclusions are really based on my inner unwillingness to accept the unsupported evidence of Merrick’s behaviour—or to admit my own failure to suspect it at the time. I have no comment to make on the figure you quote from “official” sources that, excluding the United Provinces, there were 958 sentences of whipping after the insurrection, except to say that this was a legal punishment for people caught taking part in riots. If Kumar had been arrested during a riot he might well have been caned. I suppose what you are getting at is that this kind of punishment was “in the air” and that Merrick seized an opportunity, bent the rules, and got away with it.
Having said all this I’ll now confine myself, as you request, to the larger issue—although before finally leaving behind the question of “Yes, I did, No, you didn’t,” I would point out—perhaps unnecessarily—that one should not confuse the uncertainty that surrounds actions and events with the “areas of dangerous fallibility” that lie
between
doubts, decisions and actions. Taking as an example the question of the forcible feeding—it either happened or did not happen. In attempting to map the “dangerous area” we are not concerned with
facts
the truth of which, however unascertainable now,
was known to somebody at the time?