Free Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha Page B

was abroad, seeking a rapprochement, cultural as well as political, between Dutch and English colonists. These two groups, so recently at war, now forged a common front against blacks and coloureds. 31
    The new constitution of the Transvaal allowed the franchise only to those of European descent. However, for the ruling race that was not enough: they wished to put in place laws and procedures that would steadily reduce the number of Indians. Here, the colonists in the Transvaal found a strong ally in the new Governor, Lord Selborne. Selborne vigorously promoted the agenda of his predecessor, Lord Milner. In secret letters to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, he advanced a novel argument for keeping out coloured immigrants: that the Indians were not wanted because they did not know how to use arms. Whereas ‘the white man must always be a fighter’, Indians ‘are not of any martial race’. What if the Dutch and the British fell out again in the future? It was then likely that the Transvaal would fall ‘again under Boer domination, owing largely to the absence of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen, ousted by their pressure into other lands’. 32
    Selborne held out the example of Mauritius, a once uninhabited island, discovered by Europeans, that now supported a large population of which 70 per cent was Indian and less than 3 per cent white. If Asians were not kept out of the Transvaal, he warned, then they would likewise come to form a majority of the province. ‘Under these conditions,’ wrote the Governor, ‘South Africa will, for all time, require to be occupied by troops imported from Europe, not only for its protection against foreign invasion but even for the enforcement of order among its native population.’ 33
    Gandhi, unaware of these letters, hoped to persuade the new Governor of the Indian case. On 29 November 1905, a delegation led by the lawyer, whose other members were four Gujarati Muslims and a Tamil, met Selborne in his office. They urged him to allow
bona fide
refugees to return to the Transvaal, and also allow merchants to import qualified assistants to work with them. The delegation asked for Indians to have ‘perfect freedom of owning landed property and of living where we like under the general municipal regulations as to sanitation and appearance of buildings’. They added a reassuring caveat: ‘What we want is notpolitical power; but we do wish to live side by side with other British subjects in peace and amity and with dignity and self-respect.’
    Three months later, another delegation led by Gandhi met the Assistant Colonial Secretary in Pretoria. They presented a list of sixteen complaints, among them the delays in getting permits, the insistence that applicants produce witnesses, the refusal to exempt women (even though ‘they at any rate do not compete with whites’), the difficulties that children faced in re-entering the Transvaal, and the continuing discrimination on trains and trams. 34
    The complaints were disregarded. Some Indians, with Gandhi’s encouragement, now sought to overturn the convention whereby Europeans and coloured people did not – or could not – travel together in public. Electric trams had just been introduced in Johannesburg. In March 1906, a Gujarati merchant named E. S. Coovadia took a tram in the company of an English lawyer who worked with Gandhi. Then Henry Polak accompanied the President of the British Indian Association, Abdul Gani, on a similarly transgressive journey. In both cases, the Indians were asked to get off, but appealed against their ejection in court, with Gandhi appearing for them.
    The Anglo-Boer regime in Johannesburg was new, and trams were newer still. There was no clear law regulating their use. But custom, or prejudice rather, mandated that they be reserved for whites only. The all-white Town Council debated the matter. One member argued that by allowing coloured people to buy tickets the operations would be made