Abolition of Indentured Emigration
We shall, for a moment, take leave of the Ashram, which in the very beginning had to weather internal and external storms, and briefly advert to a matter that engaged my attention.
Indentured labourers were those who had emigrated from India to labour under an indenture for five years or less. Under the Smuts-Gandhi Settlement of 1914, the £3 tax in respect of the indentured emigrants to Natal had been abolished. But the general emigration from India still needed treatment.
In March 1916 Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviyaji moved a resolution in the Imperial Legislative Council for the abolition of the indenture system. In accepting the motion Lord Harding announced that he had “obtained from His Majesty’s Government the promise of the abolition in due course” of the system. I felt, however, that India could not be satisfied with so very vague an assurance, but ought to agitate for immediate abolition. India had tolerated the system through her sheer negligence, and I believed the time had come when people could successfully agitate for this redress. I met some of the leaders, wrote in the press, and saw that public opinion was solidly in favour of immediate abolition. Might this be a fit subject for satyagraha? I had no doubt that it was, but I did not know the modus operandi.
In the meantime the Viceroy had made no secret of the meaning of “the eventual abolition,” which, as he said, was abolition “within such reasonable time as will allow of alternative arrangements being introduced.”