Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/16

 of class war, which is going on every day in all industrial countries of the world, among which India to-day occupies the fifth place and not an insignificant place.

The acuteness with which the class war operates upon the wage-earners of India is more than in most of the advanced European countries, where, thanks to the organisers of Labour, several of the cruelties of class war are being re moved. Just look at the palatial houses of any millowner of Bombay, Ahmedabad, Nagpur or Calcutta and look at the disgraceful and diabolical one-room tenements of the poor workers, devoid of all furniture, appointments or artistic embellishments. Such acute difference between dwelling conditions of the rich and the poor does not exist in Great Britain, America or any part of Europe where labour is well organised. It is an unjustifiable defence of the rich industrialists of India to describe them to the world as endowed with some special virtues, when all the facts of poor people's life proclaim loudly that these virtues are not existent. The personal obsequiousness of the poor workers towards their masters, the utter helplessness before arbitrary dismissals and the illtreatment as it actually exists in India everywhere is unthinkable in Europe or America, where labour is organised, and your defence of the Indian master class is an unpardonable mockery of the poor suffering working class. The way in which zamindars, Khotas and Mulguzaries* claim by force the labour of their tenants at certain seasons for half an anna a day is a diabolical disgrace to humanity and does not exist in countries where modern agricultural trade unions are existing.

That is not all. The class war in India is literally murderous and more cruelly murderous because it is in- fanticidal. Just analyse the figures of death. The death rate of the adults, and specially of the infants, in large industrial towns is much in excess of the normally bad death rate of India. Now kindly follow me in still closer analysis of these figures obtained from municipal health officers of infantile mortality of the well-to-do Parsee, Hindu and Mahomedan families in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Calcutta or other industrial towns. You will find that the mortality amongst infants under 12 months of age among the rich would be about 80 to 90 per thousand, whereas the infantile mortality in the
 * Castes of landlords.