Germany and Indian Revolution, 1914-18

Abstract

One of the twentieth century's most characteristic contributions to international relations in war and 'peace' has been the use of dissident groups within states or empires to weaken real or potential enemies. It is no new phenomenon; for nearly sixty years the Bourbon monarchy supported risings by Scottish and Irish Jacobites hoping that they would weaken or divert British power. Nonetheless, as recent analysis of Soviet support for Pathan and Baluchi separatists in Pakistan has again emphasised, foreign-backed subversion is a seemingly inescapable feature of late twentieth century life.1 The technique was first systematically developed during the first world war. In the Middle East Britain profitably allied herself with Arab nationalist discontent with Ottoman rule and later, together with the United States, encouraged the dissident minorities of Austria-Hungary. Some years ago, however, the American Chinese historian, Robert North, while studying the career of the Indian communist, M.N. Roy, in China in the 1920s, concluded that the real pioneer of revolutionary subversion had been Imperial Germany. His view would find sympathy in the school of historians which sees aggressive expansionism as the characteristic feature of German foreign policy in the period up to 1918. Certainly, Fritz Fischer, in Germany's Aims In the First World War, reviewed at some length German attempts to foster revolution in different parts of the British, French and Russian empires. The best known examples of this aspect of German enterprise have been their curiously lukewarm relationship with Irish nationalism in the person of Roger Casement and their more successful intrigues in Russia, but in many ways the most instructive study is that of their attempts to assist revolutionary nationalists in India. This is partly because of the