Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/328

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M. K. Gandhi

recruitment of indentured labour in India for Natal. After a thirteen months' campaign, India had been educated on the South African Indian question to a degree that aroused the attention and anxiety of the Home authorities, and when angry protests came from every part of the country against the Transvaal Government's action in deporting to India large numbers of Passive Resisters (many of them born in South Africa), with the object of breaking up the movement, the Imperial Government, upon the urgent representations of the Government of India, successfully implored the Transvaal—and subsequently, the Union—Administration to cease to deport. The deportees subsequently returned to South Africa, but with the loss of Narayansamy, who died at Delagoa Bay after having been unlawfully denied a landing anywhere in British territory.

Meanwhile, the four South African Colonies had become Provinces of the Union of South Africa, and the Imperial Government, convinced at last of the justice of the Indian cause, and taking advantage of the possibilities of the new situation, addressed to the Union Government the memorable despatch of October 7, 1910, in which they powerfully recommended the repeal of Act 2 of 1907, the removal of the racial bar, and the substitution for the latter of the Indian suggestion of non-racial legislation modified by administrative differentiation, effectively

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