Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

128 I Ramnath
mutiny among the South Asian soldiers who fo rmed the
bulk of its army in the Middle East.
As German patronage dried up in 1917, Acharya accompanied
Chatto to Stockholm, where they set about
mastering Swedish as well as equipping a reference library
and propaganda center. In spring 1919, the Criminal
Investigation Department intercepted a letter from Acharya
to Aiyer. "I have been alright these years and working in both
continents on either side of the Atlantic up to San Francisco
and Baghdad;' Acharya wrote. "I trust you have also been
well. For the last two years, I ... have been in Sweden .... All
our friends are well in France and Germany-and very hopeful
and cheerful in spite of the differences .... I have seen
here our friend [French socialist Jean] Longuet and everyone
is interested in us. I hope everything will go on well in a
few years if not months, and we will see each other as soon as
things are in order here and there."8
But Yllsuf Ali, the British Foreign Office's designated
Indian mouthpiece for loyalist propaganda, dismissed their
efforts as not representing the Indian national cause on the
grounds that the so-called Indian Committee. he scofff'c1,
really consisted of "just two anarchists." Aside from the
customary use of the term to isolate and discredit "seditionists"
regardless of their actual political views, the further
implication of Ali's slight was that what British rule provided
in India was the quintessence of modern governance,
otherwise lacking; and thus that the only idiot who could
possibly reject such a thing would have to be an anarchist.9
Chatto and Acharya published a rebuttal in a Swedish
paper in which Chatto-like Chandra-insisted that on