L’impero britannico e la guerra europea. Sovversione e stabilizzazione lungo le frontiere occidentali del Raj indiano

Abstract

In late nineteenth/early twentieth century, British India had to face a state of almost uninterrupted turmoil along its borders. At the outbreak of World War I, the problem rose to strategic relevance, especially in the light of the German efforts to destabilize Afghanistan. Since political, strategic and economic considerations conjured in excluding outright military occupation, local authorities had to develop a series of tools, from small-scale military intervention to more ambitious efforts aimed at integrating the local powers into the imperial security framework. Along the western borders of India, the treaty of Jacobabad (1876) had formally settled relations with Kalat (a semi-independent proto-state ruled by a Brahoi Khan of the Ahmadzai family) but it had also compromised the Raj to support a largely resented ruler. Situation proved the most intractable in Makran, where local headmen repeatedly tried to assert their independence. The advent of Sir John Ramsey as AGG and Chief Commissioner in Baluchistan (1911) seemed breaking this vicious circle. Ramsey tried to modernize Kalat’s administration by containing the Khan’s autocracy; at the same time, he normalized the relations with Makrani sardars and recognized their role within the system of the imperial dignities. His efforts peaked at the eve of the conflict. Implementing a politics «of conciliatory intervention, tempered with lucrative employment and light taxation», he managed to re-establish both the Khan’s authority and the Khanate’s military stability on the base of a (largely apocryphal) “federal tradition” embodied in the so-called “Brahoi Constitution”. However, this solution too proved inherently unstable. In 1915 violence spread out again, while the Baloch Camel Corps – the main symbol of Kalat’s newly found political harmony – ingloriously returned from Basra, where it was tasked to support the action of the ill-fated Indian Expeditionary Force D