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The Thunderer’s Challenge
THE London Times has thrown out to us a far more comprehensive and significant challenge than the deportation of Lajpat and all the series of repressions accomplished or contemplated. This Thunderer has all this time been watching the growth of national sentiments in the East with increasing mortification and has at last called out to the surging waves: "Thus far and no further." The British sword, which like King Arthur’s Excalibur should have been thrown into these waves because its work in India, if it had any, is fulfilled and done with, is on the contrary being flourished vigorously as if its mere glitter would frighten the ocean back within its limits. Agitators are menaced and the whole East warned against her discontent with the overlordship of the West. The Times has done well to see the ongoings in the East in their proper perspective and not to belittle them as temporary and sporadic disturbances. It would have done better still if it had not talked of putting back a world-movement by the suppression of agitation or the waving of a sword in Fleet Street. The success of the "agitators" in bringing such a movement to a head should have convinced the Times that they are being aided by a higher power than any that Lala Lajpat or Ajit Singh can wield. The Times has got a superabundance of faith in its sword. But if it really thinks this much-flourished weapon a security against Indian progress, it should keep it waiting in the scabbard till the time for use. Familiarity breeds contempt and it is scarcely dignified for a power filling so important a place in the eyes of the world to indulge in puerile vauntings of its own strength in season and out of season. Let it strike at the right moment, if that will help, but unseasonable flourishings and proddings only give strength and speed to a movement which it is the Englishman’s interest to weaken. But England’s folly is India’s advantage. Imprudence and wrong-headedness on the part of the one nation are the sure pro-
Page-365 vocatives to courage and manliness on the part of the other. It is in these challenges that the hope of our speedy salvation lies. National regeneration would have been quite an uphill work for us if the alien bureaucracy had continued unmoved in their profession and begun the actual practice of sympathy. But their increasingly militant attitude is helping the attainment of that solidarity which we could hardly have achieved but for this pressure from without. Nationalism which is a creed of faith, love and knowledge has no longer to creep in the petty pace of argument and persuasion, but is making rapid strides towards recognition by the whole people in the overwhelming reaction for which the present bullying by journals like the Times and hasty acts of repression like those in the Punjab are responsible. The whole of India is turning Nationalist by one swift revolution of feeling. When the Partition agitation of Bengal has created a universal unrest throughout India, when the cry of resistance that emanated from the small district town of Dinajpur in Bengal has been adopted by the whole country, united India can no longer be called an impossibility. The scepticism about our fitness, the superstition of philanthropy in politics, are fast disappearing before a dawning race-consciousness. The insolence of the ruling race and their constant talk of our inability have touched into life even our atrophied amour-propre. The covert and open resistance to the Swadeshi-boycott movement has revealed to us the true nature of foreign sympathy. The events of the last two years have completed our political education. We used to be much exercised how to bring on that struggle which alone can call forth the energies of body and soul in a subject people. For circumstanced as we are, we cannot act on the offensive, but if others goad us by attack, then only can this degenerate race be saved. Misguided bureaucrats and virulent publicists have created our opportunity. We have only to make the right use of the challenges which are coming in quick succession, and we shall be able to effect in a few years a work which would otherwise take centuries.
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The refusal of the Irish Parliamentary Party under Mr. Redmond’s leadership to have anything to do with the sham the Liberal Government has offered them in the place of Home Rule, is a step on which we may congratulate the Irish people. Had they been deluded into swallowing the bait which was devised for them with such unscrupulous skill by Mr. Birrell, they would have committed a false step of the worst kind and seriously compromised the Home Rule Movement. It is much better that Ireland should have to wait longer for any measure of self- government, than that she should commit political suicide by accepting Mr. Birrell’s Bill. We call it Mr. Birrell’s Bill but in reality it is Sir Antony Macdonnell’s and has the stamp of "Liberal" Anglo-Indian upon it. Its object is obviously to kill the Home Rule Movement by kindness, to break up Irish unity and take the sting out of Irish Nationalism by a sham concession skilfully calculated to corrupt the natural leaders of the people. The measure proposed was a sort of bastard cross between a Colonial Parliament and an Indian-Legislative Council. Its acceptance would have committed Irish politicians to the abandonment of the policy of Parnell and to cooperation in future with the British Government. The Irish people were openly told that the concession of further self-government would depend on the way in which they used this precious opportunity, in other words, on their abandoning passive resistance and their principle of aloofness from Government and its favours and co-operating with it in a mutilated and ineffectual scheme of self-government. What would have been the result, if the Irish people had closed with this very bad bargain? They would not have got Home Rule which England is determined never to give them unless she has no other choice. The local self-government offered to Ireland would have been extended to Scotland and Wales and when Ireland demanded Home Rule, she would have been told to be satisfied with a measure of self-government which had satisfied the other parts of the United Kingdom. The British Government would by that time have broken the solid phalanx of Irish Nationalism and by the bribe of office, position and influence,
Page-367 succeeded in detaching from the cause a great number of the natural leaders of the people, men of intelligence, ability and ambition, whose talents would be used by England in keeping the people contented and combating true Nationalism. In this way the great ideal of an Irish Nation for which Emmett died, for which O’Connell and Parnell planned and schemed and which the Sinn Fein movement is making more and more practicable, would either have been entirely frustrated or postponed for another century. Instead of a separate nationality with its own culture, language, government, the Irish would have ended by becoming a big English county governed by a magnified and glorified Parish Council. The same kind of bait was offered to the Boers, but that shrewd people resolutely refused to associate themselves with any form of self-government short of absolute colonial Self-Government. The same kind of bait is promised to the Moderates in India by Honest John and the honest Statesman, if they will only consent to dissociate themselves from the New Spirit and all its works and betray their country. The Statesman says that Mr. Redmond has been forced to the refusal by the necessity of deferring to the Sinn Fein Party in Ireland, and hopes that the Indian Moderates will not commit the same mistake. Our sapient contemporary opines that the Nationalists in India are not really so strong as they seem, and that the Moderate leaders, if they desire to betray the country, can do so with impunity, without losing their influence and position. Well, we shall see. Bande Mataram, May 24, 1907
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