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The 7th of August
THE approaching celebration of the 7th of August has a double importance this year, for it has not only its general and permanent importance as the commemoration of our declaration of independence, but an occasional though none the less urgent importance as an opportunity of reaffirming our separate national existence against the arbitrary and futile attempt of the bureaucracy to reaffirm and perpetuate a vanishing despotism. The 7th of August will be recognised in the future as a far more important date to the building up of the nation than the 16th October. On the 16th October the threatened unity of Bengal was asserted against the disingenuous and dangerous attack engineered by Lord Curzon; and since it is on the solidarity of its regional and race units that the greater Pan-Indian unity can alone be firmly founded, the 16th October must always be a holy day in the Indian Calendar. But on the 7th of August Bengal discovered for India the idea of Indian independence as a living reality and not a distant Utopia, on the 7th of August she consecrated herself to the realisation of that supreme ideal by the declaration of the Boycott. The time has not come yet when the full meaning of that declaration can be understood; even the whole of Bengal has not yet understood, much less the whole of India. But the light is coming; partly by the efforts of the preachers of the light, still more by the efforts of the enemies of the light, it is coming: and in the dim wide glimmer of the mighty dawn we can see the vast slow surge of Indian life quickening under the breath of a stupendous wind, we can discern the angry fringes of the tide casting themselves far beyond the old low level, we can almost hear the roar of the surf hurling itself on the flimsy barriers it had once accepted as an iron and eternal boundary. The waters are at last alive with the breath of God, the flood which is to overwhelm the world has begun. The 7th of August was India’s Independence Day. A big
Page-493 word, it may be said, far too grandiose for the little that was accomplished. To those who judge only by the gross material event it may seem so, but to those who look beneath and watch the course of events as they shape themselves in the soul of a nation, the phrase will not seem one whit too excessive. It is the soul within us that decides, that makes our history, that determines Fate, and the material nature, material events only shape themselves under the limitations of Space and Time to give an outward body and realisation to the decisions of the soul. The day of a nation’s independence is not the day when the administrative changes are made which complete the outward realisation of its independence but the day when it realises in its soul that it is free and must be free. For it is the self-sufficing separateness of a nation that is its independence, and when that separateness is realised and recorded as a determined thing in ourselves, the outward realisation is only a question of time. The seventh of August was the birthday of Indian Nationalism, and Indian Nationalism, as we pointed out the other day, means two things, the self-consecration to the gospel of national freedom and the practice of independence. Boycott is the practice of independence. When therefore we declared the Boycott on the seventh of August, it was no mere economical revolt we were instituting, but the practice of national independence; for the attempt to be separate and self-sufficient economically must bring with it the attempt to be free in every other function of a nation’s life; for these functions are all mutually interdependent. August 7th is therefore the day when Indian Nationalism was born, when India discovered to her soul her own freedom, when we set our feet irrevocably on the only path to unity, the only path to self-realisation. On that day the foundation-stone of the new Indian nationality was laid. Let us then celebrate the day in a spirit and after a fashion suitable to its great and glorious meaning. Let it be a reconsecration of the whole of Bengal to the new spirit and the new life, a purification of heart and mind to make it the undivided possession and the consecrated temple and habitation of the Mother. And, secondly, let it be a calm, brave and masculine reaffirmation of our independent existence. The bureaucracy has flung itself
Page-494 with savage fury on the new activities of our national life; it has attempted to trample on and break to pieces under its armed heel our economical boycott; it has made the service of the motherland penal in her young men; it has visited with the prison and deportation the preaching of Nationalism by the elder men. The 7th of August must be an emphatic answer to these persecutions and prohibitions. The Boycott must be reaffirmed and this time in its purity and simplicity as the national policy to which all are committed. The Risley Circular must be definitely and unmistakably challenged and negatived in action. Let there be a procession of students led by those venerable leaders of Bengal who are also professors of the Government University. And let us see afterwards what the bureaucracy can do and what it dare do to the men who refuse to give up their lifelong and sacred occupation at an alien bidding and to the youths who refuse to abstain from initiation in the same sacred service out of sordid hopes and fears. But most of all the day should be a day of rejoicing and a day of consecration. The whole Indian part of the town should be illumined in honour of the divine birth which saw the light two years ago. And along with the outer illumination it should be a day of the illumination of hearts. It is the sacrament of our religion that can alone give the perfect and effective blessing to our movement, and the celebration of this great day will not be complete until every Indian makes it a sacred observance, worshipping God in his own way, the Hindu in his temple, the Brahmo in his Mandir, the Mahomedan in his mosque, to consecrate himself anew on that day to the service of that single and omnipresent Deity through the task He has set to the whole nation, the upbuilding of Indian nationality by self-sacrifice for the Motherland.
The "Indian Patriot" on Ourselves
We gave in full yesterday the article of the Indian Patriot in which our contemporary criticised the action of the Bengal Government in searching the Bande Mataram office as a preliminary, it
Page-495 is presumed, to a prosecution under the sedition clause. We thank our contemporary for his sympathy, but we are bound to say that he does not seem to have entirely grasped the political gospel preached by Bande Mataram. The Patriot seems to be under the impression that it is a gospel of violent despair. Because England has refused to hear our prayers and melt at our tears, therefore we advocate an appeal to force. But this is not and has never been our attitude. Those who are at present responsible for the policy of this paper were never believers in the old gospel of mendicancy and at no time in their lives were associated with Congress politics, they publicly opposed the Congress propaganda as futile and doomed to failure at a time when the country at large was full of a touching but ignorant faith in prayers and resolutions and British justice. Despair and disappointment therefore could not possibly be the root of their policy. It is rather a settled, reasoned and calm conviction we have always held, but for which the country was not ripe until it had gone through a wholesome experience of disillusionment. Neither is our teaching a mere gospel of brute force. We preach on the contrary a great idea in the strength of which we are confident of victory. All that we contend is that we must reach the realisation of that idea in the same way as other nations by utter self-devotion, by self-immolation, by bitter struggle and terrible sacrifices, and that we cannot hope and ought not to wish to have liberty given to us at less than its eternal and inevitable price. Bande Mataram, August 6, 1907
Srijut Surendranath Banerji in his remarkable speech in College Square, the other day, observed that what the country now needed was not oratory but statesmanship, for the only effective answer to bureaucratic repression is the organisation of the whole strength of the country to carry out its natural ideal in spite of all repression. We think the veteran leader has gauged the situation very accurately, but we confess we do not see at present
Page-496 where the statesmanship is to come from which is to carry out the difficult, arduous and delicate task before us. What we have done hitherto we have done without leadership, almost without clear purpose, under an inspiring and impelling force which we must necessarily think divine. Where that force has visibly guided us, we have done astonishing things: but at the same time there has been much confusion, one-sidedness and incoherence in our work. And now that a powerful and organised Government has set itself in grim earnest to destroy our movement it is imperative that we too should organise and make our whole potential strength effective for self-defence. The divine guidance will only be continued to us if we show ourselves in our strength and wisdom worthy of it. But it cannot be denied that the first effect of the repression has been to disorganise our work. Since it began, there has been no concerted and coherent action, every man has done what seemed good in his own eyes or else remained inactive. The result has been much weakness, supineness and ineffectiveness. Barisal fights for its own hand to maintain the boycott. The Yugantar attacked carries on a heroic struggle with the bureaucracy with what stray assistance, individual generosity or patriotism may offer it. But organised resistance, organised persistence even there is none. This unsatisfactory condition of things is traceable to one main cause. All Bengal is heartily agreed in Swadeshi and professedly all are agreed on the necessity of industrial Boycott. But a majority of the older leaders, trained in another school of politics cannot adapt themselves to the new state of things, they cannot even throw themselves heartily into the only measures which can make the individual boycott crushingly effective, and they are out of sympathy with the wider developments of boycott which are becoming indispensable if we are to meet the bureaucratic attack with full success. They object personally to the new men and decline to work in co-operation with them. The new men, on the other hand, who have immensely increased their following and influence in the country are not in possession of the machinery of Congress and Conference, are, in fact, zealously excluded from it by the present possessors and have but small following among the richer men who might provide the sinews Page-497of war. They are moreover prevented, by a natural unwillingness to hopelessly divide the nation, from organising a machinery of their own. Yet to talk of organising the nation while excluding the new men is absurd. If the older party have the greater solidity and resources, the younger men have the lion’s share of the energy and driving force, they divide the great middle class and are no longer there in a hopeless minority, but are gathering adherents all over the country (even in Madras they commanded one third of the votes at the last Conference) and they exercise an overwhelming empire over the minds of the rising generation. To organise the nation means to make all its elements of strength efficient for a single clear and well-understood work under the leadership of a recognised central force. To exclude such important forces as these we have described, simply means to leave the nation unorganised. The country is in need of a statesman, yes; but what kind of statesman? He must be a man thoroughly steeped in the gospel of Nationalism, with a clear and fearless recognition of the goal to which we are moving, with a dauntless courage to aim consciously, steadily, indomitably towards it, with a consummate skill to mask his movements and aims when necessary and to move boldly and openly when necessary and, last but not least, with an overmastering magnetic power and tact to lead and use and combine men of all kinds and opinions. Such a leader might organise the nation to some purpose, but those who shrink from following where their hearts and intellects lead them or who form party feelings or personal dislike or jealously try to exclude powerful forces from the common national work cannot claim the name of statesman. It is an encouraging sign of the times that Surendranath is coming more and more into sympathy with thoroughgoing Nationalism but will he have the courage and magnanimity to hold out his hand to the new men and if he does will he be able to retain the loyalty of his principal followers? If not, he will never be able to carry out the task he has declared to be the one and supreme need of the nation. Bande Mataram, August 8, 1907
Page-498 A Compliment and Some Misconceptions
We extract in another column the opinions and interpretations of the London Times anent the Bande Mataram. It is gratifying to find the Thunderer so deeply impressed with the ability with which this journal is written and edited, even though the object of this generous appreciation be to point us out as the tallest oak of all on which the lightning may most fitly descend. But we feel bound to correct certain misapprehensions into which the Times has too readily fallen. It suits the Times to pretend that the Nationalist movement in India is a pure outcome of racial hatred and that the creation and fomentation of that hatred is the sole method of Indian agitators and the one object of their speeches and writings. But Nationalism is no more a mere ebullition of race hatred in India than it was in Italy in the last century. Our motives and our objects are at least as lofty and noble as those of Mazzini or of that Garibaldi whose centenary the Times was hymning with such fervour a few days ago. The restoration of our country to her separate existence as a nation among the nations, her exaltation to a greatness, splendour, strength, magnificence equalling and surpassing her ancient glories is the goal of our endeavours: and we have undertaken this arduous task in which we as individuals risk everything, ease, wealth, liberty, life itself it may be, not out of hatred and hostility to other nations but in the firm conviction that we are working as much in the interests of all humanity including England herself as in those of our own posterity and nation. That the struggle to realise our ideal must bring with it temporary strife, misunderstanding, hostility, disturbance, — that in short, it is bound to be a struggle and not the billing and cooing of political doves, we have never attempted to deny. We believe that the rule of three hundred millions of Indians by an alien bureaucracy not responsible to the nation is a system unnatural, intrinsically bad and inevitably oppressive, and we do not pretend that we can convince our people of its undesirability without irritating the bureaucracy on one side and generating a strong dislike of the existing system on the other. But our object is constructive and not destructive,
Page-499 to build up our own nation and not to destroy another. If England chooses to feel aggrieved by our nation-building, and obstruct it by unjust, violent or despotic means, it is she who is the aggressor and guilty of exciting hatred and ill-feeling. Her action may be natural, may be inevitable, but the responsibility rests on her, not on Indian Nationalism.
We have commented on one misconception of the Times about ourselves which it perhaps could not help, so necessary was the error to justify its own position, but it has perpetrated another which seems wilful, — unless it is the result of monomania. The Thunderer seems to have Srijut Bepin Chandra on the brain; it sees him gigantically reflected in every manifestation of Nationalism and is rapidly constructing him into a sinister Antichrist of British rule. So it insists on identifying him with the Bande Mataram and will take no denial. Somebody has been pointing out to it that Bepin Babu severed his connection with the paper nine months ago, and this is how the Times disposes of the attempt to dissipate its cherished delusions: "Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal has nominally ceased to edit the paper, but there can be no question that he is the dominating force behind its policy and comments, which are stated with a literary ability rare in the Anglo-native Press." The Times is evidently not going to be deceived. The literary ability with which the Bande Mataram states its views is rare in the "Anglo-native" Press but it is known that Bepin Pal has a rare literary ability, therefore it is unquestionably Bepin Pal and no other, who really edits and writes in the Bande Mataram. There seems to be a flaw somewhere in the Thunderer’s logic, and we do not think the Bengal Government in its recent affectionate enquiries has come to the same conclusion. Bepin Babu has his own sufficient portion of anti-bureaucratic original sin without being burdened with ours. The Times should realise that almost the whole literary ability of Young Bengal is behind the movement of which we are the daily expres-
Page-500 sion, so that the ability and literary excellence of our paper is not to be wondered at. Bande Mataram, August, 12,1907
That Boycott is the central question of Indian politics is now a generally recognised fact, recognised openly or tacitly by its supporters and its opponents alike. The Anglo-Indian papers are busy trying to make out that it is a chimera, and a failure; the executive are straining every nerve to crush it by magisterial interference, by police Zulum, by prosecution of newspapers and all the familiar machinery of repressive despotism; the friends of the alien among ourselves are reiterating that the movement is a foolish affair and that no nation ever was made by Boycott. If Boycott had really been an impossibility or a failure, it is obvious that all this elaborate machinery would not have been brought into play to crush it. On the contrary it has become a very substantial reality, a very palpable success, and now stands out, as we have said, the central and all-important question of Indian politics. Those who say that no nation was ever made by boycott, do not know what they are talking about, do not understand what boycott is, do not know the teachings of history. Boycott is much more than a mere economical device, it is a rediscovery of national self-respect, a declaration of national separateness; it is the first practical assertion of independence and has therefore in most of the national uprisings of modern times been the forerunner of the struggle for independence. The American struggle with England began in an enthusiastic and determined boycott of British goods enforced by much the same methods as the Indian boycott but with a much more stringent and effective organisation. The Italian uprising of 1848 was heralded by the boycott of Austrian cigarettes and the tobacco riots of Milan. The boycott was the indispensable weapon of the Parnell movement in Ireland, and boycott and Swadeshi are the leading cries of Sinn Fein. The first practical effect of the resurgence of
Page-501 China was the Boycott of American goods as an assertion of China’s long down-trodden self-respect against the brutal and insolent dealings of the Americans towards Chinese immigrants. In India also Boycott began as an assertion of national self-respect, and continued as a declared and practical enforcement of national separateness, liberty, independence and self-dependence. “We will no longer tamely bear injury and insult, we will no longer traffic and huckster with others for broken fragments of rights and privileges; we are free, we are separate, we are sufficient to ourselves for our own salvation,” that was what boycott meant and what its enemies have understood it to mean: its economical aspect is only an aspect. The economical boycott has been on the Whole an immense success, — not indeed in every respect, for the crusade against foreign sugar has not diminished the import, though it may have checked to some extent the natural increase of the import, and the Tarpur sugar factory is, we understand in danger of failing because people will not buy the dearer Swadeshi sugar, — an example of the futility of “honest” Swadeshi unsupported by a self-sacrificing boycott: but enormous reductions have been made in the import not only of cotton goods but of all kinds of wearing apparel, and salt has been appreciably affected. But now the whole weight of bureaucratic power is being brought to bear in order to shatter the boycott, and if we intend to save it we must oppose the organised force of the bureaucracy by the organised will of the people. What the unorganised will of the people could do, it has done; it has indeed effected miracles. But no statesman will rely on the perpetual continuation of a miracle, he will seek to counteract weaknesses, to take full advantage of every element of strength and to bring into action new elements of strength; he will in short utilise every available means towards the one great national end. Srijut Surendranath has said well that we must answer the campaign of repression by organising the country. And the readiest way to organise the country is to organise boycott. The chief weakness of the movement has been the want of co-ordinated action. We have left everything to personal and local enthusiasm. The consequence is that while in East Bengal
Page-502 the Boycott is a fact, in West Bengal it is an idea. There is some Swadeshi in West Bengal, there is no Boycott. Moreover Bengal has not brought its united influence to bear upon the other provinces in order to make the Boycott universal. The whole force of this vast country is a force which no Government could permanently resist. But this force has not been brought to bear on the struggle, Bengal and Punjab have been left to fight out their battles unaided, without the active sympathy of the rest of India. This must be altered, the rest of India must be converted and we must not rest till we have secured a mandate from the Congress for an universal boycott of British goods. Meanwhile we must bring West Bengal into a line with East Bengal, and for that purpose we must have a stringent and effective organisation. We need not go far for the system which will be most effective. We have only to apply or adapt to the circumstances of the country the methods used by the American boycotters against England. How this can be done we propose to discuss in another article.
The Bengalee seems to be much surprised and rather hurt at the unkind conduct of the Statesman in adversely criticising Justices Mitter and Fletcher for their judgment in the Bloomfield Murder Case. Our contemporary’s invincible faith in the Statesman is really pathetic. One would have thought that the attitude of the Chowringhee paper with regard to Lala Lajpat Rai and its support of the policy of repression would have opened the eyes of the blindest. What does the Bengalee expect? The Statesman is a Liberal Imperialist organ wedded to the eternal continuance of the British control and all that it implies, but willing to concede unsubstantial privileges and a carefully modified liberty because that will make the task of the British ruler easier. It cannot be expected to sympathise with Swadeshi and Nationalism. No patriotic Englishman, Sir Roper Lethbridge has said, can support Swadeshi: no patriotic Indian can help supporting Swadeshi. The opposition of interests is complete and irrecon- Page-503cilable. When therefore the Bengalee and other Moderates took up Swadeshi, they forfeited all claim to the support of the Statesman. No patriotic Englishman again can support anything which can possibly injure the prestige, supremacy and exceptional position of the white community in India; no patriotic Indian but must desire to see that prestige lowered and that supremacy and exceptional position replaced by the equality of all communities before the law, as well as socially and politically. Cases like this Bloomfield murder raise, therefore, a crucial point. When the whole basis of a political system is the despotic rule of a small alien handful over the immense indigenous numbers, it is an essential condition of its continuance that the persons of the foreigners should be held sacred, that those who lay hands on them, no matter under what provocation, should be overtaken by the most terrible retribution the other conditions of the rule may permit. While therefore there may be two opinions among Anglo-Indians as to the advisability of allowing European murderers of Indians to go free, there can be no two opinions on the necessity of avenging every loss of a European life by the execution of as many Indians as the police can lay their hands upon. No matter whether the revenge be unjust or inhuman, no matter whether it be even monstrous. The principle it is sought to uphold is itself unjust and monstrous, and squeamishness about means is out of place. Terrorism is indispensable, whether it be the naked, illegal and unashamed terrorism of Denshawi or terrorism in the fair disguise of legal forms and manipulating for its own purposes the Criminal Procedure Code and the Evidence Act. It is not the fault of the Anglo-Indians but of their position, and it is that position which must be altered if such massacres as that which the calm judicial temper of Justices Mitter and Fletcher prevented in the Bloomfield Case, are to be rendered an impossibility. Bande Mataram, August 14, 1907
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