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Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, July 16th, 1907 }
In Honour of Hyde and Humphreys
In contrast with the extraordinary row that is being made by the Anglo-Indian Press over the police libel case it is instructive to set the judgment in the Delhi sweeper’s case. In one case a Calcutta journal makes imputations which it could not prove against the immaculate Police and damages whatever reputation had already remained undamaged by their own efficiency, integrity and self-denying devotion to duty; and it is mulcted in a few thousands for the offence. In the other an Englishman carries his conception of the white man’s burden and his benevolent sympathy for the race in whose interests he is unselfishly toiling under the Indian sun, so far as to kick an Indian to death. For this reassertion of British prestige he is fined Rs. 50 by a fellow white, who is equally conscious of the burden and equally flowing over with the milk of Morleyesque sympathy, but who has also to consider the health of Delhi which was threatened by the sweepers’ strike. We do not know who killed Ganga Uriya; we do know who killed the Delhi sweeper. The Indian murderer, if he had been caught, would have been hanged; the English man-slaughterer has to pay Rs. 50 to the Government treasury, which may be regarded either as the price which the bureaucracy puts on Indian life or a sort of tax on the luxurious amusement of rupturing Indian spleens. We are surprised by the way that the Anglo-Indian Defence Association has not as yet moved in the matter or made any protest against making a poor man pay so heavily for his amusements. For our part, we would not for a moment be thought to suggest that Hyde ought to have been punished for his crime; that would be a monstrous and seditious proposal, and if we made it, we have no doubt we would be
Page – 597 immediately run in for causing enmity between the races. No, our object in writing is to suggest that now the Clive memorial idea has been dropped, statues may be raised instead to Hyde and Humphreys in a conspicuous part of the Maidan: for if Clive was the founder of the Empire, Hyde and Humphreys are among its defenders. For Indians the moral of such incidents is the old one, “To be weak is miserable.”
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