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Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, August 30th, 1906 } Loyalty and Disloyalty in East Bengal
The Englishman and those who are evidently anxious to set the machinery of relentless state prosecutions against the leaders of the present national movement in this province, need not take so much trouble to prove that there is considerable disaffection and disloyalty in East Bengal which ought at once to be put down with a strong hand. Our contemporary must be far more simple-minded than what one should expect him to be, judging both from his general education and experience and his position as an intelligent observer and critic of current affairs, if he ever thought that there could be any real affection and loyalty to an alien despotism, such as the present Government in this country undoubtedly is, in the minds of the subject populations in India. Lord Curzon once declared that though differing in colour and culture, the Indians were as much human as the Britishers, and had the same sentiments and susceptibilities that the British people had. If the Englishman and his friends believe in this common humanity of the Indian, they have simply to place themselves mentally in the position of their “native fellow-subjects”, to realise the kind of affection and loyalty for the present Government that can ever be felt by the people of this country. Indeed, loyalty as a feeling of personal love and regard for the sovereign is an extinct virtue in civilisation, and, if it is not found in countries where the sovereign belongs to the people, and lives and stands among them as the head of their State and the fountain of all social honour, and where the people always participate in his glory, his magnificence and his wealth,— each according to his status and qualification,— how much more rare must it be in a country like India whose sovereign belongs
Page – 119 to a distant country and an alien race, who professes an alien religion, who is not related to the people by any ties of tradition or past historic associations, and in the glories and prerogatives of whose throne, as well as in the wealth and magnificence of whose empire, these people have neither lot nor part. To believe the barest possibility of any true loyalty in India is really to take the Indians to be very much less than human. But, in truth, nobody ever honestly believed in it. Loyalty has ever been a mere convenient tie in this country— convenient to the ruler because the reputation for profound loyalty of the Indian people keeps foreign enemies away; convenient to the ruled because like charity it covereth a multitude of political sins. But in truth no one ever really believed in this much-proclaimed virtue. No Englishman ever honestly believed in the truth of it. No Indian ever cherished it honestly himself. Both the rulers and the ruled have been playing at blind man’s buff all these years with this great civic virtue, each seeking to make some political capital out of it. That the British Government in India never set a two-pence value on the loyalty of their Indian subjects,— though they are always anxious to proclaim it from the housetops, as a magnificent charm to keep away the evil-eye— is proved by the entire history of their past transactions with us. The Arms Act surely does not prove England’s faith in India’s loyalty. The Frenchman, the German, the American, nay, even the Negro and the Hottentot,— indeed every foreigner can possess arms and bear them in India without a licence; the man who belongs to the country and who is most interested in its prosperity and peace, alone cannot do so. The systematic exclusion of the people of the land, however qualified they may be, from all positions of exceptional trust and responsibility in what ought, by the law of God and nature alike, to be their own Government, surely does not prove that English statesmen ever honestly believed in the allegiance of the Indian people to their rule. The methods of state-regulated education, which carefully eschew every training or text book or instruction that is calculated to quicken any genuine love of freedom or any noble patriotism in the pupils; the extreme anxiety of the authorities to train the youths of this
Page – 120 country in habits of gentleness and subordination, while in their own country every form of manliness and even rowdyism as long as it does not strike against the very soul of social and civic orders are not only tolerated, but frequently encouraged by the leaders of public opinion and the custodians of public morals; the denial of the commonest right of free citizenship,— the right of free participation in public meetings having for their object the reform of the Administration,— to the commonest of public servants; the crusade against every form of patriotic efforts on the part of the people, such as are calculated to inspire them with devotion to their nation, all these go distinctly to prove at what value the much proclaimed loyalty of the people of this country is really rated by their foreign masters. The fact really is that loyalty in the sense in which the term is usually used,— either in the old sense of loving attachment to the person or throne of the sovereign, or even in the new and higher sense of devotion to the State which reveals and realises the highest civic ideals and aspirations of the subjects,— cannot naturally exist or grow in a country that is subject to the domination of another. No Englishman therefore honestly believes in it in India, however much he may be anxious to conjure it up in times of trouble or difficulty as a saving magic working for his safety and salvation. Loyalty, in the general acceptance of the term, has been a mere myth in British India; and the Englishman need not be at so much pains to disprove the presence of a thing in East Bengal that had never as yet existed in any part of the country subject to British rule. Disloyalty is want of loyalty, and there cannot be anywhere an absence of a thing,— as a new fact,— where that thing had never existed before. But if loyalty is not possible in India in its present condition of servitude, what then is the secret of that unquestioning obedience to the authority of the present alien Government in the country, which alone makes it easy and possible for them to rule so vast a population with such slender means? The answer is plain and obvious: it is not affection, neither is it disaffection, both of which are active sentiments, but mere indifference, mere listlessness, the fatuous fatalism of the Hindu and the
Page – 121 Mahomedan populations of India that keeps them so easily under British subjection. Not loyalty, not allegiance, but mere passive acquiescence,— that is the word which sums up the real attitude of the Indian people towards their foreign master and the outlandish civic order they have established in the country. This acquiescence is due to a general belief— now rapidly being undermined and destroyed by the open excesses and repressions of recent administrations— in the benevolence of the British despotism, itself the result of a strange hypnotic spell that British politicians and statesmen of the earlier generations had cast over the people. If by loyalty is meant this passive acquiescence to the existing civic order in the country, there is still considerable loyalty in the country, though the events of the past five or six years have done much to disturb even this passive sentiment in the people. But there has always been another kind of loyalty also in this country, and that species of loyalty exists still among us, both in East Bengal and West Bengal, though it has been subjected during the last eight or nine months to a strain which would kill it altogether in any other country, and most of all in that country to which the Englishman himself belongs, and this kind of loyalty will last as long as the Government and those whose views the Englishman represents, do not themselves destroy it with their own hand. Loyalty in the radical sense of the term, derived from lex— law, and meaning obedience to law— has always been a cordial characteristic of our people; and in this sense people have always been loyal in this country. This loyalty— this extreme regard for law of the Indian population— has been the strongest bulwark of the present foreign despotism in this country. We are still loyal, as we have been in the past, in the sense of law-abiding. Had we not been loyal in this, the truest sense of the term, the history of British administration in every part of India would have to be very differently written indeed. In fact the Englishman ought not to forget that it is this extreme loyalty of the people that saved the situation created in Barisal and elsewhere by the lawless excesses of the executive Government during the last nine or ten months. Had our people
Page – 122 been less law-abiding than they are, the whole country would have long ago been completely given over to riots and mob-rule, which it would tax the entire strength and resources of the Government to grapple with and conquer. The lawless excesses of the Executive and the Police in East Bengal during the last eight or nine months, are matters of common knowledge; and the Englishman knows it full well that there is no other country in the world where such wanton oppression and injustice would have been so quietly borne by the people as these have been borne in the New Province. To attribute this to the cowardice of the people would be an act of fatal folly on the part of the Government or their advisers. East Bengal, at least, has never been noted for such cowardice. It is not fear, but self-restraint due to considerations of larger and higher interests, and the command of their leaders that kept East Bengal so quiet under all these enormities during the last nine or ten months. But this loyalty also seems apparently to be giving way now, for it is useless to conceal the fact that a grim determination has gradually grown among the people to no longer suffer any illegal excesses, in the way they have been suffered so long. But even in this new spirit of resistance in the people there is no lack of regard for law, for this new determination means not to outrage but to protect the honour and dignity of the law itself, when both are openly outraged by those whose duty it is to protect them. If this be disloyalty, we freely admit this disloyalty exists, and is growing to great proportions in every part of the country; and the threats of the Englishman or the setting of the sedition-law in motion will not kill, but only increase this disloyalty the more. _______
By the Way
Diogenes in the Statesman indulges himself in a paragraph of grave advice to the “self-constituted” leaders of the Indian labour movement. For a philosopher, our friend takes singularly little trouble to understand the opponents’ case. Neither Mr. A. K. Ghose nor Mr. Aswini Banerji nor any of their assistants
Page – 123 proposes, so far as we know, to benefit labour by getting rid of English capital. What they do propose, is to get rid of the exceedingly unjust conditions under which Indian labour has to sweat in order to enrich alien capitalists. And by the way, as it were, they also propose to get rid of the habit of coarse insult and brutal speech which Englishmen have accustomed themselves to indulge in when dealing with “low-class” Indians. Are the leaders of Indian labour self-constituted? One would imagine that men whom Indian workers naturally turn to in difficulty and who can organise in a few weeks so large an affair as the Railway Union, have vindicated their claim to be the national leaders of Labour. At any rate their constituents have very enthusiastically ratified their “self-constituted” authority. But perhaps Diogenes has been converted from cynicism to Vedanta, and sees no difference between the self of the railway employees and the self of Mr. A. K. Ghose. Still, the tub from which he holds forth is a small one, and he should not cumber one-sixth of his space with such cumber. The rift between the Labourites and the Liberals grows daily wider. The alliance was never natural and cannot in its nature be permanent. But official Liberaldom will be foolish indeed if it declares war on Labour at the present juncture. The Socialistic element in England is quite strong enough to turn the Liberal triumph of 1905 into a serious disaster at the next elections. Nor are the Labourites likely to be frightened by Ministerial menaces. Mr. Winston Churchill and the Master of Elibank may thunder from their high official Olympus, but Mr. Keir Hardie will go on his way unscathed and unmoved. He knows that the future is with Socialism and he can afford to despise the temporary and imperfect fruits which a Liberal alliance promises. For us English politics have small personal interest. From the Conservatives we can expect nothing but open oppression, from the Liberals, nothing but insincere professions and fraudulent concessions,— shadows calling themselves substance. Can we hope better things from Labour? Many whose judgment we respect, think that there is a real ally— that the friendship of Labour for India is sincere and disinterested. For the present, yes.
Page – 124 But when Labour becomes a power and sits on front benches we fear that it will be as intolerant and oppressive as Conservatism itself. Australia is a Labour Commonwealth, and we know the attitude of the Australian working-man to Indians and Asiatics generally. India’s hope lies not in English Liberalism or Labour, but in her own strong heart and giant limbs. Titaness, who by thy mere attempt to rise can burst these Lilliputian bonds, why shouldst thou clamour feebly for help to these pigmies over the sea?
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