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Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, May 23rd, 1907 }
And Still It Moves
What is the precise difference which the recent Government measures have made in the conditions of the Swadeshi movement? The first to be considered, because the most dramatic and striking of these measures, is the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai. Has this deportation brought any really new element into the problem? When we began the movement, we were prepared, or at least we professed to be prepared, for the utmost use by the Government of all the weapons the existing law puts in its hand. We were prepared for press-prosecutions, we were prepared to go to jail on false charges, we refused to be appalled by regulation lathis, broken heads and Gurkha charges. Whatever use the Bengal Government might make of the repressive laws which stand on its statute books, to whatever advantage the local magistracy might turn their powers of government by ukase, we were prepared for everything, we started with the fixed determination to allow nothing to daunt us. Deportation was also a pre-existing weapon of repression available to the bureaucracy under the existing laws. The difference its use has made, is to bring in, in the place of provincial repression by the local government, imperial repression by the Government of India with the approval of the Secretary of State. It has also replaced the long and uncertain process of trial ending in a punishment of fixed duration by the swift and sudden process of kidnapping and a punishment— no, we apologise to the Friend of India, we should rather say a leniency of uncertain, perhaps life-long duration. One other element it has introduced which patriots have had to face in all other countries, but which falls on our heads for the first time,— the punishment of exile. To speak
Page – 433 the truth, this is the one and only terror of deportation to Indian patriots. The Indian mind with its passionate attachment to the very soil of the mother-country, its deep reverent feeling that mother and motherland are more to be cherished than paradise itself, must feel the deprivation with a force which no European race, except perhaps the passionate and emotional Italian, could understand. In jail the floor we tread is at least made of Indian soil; when we exercise in the prison yard, the air that visits our cheeks is Indian air; the pulsation of Indian aspiration, Indian emotion, Indian life, Indian joys and sorrows beats around our prison walls and floods our hearts with the magnetic pervasiveness of which the air of India is more full than that of any other country. The bureaucracy blundered upon an ingenious way of striking us in a very vulnerable point when it hurried Lajpat Rai away to a remote corner of the world among alien men and cut him off from all sight of Indian faces and communion with Indian hearts. But what then? It is but one suffering the more, and the deeper the suffering the greater the glory, the more celestial the reward. We cannot suffer more than Poerio in his Neapolitan dungeon or Silvio Pellico in his Austrian fortress or Mazzini in his lifelong exile. It is with the lifeblood of a nation’s best and the unshed tears that well up from the hearts of its strong men that the tree of liberty is watered. The greater the sacrifice, the earlier is its fruit enjoyed. Yet it cannot be denied that the deportation came as a shock on the Moderates and as a surprise to the Extremists. It was a shock to the Moderates because of the source from which it came. They had never been able to shake off the idea that in the end Mr. John Morley, if not the sympathetic Lord Minto, would come to their help. To renounce that hope would be to reject the very keystone of the Moderate policy and turn their backs for ever on the illusions of thirty years. Even up to the moment almost of the deportation the Bengalee was clamouring for the recall of Mr. Hare and confidently expecting that his criminal inactivity in the East Bengal disturbances would be punished by a just and benign Secretary of State. On such high expectations the deportation came as a blow straight in the face
Page – 434 and struck the Moderate party dumb and senseless for a moment. The heaviness of the blow it had received can be judged by the sudden violence of the Indu Prakash which exceeded in the fierce anger of its utterances any Extremist organ. There is no disguising the fact that the Moderate’s occupation is gone. British rule has so unmistakably, finally, irrevocably declared itself as despotism naked and unashamed, a despotism moreover which is firmly resolved to remain despotic,— the fiction of a constitution has been so relentlessly exposed as a sheer mockery and constitutional agitation has thereby been rendered such a patent, elaborate and heartless farce that, although it will continue just as the snake continues to wriggle even after it has been cut into two, it has lost all life and all chance of carrying weight in the country. The temper of the Madras meeting, which a serious and influential paper like the Madras Standard asserts to have been composed mainly not of students but of adults, shows what the temper of the nation is likely to be. The deportation therefore has introduced a new element for the Moderate politician. His gods have failed him; the benign hand from which he expected favours, has treated him instead to a whip of scorpions; the face of flowers he worshipped has had its veil torn away and stands revealed as a grinning death’s head. Moderation lies wounded to the death. It can no longer exist except as a pretence, an attitude. To the Nationalist the deportation came as a surprise because of the occasion for which it was employed. We knew that the benignant bureaucracy had this weapon in their armoury, that they had used it once and might well use it again; but we thought it had more respect for its prestige and more common sense than to waste it on an insufficient occasion. The Natus were deported because it was suspected that they were behind the Poona assassinations and that the assassinations themselves were part of an elaborate Maratha conspiracy. In the Punjab there was nothing but a riot; for the persistent wild rumours of the disarming of regiments and murder of Europeans have received no confirmation of any kind. Deportation, as directed against the Nationalist movement, was like the magic weapon of Karna which could be used only once
Page – 435 with effect; it should therefore have been reserved for a supreme occasion when it might have averted, for the time at least, an incipient mutiny or formidable rebellion. It was used instead in a moment of panic to meet a fancied mutiny; it was used not against the formidable and indispensable leader of a great approaching rebellion; but against a boy-orator and a pleader of considerable influence who at the worst was no more than one of the many prophets of revolution. Meant for Arjuna, it has been hurled against Ghatotkach. This misuse deprives it of its utility; for as the Empire shrewdly pointed out the other day the trick of deportation cannot be successfully played twice; the second time it will be a direct help to the strong revolutionary forces which are growing in the country. To the Nationalists therefore the menace of deportation does not bring in any new element into the situation, except in so far as it hastens their work or brings the leaders as well as the rank and file to the touchstone of peril where their value will be tested. The new element of deportation, therefore, so far as it is a new element, merely facilitates the work of Nationalism. There is no reason why it should modify our action in any essential feature. We may be told of course that we cannot afford to imperil the leaders on whom the progress of the movement depends. We answer that the safety of the leaders can only be assured by sacrificing the vitality and force of the movement, a price too heavy to pay; secondly where the will of a higher Power is active in a great upheaval, no individual is indispensable. The movement will not stop in the Punjab because Lajpat Rai is gone or Ajit Singh is hiding. Eppur si muove, “and still it moves”, to its predestined end. __________
British Generosity
There is no quality which the British race more persistently arrogates to itself, as if it were their monopoly, than truth and frankness. Yet by a strange ill-luck they have never been able to persuade anybody but themselves that they possess now or
Page – 436 ever possessed these high and noble qualities. On the contrary, the epithet “perfidious Albion” in which the French summed up their experience of English character before the present “cordial understanding” and to which they may have to revert when it is over, expresses the general opinion of their fellow-Europeans on the British claim to an unique and superior righteousness. The conviction of British political hypocrisy, large promise-making when it suited them and large promise-breaking now that that suits them, is the final conclusion to which India has been driven on the same subject. There is another quality of which the English are equally proud, their fair-play and generosity to enemies. Here again the world’s opinion of them does not coincide with their opinion of themselves. On the contrary, no nation is capable of greater meanness and venomous hatred in its treatment of the enemies and opponents who are so unfortunate as to fall into its hands. The generosity is reserved for those enemies who have beaten them in fight, like Washington, or with whom they have to come to an understanding after an equal struggle, like Botha. But towards others and specially for those who have put them in fear for their national existence or their supremacy or their commerce and then fallen into their power, they observe neither chivalry nor fairness nor truth. It was the British fair-play which in mediaeval times burned Joan of Arc at the stake and then for some centuries vilely slandered her character. It was British fair-play which pursued Napoleon during his lifetime with a campaign of slander and abuse of the most extraordinary vileness and then interned him in St. Helena and embittered his last days by the meanest pettiness and persecution. It was British fair-play which, in the early days of the Boer war avenged Majuba by an astonishing campaign of lies and abuse against the Boers, representing them as a race of dirty, brutal, cunning and uneducated semi-savages. We see the same national characteristic in the shameful vilification in which the Anglo-Indian Press have indulged against the patriot whose influence in the Punjab has put in fear for their empire and their trade. We waive the question whether Lajpat Rai was or was not really guilty from the standpoint of the bureaucracy,
Page – 437 whether he was or he was not actively working against the continuance of British rule, as he certainly was actively working against the continuance of irresponsible bureaucratic despotism. But as to the personal character of Lajpat Rai, his personal uprightness, honesty, candour, his earnest diligence in working for the religious, social and political elevation of his country, his unostentatious self-sacrifice, his modest worth, his quiet courage, even his opponents have nothing but praise. Yet it is this man whom the Anglo-Indian papers have been vilifying as a rascally agitator, a braggart, a coward, a “mean specimen of humanity”, whose influence was solely due to his having spent money freely on “agitation”. We can only salute with reverence this fresh exhibition of British fair-play and generosity. But if the man was such a poor and inconsiderable specimen, how is it that you have treated him as if he were a second Napoleon, thinking even distant Mandalay not remote enough or strong enough to hold the mighty rebel? All this foul-mouthed brutality is a measure of the extraordinary panic into which the ruling race has fallen as the result of what the Statesman describes as no worse than a street row or an election fight. The tiger qualities of a ruling race, no doubt!
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