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THREE
Its Necessity
WE
HAVE defined, so far, the occasion and the ultimate object of the passive
resistance we preach. It is the only effective means, except actual armed
revolt, by which the organised strength of the nation, gathering to a powerful
central authority and guided by the principle of self-development and self-help,
can wrest the control of our national life from the grip of an alien
bureaucracy, and thus, developing into a free popular Government, naturally
replace the bureaucracy it extrudes until the process culminates in a
self-governed India, liberated from foreign control. The mere effort at
self-development unaided by some kind of resistance, will not materially help us
towards our goal. Merely by developing national schools and colleges we shall
not induce or force the bureaucracy to give up to us the control of education.
Merely by attempting to expand some of our trades and industries, we shall not
drive out the British exploiter or take from the British Government its
sovereign power of regulating, checking or killing the growth of Swadeshi
industries by the imposition of judicious taxes and duties and other methods
always open to the controller of a country's finance and legislation. Still less
shall we be able by that harmless means to get for ourselves the control of
taxation and expenditure. Nor shall we, merely by establishing our own
arbitration courts, oblige the alien control to give up the elaborate and
lucrative system of Civil and Criminal Judicature which at once emasculates the
nation and makes it pay heavily for its own emasculation. In none of these
matters is the bureaucracy likely to budge an inch from its secure position
unless it is forcibly persuaded. The control of the young mind in its most
impressionable period is of vital importance to the continuance of the hypnotic
spell by which alone the foreign domination manages to subsist; the exploitation
of the country is the
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chief reason for its existence; the control of the judiciary is one of its chief
instruments of repression. None of these things can it yield up without bringing
itself nearer to its doom. It is only by organised national resistance, passive
or aggressive, that we can make our self-development effectual. For if the
self-help movement only succeeds in bringing about some modification of
educational methods, some readjustment of the balance of trade, some alleviation
of the curse of litigation, then, whatever else it may have succeeded in doing,
it will have failed of its main object. The new school at least have not
advocated the policy of self-development merely out of a disinterested ardour
for moral improvement or under the spur of an inoffensive philanthropic
patriotism. This attitude they leave to saints and philosophers, — saints like
the editor of the Indian Mirror or philosophers like the ardent Indian
Liberals who sit at the feet of Mr. John Morley. They for their part speak and
write frankly as politicians aiming at a definite and urgent political object by
a way which shall be reasonably rapid and yet permanent in its results. We may
have our own educational theories; but we advocate national education not as an
educational experiment or to subserve any theory, but as the only way to secure
truly national and patriotic control and discipline for the mind of the country
in its malleable youth. We desire industrial expansion, but Swadeshi without
boycott, — non-political Swadeshi, — Lord Minto's "honest" Swadeshi
—
has no attractions for us; since we know that it can bring no safe and
permanent national gain; — that can only be secured by the industrial and fiscal
independence of the Indian nation. Our immediate problem as a nation is not how
to be intellectual and well-informed or how to be rich and industrious, but how
to stave off imminent national death, how to put an end to the white peril, how
to assert ourselves and live. It is for this reason that whatever minor
differences there may be between different exponents of the new spirit, they are
all agreed on the immediate necessity of an organised national resistance to
the state of things which is crushing us out of existence as a nation and on the
one goal of that resistance, — freedom.
Organised national resistance to existing conditions, whether directed
against the system of Government as such or against
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some particular feature of it, has three courses open to it. It may attempt to
make administration under existing conditions impossible by an organised passive
resistance. This was the policy initiated by the genius of Parnell when by the
plan of campaign he prevented the payment of rents in Ireland and by persistent
obstruction hampered the transaction of any but Irish business in Westminster.
It may attempt to make administration under existing conditions impossible by an
organised aggressive resistance in the shape of an untiring and implacable
campaign of assassination and a confused welter of riots, strikes and agrarian
risings all over the country. This is the spectacle we have all watched with
such eager interest in Russia. We have seen the most absolute autocrat and the
most powerful and ruthless bureaucracy in the world still in unimpaired
possession of all the most effective means of repression, yet beaten to the
knees by the determined resistance of an unarmed nation. It has mistakenly been
said that the summoning of the Duma was a triumph for passive resistance. But
the series of strikes on a gigantic scale which figured so largely in the final
stages of the struggle was only one feature of that widespread, desperate and
unappeasable anarchy which led to the first triumph of Russian liberty. Against
such an anarchy the mightiest and best-organised Government must necessarily
feel helpless; its repression would demand a systematic and prolonged course of
massacre on a colossal scale the prospect of which would have paralysed the
vigour of the most ruthless and energetic despotism even of mediaeval times.
Only by concessions and compromises could such a resistance be overcome. The
third course open to an oppressed nation is that of armed revolt, which instead
of bringing existing conditions to an end by making their continuance impossible
sweeps them bodily out of existence. This is the old time-honoured method which
the oppressed or enslaved have always adopted by preference in the past, and
will adopt in the future if they see any chance of success; for it is the
readiest and swiftest, the most thorough in its results, and demands the least
powers of endurance and suffering and the smallest and briefest sacrifices.
The choice by a subject nation of the means it will use for vindicating
its liberty, is best determined by the circumstances of
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its servitude. The present circumstances in India seem to point to passive
resistance as our most natural and suitable weapon. We would not for a moment be
understood to base this conclusion upon any condemnation of other methods as in
all circumstances criminal and unjustifiable. It is the common habit of
established Governments and especially those which are themselves oppressors, to
brand all violent methods in subject peoples and communities as criminal and
wicked. When you have disarmed your slaves and legalised the infliction of
bonds, stripes and death on any one of them, man, woman or child, who may dare to
speak or to act against you, it is natural and convenient to try and lay a moral
as well as a legal ban on any attempt to answer violence by violence, the knout
by the revolver, the prison by riot or agrarian rising, the gallows by the
dynamite bomb. But no nation yet has listened to the cant of the oppressor when
itself put to the test, and the general conscience of humanity approves the
refusal. Under certain circumstances a civil struggle becomes in reality a
battle and the morality of war is different from the morality of peace. To
shrink from bloodshed and violence under such circumstances is a weakness
deserving as severe a rebuke as Sri Krishna addressed to Arjuna when he shrank
from the colossal civil slaughter on the field of Kurukshetra. Liberty is the
life-breath of a nation; and when the life is attacked, when it is sought to
suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of
self-preservation becomes right and justifiable,
—
just as it is lawful for a man who is being strangled to rid himself of
the pressure on his throat by any means in his power. It is the nature of the
pressure which determines the nature of the resistance. Where, as in Russia, the
denial of liberty is enforced by legalised murder and outrage, or, as in Ireland
formerly, by brutal coercion, the answer of violence to violence is justified
and inevitable. Where the need for immediate liberty is urgent and it is a
present question of national life or death on the instant, revolt is the only
course. But where the oppression is legal and subtle in its methods and respects
life, liberty and property and there is still breathing time, the circumstances
demand that we should make the experiment of a method of resolute but peaceful
resistance which, while less bold and aggressive than
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other methods, calls for perhaps as much heroism of a kind and certainly more
universal endurance and suffering. In other methods, a daring minority purchase
with their blood the freedom of the millions; but for passive resistance it is
necessary that all should share in the struggle and the privation.
This peculiar character of passive resistance is one reason why it has
found favour with the thinkers of the New Party. There are certain moral
qualities necessary to self-government which have become atrophied by long
disuse in our people and can only be restored either by the healthy air of a
free national life in which alone they can permanently thrive or by their
vigorous exercise in the intensity of a national struggle for freedom. If by any
possibility the nation can start its career of freedom with a fully developed
unity and strength, it will certainly have a better chance of immediate
greatness hereafter. Passive resistance affords the best possible training for
these qualities. Something also is due to our friends, the enemy. We have
ourselves made them reactionary and oppressive and deserved the Government we
possess. The reason why even a radical opportunist like Mr. Morley refuses us
self-government is not that he does not believe in India's fitness for
self-government, but that he does not believe in India's determination to be
free; on the contrary, the whole experience of the past shows that we have not
been in earnest in our demand for self-government. We should put our
determination beyond a doubt and thereby give England a chance of redeeming her
ancient promises, made when her rule was still precarious and unstable. For the
rest, circumstances still favour the case of passive resistance. In spite of
occasional Fullerism, the bureaucracy has not yet made up its mind to a Russian
system of repression. It is true that for India also it is now a question of
national life or death. Morally and materially she has been brought to the verge
of exhaustion and decay by the bureaucratic rule and any farther acquiescence in
servitude will result in that death-sleep of centuries from which a nation, if
it ever awakes at all, awakes emaciated, feeble and unable to resume its true
rank in the list of the peoples. But there is still time to try the effect of an
united and unflinching pressure of passive resistance. The resistance, if it is
to be of any use, must be united and un-
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flinching. If from any timidity or selfishness or any mistaken ideas of caution
and moderation, our Moderate patriots succeed in breaking the unity and
weakening the force of the resistance, the movement will fail and
India
will sink into those last depths of degradation when only desperate remedies
will be of any utility. The advocates of self-development and defensive
resistance are no extremists but are trying to give the country its last chance
of escaping the necessity of extremism. Defensive resistance is the sole
alternative to that ordeal of sanguinary violence on both sides through which
all other countries, not excepting the Moderates’ exemplar
England, have been compelled to pass, only at last "embracing
Liberty
over a heap of corpses".
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