|
Look on this Picture, then on That
BRITAIN,
the
benevolent, Britain, the mother of Parliaments, Britain, the champion of
liberty, Britain,
the deliverer of the slave, -- such was the
sanctified and legendary
figure which we have been trained to keep before our eyes from the earliest
years of our childhood. Our minds imbued through and through with the colours of
that legend, we cherished a faith in the justice and benevolence of Britain
more profound, more implicit, more a very part of our beings than the faith of
the Christian in Christ or of the Mahomedan in his Prophet. Officials might be
oppressive, Viceroys and Lieutenant-Governors reactionary, the Secretary of
State obdurate, Parliament indifferent, the British public careless, but our
faith was not to be shaken. If Anglo-India was unkind, we wooed the British
people in India itself. If the British people failed us, we said that it was
because the Conservatives were in power. If a Liberal Secretary showed himself
no less obdurate, we set it down to his personal failings and confidently
awaited justice from a Liberal Government in which he should have no part. If
the most Radical of Radical Secretaries condemned us to age-long subjection to a
paternal and absolute bureaucracy, we whispered to the people, 'Wait, wait,
Britain, the true Britain, the generous, the benevolent, the lover, the giver of
freedom, is only sleeping; she shall awake again and we shall see her angelic
and transfigured beauty'. Where precisely was this Britain we believed in, no
man could say, but we would not give up our faith. Credo quia impossible;
--
I believe because it is impossible, had become our political creed. Other
countries might be selfish, violent, greedy, tyrannical, unjust; in other
countries politics might be a continual readjustment of conflicting interests and clashing strengths. But Britain, the Britain of
our dreams, was guided only by the light of truth and justice and reason; high
ideals, noble impulses, liberal instincts, these were the sole guides of her
political actions, -- by the lustre of these
Page-323
bright moral
fires she guided her mighty steps through an admiring and worshipping world.
That was the dream; and so deeply had it lodged in our imaginations that not
only the professed Loyalists, the men of moderation, but even the leading
Nationalists, those branded as Extremists, could not altogether shake off its
influence. Only recently Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal at Rajamundry told his
hearers that those who thought the British Government would crush us if we
tried by passive resistance to make administration impossible, held too low an
opinion of British character and British civilisation. We fancy Srijut Bepin
Chandra watching from the south the welter of official anarchy in East Bengal
and the Punjab must have modified to a certain extent his trust in the
bearing-power of British high-mindedness. We ourselves, though we had our own
views about British character and civilisation, have allowed ourselves to
speculate whether it was not just possible that the British bureaucracy might be
sufficiently tender of their reputation to avoid extreme, violent and
arbitrary measures.
That was the dream. The reality to which we awake is Rawalpindi and Jamalpur.
The events in the Punjab are an instructive lesson in the nature of bureaucratic
rule. The Punjab has, since the Mutiny, been a quiet, loyal and patient
province; whatever burdens have been laid on it, its people have borne
without complaint; whatever oppression might go on, it gave rise to no such
clamour and agitation as the least arbitrary act would be met with in Bengal.
How have the bureaucracy treated this loyal and quiet people? What fruit have
they reaped from their loyalty, the men who saved the British Empire in 1857?
Intolerable burdens, insolent treatment, rude oppression. The Anglo-Indian cry
is that disloyal Bengal has infected loyal Punjab with the virus of sedition.
Undoubtedly, the new spirit which has gone out like a mighty fire from Bengal
lighting up the whole of India, has found its most favourable ground in the
Punjab; but a fire does not burn without fuel, and where there is the most
revolutionary spirit, there, we can always be sure, has been the most
oppression. The water tax, the land laws, the Colonisation Act legalising the
oppressions and illegalities under which the Punjab landholders and peasantry
have groaned, had generated
Page-324
the feeling of an intolerable burden, and when a few fearless men brought to the
people the message of self-help, the good tidings that in their own hands lay
their own salvation, the men of the Punjab found again their ancient spirit and
determined to stand upright in the strength of their manhood. They committed no
act of violence, they broke no law. They confined themselves to sending in a
statement of their grievances to the Government and passively abstaining from
the use of the Canal water so that the bureaucracy might not benefit by an
iniquitous tax. The rulers of India know well that if passive resistance is
permitted, the artificial fabric of bureaucratic despotism will fall down like
the walls of Jericho before mere sound, with the mere breath of a people's
revolution. To save the situation, they resorted to the usual device of stifling
the voice of the people into silence. On a frivolous pretext they struck at the Punjabee.
The only result was that the calm resolution of the people received its
first tinge of fierce indignation. Then the bureaucracy hurriedly resolved to
lop off the tall heads -- the policy of the tyrant Tarquin which is always the
resort of men without judgment or statesmanship. Lala Hansraj, one of the most
revered and beloved of the Punjab leaders, a man grown gray in the quiet and
selfless service of his country, Ajit Singh, the nationalist orator, and other
men of repute and leading were publicly threatened with prosecution and
imprisonment as criminals and an enquiry begun with great pomp and circumstance.
Then followed a phenomenon unprecedented, we think, in recent Indian history.
For the first time the man in the workshop and the man in the street have risen
in revolt for purely political reasons in anger at an attack on purely political
leaders. The distinction, which Anglo-India has striven to draw between the 'Babu
class' and the people, has in the Punjab ceased to exist. It was probably the
panic at this alarming phenomenon which hurried the Punjab Government into an
extraordinary coup d'état, also unprecedented in recent Indian history.
The result is that we have a strange companion picture to that dream of a
benevolent and angelic Britain, -- a city of unarmed men terrorised by the
military, the leaders of the people hurried from their daily avocations to
prison, siege-guns pointed at the town, police rifles ready to fire on any group
of five men or more to be seen
Page-325
in the streets, bail refused to respectable pleaders and barristers from sheer
terror of their influence. Look on this picture, then on that!
And what next? It is too early to say. This much only is certain that a new
stage begins in the struggle between democracy and bureaucracy, a new chapter
opens in the history of the progress of Indian Nationalism.
Bande Mataram,
May 6, 1907
Page-326
Home
|