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The Crisis
THE
last action of the Minto-Morley Government has torn every veil from the situation and the policy
of the British rulers. Whatever else may be the result of this vigorous
attempt to crush Nationalism in the Punjab, it has the merit of clearing the
air. We have no farther excuse for mistaking our position or blundering into
ineffective policies. The bureaucracy has declared with savage emphasis that
it will tolerate a meekly carping loyalism, it will tolerate an ineffective
agitation of prayer, protest and petition, but it will not tolerate the New
Spirit. If the Indian harbours aspirations towards freedom, towards
independence, towards self-government in his mind, let him crush them back and
keep them close-locked in his heart; for from English Secretary or Anglo-Indian
pro-consul, from Conservative or from Liberal they can expect neither concession
nor toleration. Indian aspirations and bureaucratic autocracy cannot stall
together; one of them must go. The growth of the New Spirit had been so long
tolerated in Bengal because the rulers, though alarmed at the new portent, could
not at once make up their mind whether it was a painted monster or a living and
formidable force. Even when its real nature and drift had become manifest, they
waited to see whether it was likely to take hold of the people. They were not
prepared for the enormous rapidity with which like a sudden conflagration in
the American prairies, the New Spirit began to rush over the whole of India. By
the time they had realised it, it was too late to crush it in Bengal by
prosecuting a few papers or striking at a few tall heads. For the New Spirit
in Bengal does not depend on the presence of a few leaders or the inspiration
from one or two great orators. It has embraced the whole educated class with one
unquenchable flame. If Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal were deported, and the Bande
Mataram, Sandhya and other Nationalist journals suppressed, the fire would
only become silent, pervading, irresistible. A hundred hands would catch
the
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banner of Nationalism as it fell from the hands of the
standard-bearer and a hundred fiery spirits rush to fill the place of the
fallen leader. In Bengal,
therefore, other measures have been adopted. But the moment the bureaucrats were
sure that the fire had caught in the Punjab, they hastened to strike, hoping by
the suppression of a few persons to suppress the whole movement. The first
blow at the Punjabee was a disastrous failure. The second has been
delivered with extraordinary precautions to ensure its success. The whole might
of the British Empire has been summoned to drive it home. The pomp and
prestige of its irresistible might, the tramp of its armies and the terror of
its guns, the slow mercilessness of its penal law and the swift fury of its
arbitrary statutes have all been gathered round two small cities, not to put
down a formidable rebellion or affect the capture of dangerous military leaders,
but to arrest a few respectable and unwarlike pleaders and barristers. Enveloped
with a surge of cavalry under the mouths of British siege-guns, these fortunate
individuals, most of whose names were till then hardly known outside their own
province, -- have been hurried to British jails and one eminent pleader whirled
out of India with a panic haste. All this pomp and apparatus can evidently have
no object but to terrify the New Spirit throughout India into quiescence by a
display of the irresistible power of Britain. It is an emphatic warning from Mr.
Morley and Lord Minto that they will not suffer the Indian to aspire to freedom
or to work by peaceful self-help and passive resistance for national
autonomy.
In this grave crisis of
our destinies let not our people lose their fortitude or suffer stupefaction and
depression to seize upon and unnerve their souls. The fight in which we are
engaged is not like the wars of old in which when the King or leader fell, the
army fled. The King whom we follow to the wars today, is our own Motherland, the
sacred and imperishable; the leader of our onward march is the Almighty Himself,
that element within and without us whom sword cannot slay, nor water drown, nor
fire burn, nor exile divide from us, nor a prison confine. Lajpat Rai is
nothing, Tilak is nothing, Bepin Pal is nothing: these are but instruments in the
mighty Hand that is shaping our destinies and if these go, do you think that God
cannot find others to do
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His will? Lala
Lajpat Rai has gone from us, but doubt not that men stronger and greater than he
will take his place. For when a living and rising cause is persecuted, this is
the sure result that in the place of those whom persecution strikes down, there
arise, like the giants from the blood of Raktabij, men who to their own strength
add the strength, doubled and quadrupled by death or persecution, of the martyrs
for the cause. It was the exiled of Italy, it was the men who languished in
Austrian and Bourbon dungeons, it was Poerio and Silvio Pellico and their
fellow- sufferers whose collected strength reincarnated in Mazzini and Garibaldi
and Cavour to free their country.
Let there be no fainting of heart and no
depression, and also let there be no unforeseeing fury, no blindly-striking
madness. We are at the beginning of a time of terrible trial. The passage is not
to be easy, the crown is not to be cheaply earned. India is going down into the
valley of the shadow of death, into a great horror of darkness and suffering.
Let us realise that what we are now suffering, is a small part of what we shall
have to suffer, and work in that knowledge, with resolution, without hysteria.
A fierce and angry spirit is spreading among the people which cries out for
violent action and calls upon us to embrace death. We say, let us be prepared
for death but work for life, -- the life not of our perishable bodies but of our
cause and country. Whatever we do, let it be with knowledge and foresight. Let
our first and last object be to help on the cause, not to gratify blindly our
angry passions. The first need at the present moment is courage, a courage which
knows not how to flinch or shrink. The second is self-possession. God is helping
us with persecution; we must accept it with joy and use that help calmly,
fearlessly, wisely. On the manner and spirit in which we shall resist and repel
outrage and face repression, while not for a moment playing into the hands of
the adversary, will depend the immediate success or failure of our
mission.
Bande Mataram, May
11, 1907
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Home
The Praise
of the Government
We cannot sufficiently
admire the vigorous and unselfish efforts of the British Government to turn all
India into a nation of Extremists. We had thought that it would take us long
and weary years to convert all our countrymen to the Nationalist creed. Nothing
of the kind. The Government of India is determined that our efforts shall not
fail or take too long a time to reach fruition. It will not suffer us to preach
nationalism to the people, but in its noble haste and zeal is resolved to
preserve the monopoly of the Nationalist propaganda to itself. "Alone I will
do it," they have evidently said to themselves, even as Louis XVI said to his
people when he resolved to take the work of reform out of the hands of the
States General into his own. The Government of India also has resolved to take
the work of inculcating nationalism into its own hands. There is no further
need of the inspiring oratory or compelling logic of a Bepin Chandra, the fine
and vigorous lucidity and competent organisation of a Tilak, the attractive
charm, self-sacrifice, moral force and steady, quiet work of a Lajpat Rai. The
Government will brush them aside and take their place. We cannot deny that the
methods of the Government far excel our poor efforts. Our methods are long,
wordy, weary and when all is said and done, only half-effective; those of the
Government are magnificent, brief, laconic, decisive, triumphantly effective. By its
policy of leaving the Mymensingh Mahomedans for weeks together to inflict the
utmost horrors of rapine and brigandage on a Hindu population sedulously
disarmed and terrorised by official severity, they have convinced the country
that the Pax Britannica is an illusion and no peace worth having which is not
maintained by our own strength and manhood. By the deportation of Lala Lajpat
Rai, they have destroyed the belief in British justice. By their Resolution for
the prohibition of meetings they have convinced everyone that we possess the right of
free speech, not as a right, not as a possession, but
as a temporary and conditional favour depending for its continuance on despotic
caprice. We await with confidence fresh developments of this admirable
Nationalist propaganda.
Bande Mataram,
May 13, 1907
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