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How to Meet the Inevitable Repression
THE
Swadeshi that you have started in
Bengal is a move in the right direction, said some highly placed members of the
Indian Civil Service to an Indian on their way back to this country from
England; but they continued, we shall try to break the back of it in every
possible way, we shall put the staying power of the Bengalee people to the
severest test, before we allow them to develop their new nationalism. Thus spoke
they, and what has happened since has certainly been singularly confirmatory of
their frank avowal. The Declaration of the 7th of August, 1905, came as a
surprise upon the English people; to their discerning ear trained hereditarily
to true and false political notes, the resolution of the people of Bengal to
live of their own and not to repose any longer on an unmanly faith in England's
charity and benevolence, sounded like the very death-knell of the Anglo-Indian
autocracy. The consciousness of potential strength that lay at the bottom of the
people's determination to boycott English goods would, as it developed,
inevitably render England's arbitrary tenure of power in India progressively
difficult to maintain. The oversea overlords therefore made up their mind at the
very outset to crush this ominous phenomenon in Bengal. But the Briton is by
nature an optimist, a born believer in his own immense power and in the
insignificance of others. And thus, though visited by a secret dread of ultimate
possibilities, he at first nursed the fond illusion that the discontent in
Bengal was only a mere surface-simmer, the Declaration of the 7th a mere
petulant outcry, that the boycott was an impossibility in Bengal because it
required for its success a higher patriotism than was to be expected of the
Bengalee character. And many English people in England as well as in this
country kept speaking in this strain for sometime, always finishing up with the
confident and pleasant prediction that the Boycott movement in Bengal was doomed
to a speedy and complete failure. It is this condition of the British mind that
accounts for the somewhat
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mental attitude of the Government during
the first phase of the movement in Bengal. But as soon as the success of the
boycotters was patently manifest in the substantial and steady diminution of the
imports from England, the self-assurance of the English people and their scepticism of the Bengalee character vanished into thin air, and they definitely
launched upon their policy of "breaking the back of the movement".
The country must fully realise
the seriousness of the struggle on which it has entered with the Bureaucracy; it
must be strong enough to withstand and triumph over the most merciless act of
hostility from an immensely powerful opponent. To extinguish the boycott at any
cost is clearly now the one policy of the Anglo-Indian autocrats. The weapons in
their hands are many, some possessed of such subtle potency as easily to elude
the comprehension of those who are not always on their guard. The policy of
breaking up the dawning sense of Indian nationality into a congeries of
conflicting forces that have been initiated under the guise of reform by the
Secretary of State who happens, by the way, to be a commentator of the Prince of
Machiavelli, shows the consummate cunning of the foe with whom we have joined
action on behalf of our country. The treatment meted out to Liakat Hossain,
Saroda Charan Sen and the Printer of the Sandhya gives us a glimpse of
the relentlessness that we must be prepared as a nation to face; the protected
hooliganism that fell like a scourge on the city but a few days ago, is a
luminous indication of what is to come with increasing intensity (does it not
remind one of very similar happenings at Naples in the days of Austrian
tyranny?) The Seditious Meetings Bill that has been ushered into birth with such
a blare of the legislative trumpet shows the boldness with which the Bureaucracy
can fling defiance in the face of those who have dared to dream of Indian unity.
And behind it all can you hear the roar — like that which the Christian martyrs
heard when the gentler methods of persuasion had failed to shake their
Christianity?
Providence has however
simplified our task. Nowhere in the world has an absolutism been so helplessly
dependent on the loyalty and cooperation of those over whom it is set. The day
that cooperation comes to a stop the English cease to be the rulers
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of this country. And it is this that sets
a strict limit to the extent to which the Indian Government can carryon its
repressive policy. There are acts from which even the Indian police will recoil
with horror; there are policies against which even the loyal Subordinate Civil
Service will revolt; and such acts and policies therefore are beyond the range
of practical politics in this country — acts and policies of which we consantly
read in connexion with the Russian and Turkish tyrannies. No one could accuse us
of the intention to minimise to the country the immensity of the sacrifice it
must nerve itself to face in the struggle with the powers that be; but at the
same time we do not agree with those who turn away from the thought of liberty
because it must necessarily involve the country, they think, in all those
bloodcurdling inhumanities which they have read of, say, in the memoirs of
Prince Kuropatkin. The position of the Indian Government, it must be borne in
mind, is much less secure than that of any other Government in the world. Many
Englishmen, not unpossessed of some culture and learning, were grossly
scandalised to see Bepin Chandra Pal going about freely after he had refused to
give evidence in the case against the Bande Mataram; he would have been
hurried into Newgate the very next moment after his refusal to help the
prosecution, had he been in England, they said, or he would have been
immediately led off to Siberia had he been guilty of a similar defiance of the
Government in Russia. The obvious answer to these plaintive hypotheses was that
the Indian Government possesses none of that strength that is enjoyed by the
Government either in England or Russia. In our national preparation against
arbitrary rule we must not be wanting in a correct appreciation of our own
strength and of the points of weakness of our opponents. The problem of the
Bureaucracy, to state it finally, is to push its policy of repression against
the Indian Nationalists as far as it can without alienating the moral sympathy
of those on whose collaboration their tenure of power rests.
Our duty is thus obviously to
train up the moral consciousness of our people to that level of development at
which it will refuse as a whole to tolerate for any space of time at all the
rule of the few over the many. And in doing this work we must press
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up all the avenues that lead to the common
goal. The missionary work of preaching the ideal of self-rule in every part of
the country, as the essential precondition of our National realisation, is of
course of superlative importance, and the bold and unflinching facing of
persecution in the faithful discharge of this sacred task is of equal service.
But apart from this work we must also endeavour to foster the growth of those
conditions that favour the easy and rapid germination of the love of liberty.
Even a cursory glance at Indian life would convince everybody that it is only in
the independent professions in our country that the ideal of Indian liberty
struck its first root and is now most widely prevalent. The vast majority of our
educated countrymen are absorbed in Governmental or quasi-Governmental services
where the growth of the liberty ideal is naturally inhibited and where at best
it acquires but a stunted development, being condemned from birth to deafness
and dumbness. It would be difficult to think of anything more ruinously
unfortunate for a country than that the greater majority of its educated men
should be debarred throughout the most fruitful period of their life from
participation in patriotic work, should be
robbed of their only chance of livelihood if they ever happened to give
explicit utterance to their love for the land that gave them birth. One can
easily realise how unspeakably demoralising the influences of such a service
must be, and yet the overwhelming proportion of our educated countrymen are
constantly subject to them. The only way to remove this gross anomaly is to
create rival sources of employment which will provide Indians an independent
living. The existing professions are too few for this purpose, and are, further,
filled already to choking. The only adequate means to this end is therefore the
industrial development of the country which will open to our present and coming
generations a much more attractive and promising avenue of employment than the
services, the strictly subordinate services, let us not forget, of the alien
Bureaucracy. The uprise of a numerous industrial class will thus spell a great
and invaluable accession of strength to the political interest of the country.
It is this that lends to the question of India's industrial development its main
fascination and interest, and serves to remind us forcibly of the vital
interaction that
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exists between the different branches of
human activity. The stir and activity in the various industries of the country
that have already been caused by the Swadeshi boycott movement is full of happy
augury. We must strain every nerve to fill the whole country with trained
industrial ability, we must send our young men in hundreds and thousands all
over the world to learn the scientific methods of production so that India may
in a very few years be covered with a network of industrial centres that will
supply work to hundreds of thousands of our educated men, and rescue them from
the inanition of a living death in Government service. The work already begun in
this direction by the Association for the Advancement of Scientific and
Industrial Training of Indians cannot be too much praised and deserves the most
liberal encouragement. How very many more Basantas we may very reasonably expect
to see rising up in an industrial India, ready to court suffering in the name of
the Motherland.
And besides, the successful
working of the handful of trades union in Bengal mostly composed as yet of
illiterate men, certainly give us a most promising insight into the latent
possibilities that lie in the direction of a general policy of passive
resistance that may be adopted by the country. If the people of India are one
day to signify their intolerance of arbitrary rule, it will very probably be, as Seely and Meredith Townsend foretell, by a general declaration of passive
resistance. And before we can expect our countrymen in the services seriously to
entertain the thought of refusing to serve the Bureaucracy, we must see that the
country has other means of obtaining their subsistence to offer them.
Bande Mataram,
November 2, 1907
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