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About Unmistakable Terms
WE
answered yesterday in general terms the claim
advanced in the columns of the Bengalee to implicit and blind obedience
from all Bengalis to the Calcutta Moderate leaders and to any local
representatives of loyalty and moderation whom they may be pleased to erect to
the gaze of an adoring public. But the Bengalee's article contained also
certain passages which demand more direct and plain-spoken answers and this
today we will give. The Bengalee, not contented with its arrogant demand
for submission, goes on to declare that the Nationalists, because they refuse
this claim, are traitors to their country, that the men who opposed Mr.
Chitnavis' autocracy at Nagpur or Sir Pherozshah's at Calcutta or Mr. K. B.
Dutt's at Midnapur are rowdies and the Nationalist leaders, Mr. Tilak and Mr.
Khaparde in the West of Srijuts Bepin Pal, Aurobindo Ghose or Brahmabandhab
Upadhyay in Calcutta have been abettors of rowdies, and it calls on the whole
country to speak out in unmistakable terms against us. Unmistakable terms?
Well, then, let us have an understanding about terms, to begin with. What is the
definition of a traitor to his country? Are men traitors who have exposed
themselves to persecution, imprisonment and harassment for the sake of their
country? Are those traitors who have made large sacrifices and devoted
themselves to the cause of the Motherland? Or are those young men traitors who
have stood in the forefront of the battle of boycott, braving the full fury of
the bureaucrats and their police, and but for whom the boycott agitation would
have flagged and perished after the first six months of excitement? The Bengalee
says they are: for they may have done all these things, and yet if they
oppose Mr. K. B. Dutt or Srijut Surendranath, they are traitors to their
country. On the other hand, have not those rather the complexion of traitors who
are ready to call in police assistance against their countrymen in a Swadeshi
conference although there has been no riot or violence, who boast that the
police are
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in
their hands and they can get all arrested who oppose them, who are ready to
forget all the oppression from Barisal till now and call in Magistrates and
police superintendents to the place of honour in national meetings, who are
ready to take the lathis out of the hands of volunteers to please a District
official? Or those, to take other examples, who wrote with brilliant success to
Anglo-Indian papers to get Mr. Tilak prosecuted at the time of the Poona
murders? Or those who pointed out Lala Lajpat Rai to the bureaucracy as the man
to strike at when the Punjab was in a ferment over the Colonisation Bill? But,
by the Bengalee's reasoning, men may be the moral descendants of Mir
Jafar and Jagat Seth and yet be excellent patriots so long as they obey Moderate
leaders and respect age and authority.
The second term we want to see so defined as to be unmistakable, is the
term "leaders". The Bengalee calls for discipline and
submission to leadership, but who are the leaders to whom we are to yield this
unquestioning military obedience? What is the qualification in Mr. K. B. Dutt of
Midnapur, for instance, by virtue of which we are called upon to sacrifice for
his sake our national self-respect, our convictions, and our natural right to a
free exercise of our individual reason and conscience? The Bengalee talks
of age, but it is preposterous to set up age by itself as the claim to
leadership in politics; nor did the Moderate leaders themselves show an
overwhelming deference to age when they were themselves younger and more ardent.
Respect for age as a part of social discipline we can understand, but leadership
by seniority is a new doctrine. Then again the Bengalee talks of
authority. What authority? The authority of social position, wealth,
professional success? Are we to obey Mr. K. B. Dutt because he is the leader of
the Midnapur bar just as the East Bengal Mahomedans obey Salimullah because he is
the Nawab of Dacca? We decline to accept any such law of obedience. Authority is
always a delegated power which does not rest in the individual but proceeds to
him from a definite source and returns to that source. Official authority
proceeds from an organised government executing the law which can both delegate
its power to individuals and take them away again as it pleases. In popular
movements the people are the only source from which authority
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can
proceed. The people follow a leader because he best interprets their ideas, aims
and feelings or because he shows himself the best fitted to organise and lead
the popular forces to the realisation of popular aspirations and ideals, and the
moment their confidence is shaken, the moment they begin to think he does not
represent their best ideas and aspirations or that his methods of leadership are
mistaken, the authority begins to depart out of him. There can be no other kind
of authority in democratic politics, nor can popular leadership be
self-constituted. Those who demand military obedience to self-constituted
leaders are not preparing self-government but killing it, striking at its very
roots. If what the Moderate leaders want is to replace bureaucracy not by
popular self-government but by the government of particular persons or classes,
if they want the movement to be not democratic but oligarchic, or plutocratic,
let them say so clearly, in God's name and let us have done with this juggling
with words, and henceforward on both sides "speak in unmistakable
terms".
Finally, while we are about defining terms, let us know when a man
becomes President of a Conference or Congress session. The Bengalee says,
"The attempt that was made to heckle the President and to bring into
contempt his position as the head of the Conference was unique in the history of
our Conferences and Congresses. We never witnessed in the whole course of our
public life a proceeding...so derogatory to the authority of the
President." The "heckling" took place before Mr. K. B. Dutt was
elected, when the President's chair was vacant. Are we then to suppose that a
man becomes President before he is elected? It is curious that Mr. K. B. Dutt
himself made this unwarrantable claim when the trouble first began. By custom
the Reception Committee designates a President but the decision of the Committee
has no binding force on the delegates of the Conference who have always the
power to elect any one else whom they may prefer and not till a public
confirmation by the votes of the delegates, has the President designated by
the Reception Committee any authority or tenure of office. Until then he is
merely a public man nominated for a particular function and the public have
every right to "heckle" him so as to be sure that he will properly
represent them before they give him their votes. Because till now
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this
right has not been enforced, it does not follow that the public has forfeited
its right, nor are we bound by "traditions" which mean simply the
absence of lively popular interest and have no sanction in any reasonable
principle of procedure.
The Bengalee sets up discipline as the one requisite of a popular
movement and to back up its proposition it is so ill-advised as to quote the
example of Parnell and his solid Irish phalanx. The choice of this example shows
a singular ignorance of English politics. Before Parnell's advent, the Irish
Party in Parliament was a moderate party of Irish Liberals of very much the same
nature as the old Congress Party before the Boycott. It was balanced in Ireland
by a revolutionary organisation using the most violent means employed by secret
societies. When Parnell first appeared on the scene, his first action was to
revolt against the leader of the Irish Party and make a party of his own.
Consisting at first of a mere handful it soon captured the whole of Ireland and
created the solid phalanx. But what was the secret of Parnell's success?
Parnell, unlike our Moderate leaders, did not dwarf the ideal of a national
movement but always held the absolute independence of his country as the goal:
he made it a fixed principle to accept no half-way house between independence
and subjection short of an Irish Parliament with independent powers; he suffered
no man to enter his party who did not pledge himself to refuse all office,
honour or emolument from the alien government and he showed his people a better
way of agitation than mere dependence on England on one side and secret outrage
on
the other —
the way of passive resistance, obstruction in Parliament and refusal of
rent in the country. Only so could Parnell succeed in creating
the solid phalanx, and when it was broken, it was by the folly of his adherents
who receded from his principles and sacrificed their leader at the bidding of an
English statesman. If Srijut Surendranath wishes to have the country solid
behind him, he must be a Parnell first and not shrink from a Parnellite policy
and ideals. Only clear principles and unambiguous conduct can secure implicit
obedience.
Bande
Mataram, December 12, 1907
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