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The Latest Sedition Trial
WE DO
not generally concern ourselves with the
results of trials in bureaucratic law-courts. The law that is now recognised by
the civilised world is the will of a people. The law that is really binding on a
people is the mature deliberation of its own representatives as to the proper
want and scope of individual activity in relation to the common weal. Law if it
is to be beneficial to society cannot be divorced from the truths established by
science, on the contrary derives its binding force from being based on them.
That a bureaucratic law is not so much meant to ensure social well-being but
designed for restricting even a legitimate freedom of action sanctioned by
science has been amply illustrated in the judgment of the Police Magistrate of
Calcutta in the Nabasakti case. The Magistrate was confronted with the
difficulty that neither common sense nor jurisprudence can penalise the
preaching of a political truth. The strange syllogism with which he has sought
to bring the preaching of an ideal within the purview of the bureaucratic law is
ridiculous to the extreme. The Magistrate in his judgment does not seem even to
know his own mind. In the earlier part of his judgment he talks as if the
preaching of independence as an ideal were in itself sedition. "To my mind," he
says in powerful magisterial fashion, "the meaning and intention of this article
admit of no doubt whatever. The writer is advocating independence and the
article is seditious." Later on he has misgivings. Glimpses of a common sense
buried deep away under long habits of reading political necessity into judicial
interpretation seem to visit the official mind:
“The ideal of national
independence is one which appeals to Englishmen with very strong force, and it
is one which when reasonably and temperately expressed will always meet with a
great deal of sympathy. There is undoubtedly at the present day, a growing
belief amongst men of liberal and statesmanlike views
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that India will at a future date attain
this national independence. Moreover it is an object with which the use of force
need not be associated at all for it is an object attainable by constitutional
means. I believe therefore that no Liberal Government would ever take serious
exception to the temperate expression of the ideal. ”
The only fault to be found
with this expression of a common sense view of things is that the Magistrate
seems to lay down the proposition that it depends on the feelings and views of
Englishmen whether the preaching of independence is seditious or not. That is so
in practice, no doubt, but judicially it is a strange principle of
interpretation. On this ground, clearly stated by the Magistrate, that the
preaching of national independence is not in itself seditious and does not
become seditious unless coupled with excitations to revolt or violence or with
matter tending to bring the Government into hatred or contempt,
— the Printer of the Nabasakti was
entitled to an acquittal. But the Magistrate immediately afterwards falls back
from light into a thick fog in which he flounders helplessly for some way of
unsaying what he has said.
“An Indian writer, however,
who holds up national independence as an immediate panacea for the wrongs of his
countrymen, is a mere visionary, and it is most unfortunate that so much of the
political writing in Bengali newspapers should be the crude product of ignorant
and ill-trained minds." And he goes on to say that the accused had published
articles of this description and coupled them with others inciting to violence.
Therefore he is convicted of sedition. Are we then to understand that the
Printer is found guilty of sedition not because he advocated independence but
because he advocated independence in an ignorant and ill-trained manner and his
article was a crude product? If an article is to be declared seditious merely
because it does not please the literary taste of a Police Court Magistrate, a
new terror will be added to the law of sedition. Or are we to understand that
the article is not seditious, is quite innocent, since to preach independence is
not seditious, but it is declared seditious because other articles in the paper
which contain
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nothing about independence are violent in
tone? So far as we can see from the judgment of this learned Magistrate, the
article in question is not seditious, though it may or may not be "a crude
product", the other articles are not seditious though they may come under some
other Section of the penal Code than 124A, and in any case they are not the
subject matter of the charge. But because one article preaches independence and
another which has no connection with it is written in a violent tone, therefore
the first non-seditious article is transmuted into sedition by some strange
magisterial alchemy. We come out of the reading of this judgment with a
bewildered brain and only one clearly grasped
idea, viz., that whether what we write is seditious or not,
depends not on the law, but on the state of "public opinion" in England and
Anglo-India, and on the intellectual vagaries of a Magistrate who cannot even
misinterpret the law consistently. And after all that is "all we know or need to
know" on the subject of the law of sedition.
Bande Mataram,
February 21, 1908
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