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The Weapon of Secession
THERE
has been much talk recently of drawing up a constitution for the Congress, but
even if we are able to decide the question of the constitution, the next step
before us will be to carry it out. To think that a paper constitution will help
to bring about peace between the parties, is to ignore the fact that men are
swayed by feelings and not by machinery. Paper constitutions have always failed
to effect their object, except when they are in harmony with the feeling of the
nation and express the actual situation in their arrangements. Whatever
constitution we may draw up, must be one which will suit the conditions of the
country and meet the difficulties of the present crisis. We propose to go into
the question from time to time and deal with the chief points which in our
opinion ought to be decided in order to form a real starting-point for the fresh
life of the Congress. The first and initially essential question is the object
of the Congress, the function which it proposes to discharge and the aim which
it sets before itself. We agree with the Moderates that this is the first point
on which a clear understanding is necessary, but we do not follow them in their
contention that the decision of this question need imply the exclusion of all
who differ from the precise terms in which it is decided. The Congress is an
expression of the life of the nation, and the will and aspiration of the nation
must decide the function and object of the Congress; but that will and
aspiration are not immutable; they develop, change, progress, and it is always
the function of the dissentient minority to stand for that potential development
and progress without which life is impossible. The exclusion of the minority by
a rigid shibboleth means the perpetuation in the Congress of a state of things
which may correspond for the moment to the desire of the nation, but may cease
so to correspond in a few years. It means the conversion of a national assembly
into
a party caucus.
The
function of the Congress has hitherto been to pass in-
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operative
resolutions, its aim to influence British opinion. Needless to say, the
originators were men of ability and wide views, and they had an ulterior object
in instituting this body and giving it the shape it took. The situation in India
as they envisaged it, resembled that of the patricians and plebeians in Rome;
for they accepted the permanence of British control almost as a law of Nature
though they were anxious to alter its conditions. A caste of white patricians
arrogated the control of the State in all its functions and effected an inborn
social superiority accompanied not only by an intolerable arrogance and
aloofness but often by actual brutality; yet it was the indigenous mass that
supplied the sinews of war and did the substantial work which secured the
peaceful and efficient conduct of the administration. The political and social
grievances were farther accentuated by the economical sufferings of the
proletariat, which were largely caused by the selfish policy of the ruling
caste. Yet there was no legal or constitutional means of redress, the people had
no votes, no means of checking directly or indirectly either executive or
legislature, no power over the purse. The only force at their command was the
vague strength of public opinion. The object of the Indian leaders, like that of
the Roman plebeians, was to give a definite form to that public opinion, —
focus it, as it is commonly expressed, and, secondly, to make that definitely
formulated opinion effective. In each case a new body was formed within the
State which served the purpose of formulating popular sentiment with a view to
bring pressure on the ruling caste and bring about a change in political
conditions. But while the Roman comitia became a new sovereign assembly in the
State, existing side by side with the already recognised organs of Government,
invested with full legislative powers, governing by means of plebiscites or
resolutions of the people and appointing magistrates of its own who were
empowered to exercise a check on every action, legislative, executive or fiscal
of the Government, the Congress has remained from beginning to end a nullity.
The difference lay partly in the conditions, partly in the means employed.
The originators of the Congress had undoubtedly before them an object
very similar to that of their Roman prototypes.
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The
Congress has sometimes been described as His Majesty's permanent Opposition; but
the aim of the originators was to make it something less futile than a mere
meeting of powerless critics; they certainly hoped that the plebiscites or
resolutions of the Congress would eventually come to have a sovereign force and
translate themselves almost automatically into laws. But they took no sufficient
notice of the immense difference in the conditions of a struggle for popular
rights which is introduced by the foreign character of the ruling caste. There
can always be an accommodation between the contending factions or classes within
the same nationality, even though the accommodation may not come till after a
severe and even violent struggle, but when the ruling caste is a caste of
foreigners, it is unlikely to give up its powers, on any lesser compulsion than
the alternative of extinction and will often prefer extinction to surrender.
Even when the Congress leaders discovered that the bureaucracy were implacable
and irreconcilable, they did not lay their hands on the right source of
strength. The bureaucracy in India is in itself weak and powerless; it subsists
greatly by the acquiescence and support of the people, partly by the existence
behind it of the strength of the British Empire. The Congress leaders saw only
the second source of its strength and sought to cut it off by depriving the
bureaucracy of the moral support of the British public. Their initial
miscalculation pursued them. They forgot that the British justice to which they
appealed was foreign justice, the justice of alien to alien, of self-satisfied
and arrogant masters to discontented dependents with whom they have no bonds of
blood, culture, religion or social life. Justice might be on their side, but
nature and self-interest were against them. Therefore they failed.
The real strength of their position lay in the other source of
bureaucratic security, the acquiescence and support of the people. As at Rome,
so in India the ruling caste cannot last for a moment except by this aid and
acquiescence of the plebeian mass and when the plebeian leaders found their
rulers deaf to the opinions and loudly-expressed feelings of the oppressed
populace, they discovered an infallible weapon, a brahmāstra of peaceful
political struggle, the weapon of secession. They gave the patricians notice
that they would cease to give their aid and acquies-
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cence
to the patrician rule and would form a new city over against Rome. In India, by
force of a similar situation, we rediscovered this weapon of secession. For
boycott is nothing but this secession; we threaten to secede industrially,
educationally, politically, to refuse our aid and acquiescence to the
maintenance of British exploitation and British education and British
administration in India, and build ourselves a new city, a State within the
State, by creating our own industries, our own schools and colleges, our own
instruments of justice and protection, our own network of public, executive and
administrative bodies throughout the realm. Only while it was enough for the
Romans to threaten, we have to carry out our threat before the weapon can be
effective, because our ruling caste, being foreign, will certainly refuse to recognise the Congress as a sovereign body whether existing side by side with
the present organs of Government or replacing them until it has such a position
as an actual fact; they will recognise only the realised aspiration, not the
distant possibility. The party of peaceful secession of thoroughgoing passive
resistance does not forget that besides the support and acquiescence of the
people the bureaucracy have another source of strength in the military force of
the British Empire. They are often accused of forgetting it, but they realise it
fully, only they also realise that this weapon of secession, of boycott and
self-help, is the only chance which yet remained of a peaceful solution of the
problem, — and they are willing to make full use of that chance.
The question of the function of the Congress hinges upon this acceptance
or rejection of this weapon. Whatever be the aim of the Congress, whether it be
Swaraj or Colonial Self-government or administrative reform, it cannot be
brought about by inoperative resolutions, it can only be brought about by
pressure; and the only means of pressure in our hands is the threat or the
practice of boycott or secession. If the function of the Congress is merely to
focus public opinion, it need do nothing but pass resolutions and a few slight
changes of procedure will be sufficient. But if its function is to pass
effective resolutions, if it is not only to focus public opinion but to collect
and centralise national strength, it will have to use the weapon of secession to
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organise
a State within the State, and for that purpose the body will have not only to be
readjusted but gradually reconstructed.
Sleeping
Sirkar and Waking People
In
commenting on the helplessness of the frontier Hindus, the Afridi raids and the
callous indifference of the British authorities, the Punjabee reports the
conversation between the old Chowdhury of a raided village and a high officer of
the district. "Were you awake or asleep when the raiders came in?"
asked the belated Heaven-born. "Sir," was the old man's reply,
"we were all asleep, for we thought our great Sirkar was wide awake. Had we
known the Sirkar had gone to sleep, we would have, in that case, taken care to
keep awake." The reply carried with it a lesson which lies at the very root
of all stable government. The king is king because he tries to please his
people; he rules not by right of strength and power which are given to him by
God to help him in his duties, but by service,
—
because he gives protection, because he
deals justice, because he helps his people in their wants and in their sorrows.
That is the ideal on which kingship is based, and when the ruler wilfully falls
short of the ideal, he is punished first by demoralisation, last, by loss of
the strength and power which are not his but delegated. The British are in India
because they had a certain mission to perform; but the condition of their tenure
was justice, protection and sympathy, and if their rule has lasted for these
hundred years, it was because some of them tried to satisfy the condition.
Unfortunately for them, they allowed commercial greed to overcome their kingly
instincts and the punishment of demoralisation has come upon them in full
measure. Their sympathy exists only in Mr. John Morley's stock of liberal cant
phrases, their justice is no longer believed in and their protection is now
following the other virtues. Protection is vested in a corrupt and oppressive
police of which the ruler of a great Province does not feel ashamed to be
greeted as the friend and protector. Protection takes the form of making Afridi
raids an excuse for military practice on the frontier and then quietly allowing
the raids to continue. The other kingly qualities, pro-
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vident
wisdom, calm courage, the instinct for the right action and the right moment are
already decayed. Only the power and the strength remain and that will disappear
when the people are compelled to feel their own strength. The strength of God in
the people has slumbered because they "thought that the great Sirkar was
awake". But they find, like the old Punjabi that the Sirkar is asleep and
it is time for them to awake. Self-protection, not the protection of military
exercises in the frontier; self-protection, not the curse of a police enquiry
— when this ideal wakes in the heart of the people, what will become of mere
power and strength which has no office left but selfishness and self-aggrandisement?
How long will it be before it is withdrawn as the strength of Arjuna was
withdrawn when Krishna went from him; as the strength of Ravana was withdrawn
when Rama beheld the Power of God protecting the Rakshasa in her arms, and
prayed to the Mother?
The
Madras Standard has undoubtedly hit the right nail on the head when it
derives the Tinnevelly disturbances from the establishment of the Swadeshi Steam
Navigation Company and the attempt to throw difficulties in the way of its
success. The struggle generated an acute feeling on both sides and when the
commercial war extended itself and the people took sides with Indian labour
against British capital in the affair of the Coral Mills, the patience of the
English officials gave way and they rushed to the help of their mercantile
caste-fellows, misusing the sacred seal of justice and the strong arm of power
as instruments to maintain their trade supremacy. This unjust and unwarrantable
action has been responsible for the riots and the corpses of dead men lying with
their gaping wounds uncared for in Tinnevelly streets, — uncared for but not
forgotten in the book of divine reckoning. Nations as well as individuals are
subject to the law of karma, and in the present political and industrial
revolt British rule in India is paying for the commercial rapacity which
impelled it to prefer trade returns to justice and kingly duty and
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use
its political power to turn India from a land of fabulous wealth into a nation
of starving millions. The payment has only just begun
—
for these karmic debts are usually repaid
with compound interest.
Bande Mataram,
March 23, 1908
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