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Freedom of Speech
THE
questions in Parliament about the change of the existing law and Mr. Morley's
answers seem to point to a coming repressive measure intended to suppress the
small amount of free speech still existing in India. The rights of free speech
and free meeting were once reckoned among the priceless blessings which British
rule had brought to India. Nowadays one can with difficulty put oneself back
into the frame of mind which made such a conception possible. The entire
dependence on British protection, the childlike faith in the machinery of
European civilisation, the inability to perceive facts or distinguish words from
realities, the facile contentment with
the liberties of the slave to which that conception testified, are
happily growing obsolete. They persist in the survivors of the old generation
and in those of the present generation who cannot open themselves to new ideas,
but are dead in the minds of those who will be the future people of India. In
the course of another fifty years men will look back to the times when such
ideas were possible, in the same spirit that the nineteenth century looked back
to the Middle Ages, as a period of absolute ignorance and darkness when the
national mind and consciousness were in a state of total eclipse. The blessings
of British rule have all been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The Pax
Britannica is now seen to be the cause of our loss of manliness and power of
self-defence, a peace of death and torpor, security to starve in, the ease of
the grave. British law has been found to be a fruitful source of demoralisation,
an engine to destroy ancient houses, beggar wealthy families and drain the poor
of their little competence. British education has denationalised the educated
community, laid waste the fertile soil of the Indian intellect, suppressed
originality and invention, created a gulf between the classes and the masses and
done its best to kill that spirituality which is the soul of India. The petty
privileges which British statecraft has thrown to us as morsels
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from
the rich repast of liberty, have pauperised us politically, preserved all that
was low, weak and dependent in our political temperament and discouraged the old
robust manhood of our forefathers. Every Municipal or District Board has been a
nursery of dependence and pampered slavery, and the right of public meeting and
freedom of the Press only served to complete this demoralisation, while at the
same time cheating us into the belief that we were free.
The ancient Romans had a class of slaves born in the family and pampered
in their childhood by their masters, who were called vernae and enjoyed a
peculiar position of mingled licence and subjection. They were allowed to speak
with the most unbounded licence, to abuse their masters, to play tricks
sometimes of a most
injurious character and were yet indulged
—
so long as the master was in a good humour;
let the master's temper turn sour or break into passion and the lash was called
into requisition. The freedom of speech enjoyed by us under the bureaucratic
rule has been precisely of this kind. It depended on the will of a despotic
administration, and at any moment it could be withdrawn or abridged, at any
moment the lash of the law could be brought down on the back of the critic. This
freedom of speech was worse than the Russian censorship; for in Russia the
editor laboured under no delusion, he knew that freedom of speech was not his,
and if he wrote against the administration, it was at his own risk; there was no
pretence, no dissimulation on either side. But our freedom of speech has
demoralised us, fostered an ignoble mixture of servility and licence, of
cringing and impudence, which are the very temperament of the slave. We were
extravagantly pleased with the slightest boons conceded to us and poured out our
feelings with fulsome gratitude, or we grew furious at favours withheld and
abused the withholders in the same key. Our public expressions were full of
evasions, falsehoods, flatteries of British rule coupled with venomous and
damaging attacks on that which in the same breath we lauded to the skies. A
habit of cowardly insincerity became ingrained in us, which was fatal to the
soundness of the heart, an insincerity which refused to be confined to our
relations with the rulers and pursued us into our relations with our own
countrymen. The same dry rot
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of
insincerity vitiated all our public action and even our private lives, making a
farce of our politics, a comedy of our social reform, and turning us from men
into masks. The strenuous attempt to live what we believed, which was the result
of the ancient Indian discipline, left the educated class altogether and a gulf
was placed between our practice and our professions, so that the heart of India
began to beat slower and slower and seemed likely to stop.
It was the proud privilege of the Nationalist Party to strike at the root
of this terrible evil. From the first outburst of the Swadeshi movement, their
speakers and writers decided to be no longer masks but men, to speak and write
the truth that was in their minds, the feeling that was in their hearts without
disguise, without equivocation, as freemen vindicating their freedom, — a
freedom not bestowed but inborn. The poison passed out of the national system
and the blood began to circulate freely in our veins. Once more we stood up as
men and not as gibbering spectres of a vanished humanity. The attitude of the Sandhya
and Yugantar, consistently maintained in the dock, stood for a
revival of Indian sincerity, truthfulness, manliness, fearlessness; it was the
resurgence of the Arya, the ideal of honour and quiet manhood which made our
forefathers great. But when the prosecutions failed to crush the papers for
which the martyrs offered themselves as a sacrifice, the cry was raised that
they were being sacrificed by designing men who kept themselves in the
background. The persistence of the same tone and the same writings showed that
those who maintained the spirit of the paper were untouched, and it was obvious
that only by putting them under lock and key, could the journal itself be
snuffed out. So the threat of a change in the law which would hunt out the real
culprits, has been persistently held before our eyes, and, if disregarded, may
be carried out. The threat is an empty one, because no change of law can find
out those whom the nation is determined to save, lest the light of truth be
prematurely put under eclipse. Only by the abrogation of all law, by an
arbitrary measure extinguishing the freedom of speech altogether can these
journals be snuffed out of being by the hand of Power. Such a measure may at any
moment be hurried through the Legislative
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Council,
and the fear of it troubles our Moderate friends and sometimes finds expression
in objurgations against our past indiscretions or our policy of protecting our
writers and contributors coupled with more or less bland invitations to commit
suicide so that their journals may survive. But the existence of one paper which
does not shrink from expression of the heart and mind of the nation is of a
higher value than that of many journals which fill their columns with
insincerities and platitudes. The freedom of speech which the Moderate Party are
so anxious to save from extinction is a badge of slavery, a poison to the
national health, a perpetuation of servitude, and it is better that it should be
extinguished than that the recovered freedom of a nation's soul should cease.
God will find out a way to spread the movement, even as it was found out in
Russia, if the bureaucracy are so ill-advised as to gag the Press. This voice is
abroad and what law shall prevail against it?
The
campaign of repression proceeds merrily in Madras. Srijuts Chidambaram Pillai
and Subramaniya Shiva are to be prosecuted for sedition, (we notice, by the way,
that Srijut Pillai was not allowed to see his Vakils in jail, a typical piece of
bureaucratic "justice") the Tuticorin lawyers are being bound down to
keep the peace, and "it is reported that instructions have been issued to
the Sub-Magistrate, Tinnevelly, to issue warrants for the arrest of persons
shouting 'Bande Mataram' within the Municipal limits of Tinnevelly and
Palancotta." The bureaucrats of Madras are profiting by lessons in
Russianism both from East Bengal and from the Punjab. Meanwhile the people crowd
round the jail gates and line the roads to get a glimpse of the faces of their
imprisoned leaders, and Chidambaram Pillai, agent of the Swadeshi Steam
Navigation Company, whose name yesterday was little known outside one corner of
Madras, is now a popular hero; his name will be a household word; his photograph
will hang on the walls of private houses as one of the family gods; and when he
comes out from the term of imprisonment which is
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now
a foregone conclusion, he will be a man of mighty influence and, where he swayed
thousands before, will sway millions of men throughout his native Presidency. It
is the old story, so old, so hackneyed, so certain in its dénouement that one
wonders the despotisms of the world do not get tired of playing it.
Bande Mataram,
March 26, 1908
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