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About Unity
OUR esteemed contemporary, the Bengalee, has recently been reading us eloquent sermons on the uses and advantages of unity. We confess we cannot follow our contemporary's argument. We gave utterance to the very obvious and we thought, undeniable sentiment that Unity is a means and not an end in itself. But the Bengalee asserts, and it has now got the strong authority of Mr. Myron Phelps to back it, that unity is an end in itself and not a means, but it seems to us that neither our contemporary nor his authority have anything but their ipse dixit to prove their assertion. We have great respect for Mr. Myron Phelps who is evidently a sincere well-wisher of our nation, but it does seem to us that he is forgetting the history of his own country when he asserts that unity is an end in itself. The end his countrymen aimed at during their quarrel with England was certainly not unity but independence, and to the attainment of that end there was a strong loyalist minority opposed and unfriendly. Even among the American Liberals the democratic Extremists were a minority while the greater number would have been glad to combine submission to the English crown with American liberty. It was the fiery vehemence and energy of the Extremists aided by the intensity of popular indignation which hurried the Moderate majority into the Boycott and the same force which plunged them half against their will into war with the suzerain and into ultimate democracy. The same thing has happened in India, for there is not the slightest doubt that the Moderates have been carried at the fiery chariot-wheels of Extremism into the perpetuation of the Boycott and the angry struggle between people and bureaucracy from which they would have gladly withdrawn and more than once made motions to withdraw, if left to themselves. We insist that the end of national action is the acquisition and maintenance of national independence and greatness, and unity is only a means to that end. Moreover, political unity which is an essential condition of inde-
Page-615 pendence differs from unity of ideas and methods which are not essential. Political unity can be prepared by men of all parts of the country joining in a common struggle for the creation of a single national government, but the other unity is only possible if the whole nation is inspired by one spirit and one idea. The Bengalee thinks there is substantially such a unity between, say, Sir Pherozshah Mehta, Srijut Surendranath Banerji and Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal; but we have our doubts. Surendranath wants Colonial Self-government, Pherozshah would be hugely pleased with something infinitely less; Bepin Chandra wants absolute autonomy. Where is the unity? If Colonial Self-government for India, that political monstrosity, means anything, it means a hampered and provincial autonomy; the Nationalists strive for a complete and international autonomy, and if our contemporary thinks that is a small or merely academic difference, we cannot compliment him on his knowledge either of history or politics. We will admit however for the sake of argument that our aim is identical, though in one case frankly expressed and in the other hidden under a. veil, but that our methods are different. How then can there be that unity of action for which the Bengalee so sonorously but hazily pleads? Unity of action along with and unaffected by difference of methods is a kind of unity which we do not understand, and we rather suspect it is a chimera from the land of confused ideas very much on a par with the "Colonial Self-government for India" of our friends or Mr. Morley's wonderful reconciliation of a free Press and Platform with an autocratic government. If one party has petitioning for its method and another rejects it for passive resistance, how can there be unity of action? Or if one party insists on association with and opposition to the bureaucracy (another twynatured and self-contradictory figment from dreamland) and the other repudiates the association, how can there be united action? If united action is at all possible in Bengal, it is because the Moderate Party in Bengal has ceased to be wagged by its loyalist tail and is now following the lead of its small but advanced head which is in sympathy with many of the Nationalist ideas though it is not prepared to carry them to their complete and logical end with the thoroughness and audacity which true Nationalism requires.
Page-616 The Moderates have given up for the present the policy of mendicancy, they have given in their adherence to the programme of passive resistance though only in part. So far therefore as the methods of the two parties agree, united action is possible, though difference of fundamental ideas and difference of spirit make it impossible for that concord to be real and whole-hearted, even if personal misunderstandings and dislikes did not stand in the way. But it is only in Bengal that even so much unity is possible, though there is a tendency in that direction in Madras. In the rest of India Moderatism is in its public professions and actions frankly loyalist and is quite prepared to eject the Nationalists from the Congress so far as it can be done with safety to itself. The Nagpur affair and the action of the All-India Congress Committee prove that beyond doubt. Where then is the basis of unity? For that matter, the Bengal Moderates while they sing dulcetly to us the praises of Unity, have invariably joined heartily in Loyalist attempts to suppress the voice of Nationalism in the Congress. They were, we are convinced, consenting parties to the unconstitutional political trickery by which Sir Pherozshah transferred the meeting place of the Congress to one of his own pocket boroughs. Again we ask, on what ground can we meet for heartily united action? We have our work to do and cannot wait for ever on sweet words and professions used as a veil for secret — well, shall we say, diplomacy? We are ourselves anxious to carry the support of our Moderate countrymen with us in our struggles, but their friendship must first become less of the "I love you and kick you downstairs" kind than it is at present. Sincerity has great healing properties and without it professions are a poor salve for old sores. Bande Mataram, December 2, 1907
Our contemporary, the Punjabee, has in its last issue a balanced and carefully impartial comment on the Congress trouble and the action of the All-India Congress Committee, or rather of Sir Pherozshah Mehta in the exercise of his role of Congress Lion
Page-617 and Dictator. There is one remark of our contemporary's, however, which seems to us unfair to the Nationalist Party and with which therefore we feel bound to join issue. He censures the Nagpur Nationalists for forcing on a division in the camp over a personal question like the election of Mr. Tilak as President. The question of the Presidentship is, in his opinion, not only a purely personal issue but also extremely trivial, as the President has no function of importance and a democratic body like the Congress ought not to make a vital issue out of a nomination to a purely honorific post. We have already given our reasons for originally raising and still persisting in this question and we again assert that we are not swayed in the slightest degree by personal questions. It will not raise Mr. Tilak in our eyes if he becomes President, it will not lower him in our eyes if he is never nominated. To a certain extent the Presidentship is a position of honour, and so far as it is so, a man of ability and reputation, an acknowledged leader and moulder of opinion, who has suffered courageously for the country is entitled to that honour. But that is not the position we take. The Presidentship is in our view much more a position of responsibility and service. We cannot agree that it is of no importance who is chosen to fill the chair, even if the Congress be a democratic body, which, as at present constituted and conducted, it is not. In no democratic assembly is the choice of the President, whether he be a virtual ruler, as in America, or only a Moderator, as in France, a question of no importance. Our Congress is not as yet either a deliberative or a legislative body, but even so the Presidentship is a function of considerable importance. The President is the embodiment to all observers of the dignity and personality of that year's session and as such his address, though it may not be binding on the whole body, is an utterance of great weight and is or ought to be largely indicative of the national temper and policy. The Congress shows the importance it attaches to his address by devoting the first day to it, an arrangement which, if the address has no weight or value as a manifesto of Congress views and policy, is an absurd and reprehensible waste of time. Besides, the President is a moderator of debate in the Subjects Committee, and of rule and decorum in the public sitting. When divided views are
Page-618 before the national gathering it depends on him whether all sides shall get a fair hearing and a chance of impressing their views on the Congress. We raised the question of Mr. Tilak's Presidentship at a time when Swadeshi was the question before the country partly in order that the most powerful Swadeshi worker in the country might pronounce for Swadeshi from the President's chair, and the Congress by electing him might show its sympathy with the movement. We made no secret of our object at the time and it was certainly not of a personal nature. But there was a second point at issue which was in the minds of all though it was never formulated, and this too was a point of principle, viz. that the Congress should not in any of its actions be influenced by the desire of bureaucratic favour or the fear of bureaucratic displeasure, that it should declare its complete independence as a body which looked to the people alone and not to the bureaucracy. This could not be better done than by the election of a great man and leader who was not a persona grata with the bureaucrats and had undergone sentence of imprisonment for the crime of patriotism. That is the real difficulty in the way of the Moderates' accepting Mr. Tilak and it is equally the reason why the Nationalists refuse to give up their point. An apparently personal question often conceals one of essential principle, even when the person is not as in this case a great patriot and leader. It was not for profligate John Wilkes that the people of Middlesex fought in the eighteenth century but for the liberty of the Press which was attacked in his person. We too fight not for honour to be done to a man however great and noble, but for the liberty of the Congress from all shadow of bureaucratic influence and its new creation as an independent, popular and democratic assembly.
The progress of democracy in the East will, if signs can be trusted, receive a powerful impetus from the creation of the Persian Parliament. In Persia the people are proving themselves too powerful for both the Crown and the Church and rapidly taking
Page-619 all power into their hands. When the second of Asia's Parliaments came into being, the European critics wrote, patronisingly or scornfully as the mood took them, about this new departure of these funny Asiatics who will not understand that it is only Europeans who are capable of self-government or fit for democracy and that God made Asia only to be civilised, exploited and ruled by white men, and they were liberal of prophecies that the Shah would re-establish absolutism by the sword before the world was many months older, or that Persia would be mis-governed by fanatical Mullahs. The prophets were evidently very much out of it, for the reverse has happened. The Shah is evidently being overwhelmed in the tide of democracy and the clergy who took the first step towards revolution find themselves, like the French noblesse after a similar step, already in the position of reactionaries threatened by the flood they set going. Democracy is not only the natural bent of Mahomedanism, but it is obviously the only hope of Persia where there is no wise and powerful aristocracy to lead and organise the people as in Japan. Only the fire of the democratic idea and the resurgence of the whole people, can save Persia from the European menace. Democracy is not merely the dream of "the young and ignorant" in Bengal, it is a rising force throughout Asia. Sir Harvey Adamson will have it that democracy is neither conceivable nor desired in India. Well, well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and we will see by practical experiment whether you are right or we. Bande Mataram, December 3, 1907
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