|
The New Ideal
THE need of a great ideal was never more keenly felt than it is in India at the present day. Nowhere have so many weaknesses combined to stand in the way of a nation in the whole range of history. Nowhere have the rulers reduced their subjects to so complete, pervading and abject a material helplessness. When the Mogul ruled, he ruled as a soldier and a conqueror, in the pride of his strength, in the confidence of his invincible greatness, as the lord of the peoples by natural right of his imperial character and warlike strength and skill. He stooped to no meanness, hedged himself in with no army of spies, entered into no relations with foreign powers, but, grandiose and triumphant, sat on the throne of a continent like Indra on his heavenly seat, master of his world because there was none strong enough to dispute it with him. He trusted his subjects, gave them positions of power and responsibility, used their brain and arm to preserve his conquests and by the royalty of that trust and noble pride in his own ability to stand by his innate strength, was able to hold India for over a century until Aurangzebe forgot the Kuladharma of hi use and by distrust, tyranny and meanness lost for his descendants the splendid heritage of his forefathers. The present domination is a rule of shopkeepers who are at the same time bureaucrats, a combination of the worst possible qualities for imperial Government. The shopkeeper rules by deceit, the bureaucrat by the use of red tape. The shopkeeper by melancholy meanness alienates the subject population, the bureaucrat by soulless rigidity deprives the administration of life and human sympathy. The shopkeeper uses his position of authority to push his wares and fleece his subjects, the bureaucrat forgets his duty and loses his royal character in his mercantile greed. The shopkeeper becomes a pocket Machiavel, the bureaucrat a gigantic retail trader. By this confusion of dharmas, varnasankara is born in high places and the nation first and the rulers afterwards go to perdition.
Page-834 This is what has happened in India under the present regime. The bureaucracy have ruled in the spirit of a mercantile power, holding its position by aid of mercenaries, afraid of its subjects, with no confidence in its destiny, with no trust even in the mercenaries who support it, piling up gold with one hand, with the other holding a borrowed sword over the head of a fallen people. It has sought its strength not in the mission with which God had entrusted it, nor in the greatness of England, her mastery of the ocean, her pride of unconquered prowess, her just and sympathetic principle of government, but in the weakness of the people. The strength of England has been held as a threat in the background, not as a source of quiet and unostentatious self-confidence which enable the rulers to be generous as well as just. The liberal principles of English rule have been chanted as a sort of magic mantra to hypnotise the nation into willing subjection, not used as a living principle of government. What have been the real sources of bureaucratic strength? An Arms act, a corrupt and oppressive police, an army of spies, a mercenary military force officered by Englishmen, a people emasculated, kept ignorant, out of the world's life, poor, intimidated, abjectly under the thumb of the police constable or the provincial prefect. Such a principle of rule cannot endure. It contradicts the law of God and offends the reason of man; it is as unprofitable as it is selfish and heartless. The nation which has passed through a century of such a misgovernment must necessarily have degenerated. The bureaucracy has taken care to destroy every centre of strength not subservient to itself. A nation politically disorganised, a nation morally corrupted, intellectually pauperised, physically broken and stunted is the result of a hundred years of British rule, the account which England can give before God of the trust which He placed in her hands. The condition of the people is the one answer to all the songs of praise which the bureaucrats sing of their rule, which the people of England chorus with such a smug self-satisfaction and which even foreign peoples echo in the tune of admiration and praise. But for us the people who have suffered, the victims of the miserable misuse which bureaucrats have made of the noblest opportunity God ever gave to a nation, the song has no longer any charm, the mantra has lost its hypno-
Page-835 tic force, the spell has ceased to work. While we could we deceived ourselves, but we can deceive ourselves no longer. Pain is a terrible disillusioner and the pangs which had come upon us were those of approaching dissolution. It was at the last moment, when further delay would have meant death, that a higher than earthly physician administered through a proud viceroy the potent poison of Partition and saved the life of India. The treatment of the disease has been drastic and will continue to be drastic. There are those who dream of mild remedies, whose beautiful souls will not bear to think of the fierceness of strife, hatred or agony which a revolution implies; but strong poisons are the only salvation in desperate diseases and we fear that without these poisons India will not easily or ever recover from the fatal and consuming disease which has overtaken her. What will support her under the stress of the agony she will have to undergo? What strength will help her to shake off the weaknesses which have crowded in on her? How will she raise herself from the dust whom a thousand shackles bind down? Only the strength of a superhuman ideal, only the gigantic force of a superhuman will, only the vehemence of an effort which transcends all that man has done and approaches divinity. Where will she find that strength, that force, that vehemence? In herself. We have seen Ramamurti, the modern Bhimasen, lie motionless, resistant, with a superhuman force of will-power acting through the muscles while two carts loaded with men are driven over his body. India must undergo an ordeal of passive endurance far more terrible without relaxing a single fibre of her frame. We have seen Ramamurti break over his chest a strong iron chain tightened round his whole body and break it by the sheer force of will working through the body. India must work a similar deliverance for herself by the same inner force. It is not by strength of body that Ramamurti accomplishes his feats, for he is not stronger than many athletes who could never do what he does daily, but by faith and will. India has in herself a faith of superhuman virtue to accomplish miracles, to deliver herself out of irrefragable bondage, to bring God down upon earth. She has a secret of will power which no other nation possesses. All she needs to rouse in her that faith, that will, is an ideal which will
Page-836 induce her to make the effort. That ideal is now being preached by Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal in every speech he delivers and never has it been delivered with such beauty of expression, such a passion of earnestness and pathos, such a sublimity of feeling as at Uttarpara on Sunday when he addressed a meeting of the people in the compound of the Uttarpara Library. The ideal is that of humanity in God, of God in humanity, the ancient ideal of the sanātana dharma but applied, as it has never been applied before, to the problem of politics and the work of national revival. To realise that ideal, to impart it to the world is the mission of India. She has evolved a religion which embraces all that the heart, the brain, the practical faculty of man can desire but she has not yet applied it to the problems of modern politics. This therefore is the work which she has still to do before she can help humanity; the necessity of the mission is the justification for her resurgence, the great incentive of saving herself to save mankind is the native power which will give her the force, the strength, the vehemence which can alone enable her to realise her destiny. No lesser ideal will help her through the stress of the terrible ordeal which she will in a few years be called to face. No hope less pure will save her from the demoralisation which follows revolutionary strife, the growth of passions, a violent selfishness, sanguinary hatred, insufferable licences, the disruption of moralities, the resurgence of the tiger in man which a great revolution is apt to foster. Srijut Bepin Chandra speaks under an inspiration which he himself is unable to resist. The public wish to hear him on Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott, National Education — the old subjects of his unparalleled eloquence, and he himself may desire to speak on them, but the voice of a prophet is not his own to speak the thing he will, but another's to speak the thing he must. India needed the gospel of Swaraj, Swadeshi, Boycott and National Education to nerve her to her first effort, but now that she is drawing nearer to the valley of the shadow of Death she needs a still mightier inspiration, a still more enthusiastic and all-conquering faith. The people have not yet understood, but the power to understand is in them, and if any voice can awake that power, it is Bepin Chandra's. Bande Mataram, April 7, 1908
Page-837 The "Indu" and the Dhulia Conference
Non-Party Lines
The Reception Committee of the Dhulia Conference has fallen under the ban of the Indu Prakash because it has dared to attempt a compromise in which the views of the "Extremists" have not been completely ignored. The only "compromise" which Moderates are prepared to accept is one in which Nationalism is ignored and the Nationalists make a complete surrender. It is strange to find these irreconcilable fanatics of separatism posing as men of sobriety and moderation, these ignorers of every principle of constitutional action posing as constitutionalists. The framing of two or three resolutions of self-help and the repetition of three of the Calcutta Congress resolutions is described by the organ of Sir Pherozshah as the capture of the Conference by Extremism. The Dhulia Reception Committee have framed fifteen resolutions of which the first three are the Congress resolutions on Self-Government, Swadeshi and National Education; the fourth is a resolution for an united Congress on the lines settled at the Calcutta Congress; the fifth is for village organisation and arbitration; the ninth advocates physical culture. These six resolutions are the only ones which have the slightest nationalist tinge, and it must be remembered that the first is a Moderate and not a Nationalist resolution. The rest are petitionary resolutions of the ancient type, the last of them compromising a respectable-sized omnibus full of petitions. To our mind, it seems that the Dhulia Nationalists have compromised with a vengeance and if ever there was a Conference framed on non-party lines, this deserves the description. But our excellent old Moonshine will not allow anything to be non-party which is not entirely Moderate.
Prescriptive Rights
The first offence of the Conference is that it has not said ditto to the suggestion of the Bombay. Presidency Association to postpone the Conference till October by which time the Mode-
Page-838 rates could have made all arrangements for holding the Congress according to their will and pleasure and would have pleaded that it was too late to make any change. The Association has by prescription been organising Conferences, says the Indu, and so to ignore its opinion is Extremism. The idea of an Association in Bombay city having the prescriptive right to organise Conferences and dictate to the Reception Committee, is one of those staggering assumptions which the Bombay Moderate brain puts forth with an appallingly cheerful defiance of common sense, logic and constitutional principles unintelligible to the ordinary man. Might we be allowed to suggest that the early part of the year is now generally accepted as the proper time for a Provincial Conference and that the Bombay Association has no more right to be obeyed in this or any other matter than, say, the Moderate Convention?
The Calcutta Resolutions
The Indu proceeds to put forward the remarkable argument that the Conference could have been an united success only if all contentious matter relating to Congress politics had been scrupulously omitted, considering that almost all matters which come before the Congress now involve more or less the contentions as to principles which divide the Congress, this amounts to saying that an united Conference is impossible, — a confession of the country's political incapacity which is redolent of Sir Pherozshah Mehta. The next complaint is that the Moderates did not try to force their creed on the Conference, while the Extremists have unblushingly pushed their hobby of the Calcutta positions. We invite the attention of the country to the practical admission that the Moderates are opposed to the Calcutta resolutions, an admission which may be advantageously compared with the repeated Moderate protestations that there was never any intention of drawing back from the Calcutta positions. Our answer to the contention is that the Calcutta resolutions are in the nature of a compromise by which both parties with their programmes are given scope in the Congress and are
Page-839 therefore not of a party character but the sole possible basis for united work; the creed on the other hand is avowedly of a party character and intended to exclude Nationalists from the Congress. It was for this reason that the Moderates and Nationalists at Dhulia, being sincerely desirous of union, accepted the former and avoided the latter. This is a fact which the Bombay Moderates find it convenient to misrepresent, but it has been clearly recognised both at Pabna and Dhulia; — the Calcutta resolutions are not "Extremist" positions, but a compromise between the parties; as such the Nationalists hold to them and not as a hobby or as their "creed".
Ignoring and Defying
This resolution, says the Indu, is an attempt "to ignore and defy the Convention Committee (and commit the Conference to the lines of the Bodas Ghose Committee) the unconstitutionalism of which we exposed the other day." We have unfortunately missed this no doubt luminous exposure, but we are curious to know by what principle of constitutionalism the Convention Committee enjoys any authority over a Provincial Conference for it to defy, or holds any position which it is not at perfect liberty to ignore. What part has a Convention which was avowedly a party Convention excluding over six hundred Congress delegates, in the constitution of the Congress? The Provinces are at liberty to ignore both Committees equally, for neither has at present any constitutional authority or position, if the Congress is alive. If the Congress is dead, there can be no talk of constitution; at most the Convention and the Conference are co-legators and divide the property. The question for a Provincial Conference is not between one committee and another, but between union and division, the death of the Congress or its resuscitation.
The Calcutta Compromise
Finally, the Indu after sneering at the Calcutta resolutions as an
Page-840 Extremist creed, itself charges the Reception Committee with disloyalty to the Calcutta position, because they have adopted the Self-Government resolution without taking on a rider about Legislative Councils and other "steps" to Self-Government. We know it is the position of the Mehta clique that even Self-Government is a far off, almost impracticable dream and that we should in the meanwhile be satisfied with small reforms. The Calcutta Congress fixed Colonial Self-Government as a practical demand, a thing which should be extended to India, but it did not as the Indu pretends, fix a far off date for the extension, only knowing that its demand, though perfectly and immediately practical (otherwise the expression "should be extended" has no meaning) would not be granted, it demanded certain reforms as steps towards Colonial Self-Government. The Dhulia Conference does precisely the same though the "steps" are asked for in separate resolutions. The Calcutta Congress, as a compromise, combined petitions with self-help, a resolution for National Education with a prayer for the extension of Government education. The Dhulia Conference does precisely the same. The Indu discovers the inconsistency of this position with the air of Newton discovering the law of gravitation. Inconsistent it is, but the Calcutta resolutions are not an essay in logic, they are a compromise between two entirely different programmes, of which the fittest will survive. We have noticed the arguments of the Indu at length because it is necessary for the country to realise the sort of shufflings by which it is sought to justify the policy of "divide and serve" on which the Bombay clique has set its heart. If we can save the Congress, we will, but if it is broken, this time at least the responsibility shall rest on the right shoulders. Bande Mataram, April 8, 1908
Page-841 |