A Treacherous Stab   

                            WE HAVE seldom read anything more disgraceful, more unpatriotic, more opposed to all ideas of decency, than the sneering and ill-natured attack on Lala Lajpatrai which the Tribune has chosen this particular moment to deliver. It is a time when all over India men of all shades of opinion, except the worshippers of the bureaucracy, are putting aside their differences with this modest and self-sacrificing patriot in order to express their unanimous fellow-feeling with him in his hour of trial. It is precisely this moment that the Tribune chooses for its stab at Lala Lajpatrai who is no longer there to speak for himself. If this unseemly conduct is dictated by a desire to dissociate itself from the exiled patriot in order to save its own skin, it can only be characterised as the basest cowardice. If by envy, party spirit and secret jubilation at the removal of a powerful Nationalist, it is indecent and unpatriotic. In ordinary times the Tribune was free to criticise and abuse Lajpatrai and nobody would have cared, but when a man is suffering for his country, no one pretending to be a patriot has a right to vent on him either private spleen or a dislike on public grounds. We have our own differences with Mr. Gokhale and Srijut Surendranath Banerji, but were either of these leaders to become the objects of official persecution, we should consider ourselves eternally disgraced if we remembered anything but the one fact that he was suffering for the sake of our common Motherland. The sneers of the Tribune would not in themselves be worth noticing; it is as an example of the utter want of true patriotism that it calls for condemnation.

Bande Mataram, May 14, 1907

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