SWARAJ ON THE PLATFORM AND IN THE PRESS.
Before proceeding to describe the methods by which Indian unrest has
been fomented, and to study as far as possible its psychology, it may be
well to set forth succinctly the political purpose to which it is
directed, as far as there is any unity of direction. One of the chief
difficulties one encounters in attempting to define its aims is the
vagueness that generally characterizes the pronouncements of Indian
politicians. There is, indeed, one section that makes no disguise either
of its aspirations or of the way in which it proposes to secure their
fulfilment. Its doctrines are frankly revolutionary, and it openly
preaches propaganda by deed--i.e., by armed revolt, if and when it
becomes practicable, and, in the meantime, by assassination, dynamite
outrages, dacoities, and all the other methods of terrorism dear to
anarchists all over the world. But that section is not very numerous,
nor would it in itself be very dangerous, if it did not exercise so
fatal a fascination upon the immature mind of youth. The real difficulty
begins when one comes to that much larger section of "advanced"
politicians who are scarcely less bitterly opposed to the maintenance of
British rule, but, either from prudential motives or lest they should
prematurely alarm and alienate the representatives of what is called
"moderate" opinion, shrink from the violent assertion of India's claim
to complete political independence and, whilst helping to create the
atmosphere that breeds outrages, profess to deprecate them.
The difficulty is further enhanced by the reluctance of many of the
"moderates" to break with their "advanced" friends by proclaiming, once
and for all, their own conviction that within no measurable time can
India in her own interests afford to forgo the guarantees of internal
peace and order and external security which the British _Raj_ alone can
afford. Hence the desire on both sides to find some common denominator
in a nebulous formula which each can interpret as to time and manner
according to its own desires and aims. That formula seems to have been
discovered in the term _Swaraj_, or self-rule, which, when
euphemistically translated into Colonial self-government for India,
offers the additional advantage of presenting the political aspirations
of Indian "Nationalism" in the form least likely to alarm Englishmen,
especially those who do not care or wish to look below the surface and
whose sympathies are readily won by any catchword that appeals to
sentimental Liberalism. Now if _Swaraj_, or Colonial self-government,
represents the _minimum_ that will satisfy Indian Nationalists, it is
important to know exactly what in their view it really means.
Fortunately on this point we have some _data_ of indisputable authority.
They are furnished in the speeches of an "advanced" leader, who does not
rank amongst the revolutionary extremists, though his refusal to give
evidence in the trial of a seditious newspaper with which he had been
connected brought him in 1907 within the scope of the Indian Criminal
Code. Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, a high-caste Hindu and a man of great
intellectual force and high character, has not only received a Western
education, but has travelled a great deal in Europe and in America, and
is almost as much at home in London as in Calcutta. A little more than
three years ago he delivered in Madras a series of lectures on the "New
Spirit," which have been republished in many editions and may be
regarded as the most authoritative programme of "advanced" political
thought in India. What adds greatly to the significance of those
speeches is that Mr. Pal borrowed their keynote from the Presidential
address delivered in the preceding year by the veteran leader of the
"moderates," Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, at the annual Session of the Indian
National Congress. The rights of India, Mr. Naoroji had said, "can be
comprised in one word--self-government or _Swaraj_, like that of the
United Kingdom or the Colonies." It was reserved for Mr. Pal to define
precisely how such _Swaraj_ could be peacefully obtained and what it
must ultimately lead to. He began by brushing away the notion that any
political concessions compatible with the present dependency of India
upon Great Britain could help India to _Swaraj_. I will quote his own
words, which already foreshadowed the contemptuous reception given by
"advanced" politicians to the reforms embodied in last year's Indian
Councils Act:--
You may get a High Court judgeship here, membership
of the Legislative Council there, possibly an Executive
Membership of the Council. Or do you want an expansion
of the Legislative Councils? Do you want that a few Indians
shall sit as your representatives in the House of Commons?
Do you want a large number of Indians in the Civil Service?
Let us see whether 50, 100, 200, or 300 civilians will make
the Government our own.... The whole Civil Service
might be Indian, but the Civil servants have to carry out
orders--they cannot direct, they cannot dictate the policy.
One swallow does not make the summer. One civilian,
100 or 1,000 civilians in the service of the British Government
will not make that Government Indian. There are traditions,
there are laws, there are policies to which every civilian, be
he black or brown or white, must submit, and as long as
these traditions have not been altered, as long as these principles
have not been amended, as long as that policy has not
been radically changed, the supplanting of European by
Indian agency will not make for self-government in this
country.
Nor is it from the British Government that Mr. Pal looks for, or would
accept, _Swaraj_:--
If the Government were to come and tell me to-day "Take
_Swaraj" I would say thank you for the gift, but I will not
have that which I cannot acquire by my own hand....
Our programme is that we shall so work in the country,
so combine the resources of the people, so organize the forces
of the nation, so develop the instincts of freedom in the community,
that by this means we shall--_shall_ in the imperative--compel
the submission to our will of any power that may set
itself against us.
Equally definite is Mr. Pal as to the methods by which _Swaraj_ is to be
made "imperative." They consist of _Swadeshi_ in the economic domain,
i.e., the encouragement of native industries reinforced by the boycott
of imported goods which will kill British commerce and, in the political
domain, passive resistance reinforced by the boycott of Government
service.
They say:--Can you boycott all the Government offices?
Whoever said that we would? Whoever said that there
would not be found a single Indian to serve the Government
or the European community here? But what we can do is this.
We can make the Government impossible without entirely
making it impossible for them to find people to serve them.
The administration may be made impossible in a variety of
ways. It is not actually that every deputy magistrate
should say: I won't serve in it. It is not that when one
man resigns nobody will be found to take his place. But
if you create this spirit in the country the Government service
will gradually imbibe this spirit, and a whole office may go
on strike. That does not put an end to the administration,
but it creates endless complications in the work of administration,
and if these complications are created in every
part of the country, the administration will have been brought
to a deadlock and made none the less impossible, for the
primary thing is the prestige of the Government and the
boycott strikes at the root of that prestige.... We
can reduce every Indian in Government service to the position
of a man who has fallen from the dignity of Indian citizenship....
No man shall receive social honours because he is a
Hakim or a Munsiff or a Huzur Sheristadar.... No law
can compel one to give a chair to a man who comes to his
house. He may give it to an ordinary shopkeeper; he may
refuse it to the Deputy Magistrate or the Subordinate Judge.
He may give his daughter in marriage to a poor beggar,
he may refuse her to the son of a Deputy Magistrate, because
it is absolutely within his rights, absolutely within legal
bounds.
Passive resistance is recognized as legitimate in England.
It is legitimate in theory even in India, and if it is made
illegal by new legislation, these laws will infringe on the primary
rights of personal freedom and will tread on dangerous
grounds. Therefore it seems to me that by means of the boycott
we shall be able to do the negative work that will have
to be done for the attainment of _Swaraj_. Positive work
will have to be done. Without positive training no self-government
will come to the boycotter. It will (come)
through the organization of our village life; of
our talukas and districts. Let our programme
include the setting up of machinery for popular administration,
and running parallel to, but independent of, the existing
administration of the Government.... In the Providence
of God we shall then be made rulers over many things.
This is our programme.
But Mr. Pal himself admits that even if this programme can be fulfilled,
this _Swaraj_, this absolute self-rule which he asks for, is
fundamentally incompatible with the maintenance of the British
connexion.
Is really self-government within the Empire a practicable
ideal? What would it mean? It would mean either no
real self-government for us or no real overlordship for England.
Would we be satisfied with the shadow of self-government?
If not, would England be satisfied with the shadow of overlordship?
In either case England would not be satisfied
with a shadowy overlordship, and we refuse to be satisfied
with a shadowy self-government. And therefore no compromise
is possible under such conditions between self-government
in India and the overlordship of England. If self-government
is conceded to us, what would be England's
position not only in India, but in the British Empire itself?
Self-government means the right of self-taxation; it means
the right of financial control; it means the right of the
people to impose protective and prohibitive tariffs on foreign
imports. The moment we have the right of self-taxation,
what shall we do? We shall not try to be engaged in this
uphill work of industrial boycott. But we shall do what
every nation has done. Under the circumstances in which
we live now, we shall impose a heavy prohibitive protective
tariff upon every inch of textile fabric from Manchester,
upon every blade of knife that comes from Leeds. We shall
refuse to grant admittance to a British soul into our territory.
We would not allow British capital to be engaged in
the development of Indian resources, as it is now engaged.
We would not grant any right to British capitalists to dig
up the mineral wealth of the land and carry it to their own
isles. We shall want foreign capital. But we shall apply
for foreign loans in the open market of the whole world,
guaranteeing the credit of the Indian Government, the
Indian nation, for the repayment of the loan, just as America
has done and is doing, just as Russia is doing now, just as
Japan has been doing of late. And England's commercial
interests would not be furthered in the way these are being
furthered now, under the conditions of popular self-government,
though it might be within the Empire. But what
would it mean within the Empire? It would mean that
England would have to enter into some arrangement with
us for some preferential tariff. England would have to come
to our markets on the conditions that we would impose
upon her for the purpose, if she wanted an open door in
India, and after a while, when we have developed our resources
a little and organized our industrial life, we would want the
open door not only to England, but to every part of the
British Empire. And do you think it is possible for a small
country like England with a handful of population, although
she might be enormously wealthy, to compete on fair and
equitable terms with a mighty continent like India, with
immense natural resources, with her teeming populations,
the soberest and most abstemious populations known to any
part of the world?
If we have really self-government within the Empire, if
we have the rights of freedom of the Empire as Australia
has, as Canada has, as England has to-day, if we, 300 millions
of people, have that freedom of the Empire, the Empire
would cease to be British. It would be the Indian Empire,
and the alliance between England and India would be absolutely
an unequal alliance. That would be, if we had really
self-government within the Empire, exactly the relation as
co-partners in a co-British or anti-British Empire of the
future; and if the day comes when England will be reduced
to the alternative of having us as an absolutely independent
people or a co-partner with her in the Empire, she would
prefer to have us, like the Japanese, as an ally and no longer
a co-partner, because we are bound to be the predominant
partner in this Imperial firm. Therefore no sane Englishman,
politician or publicist can ever contemplate seriously the
possibility of a self-governing India, like the self-governing
colonies, forming a vital and organic part of the British
Empire. Therefore it is that Lord Morley says that so
long as India remains under the control of Great Britain
the government of India must continue to be a personal
and absolute one. Therefore it seems to me that this ideal,
the practically attainable ideal of self-government within the
Empire, when we analyse it with care, when we study it in
the light of common human psychology, when we study
it in the light of our past experience of the racial characteristics
of the British people, when we study it in the light of past
British history in India and other parts of the world, when
we study and analyse this ideal of self-government within
the Empire, we find it is a far more impracticable thing to
attain than even our ideal _Swaraj_.
I have quoted Mr. Pal's utterances at some length, because they are the
fullest and the most frank exposition available of what lies beneath the
claim to Colonial self-government as it is understood by "advanced"
politicians. No one can deny the merciless logic with which he analyses
the inevitable results of _Swaraj_, and Englishmen may well be grateful
to him for having disclosed them so fearlessly. British sympathizers who
are reluctant to look behind a formula which commends itself to their
peculiar predilections, naturally dislike any reference to Mr. Pal's
interpretation of Indian "self-government," and would even impugn his
character in order the better to question his authority. But they cannot
get over the fact that in India, very few "moderate" politicians have
had the courage openly to repudiate his programmes, though many of them
realize its dangers, whilst the "extremists" want a much shorter cut to
the same goal. It is only by pledging itself to _Swaraj_ that the Indian
National Congress has been able to maintain a semblance of unity.
Moreover, if any doubt still lingers as to the inner meaning of _Swaraj_
and _Swadeshi_, and other kindred war-cries of Indian Nationalism, the
language of the Nationalist Press remains on record to complete our
enlightenment. However incompatible with the maintenance of British rule
may be the propositions set forth by Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, they contain
no incitement to violence, no virulent diatribes against Englishmen. It
is in the Press rather than on the platform that Indian politicians,
whether "extreme" or merely "advanced" are apt to let themselves go.
They write down to the level of their larger audiences. So little has
hitherto been done to enlighten public opinion at home as to the gravity
of the evil which the recent Indian Press law has at last, though very
tardily, done something to repress that many Englishmen are still
apparently disposed to regard that measure as an oppressive, or at least
dubious, concession to bureaucratic impatience of criticism none the
less healthy for being sometimes excessive.[1] The following quotations,
taken from vernacular papers before the new Press law was enacted, will
serve to show what Lord Morley meant when he said, "You may put picric
acid in the ink and the pen just as much as in any steel bomb," and
again, "It is said that these incendiary articles are 'mere froth.' Yes,
they are froth, but froth stained with bloodshed." Even when they
contain no definite incitement to murder, no direct exhortation to
revolt, they will show how systematically, how persistently the wells of
Indian public opinion have been poisoned for years past by those who
claim to represent the intelligence and enlightenment of modern India.
Only too graphically also do they illustrate one of the most
unpleasantly characteristic features of the literature of Indian
unrest--namely, its insidious appeals to the Hindu Scriptures and the
Hindu deities, and its deliberate vilification of everything English.
Calumny and abuse, combined with a wealth of sacred imagery, supply the
place of any serious process of reasoning such as is displayed in Mr.
Pal's programme with all its uncompromising hostility.
In the first place, a few specimens of the hatred which animates the
champions of _Swaraj_--of Indian independence, or, at least, of Colonial
self-government. The _Hind Swarajya_ is nothing if not plain-spoken:--
Englishmen! Who are Englishmen? They are the present
rulers of this country. But how did they become
our rulers? By throwing the noose of dependence round our
necks, by making us forget our old learning, by leading us
along the path of sin, by keeping us ignorant of the use of
arms.... Oh! my simple countrymen! By their
teaching adultery has entered our homes, and women have
begun to be led astray.... Alas! Has India's golden
land lost all her heroes? Are all eunuchs, timid and afraid,
forgetful of their duty, preferring to die a slow death of torture,
silent witnesses of the ruin of their country? Oh!
Indians, descended from a race of heroes! Why are you afraid
of Englishmen? They are not gods, but men like yourselves,
or, rather, monsters who have ravished your Sita-like beauty
[Sita, the spouse of Rama, was abducted by the demon
Ravana, and recovered with the help of the Monkey God
Hanuman and his army of monkeys]. If there be any Rama
amongst you, let him go forth to bring back your Sita. Raise
the banner of Swadesh, crying Victory to the Mother! Rescue
the truth and accomplish the good of India.
The Calcutta _Yugantar_ argues that "sedition has no meaning from the
Indian standpoint."
If the whole nation is inspired to throw off its yoke and
become independent, then in the eye of God and the eye of
Justice whose claim is more reasonable, the Indian's or the
Englishman's? The Indian has come to see that independence
is the panacea for all his evils. He will therefore even
swim in a sea of blood to reach his goal. The British
dominion over India is a gross myth. It is because the Indian
holds this myth in his bosom that his sufferings are so great
to-day. Long ago the Indian Rishis [inspired sages] preached
the destruction of falsehood and the triumph of truth. And
this foreign rule based on injustice is a gross falsehood. It
must be subverted and true _Swadeshi_ rule established. May
truth be victorious!
The _Gujarat_ hails the Hindu New Year which is coming "to take away the
curse of the foreigners":--
Oh noble land of the Aryas, thou who wert so great art like
a caged bird. Are thy powerful sons, Truth and Love, dead?
Has thy daughter Lakshmi plunged into the sea? or art
thou overwhelmed with grief because rogues and demons
have plundered thee? ["Demons" is the term usually affected
by Nationalist journalists when they refer to Englishmen.]
The _Shakti_ declares that:--
By whatever names--anarchists, extremists, or seditionists
--those may be called who are taking part in the movement
for independence, whatever efforts may be made to humiliate
and to crush them, however many patriots may be sent to
jail, or into exile, yet the spirit pervading the whole atmosphere
will never be checked, for the spirit is so strong and spontaneous
that it must clearly be directed by Divine Providence.
The following appears In the _Kal_ (Poona):--
We Aryans are no sheep. We have our own country, our
religion, our heroes, our statesmen, our soldiers. We do
not owe them to contact with the English. These things
are not new to us. When the ancestors of those who boast
to-day of their enterprise and their civilization were in a
disgusting state of barbarism, or rather centuries before then,
we were in full possession of all the ennobling qualities of
head and heart. This holy and hoary land of ours will surely
regain her position and be once more by her intrinsic lustre
the home of wealth, arts, and peace. A holy inspiration
is spreading, that people must sacrifice their lives in the
cause of what has once been determined to be their duty.
Heroes are springing up in our midst, though brutal imprisonment
reduce them to skeletons. Let us devote ourselves
to the service of the Mother. A man maddened by
devotion will do everything and anything to achieve his
ideal. His strength will be adamantine. Just as a widow
immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, let
us die for the Mother.
The _Dharma_ (Calcutta) emphasizes specially the religious side of the
movement:--
We are engaged in preaching religion and we are putting
our energy into this agitation, looking on it as the principal
part of our religion.... The present agitation, in its
initial stages, had a strong leaven of the spirit of Western
politics in it, but at present a clear consciousness of Aryan
greatness and a strong love and reverential spirit towards
the Motherland have transformed it into a shape in which
the religious element predominates. Politics is part of religion,
but it has to be cultivated in an Aryan way, in accordance
with the precepts of Aryan religion.
Nowhere is the cult of the "terrible goddess," worshipped under many
forms, but chiefly under those of Kali and Durga, more closely
associated with Indian unrest than in Bengal. Hence the frequency of the
appeals to her in the Bengal Press. The _Dacca Gazette_ welcomes the
festival of Durga with the following outburst:--
Indian brothers! There is no more time for lying asleep.
Behold, the Mother is coming. Oh Mother, the giver of all
good! Turn your eyes upon your degraded children. Mother,
they are now stricken with disease and sorrow. Oh Shyama,
the reliever of the three kinds of human afflictions, relieve
our sorrows. Come Mother, the destroyer of the demons,
and appear at the gates of Bengal.
The Barisal _Hitaishi_ refers also to the Durga festival, in which the
weird and often horrible and obscene rites of _Skakti_ worship not
infrequently play a conspicuous part:--
What have we learnt from the _Shakti Puja_? Sooner or
later this great _Puja_ will yield the desired results. When the
Hindus realize the true magnificence of the worship of the
Mother, they will be roused from the slumber of ages, and
the auspicious dawn of awakenment will light up the horizon.
You must acquire great power from the worship of the Mother.
Ganesh, the god who grants success, has his seat assigned
to him on the left of the great Mother. Why should you
despair of obtaining success? Look at Kartiki, the god
who is the chief commander of the armies of the gods, who
has stationed himself to the right of the Mother; he is
coming forward with his bow, to assist you against the demons
of sin, who stand in the way of your accomplishing that great
object, and as he is up in arms, who can resist?
The _Khulnavasi_ breaks out into poetry:--
For what sins, O Mother Durga, are thy sons thus dispirited
and their hearts crushed with injustice? The demons
are in the ascendant, and constantly triumphing over godliness.
Awake, Oh Mother, who tramplest on the demons!
Thy helpless sons, lean for want of food, worn out in the
struggle with the demons, are, struck with terror at the way
in which they are being ruled. Famine and plague and
disease are rife, and unrighteousness triumphs. Awake, Oh
Goddess Durga! I see the lightning flashing from the
point of thy bow, the world quaking at thy frowns, and
creation trembling under thy tread. Let a river of blood
flow, overwhelming the hearts of the demons.
The _Kalyani_ chides the Hindus for breaking their _Swadeshi_ vows to
Durga:--
You have made all sorts of vows to stick to Swadeshi,
but you are still using _bilati_ [foreign] salt, sugar, and
cloths which are polluted with the blood and fat of animals.
You swear by the Mother, and then you go and disobey her
and defile her temples. Do you know that it is owing to your
sins that Mother Durga has not come to accept your worship
in Bengal this year? In fact, she is heaving deep sighs of
sorrow--sighs which will bring a cataclysmic storm upon you.
If you still care to save your country from utter ruin, mend
your ways and keep your promises to the Mother.
In other provinces where other deities are more popular it is they who
are similarly called in aid. The _Bedari_ of Lahore, for instance,
reproduces from the Puranas the story of the tyrant Rajah Harnakath, who
brought death on himself at the hands of Vishnu for attempting to kill
his son Prahlad, whose offence was that he believed in God and
championed the cause of justice, in order to liken British statesmen and
Anglo-Indian officials to the wicked Rajah and the Indians to Prahlad.
As most British statesmen and their representatives abroad are the
enemies of liberty and justice and support slavery and oppression, the
fall of Great Britain is near at hand, and India will then pass into the
possession of her own sons.
The _Prem_ of Firozpur is inclined even to give Mr. Keir Hardie a niche
in the Hindu Pantheon. Its editor dreamt he was at a meeting in a free
and contented country. It was attended by some other Indians, and one of
them recited verses bewailing the condition of India, which was once a
heaven on earth and was now converted into a hell by its foreign rulers,
&c. After prayers had been recited for India, some heavenly beings
appeared, one of whom swore to do his best to relieve the sufferings of
Indians. The editor learnt on inquiry that the dream country was
England, the Indian speaker Bepin Chandra Pal, and the heavenly being
Mr. Keir Hardie!
The _Sahaik_, of Lahore, furnishes an apt illustration of the scurrilous
abuse and calumny which constitute one of the favourite weapons of Hindu
writers. Referring to the Malaria Conference held last year, it begins
by remarking that when a famine occurs--
relief works are opened only when the sufferings of the famine-stricken
become acute, and their supervision is entrusted
to a fat-salaried Englishman who swallows up half the collections,
which amount could have fed hundreds of the poor
people. Thus also with the forthcoming inquiries concerning
malarial fever, which is spreading all over the country.
Every Indian knows that, like the plague, this form of fever
is due to the poverty and consequent physical weakness
of the people. It is, however, to the mosquito that the
authorities went for the causes of the disease, just as to
the rats for the causes of plague. Different medicines
and instruments were invented for extirpating the insect,
doctors were also employed, and rewards paid for the writing
of books. In this way crores of rupees went into the pockets
of English shopkeepers and others. A trial is now being
given to quinine, and lakhs-worth sold to Indians, English
quinine manufacturers being thus enriched. Again a commission
is about to sit on the heights of Simla. The commissioners
will enjoy feasts and dances and drink brandy which
will cost poor natives lakhs of rupees, and afterwards they
will devise means to develop the trade in quinine or other
drugs.
The Ranjpur _Vartabaha_ writes that in the local charitable dispensary a
surgical operation was performed on a patient who died in two hours, and
that a similar operation on a pregnant woman resulted in her death. It
adds, with delicate sarcasm, that "the Chief Medical Officer should get
his salary increased." The idea that Englishmen deliberately want to
depopulate India is one that is sedulously propagated. Thus the _Jhang
Sial_ jeers at British "generosity" which has "converted India, one of
the richest countries in the world, into the land of the starving," and
British "wisdom" for wishing to "starve out the natives and reign over
empty brick and mortar buildings."
The _Akash_ (Delhi), referring to the pension granted to the widow of
Sir W. Curzon Wyllie, asks whether "the English can hold up their heads
after this. Even their widows are fed by India. A nation whose widows
are fed by another should never boast that it is an Imperial and
self-respecting nation."
In the same spirit another Punjab paper argues ironically from the
speech of a Mahomedan member of the Punjab Legislative Council in
condemnation of Dhingra that "all the white-skinned Europeans, including
the English rulers of India, must be the lowest born people in the
world, seeing that they are in the habit of killing natives every day."
No public servants who venture to discharge their duty loyally fare
worse at the hands of the Nationalist Press than Judges--especially if
they are Indians. Mr. Justice Davar was the Parsee Judge who sentenced
Tilak. The _Kesari_ declared that "he had already settled the sentence
in his own mind after a careful consideration of external
circumstances," and "had made himself the laughing-stock of the whole
world, like the meddlesome monkey in the fable who came to grief in
trying to pull out the peg 'from a half-sawed beam,'" Now the _Kesari_
was Tilak's own paper, and he was convicted on two seditious articles
that had appeared in its columns, but the _Kal_, another Poona sheet,
also maintained that everything was done on a prearranged plan. "There
is no sense in saying that Mr. Tilak was sentenced according to law.
There was mockery of justice, not justice." It added that "if the Hindus
are to suppose Mr. Tilak guilty because an English Court of Justice had
condemned him, Christians will have to forswear Christ because He was
crucified by a Roman Court." The _Karnatak Vaibhau_ recalled the story
of the notorious washerman who, by scandalizing Rama, had been
immortalized in the Ramayana. In the same way the names of Strachey--who
sentenced Tilak at his first trial in 1897--and Davar would be
remembered as long as history endured.
Quotations could be multiplied _ad infinitum_ and _ad nauseam_ from the
same papers--I have given only one from each--and from scores of others.
These will suffice to show what the freedom of the Press stood for in
India, in a country where there is an almost superstitious reverence
for, and faith in, the printed word, where the influence of the Press is
in proportion to the ignorance of the vast majority of its readers, and
where, unfortunately the more violent and scurrilous a newspaper
becomes, the more its popularity grows among the very classes that boast
of their education. They are by no means obscure papers, and some of
them, such as the _Kal_ the _Hind Swarajya_, and especially the
_Yugantar,_ which became at one time a real power in Bengal, achieved a
circulation hitherto unknown to the Indian Press. Can any Englishman,
however fervent his faith in liberty, regret that some at least of these
papers have now disappeared either as the result of prosecutions under
the Indian Criminal Code or from the operation of the new Press Law? The
mischief they have done still lives and will not be easily eradicated.
It is the fashion in certain quarters to reply:--"But look at the
Anglo-Indian newspapers, at the aggressive and contemptuous tone they
assume towards the natives of India, at the encouragement they
constantly give to racial hatred." Though I am not concerned to deny
that, in the columns of a few English organs, there may be occasional
lapses from good taste and right feeling, such sweeping charges against
the Anglo-Indian Press as a whole are absolutely grotesque, and its most
malevolent critics would be at a loss to quote anything, however
remotely, resembling the exhortations to hatred and violence which have
been the stock-in-trade not only of the most popular newspapers in the
vernaculars, but of some even of the leading newspapers published in
English, but edited and owned by Indians.
Even such extracts as I have given above from vernacular newspapers do
not by any means represent the lengths to which Indian "extremism" can
go. They represent merely the literature of unrest which has been openly
circulated in India. There is another and still more poisonous form
which is smuggled into India from abroad and surreptitiously circulated.