After the great war it is difficult, to point out a single nation that
is happy; but this has come out of the war, that there is not a single
nation outside India, that is not either free or striving to be free.
It is said that we, too, are on the road to freedom, that it is better
to be on the certain though slow course of gradual unfoldment of freedom
than to take the troubled and dangerous path of revolution whether
peaceful or violent, and that the new Reforms are a half-way house
to freedom.
The new constitution granted to India keeps all the military forces,
both in the direction and in the financial control, entirely outside the
scope of responsibility to the people of India. What does this mean? It
means that the revenues of India are spent away on what the nation does
not want. But after the mid-Eastern complications and the fresh Asiatic
additions to British Imperial spheres of action. This Indian military
servitude is a clear danger to national interests.
The new constitution gives no scope for retrenchment and therefore no
scope for measures of social reform except by fresh taxation, the heavy
burden of which on the poor will outweigh all the advantages of any
reforms. It maintains all the existing foreign services, and the cost of
the administrative machinery high as it already is, is further
increased.
The reformed constitution keeps all the fundamental liberties of person,
property, press, and association completely under bureaucratic control.
All those laws which give to the irresponsible officers of the Executive
Government of India absolute powers to override the popular will, are
still unrepealed. In spite of the tragic price paid in the Punjab for
demonstrating the danger of unrestrained power in the hands of a foreign
bureaucracy and the inhumanity of spirit by which tyranny in a panic
will seek to save itself, we stand just where we were before, at the
mercy of the Executive in respect of all our fundamental liberties.
Not only is Despotism intact in the Law, but unparalleled crimes and
cruelties against the people have been encouraged and even after
boastful admissions and clearest proofs, left unpunished. The spirit of
unrepentant cruelty has thus been allowed to permeate the whole
administration.