I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England to
placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up that I should explain
why from a staunch loyalist and co-operator I have become an
uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator. To the Court too I
should say why I plead guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection
towards the Government established by law in India. My public life
began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with
British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I
discovered that as a man and as an Indian I had no rights. On the
contrary I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was
an Indian.
But I was not baffled. I thought that this treatment of Indians was an
excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good. I gave
the Government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticising it
fully where I felt it was faulty but never wishing its destruction.
Consequently when the existence of the Empire was threatened in 1899 by
the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer
ambulance corps and served at several actions that took place for the
relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906 at the time of the Zulu revolt I
raised a stretcher-bearer party and served till the end of the
'rebellion'. On both these occasions I received medals and was even
mentioned in despatches. For my work in South Africa I was given by Lord
Hardinge a Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal. When the war broke out in 1914
between England and Germany I raised a volunteer ambulance corps in
London consisting of the then resident Indians in London, chiefly
students. Its work was acknowledged by the authorities to be valuable.
Lastly in India when a special appeal was made at the War Conference
in Delhi in 1917 by Lord Chelmsford for recruits, I struggled at the
cost of my health to raise a corps in Kheda and the response was being
made when the hostilities ceased and orders were received that no more
recruits were wanted. In all those efforts at service I was actuated by
the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status of
full equality in the Empire for my countrymen.
The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlalt Act a law designed to
rob the people of all real freedom. I felt called upon to lead an
intensive agitation against it. Then followed the Punjab horrors
beginning with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and culminating in
brawling orders, public floggings and other indescribable humiliations,
I discovered too that the plighted word of the Prime Minister to the
Mussalmans of India regarding the integrity of Turkey and the holy
places of Islam was not likely to be fulfilled. But in spite of the
foreboding and the grave warnings of friends, at the Amritsar Congress
in 1919 I fought for co-operation and working the Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister would redeem his promise to the
Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would be healed and that the
reforms inadequate and unsatisfactory though they were, marked a new era
of hope in the life of India. But all that hope was shattered. The
Khilafat promise was not to be redeemed. The Punjab crime was
white-washed and most culprits went not only unpunished but remained in
service and some continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue, and
in some cases were even rewarded. I saw too that not only did the
reforms not mark a change of heart, but they were only a method of
further draining India of her wealth and of prolonging her servitude.
I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had
made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and
economically. A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any
aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him. So much
is this the case that some of our best men consider that India must take
generations before she can achieve the Dominion status. She has become
so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the
British advent India spun and wove in her millions of cottages just the
supplement she needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources.
The cottage industry, so vital for India's existence, has been ruined by
incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English
witnesses. Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of
Indians are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that
their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work
they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage
are sucked from the masses. Little do they realise that the Government
established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation
of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the
evidence the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have
no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town dwellers of India
will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against
humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. The law itself in this
country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter. My unbiased,
examination of the Punjab Martial Law cases had led me to believe that
at least ninety-five per cent. of convictions were wholly bad. My
experience of political cases in India leads me to the conclusion that
in nine out of every ten the condemned men were totally innocent. Their
crime consisted in love of their country. In ninety-nine cases out of
hundred justice has been denied to Indians as against Europeans in the
Court of India. This is not an exaggerated picture. It is the experience
of almost every Indian who has had anything to do such cases. In my
opinion the administration of the law is thus prostituted consciously or
unconsciously for the benefit of the exploiter. The greatest misfortune
is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in the administration of
the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have
attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many English and Indian
officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best
systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow
progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of
terrorism and an organised display of force on the one hand and the
deprivation of all powers of retaliation of self-defence on the other
have emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation.
This awful habit has added to the ignorance and the self-deception of
the administrators. Section 124-A under which I am happily charged is
perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code
designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be
manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person
or thing one should be free to give the fullest expression to his
disaffection so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to
violence. But the section under which mere promotion of disaffection is
a crime. I have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know
that some of the most loved of India's patriots have been convicted
under it. I consider it a privilege therefore, to be charged under it.
I have endeavoured to give in their briefest outline the reasons for my
disaffection. I have no personal ill-will against any single
administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King's
person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a
Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any
previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she
ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to
have affection for the system. And it has been a precious privilege for
me to be able to write what I have in the various articles tendered in
evidence against me.
In fact I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by
showing in non-co-operation the way out of the unnatural state in which
both are living. In my humble opinion, non-co-operation with evil is as
much a duty as is co-operation with good. But in the past,
non-co-operation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil
doer. I am endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent
non-co-operation only multiplies evil and that as evil can only be
sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete
abstention from violence. Non-violent implies voluntary submission to
the penalty for non-co-operation with evil. I am here, therefore, to
invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can he
inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears
to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you,
the Judge and the Assessors, is either to resign your posts and thus
dissociate yourselves from evil if you feel that the law you are called
upon to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent, or to
inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and
the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this
country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.