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Look on this Picture, then on That
BRITAIN, the benevolent, Britain, the mother of Parliaments, Britain, the champion of liberty, Britain, the deliverer of the slave, – such was the sanctified and legendary figure which we have been trained to keep before our eyes from the earliest years of our childhood. Our minds imbued through and through with the colours of that legend, we cherished a faith in the justice and benevolence of Britain more profound, more implicit, more a very part of our beings than the faith of the Christian in Christ or of the Mahomedan in his Prophet. Officials might be oppressive, Viceroys and Lieutenant-Governors reactionary, the Secretary of State obdurate, Parliament indifferent, the British public careless, but our faith was not to be shaken. If Anglo-India was unkind, we wooed the British people in India itself. If the British people failed us, we said that it was because the Conservatives were in power. If a Liberal Secretary showed himself no less obdurate, we set it down to his personal failings and confidently awaited justice from a Liberal Government in which he should have no part. If the most Radical of Radical Secretaries condemned us to age-long subjection to a paternal and absolute bureaucracy, we whispered to the people, ‘Wait, wait, Britain, the true Britain, the generous, the benevolent, the lover, the giver of freedom, is only sleeping; she shall awake again and we shall see her angelic and transfigured beauty’. Where precisely was this Britain we believed in, no man could say, but we would not give up our faith. Credo quia impossible; -- I believe because it is impossible, had become our political creed. Other countries might be selfish, violent, greedy, tyrannical, unjust; in other countries politics might be a continual readjustment of conflicting interests and clashing strengths. But Britain, the Britain of our dreams, was guided only by the light of truth and justice and reason; high ideals, noble impulses, liberal instincts, these were the sole guides of her political actions, — by the lustre of these
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fires she guided her mighty steps through an admiring and worshipping world.
That was the dream; and so deeply had it lodged in our imaginations that not
only the professed Loyalists, the men of moderation, but even the leading
Nationalists, those branded as Extremists, could not altogether shake off its
influence. Only recently Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal at Rajamundry told his
hearers that those who thought the British Government would crush us if we
tried by passive resistance to make administration impossible, held too low an
opinion of British character and British civilisation. We fancy Srijut Bepin
Chandra watching from the south the welter of official anarchy in East Bengal
and the Punjab must have modified to a certain extent his trust in the
bearing-power of British high-mindedness. We ourselves, though we had our own
views about British character and civilisation, have allowed ourselves to
speculate whether it was not just possible that the British bureaucracy might be
sufficiently tender of their reputation to avoid extreme, violent and
arbitrary measures.
Page-324 the feeling of an intolerable burden, and when a few fearless men brought to the people the message of self-help, the good tidings that in their own hands lay their own salvation, the men of the Punjab found again their ancient spirit and determined to stand upright in the strength of their manhood. They committed no act of violence, they broke no law. They confined themselves to sending in a statement of their grievances to the Government and passively abstaining from the use of the Canal water so that the bureaucracy might not benefit by an iniquitous tax. The rulers of India know well that if passive resistance is permitted, the artificial fabric of bureaucratic despotism will fall down like the walls of Jericho before mere sound, with the mere breath of a people’s revolution. To save the situation, they resorted to the usual device of stifling the voice of the people into silence. On a frivolous pretext they struck at the Punjabee. The only result was that the calm resolution of the people received its first tinge of fierce indignation. Then the bureaucracy hurriedly resolved to lop off the tall heads — the policy of the tyrant Tarquin which is always the resort of men without judgment or statesmanship. Lala Hansraj, one of the most revered and beloved of the Punjab leaders, a man grown gray in the quiet and selfless service of his country, Ajit Singh, the nationalist orator, and other men of repute and leading were publicly threatened with prosecution and imprisonment as criminals and an enquiry begun with great pomp and circumstance. Then followed a phenomenon unprecedented, we think, in recent Indian history. For the first time the man in the workshop and the man in the street have risen in revolt for purely political reasons in anger at an attack on purely political leaders. The distinction, which Anglo-India has striven to draw between the ‘Babu class’ and the people, has in the Punjab ceased to exist. It was probably the panic at this alarming phenomenon which hurried the Punjab Government into an extraordinary coup d‘état, also unprecedented in recent Indian history. The result is that we have a strange companion picture to that dream of a benevolent and angelic Britain, — a city of unarmed men terrorised by the military, the leaders of the people hurried from their daily avocations to prison, siege-guns pointed at the town, police rifles ready to fire on any group of five men or more to be seen
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in the streets, bail refused to respectable pleaders and barristers from sheer
terror of their influence. Look on this picture, then on that! Bande Mataram, May 6, 1907
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