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Facts and Opinions Volume I – Oct. 2, 1909 – Number 15 The Rump Presidential Election
The Lahore Special Correspondent of the Rashtra Mat telegraphs to his paper a story of the proceedings at the Presidential election for the Rump Congress at Lahore, which, if correct, sheds a singular light on the proceedings of the valiant Three who are defending the bridge of conciliation and alliance between the bureaucracy and the Moderates which now goes by the name of the Indian National Congress. According to this correspondent, the account of Sir Pherozshah’s election cabled from Lahore is incorrect and garbled. What really happened was that eighteen gentlemen assembled at Lahore as the Reception Committee, of whom more than half were employees of Mr. Harkissen Lal’s various commercial ventures. This independent majority voted plump for Harkissen Lal’s candidate. Sir Pherozshah, but the rest were strong and firm for Sj. Surendranath Banerji. This revolt in the camp led to much anxiety and confusion and great efforts were made to bring back the insurgents to their allegiance, but in vain. If this account is correct, no criticism can be too strong for the misrepresentation which suppressed the facts of the election. Was it not circulated that Sir Pherozshah would not accept the Presidentship unless it were offered unanimously ? A strenuous attempt was made to save the face of the Dictator by representing in the Lahore cables that the nomination of Sj. Surendranath by the Bengal Convention Committee was only a suggestion in a private letter. But even then, what of Burma ? What of this remarkable division in the toy committee itself at Lahore ? We imagine that the Lion will put his dignity in his pocket or in his mane or any other hiding place that may be handy and accept the Presidentship; and if he does, we also imagine that he will roar discreetly at Lahore about the touching and unanimous confidence placed in him and the imperative voice of the whole country calling him to fill this great
Page – 215 and responsible position of a Rump President ! We have a suggestion for our highly esteemed Lion. Why not save his dignity and effect his object by appointing some lieutenant like Mr.Wacha as President ? In that case Sir Pherozshah would be as much President in fact as if he enjoyed the doubtful and mutilated honours of the Rump Presidentship.
The Powers of Europe are highly indignant at the tortures and mutilations practised by Mulai Hamid on his vanquished rival, El Roghi, and his captured adherents. There is no doubt that the savage outbreak of mediaeval and African savagery of which the Moorish Sultan has been guilty, is revolting and deprives him personally of all claim to sympathy; but European moral indignation in the matter seems to us to be out of place when we remember the tortures practised by American troops on Filipinos (to say nothing of the ghastly details of lynching in the Southern States,) and the unbridled atrocities of the European armies in China. Be that as it may, we come across a remarkable account, extracted in the Indian Daily News, of the stuff of which the Moorish people are made. The narrator is Belton, the Englishman who commanded the Sultan’s army and has resigned his post as a protest against the Sultan’s primitive method of treating political prisoners. Death and mutilation seem to have been the punishments inflicted. Belton narrates that twenty officers of El Roghi had their right hands cut off and then seared, according to the barbarous old surgical fashion, in a cauldron of boiling oil, to stop the bleeding. Not from one of these men, reports the English soldier with wonder, did there come, all the time, a single whimper. And he goes on to tell how one of them, after the mutilation, quietly walked over to the fire where the cauldron was boiling, and, while his stump was being plunged in the boiling liquid, lighted from the flame with the utmost serenity a cigarette he held in his hand. Whatever may be the present backwardness of the Moors and the averseness to light of their tribes, there is the stuff of a strong, warlike and princely nation in the
Page – 216 land which gave birth to these iron men. If ever the wave of Egyptian Neo-Islam and Mahomedan Nationalism sweeps across Morocco, Europe will have to reckon with no mean or contemptible people in the North West of Africa.
It is with a somewhat sardonic sense of humour that we in India, whom that eminently truthful diplomat, Lord Curzon, once had the boldness to lecture on our mendacity and the superior truth of the Occidental, have watched the vulgar squabble between Dr. Cook and Commander Peary about the discovery of the North Pole. Long ago, most of the romance and mystery had gone out of the search for the Pole. The quest, though still extremely difficult and even perilous to an incautious adventurer, had no longer the charm of those gigantic dangers which met and slew the old explorers. It was known besides that little was likely to reward the man who succeeded, and there was small chance of anything but ice and cold being discovered at the North Pole. What little of the interesting and poetic was left in the idea, has now gone out of it for ever, and only a sense of nausea is left behind, as the controversy develops and leaves one with a feeling that it would have been better if the goal of so many heroic sacrifices had been left undiscovered for all time, rather than that it should have been discovered in this way. The spectacle of two distinguished explorers, one, we suppose from his title, an American naval officer and the other a savant not unknown to fame, hurling at each other such epithets as liar and faker, accusing each other of vile and dishonourable conduct, advancing evidence that when examined melts into thin air, citing witnesses who, when questioned, give them the lie, while all Europe and America join and take sides in the disgusting wrangle, is one that ought to give pause to the blindest admirer of Western civilisation and believer in Western superiority. We certainly will not imitate the general run of European writers who, arguing smugly from temporary, local or individual circumstances, talk in the style of self-satisfied arrogance, of Oriental barbarity, Oriental trea-
Page – 217 chery and mendacity, Oriental unscrupulousness; we will not say that the continents of Europe and America are peopled by nations of highly civilised liars, impostors and fakers of evidence without any sense of truth, honour or dignity, although we have as good cause as any Western critic of Asia; but at any rate the legend of European superiority and the inferior morals of the Asiatic has, by this time, been so badly damaged that we think even the Englishman might think twice before it bases its opposition to national aspirations on the pretensions of the Pharisee. It is evident that we are as good as the Europeans; we think we are in most respects better; we certainly could not be worse.
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