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Facts and Opinions Volume I – Nov. 13, 1909 – Number 19 House-Searches
One wonders what would happen in any European country if the police as a recompense for their utter inefficiency and detective incapacity were armed with the power and allowed to use it freely of raiding the houses of respectable citizens, ransack the property of absent occupants and leaving it unsafe and unprotected, carrying off the business books of Presses, newspapers and other commercial concerns, the private letters of individuals, books publicly sold and procurable in every bookshop, violating the sanctity of correspondence between wife and husband, searching the persons of ladies of the house even though it be by female hands and the trampling on the sanctity of the home, the dignity of the person and the self-respect which every race worthy of existence holds to be dearer than life itself. And all this in spite of the fact, exemplified a hundred times over, that these inquisitions are wholly infructuous and can serve no purpose but harassment and exasperation. Usually the searches are undertaken, if we do not err, on the vague information of disreputable hirelings used as spies and informers, the statements of lying approvers eager to save their own skins by jeopardising innocent men and confessions to the police of arrested prisoners made either for the same purpose or dictated by a morbid vanity and light-headed braggadocio which invents facts and details in order to give dignity to petty crime and magnitude to small and foolish undertakings. The ludicrously irrelevant and useless nature of the articles which are the sole reward of this odious activity are its sufficient condemnation. Even if the widespread conspiracy dreamed of by authorities were a fact is it conceivable that respectable men, knowing the police to be on the alert, would risk liberty and property by storing bombs, looted ornaments or treasonous correspondence in their houses ? We are aware that the right of house-search is a necessary weapon in the
Page – 263 hands of authority for the suppression of crime, but it was never meant that this should be misused in order to supply the place of detective ability in the Police. House searches are unwarrantable unless the information on which they proceed is precise, reliable and highly probable. Judging from results not one of these epithets can be applied to the numerous searches which are now becoming a standing feature of life in Bengal. And if the search of the persons of ladies is to become another common feature of these domiciliary visits, we fear that the patience of a people jealously sensitive on these matters will not long endure the strain. Surely, the higher authorities ought to have sufficient good sense to draw inevitable conclusion from experience, perceive the limitations of this weapon and, if not for the possible evil consequence of creating still greater disaffection, yet for its barren inutility, renounce its excessive use.
There are two methods of progress, two impelling motives from which great changes and far-reaching reforms can be effected. One is the struggle of selfish interests between man and man, class and class, working out progress by ignoble strife, the forced compromise and convenient barter of the lower kind of politics. The other is the impulse and clash of mighty ideas, noble aspirations, great national or humanitarian aims, the things which inspire mankind in its upward march and create empires and nations. Both are freely used by the Master of the world in His careful providence and various economy. Often they are intermingled. But it cannot be doubted which is most healthful to the individual, the nation and the race. The social result worked out by a bitter and selfish struggle between upper class and lower class. Labour and Capital, is one thing; the harmony created by a mighty enthusiasm, such as led the aristocracy of Japan to lay down their exclusive privileges and, without reserve, call upon the masses to come up and share their high culture, their seats of might and their ennobling traditions, is quite another. Hindu society in the mofussil is now bitterly divided, and tends more and
Page – 264 more to be convulsed, by the new aspirations of the lower castes and the inability of the higher to decide how they will meet the demand. It is a bad sign that the action of both sides tends more and more to be selfish and narrow, political in the worst sense of the word. To barter help in Swadeshi or faithfulness to Hinduism for social privileges, or to bribe the masses to Swadeshism by petty and calculated concessions will tend neither to the genuineness of the Swadeshi sentiment, nor the strength of the national movement, nor the dignity and purity of our religion. It is an evil and foreign principle which has entered into our system, one of the many evil results of our disastrous contact with European civilisation at a time of national weakness and disintegration and our attempt to assimilate it without first vindicating our inner liberty and establishing ourselves as free agents. A great social revolution in this ancient society ought only to come as the fruit of a mighty national, humanitarian and religious impulse. The fault of the present state of things rests largely with the waning insight and statesmanship of the Brahmins. Formerly, they would not have been wanting either in concerted action, largeness of view or skilfulness of device. It was not their wont to stand still in an inert and impossible conservatism but to recognise circumstances and meet them without sacrificing the essence of their religion or the basic principles of Hindu society.
Recently some of the Bengali papers have contained detailed information of the feat of a Sadhu who buried himself for some days not, as in the well-known Punjab case, giving up his outward consciousness and entering into the Jada Samadhi or inert inner existence, but in full possession of his outer senses and conversing at times from his living tomb with visitors outside. The correspondent of the Bengalee tells us that the local people were dissatisfied with the Sadhu because the peculiar power he evinced was unattended by any moral elevation or true ascetic qualities. It is a general delusion that the power thus shown is a very great and almost supernatural Siddhi and ought to be in the possession
Page – 265 only of very highly developed souls. A false Indian tradition is partly responsible for the error; partly, it is due to the supreme ignorance of the deeper secrets of our being which belongs to the limited and self-satisfied materialistic Science of Europe now dominant in our midst. There is nothing wonderful in the feat of the Deoghar Sadhu, which was the result of the conquest of the breath, Pranayam, achieved by certain physical and mental processes and not necessarily dependent on moral or spiritual progress. The Kumbhak or retention of the Prana, dispensing with the process of inbreathing and outbreathing, is the final achievement of the process and the Kumbhak can, when thoroughly conquered, be continued for an indefinite period. Given the power of Kumbhak, it is obvious that one can stay under water or earth or in a room hermetically sealed for as long as the state continues. The power of stopping the heartbeats, dispensing with the process of breathing, and other of the outworks of Yogic knowledge and achievement are being slowly established in order to break down the exclusive pride of European Science and prepare for a new order of knowledge and a greater science to which its dogmatic narrowness is bitterly and scornfully opposed.
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