Bande Mataram

A Curious Procedure

09-July-1907

That the bureaucracy and its instruments should look with disfavour on the Bande Mataram and dread the increase of its circulation, is only to be expected; but the means by which they combat its diffusion are sometimes of a peculiar, if characteristic kind. An up-country agent writes to us: "The police and the Government officials are obstructing us much. They are threatening the servants with punishment and imprisonment, if they sell the Bande Mataram paper, because the paper writes against Government. So the poor illiterate people of this place are afraid of selling them." We are often advised to keep our agitation within the limits of law; we would suggest that the bureaucrats might show us the example. If in order to prevent the growth of an infant Nationalism and its new-born exponent, an all-powerful bureaucracy is compelled to stoop to such petty persecution and intimidate people from a peaceful avocation by the illegal menaces of their underlings, the as yet weak and disorganized people of this country may surely be excused if they are sometimes carried beyond the precise limits of moral suasion in struggling against the most powerfully organized commerce in the world backed by the whole administrative strength, the police, magistracy and troops of the British Indian Empire. As to the paltry meanness of such obstructions, we say nothing; "melancholy meanness" and bureaucracy have always gone hand in hand in all climes and ages.

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