Bande Mataram

A Plague o' Both Your Houses

19-July-1907

The mellay between the Anglo-Indian Press and the Bengal Government over the dead body of Ganga Uriya shows no sign of diminishing in intensity. The indignation meeting which was foreshadowed by the Daily News is, we are told, to come off in the Town Hall. We can have no possible objection so long as our only share in this civil strife is to look on as interested spectators and shout "Charge, Fraser, charge! On, Digby, on!" according as our sympathies are enlisted on one side or the other by the merits of the case or our personal predilections or the gallant bearing of the high and mighty combatants. But it becomes a serious matter when we are asked to join in as allies of Anglo-India and ourselves take a share in the chances of battle. Some of our public men are deceiving themselves into the notion that we ought to make common cause with our natural enemies in this struggle. We should have thought that the reasons against this suicidal course were too plain to even need formulating; but then many of our countrymen allow the over-subtlety of their brains acting in a complete void of political experience to cheat them into strangely foolish courses.

The claim for Indian support to the Anglo-Indians in the Police libel case rests on the assumption that both communities are alike citizens of the same state with the same rights and disabilities on the whole and therefore equally interested in preserving those rights or removing those disabilities. If this were true, we should freely admit the desirability of supporting our fellow citizens against bureaucratic injustice. We do not indeed consider that the Daily News has been unjustly mulcted, if justice and law be identical and convertible terms. The judgment of Justice

Page 601

Chitty seems to us to be a fair and judicial application of the law on the subject to the particular case. But then a large part of the law in India is unjust, repressive and even monstrously severe, and it is to the interest of the people, if they cannot get these laws altered, at least to insist on seeing that they are administered not in the letter but under the modifying influence of the spirit of equity. The Anglo-Indians are therefore justified in challenging the action of the Government and the spirit in which the case has been engineered and decided. But unfortunately, this which would be the whole matter in a free country, is a very small part of it in India. What is it that Anglo-India is fighting for? What is it that we shall be helping to establish if we support her? It is not the independence of the Press, it is not the common rights of the citizen. Anglo-India is a determined enemy of the freedom of the Indian Press, she is always howling for the repression of free speech in matters political and for savage punishments to be meted out to Indian speakers and journalists; and even in non-political matters, if it were only Indian journals that were being prosecuted, she would not care a button or stir a finger to help them. Anglo-India is equally a determined opponent of the rights of citizens being extended to Indians, a consistent supporter of despotic and personal rule. And she is so because she has felt confident that the Press repression and administrative coercion she advocated would not be applied against her, rather she would herself be the power behind the throne. This confidence has received a rude and startling shock. Hence her rage and outcry, hence this howling of wolves for the blood of Sir Andrew Fraser. What Anglo-India is fighting for is the independence of the Anglo-Indian Press, and that only as part of the Anglo-Indian supremacy. She is fighting for her exemption from the laws and the administrative severity which she desires to see savagely applied to us. She is fighting against her being put on the same level as her Indian fellow-subjects. Is this an object in which we can support her? She wishes us to support her in vindicating her independence and supremacy which she will use in binding the chains tighter on ourselves. Are we going to be such idiots as to help her in her game?

Page 602

The spirit in which Anglo-India is fighting has hardly been concealed. The Daily News has frankly said that despotism is necessary as against the people of India, but that it is limited as against men of English birth by the ultimate supremacy of the English people of whom, it is hinted, the Anglo-Indians are a part. The question is not so easy as all that. The supreme power, the sovereignty, maker of the laws and above the laws, in India is the conjoint power of the British Parliament and the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, the latter receiving its authority from the former, but in practice exercising the whole sovereignty. Every sovereign, however, rests his sovereignty on some support in the country or outside it, and our sovereign the bureaucracy rests on the support, for extraordinary occasions, of the people of England and for ordinary purposes on that of the Indian police and army and the Anglo-Indian community. If the Indian police and military revolt or are unable to maintain the sovereign, a life and death crisis supervenes and the British army has to be called in to restore the balance. But ordinarily the Indian police and military and especially the former are of supreme importance, much more so than the unofficial Anglo-Indians who can only give a valuable but not indispensable moral support. In order therefore to secure and make the most of its chief support, the sovereign bureaucracy must itself support the police even against Anglo-India. But Anglo-India is not satisfied with this position; she puts a high value on her support and desires to share the sovereignty informally, through the Press and the Chambers of Commerce. This is a natural desire, but why should we help her to attain it? If the bureaucracy is supreme, we suffer, but if the weight of a triumphant and dominant Anglo-India is added to the weight of the bureaucracy we shall be oppressed indeed. Our business is to develop our own strength so that we may get the sovereignty for ourselves and not help either of our enemies to our own hurt. A plague o' both our houses is the only sensible attitude for us in the question between the Government and the Anglo-Indian community which the Police Libel Case has raised.

Page 603