Bande Mataram

Bureaucratic Alarms

30-July-1907

We would call the especial attention of our readers to the interesting communication from a Bhagalpur correspondent in another column. The exaggerated praise which was showered by the Bhagalpur vendors of loyalty on officials who had little or nothing to do with the actual fight with the plague, is an example of the value of these addresses. It is of course impossible for the address-mongers not to have known the real facts, but truth is not a commodity which one can profitably offer to the official dispensers of posts and titles. There are three kinds of composition which are exempted from the moral obligation of truthfulness, an epitaph, a loyalist address and an official statement. The description given of the work of the Ramakrishna Mission is admirable and touching, but such deeds we take as a matter of course and the least we can expect from those whose

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lives have been shaped by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; it would be surprising if those who have touched the hem of the garments of divinity should not themselves have something in them of the divine. But the most significant part of the communication is the remarkable statement about the alarm of the police at the work of the Mission. That alarm is a pregnant comment on the nature of the bureaucratic domination in India. We have more than once pointed out that an alien rule without roots in the soil cannot possibly tolerate the growth of any strength or manliness or nobility in the subject people, and must inevitably try to crush, curb or render ineffective any actual or possible centre of strength around which it is remotely possible for the national self-consciousness to crystallize. Hence the alarm and suspicion which a movement like the Ramakrishna Mission, utterly divorced from politics as it is, awakes in the rulers. "Here are men, here are people who can feel work and dare for their suffering countrymen. If this manhood should prove catching? if it should even grow common and turn into channels directly dangerous to me? if these men should win a commanding influence by their good works and use it against me?" Such are the guilty suspicions which the bureaucrat is tortured with, and no movement however innocent can escape them. So he first bids his police spy out and give him full reports of these dangerous characters, dangerous because of their very nobility, and by police oppression, surveillance and harassment he will, when he thinks necessary, try to grind down, wear away and gradually efface the thing he fears. In the beginning of the Yugantar case one young man who was questioned by the police wished to take upon himself the responsibility for the incriminating articles, but the inquiring officer told him, "Whatever you may say, you will not save Bhupen Dutt; the mere fact that he is Swami Vivekananda's brother will be enough to send him to prison."

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