Bande Mataram

Government by Panic

13-May-1907

One does not know precisely how to take the extraordinary accounts of the charges against Lala Lajpat Rai and the panic among Europeans which have been reaching us from the North. We used to think the English deficient in imagination, but the vivid and fluorescent powers of fancy which this panic has revealed, puts all our preconceived ideas to rout. Not only have the Government given vent to an outburst of poetical fancy beyond all parallel but they have insisted on staging and enacting their dramatic creation in real life. Sir Denzil Ibbetson reminds us of that great aesthetic realist, Nero, who made slaves and prisoners enact the parts of classic tragedy and had them actually stabbed or crucified or torn by real wild beasts to embody his mimic imaginations. Sir Denzil has conceived a splendid melodramatic tragedy called The Rebellion Forestalled or British Empire Saved and the Punjab Bar have been obliged to play the leading parts. The conception is admirable. An inoffensive pleader sitting among his briefs, to all appearance harmless, unmilitary, civilian, but in reality a masked Tamerlane, Napoleon or Shivaji, full of dark and tremendous schemes; a disarmed and helpless mob of workmen and peasants who are really a dangerous, well-equipped and well-organised army of a hundred thousand Jats capable of overthrowing the British Empire; a widespread and diabolically complex plot on the bursting point, Lahore Fort to be seized and, we presume, Lajpat to be crowned the first Punjabi Emperor of India,—when suddenly, lo and behold! the glorified and splendiferous figure of Sir Denzil Ibbetson appears, hurling lightnings and clothed in majesty, catches up the arch-conspirator in his mighty hand and a motor-car

Page 400

tosses him over the continent to Rangoon or the Andamans, envelops the rebel province in a cloud of cavalry and siege-guns and the British Empire—and incidentally Lahore Fort—is saved. A most admirably dramatic denouement! And to add the right Shakespearian touch of grotesque humour, we are told that this phantom army foreshadows its attack by throwing stones at the gate of Lahore Fort, whose feelings must have been deeply hurt by such contumelious behaviour—either as a sort of chivalrous warning to the garrison or as a symbolic rehearsal of the intended storm!

Are these the imaginations of sane men, or the diseased and distorted phantasmagoria which presents itself to bemused intellects in a Chinese opium-den? If it had been a little more plausible, we might have thought it a Machiavellian invention of Anglo-Indian statesmen to justify their instituting a Russian policy of repression. But a lawyer militarist leading an army of Indian peasants, Lahore Fort to be stormed by an unarmed mob with their fists—or with stones, the British Empire to be overthrown by this extraordinary army—the whole is a wild nightmare of panic-stricken brains. We are told that the Europeans were so panic-stricken, many of them passed the night on the railway platform, ready for flight. The Civil and Military Gazette also solemnly affirms that Lajpat Rai was an arch-rebel with a hundred thousand men under his orders and hints pretty plainly that the prompt action of Sir Denzil Ibbetson saved the British from a rebellion. And these are the men who think that they can go on ruling a nation of three hundred millions by mere repression and the terror of the sword, after the moral bases of their supremacy are gone! The great strong successful despots of the world were not men who started at every shadow and took every bush in the darkness for an enemy. Government by panic has never yet been a success and we doubt whether it will be any more successful in India than elsewhere. But here we find panic initiating a policy, bewilderment approving of it and alarm sanctioning it. Not only the Punjab Government, not only the "level-headed" Lord Minto, but even the austere and philosophical Mr. Morley has committed himself to government

Page 401

by panic. It is for us to take full advantage of the mistakes of our political adversaries.