Bande Mataram

Loyalty and Disloyalty in East Bengal

30-August-1906

The Englishman and those who are evidently anxious to set the machinery of relentless state prosecutions against the leaders of the present national movement in this province, need not take so much trouble to prove that there is considerable disaffection and disloyalty in East Bengal which ought at once to be put down with a strong hand. Our contemporary must be far more simple-minded than what one should expect him to be, judging both from his general education and experience and his position as an intelligent observer and critic of current affairs, if he ever thought that there could be any real affection and loyalty to an alien despotism, such as the present Government in this country undoubtedly is, in the minds of the subject populations in India. Lord Curzon once declared that though differing in colour and culture, the Indians were as much human as the Britishers, and had the same sentiments and susceptibilities that the British people had. If the Englishman and his friends believe in this common humanity of the Indian, they have simply to place themselves mentally in the position of their "native fellow-subjects", to realise the kind of affection and loyalty for the present Government that can ever be felt by the people of this country. Indeed, loyalty as a feeling of personal love and regard for the sovereign is an extinct virtue in civilisation, and, if it is not found in countries where the sovereign belongs to the people, and lives and stands among them as the head of their State and the fountain of all social honour, and where the people always participate in his glory, his magnificence and his wealth,—each according to his status and qualification,—how much more rare must it be in a country like India whose sovereign belongs

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to a distant country and an alien race, who professes an alien religion, who is not related to the people by any ties of tradition or past historic associations, and in the glories and prerogatives of whose throne, as well as in the wealth and magnificence of whose empire, these people have neither lot nor part. To believe the barest possibility of any true loyalty in India is really to take the Indians to be very much less than human. But, in truth, nobody ever honestly believed in it. Loyalty has ever been a mere convenient tie in this country—convenient to the ruler because the reputation for profound loyalty of the Indian people keeps foreign enemies away; convenient to the ruled because like charity it covereth a multitude of political sins. But in truth no one ever really believed in this much-proclaimed virtue. No Englishman ever honestly believed in the truth of it. No Indian ever cherished it honestly himself. Both the rulers and the ruled have been playing at blind man's buff all these years with this great civic virtue, each seeking to make some political capital out of it.

That the British Government in India never set a two-pence value on the loyalty of their Indian subjects,—though they are always anxious to proclaim it from the housetops, as a magnificent charm to keep away the evil-eye—is proved by the entire history of their past transactions with us. The Arms Act surely does not prove England's faith in India's loyalty. The Frenchman, the German, the American, nay, even the Negro and the Hottentot,—indeed every foreigner can possess arms and bear them in India without a licence; the man who belongs to the country and who is most interested in its prosperity and peace, alone cannot do so. The systematic exclusion of the people of the land, however qualified they may be, from all positions of exceptional trust and responsibility in what ought, by the law of God and nature alike, to be their own Government, surely does not prove that English statesmen ever honestly believed in the allegiance of the Indian people to their rule. The methods of state-regulated education, which carefully eschew every training or text book or instruction that is calculated to quicken any genuine love of freedom or any noble patriotism in the pupils; the extreme anxiety of the authorities to train the youths of this

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country in habits of gentleness and subordination, while in their own country every form of manliness and even rowdyism as long as it does not strike against the very soul of social and civic orders are not only tolerated, but frequently encouraged by the leaders of public opinion and the custodians of public morals; the denial of the commonest right of free citizenship,—the right of free participation in public meetings having for their object the reform of the Administration,—to the commonest of public servants; the crusade against every form of patriotic efforts on the part of the people, such as are calculated to inspire them with devotion to their nation, all these go distinctly to prove at what value the much proclaimed loyalty of the people of this country is really rated by their foreign masters. The fact really is that loyalty in the sense in which the term is usually used,—either in the old sense of loving attachment to the person or throne of the sovereign, or even in the new and higher sense of devotion to the State which reveals and realises the highest civic ideals and aspirations of the subjects,—cannot naturally exist or grow in a country that is subject to the domination of another. No Englishman therefore honestly believes in it in India, however much he may be anxious to conjure it up in times of trouble or difficulty as a saving magic working for his safety and salvation. Loyalty, in the general acceptance of the term, has been a mere myth in British India; and the Englishman need not be at so much pains to disprove the presence of a thing in East Bengal that had never as yet existed in any part of the country subject to British rule. Disloyalty is want of loyalty, and there cannot be anywhere an absence of a thing,—as a new fact,—where that thing had never existed before.

But if loyalty is not possible in India in its present condition of servitude, what then is the secret of that unquestioning obedience to the authority of the present alien Government in the country, which alone makes it easy and possible for them to rule so vast a population with such slender means? The answer is plain and obvious: it is not affection, neither is it disaffection, both of which are active sentiments, but mere indifference, mere listlessness, the fatuous fatalism of the Hindu and the

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Mahomedan populations of India that keeps them so easily under British subjection. Not loyalty, not allegiance, but mere passive acquiescence,—that is the word which sums up the real attitude of the Indian people towards their foreign master and the outlandish civic order they have established in the country. This acquiescence is due to a general belief—now rapidly being undermined and destroyed by the open excesses and repressions of recent administrations—in the benevolence of the British despotism, itself the result of a strange hypnotic spell that British politicians and statesmen of the earlier generations had cast over the people. If by loyalty is meant this passive acquiescence to the existing civic order in the country, there is still considerable loyalty in the country, though the events of the past five or six years have done much to disturb even this passive sentiment in the people.

But there has always been another kind of loyalty also in this country, and that species of loyalty exists still among us, both in East Bengal and West Bengal, though it has been subjected during the last eight or nine months to a strain which would kill it altogether in any other country, and most of all in that country to which the Englishman himself belongs, and this kind of loyalty will last as long as the Government and those whose views the Englishman represents, do not themselves destroy it with their own hand. Loyalty in the radical sense of the term, derived from lex—law, and meaning obedience to law—has always been a cordial characteristic of our people; and in this sense people have always been loyal in this country. This loyalty—this extreme regard for law of the Indian population—has been the strongest bulwark of the present foreign despotism in this country. We are still loyal, as we have been in the past, in the sense of law-abiding. Had we not been loyal in this, the truest sense of the term, the history of British administration in every part of India would have to be very differently written indeed. In fact the Englishman ought not to forget that it is this extreme loyalty of the people that saved the situation created in Barisal and elsewhere by the lawless excesses of the executive Government during the last nine or ten months. Had our people

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been less law-abiding than they are, the whole country would have long ago been completely given over to riots and mob-rule, which it would tax the entire strength and resources of the Government to grapple with and conquer. The lawless excesses of the Executive and the Police in East Bengal during the last eight or nine months, are matters of common knowledge; and the Englishman knows it full well that there is no other country in the world where such wanton oppression and injustice would have been so quietly borne by the people as these have been borne in the New Province. To attribute this to the cowardice of the people would be an act of fatal folly on the part of the Government or their advisers. East Bengal, at least, has never been noted for such cowardice. It is not fear, but self-restraint due to considerations of larger and higher interests, and the command of their leaders that kept East Bengal so quiet under all these enormities during the last nine or ten months. But this loyalty also seems apparently to be giving way now, for it is useless to conceal the fact that a grim determination has gradually grown among the people to no longer suffer any illegal excesses, in the way they have been suffered so long. But even in this new spirit of resistance in the people there is no lack of regard for law, for this new determination means not to outrage but to protect the honour and dignity of the law itself, when both are openly outraged by those whose duty it is to protect them. If this be disloyalty, we freely admit this disloyalty exists, and is growing to great proportions in every part of the country; and the threats of the Englishman or the setting of the sedition-law in motion will not kill, but only increase this disloyalty the more.