Bande Mataram

Unofficial Commissions

21-February-1908

The self-appointed Unofficial Commission consisting of Srijuts Bhupendranath Bose and U. N. Mukherji has issued its report and findings on the Police hooliganism at Mymensingh. The report is interesting reading and we appreciate the trouble taken by these gentlemen out of purely patriotic motives, but when all is done we are compelled to ask, Cui bono? What is the utility of these so-called commissions, whom do they benefit and how do they help either to mend such illegal outrages as have been committed or to prevent their recurrence in future? As commissions they are open to the objection that two eminent gentlemen travelling to Mymensingh to interview the victims of outrage, do not form a Commission, since there is no recognized or unrecognized power in the country which has commissioned

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them and is prepared to take action on their report. As a judicial proceeding, their enquiry is open to the objection that the findings are given on the unsifted statements of one side only. As a collection of facts from the personal statements of sufferers and eyewitnesses, the report is indeed invaluable. But still what purpose does it serve? The country did not need this report to believe the statements of our own countrymen in preference to those of the Police or the officials, and in all other ways the action of these two public-spirited gentlemen is entirely infructuous. It is the old idea of placing our grievances—before whom? The tribunal of British justice is discredited and the tribunal of Indian patriotism not yet erected. Meanwhile outrages of the Mymensingh type are likely to remain a standing feature of the present struggle between darkness and light, liberty and absolutism, until Democracy arises and in no uncertain language forbids them.