Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

37

The Bureaucracy

The Anglo-Indian bureaucrats were tearing their hair. What was the vernacular press doing? To add insult to injury here was the Bande Mataram merrily using a language that was 'a direct incentive to violence and lawlessness.' But they felt helpless. The Government shared the view of the editor of The Friend of India (The Statesman) who complained that the editorials were too diabolically clever, crammed full of sedition between the lines, but legally unattackable because of the skill of the language.

"This agitation," wrote Sri Aurobindo in the Bande Mataram of 4 September 1906, a few days after he had actually joined the paper, "is not an agitation merely against [Bengal's] Partition.... The attainment of absolute national autonomy — it is this alone that will settle down this movement." Indeed, "Sri Aurobindo's first preoccupation was to declare openly for complete and absolute independence as the aim of political action in India and to insist on this persistently in the pages of the journal; he was the first politician in India who had the courage to do this in public and he was immediately successful."

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Let us repeat for posterity. that Sri Aurobindo was the first Indian to declare Independence as India's aim. It was neither Mr. M. K. Gandhi nor Jawaharlal Nehru, as some people have begun to claim.

For the record, it was again Sri Aurobindo who first set in motion the doctrine of passive resistance, or non-cooperation with the colonial Governement. Years later Gandhi adopted the doctrine and adapted it to suit his own political programme.

Asked Sri Aurobindo, "Are we to guide our own destinies or are we to have no destiny at all except nullity, except death? For it is nonsense to talk of other people guiding our destinies, that is only a euphemism for killing our destinies altogether; it is nonsense to talk of others giving us enlightenment, civilisation, political training, for the enlightenment that is given and not acquired brings not light but confusion, the civilisation that is imposed from outside kills a nation instead of invigorating it, and the training which is not acquired by our own experience and effort incapacitates and does not make efficient. The issue of freedom is therefore the only issue."

He declared that "the rule of one nation over another is against natural law and therefore a falsehood, and falsehood can only endure so long as the Truth refuses to recognise itself." Stated Sri Aurobindo, "Nationalism is the gospel of inalienable freedom. Boycott is the practice of freedom. To break the Boycott and to stop the preaching of Nationalism is the whole object of the bureaucracy. The Times saw this when it singled out the writings of Bande Mataram and Yugantar, the speeches

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of Bepin Chandra Pal and his like and above all, the Boycott as the root of all evil. Behind all technicalities this is the true and only issue in these sedition cases."

The Bande Mataram, from its very inception, began attacking without fear and without disguise the then system of Government and advocated a radical and revolutionary change. Its blistering attack on the bureaucracy left the latter gasping for breath.

"The Anglo-Indian bureaucrats,"¹ wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1907, "have set out on the slippery path where futile ferocity and vain blood guiltiness hurry down the car of empire to sink in the sea of shame and blood below. Seldom and by a miracle can the wheels that have once gone some way down by that slope be retarded and stopped.

"What is it that you seek, rulers who are eager to confuse the interests of a handful of white administrators with the welfare of humanity, or what is it that you dream, traders who think that God made this India of ours only as a market for your merchandise?"

What then was India? "This great and ancient nation was once the fountain of human light, the apex of human civilisation, the exemplar of courage and humanity, the perfection of good Government and settled society, the mother of all religions, the teacher of all wisdom and philosophy. It has suffered much at

1. The astute Reader must have noticed that all the criticism in this book has been directed towards the policy-makers and policy-implementers only. There were —there are—many Westerners who loved India more than any Indians do.

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the hands of inferior civilisation and more savage peoples; it has gone down into the shadow of night and tasted often of the bitterness of death. Its pride has been trampled into the dust and its glory has departed. Hunger and misery and despair have become the masters of this fair soil, these noble hills, these ancient rivers, these cities whose life story goes back into prehistoric night." He asked a question. "But do you think that therefore God has utterly abandoned us and given us up for ever to be a mere convenience for the West, the helots of its commerce, and the feeders of its luxury and pride?" Sri Aurobindo asserted, "We are still God's chosen people.... The time for our resurgence is come. And no power shall stay that uprising and no opposing interest shall deny us the right to live, to be ourselves, to set our seal once more upon the world. Every race and people that oppressed us even in our evening and our midnight has been broken into pieces and their glory turned into a legend of the past. Yet you venture to hope that in the hour of our morning you will be able to draw back the veil of night once more over our land.... God has lighted the fire in a quarter where you least feared it and it is beginning to eat up your commerce and threaten your ease. He has raised up the people you despised as weaklings and cowards, a people of clerks and babblers and slaves and set you to break their insurgent spirit and trample them into the dust if you can. And you cannot. You have tried every means except absolute massacre and you have failed. And now what will you do?"

That was the big question troubling the bureaucrats.

Had the English mind taken the first step and tried to see things from the Indian standpoint, and acted accordingly,

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most, if not all, of the difficulties might have been solved. "The Indian mind has not the Irish memory for past wrongs and discords," analyzed Sri Aurobindo, "it forgives and forgets easily. Only it must be made to feel that the approach on the other side is frank and whole-hearted. If it once felt that, every difficulty would be solved."

Never known for its imaginative ideas, the bureaucracy simply reacted. "Barren of resources, it blindly persists in the old stupid violences that can hurt and enrage but cannot kill, the old menaces and outbursts of barbarous rage that have lost their power to intimidate an incensed and stubborn people, and will not realise that every blow evokes a mightier reaction, that every missile of death it hurls is returning with fearful rapidity upon the thrower, that the chains with which it binds the limbs of the nation's martyrs are so much iron which the nation will forge into weapons against its oppressors, that the blood it sheds is so much water of life to foster the young plant of liberty, that, when sentence has been passed upon men or class or institution, every device invented for safety becomes an instrument for destruction and the fiercer the attempts to escape, the swifter the motion straight towards doom."

The Anglo-Indian bureaucrats had issued a spate of ordinances and savagely tightened the sedition laws. Any Indian who asserted his countrymen's natural right to rule over India was apt to be accused of "waging war against the Empire," against a King seated on a throne at the other end of the world, and to be thrown into jail and kept there without trial as long as it pleased His distant Majesty. John Morley was alarmed at the

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severe penalties for seditious writings. "These sentences are monstrous and outrageous and can never be supported," he wrote to Minto. "I must confess to you that I am watching with the deepest concern and dismay the thundering sentences that are being passed for sedition, etc. We must keep order, but excess of severity. is not the path to order. On the contrary, it is the path to the bomb."

He was proved right. Very soon.

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