I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my peopl bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad; I am deeply sorry for it. I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for any extenuating act of clemency. I am here to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge, is as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post, or inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal. I do not expect that kind of conversion, but by the time I have finished with my statement, you will, perhaps, have a glimpse of what is raging within my breast to run this maddest risk that a sane man can run.
The statement was then read out.
STATEMENT
I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England, to placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up, that I should explain why, from a staunch loyalist and co-operator, I have become an uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator. To the court, too, I should say why I plead guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection towards the government established by law in India.
My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.
But I was not baffled. I thought that this treatment of Indians was an excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good.
I gave the government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticizing it freely where I felt it was faulty, but never wishing its destruction. Consequently, when the existence of the empire was threatened in 1899 by the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance corps and served at several actions that took place for the relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906, at the time of the Zulu revolt, I raised a stretcher-bearer party and served till the end of the rebellion. On both these occasions I received medals and was even mentioned in despatches. For my work in South Africa I was given by Lord Hardinge a Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal. When the War broke out in 1914 between England and Germany, I raised a volunteer ambulance corps in London consisting of the then resident Indians in London, chiefly students. Its work was acknowledged by the authorities to be valuable. Lastly, in India, when a special appeal was made at the War Conference in Delhi in 1918 by Lord Chelmsford for recruits, I struggled at the cost of my health to raise a corps in Kheda and the response was being made when the hostilities ceased and orders were received that no more recruits were wanted. In all these efforts at service, I was actuated by the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status of full equality in the empire for my countrymen.
The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlatt Act, a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom. I felt called upon to lead an intensive agitation against it. Then followed the Punjab horrors beginning with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and culminating in crawling orders, public floggings and other indescribable humiliations. I discovered, too, that the plighted word of the Prime Minister to the Mussalmans of India regarding the integrity of Turkey and the holy places of Islam was not likely to be fulfilled. But, in spite of the forebodings and the grave warnings of friends, at the Amritsar Congress in 1919, I fought for co-operation and working the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister would redeem his promise to the Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would be healed and that the reforms, inadequate and unsatisfactory though they were, marked a new era of hope in the life of India.
But all that hope was shattered. The Khilafat promise was not to be redeemed. The Punjab crime was white-washed and most culprits went not only unpunished, but remained in service and some continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue, and in some cases were even rewarded. I saw, too, that not only did the reforms not mark a change of heart, but they were only a method of further draining India of her wealth and of prolonging her servitude.
I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically. A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him. So much is this the case that some of our best men consider that India must take generations before she can achieve the dominion status. She has become so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the British advent, India spun and wove in her millions of cottages just the supplement she needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources. This cottage industry, so vital for India’s existence, has been ruined by incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English witnesses. Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the government established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town-dwellers of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. The law itself in this country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter. My unbiased examination of the Punjab Martial Law cases has led me to believe that at least ninety-five percent of convictions were wholly bad. My experience of political cases in India leads one to the conclusion that in nine out of every ten cases the condemned men were totally innocent. Their crime consisted in the love of their country. In ninety-nine cases out of hundred, justice has been denied to Indians as against Europeans in the courts of India. This is not an exaggerated picture. It is the experience of almost every Indian who has had anything to do with such cases. In my opinion, the administration of the law is thus prostituted consciously or unconsciously for the benefit of the exploiter.
The greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in the administration of the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many English and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, have emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation. This awful habit has added to the ignorance and the self-deception of the administrators. Section 124 A under which I am happily charged is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. But the section under which Mr Banker and I are charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know that some of the most loved of India’s patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a privilege, therefore, to be charged under it. I have endeavo
ured to give in their briefest outline the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal ill will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King’s person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the system. And it has been a precious privilege for me to be able to write what I have in the various articles tendered in evidence against me.
In fact, I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by showing in non-co-operation the way out of the unnatural state in which both are living. In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good. But, in the past, non-co-operation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil-doer. I am endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent non-co-operation only multiplies evil and that, as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence. Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for non-co-operation with evil. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge, is either to resign your post and thus dissociate yourself from evil, if you feel that the law you are called upon to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent; or to inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my activity is, therefore, injurious to the public weal.
The dangerous cult of absolute non-violence (Madurai, December 1940)
V.D. SAVARKAR (1883–1966)
Savarkar had been a militant revolutionary before he became a champion of Hindutva. In 1907, on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolt of 1857, he had held up the uprising’s armed and united (Hindu and Muslim) resistance to the British as a model for action in the present. He was convinced that British rule could be overthrown only through violence and his hatred for non-violence was visceral. He argued that non-violence made men effeminate. He delivered this speech at the twenty-second session of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha. His views were the ideological inspiration for Nathuram Godse who became Savarkar’s protégé. There is a direct link between Savarkar’s views and those of Godse as put forward in his trial speech.
Relative non-violence on the whole, is doubtless a virtue so pre-eminently contributing to human good as to form one of the fundamentals on which human life whether individual or social can take its stand and evolve all social amenities. But absolute non-violence, that is, non-violence under all circumstances and even when instead of helping human life whether individual or national it causes an incalculable harm to humanity as a whole, ought to be condemned as a moral perversity. It is on the whole condemned likewise by those very religious and moral schools which lauded relative non-violence as the first and foremost human virtue.
It should be noted in particular that the ahimsa preached by Buddhism or Jainism is directly opposed to the absolute ahimsa or the absolute non-violence as Gandhiji interprets it, condemning all armed resistance under all circumstances. The very fact that the Jains reared up kingdoms, produced heroes and heroines who fought armed battles and Jain commanders in chief leading Jain armies without being ostracized by the Jain acharyas, prove the point to the hilt that the ahimsa of the Jains cannot be the rabid ahimsa of the Gandhist school. The Jain scriptures openly assert that armed resistance to incorrigible aggression is not only justifiable but imperative. Lord Buddha also gave the same ruling when questioned by the leaders of a clan as to whether they should take to armed resistance as soldiers against the armed aggression, of another clan. ‘Soldiers may fight against armed aggression,’ said Lord Buddha, ‘without committing a sin if but they fight with arms in defence of a righteous cause.’
Call it a law of nature or the will of God as you like, the hard fact remains that there is no room for absolute non-violence in nature.
Man could not have saved himself from utter extinction and nor could he have led the precarious and wretched life of a coward had he not succeeded in adding the strength of artificial arms to his natural arms. Throughout the paleolithic and neolithic periods, the bronze age and the iron age, man could maintain himself, multiply and master this earth chiefly through his armed strength. In all honesty, the ‘defensive sword was the first saviour of man’.
You may perhaps add something new to history but you cannot add to or take away a syllable from the iron law of nature itself. Even today if man hands over a blank cheque to a wolf or a tiger to be filled in, with a human pledge of absolute non-violence, no killing of a living being, no armed force to be used, even then the wolves and the tigers will lay waste all your mandirs and mosques, culture and cultivation and ashrams. In face of such an iron law of nature can anything be more immoral and sinful than to preach a principle so anti-human as that of absolute nonviolence condemning all armed resistance even to aggression? Yet it is curious to find that even those who condemn this doctrine of absolute non-violence as impracticable, still seem to believe that though it is impracticable for us worldly men, this doctrine is nevertheless highly moral and evince some mahatmaic excellence, some superhuman sanctity. This apologetic tone must be changed. It raises these prophets of this eccentric doctrine in their own estimation and makes them feel they had really invented some moral law raising human politics to some divine level. Seeing that even their opponents on practical grounds attribute to them a superhuman saintliness owing to the very eccentricity of their doctrine, they grow, perhaps unconsciously all the more eccentric and have the insane temerity to preach in all seriousness to the Indian public that even the taking up of a lathi (stick) is sinful. The best means of freeing India from the foreign yoke is the spinning-wheel. Not only that, but even after India becomes independent there would not be any necessity of maintaining a single armed soldier or a single warship to protect in the streets, and that there are men who after passing the intermediate examination are engaged as cycle peons. There are LLBs who have accepted very humble positions in the excise, registration department and other departments—positions which they would not be allowed to accept in England by virtue of certain traditions of the English bar. Taking the practical view of the position, may I be permitted to ask how long can any government and how long can any society, shut its eyes to the reality of the situation? How long can it profess to be a martyr to this illusive cry of knowledge and culture if that is going to be the end of our young men? People in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy have realized this and they are now giving a different turn to their education.
Do not go away with the idea at all that I am opposed to university education. Frankly, I would throw open the doors of universities as wide as possible to everyone of you, provided I was assured that you would benefit by that education and provided I was assured that you would then, after you have completed your university education, become useful economic units of society and useful members of the Indian community.
Purna Swaraj (Lahore, December 1929)
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU (1889–1964)
Jawaharlal Nehru was president of the Congress at its session held in Lahore in 1929. Riding on a white horse at the Congress procession, he seemed destined to be—as Mahatma Gandhi had prophesied—the young Galahad of revolt. His presidential address demanding complete independence captured the nation’s mood of defiance and rebellion. The demand for complete independence had been in the air for sometime. The Congress resolution of Purna Swaraj embodied it and Nehru’s presidential address gave it formal shape. Nehru spoke of India’s struggle for independence as a conquest of power and put it in an international context of ending European dominance. The speech was received with great enthusiasm except obviously by
the British who were dismayed that the Congress had enthroned a socialist and a revolutionary. The mood of the Lahore Congress was appositely captured in the cries of ‘inquilab zindabad’ that went up with the traditional ‘bande mataram’ when the tricolour was unfurled. Nehru, the idealistic nationalist, was clearly in no mood for political compromise. This would be the last such romantic speech he would make; the Jawaharlal of the 30s and 40s would be a more sombre, grander figure.
Comrades—for four and forty years this National Congress has laboured for the freedom of India. During this period it has somewhat slowly, but surely, awakened national consciousness from its long stupor and built up the national movement. If, today we are gathered here at a crisis of our destiny, conscious of our strength as well as of our weakness, and looking with hope and apprehension to the future, it is well that we give first thought to those who have gone before us and who spent out their lives with little hope of reward, so that those that followed them may have the joy of achievement. Many of the giants of old are not with us and we of a later day, standing on an eminence of their creation, may often decry their efforts. That is the way of the world. But none of you can forget them or the great work they did in laying the foundations of a free India. And none of us can ever forget that glorious band of men and women who, without tacking the consequences, have laid down their young lives or spent their bright youth in suffering and torment in utter protest against a foreign domination.
The Great Speeches of Modern India Page 9