Not the least alarming feature of the situation was the attitude of the
Indian public generally towards this epidemic of political crime which
assumed some forms hitherto quite unknown to India and abhorrent to
most Indians. The movement could only be correctly described as an
Anarchist movement in so far as the methods to which it resorted were
largely modelled upon those of Russian anarchists and aimed, like
theirs, at the subversion of the existing Government. It differed
fundamentally from Russian anarchism in that it was directed against
alien rulers of another faith and another civilisation. That it created
a widespread feeling of apprehension and even of detestation amongst the
great majority of peaceful and sober-minded Indians cannot be doubted,
and especially amongst those who watched with alarm the ravages it was
making amongst the younger generation. But few had the courage to carry
reprobation to the length of assisting Government in the detection and
repression of crimes which terrorism made it less dangerous to extenuate
as lamentable exhibitions of a misguided patriotic frenzy. The
Western-educated classes were completely estranged and smarted so
bitterly over the contempt with which their representations and protests
against the policy of Government had been treated that those even of the
more moderate school of politics were content to throw up their hands in
horror and declare that if they were unable to stem the torrent, the
fault lay entirely with the bureaucracy which had killed by long years
of neglect and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been
able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress. The
Extremists boldly threw the whole responsibility for the movement on
British rule and combined with a perfunctory and dubious condemnation of
the crimes themselves an ecstatic admiration for the heroism which had
driven the youth of India to follow the example of the Russian
_intelligentsia_ in its revolt against an autocracy as brutal and as
odious as that of Russia. Mere measures of repression under the ordinary
law were clearly incapable of coping with a situation which was becoming
no less dangerous in its negative than in its positive aspects. British
rule in India had concentrated so largely on mechanical efficiency that
it had gradually lost sight of the old and finer principles of
Anglo-Indian as well as of British statesmanship based on the paramount
importance of genuine co-operation between British and Indians. During
the Mutiny there were few of the Western-educated classes whose loyalty
to the British _Raj_ ever wavered. Fifty years later, when the _Raj_ was
confronted with a less violent but more insidious movement of revolt, a
large part of the Western-educated classes, whose influence and numbers
had increased immensely in the interval, were, if not in league, at
least to some extent in sympathy with it, and many of those who deplored
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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