Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
But again, by dint of lobbying
and even more by threatening to break up the Congress, Tilak carried the
day, and a resolution was passed in the form upon which he insisted to
the effect that the boycott movement was legitimate. It was not till the
following year at Surat, after the preaching of lawlessness had begun to
yield its inevitable harvest of crime, that the "moderates" recoiled at
last from the quicksands into which the "extremists" were leading them.
Tilak, however, carried out his threat, and he and his friends wrecked
that session of the Congress amidst scenes of disgraceful riot and
confusion.
Yet even after this the "moderates" lacked the courage of their
convictions. The breach has never been altogether repaired, but there
have been frequent negotiations and exchanges of courtesies. In the very
next year at Madras a man as incapable of promoting or approving
criminal forms of agitation as Dr. Rash Behari Ghose was holding out the
olive branch to "the wayward wanderers" who had treated him so
despitefully at Surat; and last year at Lahore, when Pandit Mohan
Malavya was expounding from the chair the latest formula adopted by
Congress as a definition of its aims, his chief anxiety seemed to be to
prove that it offered no obstacle to the return of the Surat insurgents
to the fold. This formula, it may be mentioned, lays down that "the
objects of the Indian National Congress are the attainment by the people
of India of a system of Government similar to that enjoyed by the
self-governing members of the British Empire and a participation by them
in the rights and responsibilities of the Empire on equal terms." This
is a formula which many "moderates" no doubt construe in a spirit of
genuine loyalty, but it does not exclude the construction which more
"advanced" politicians like Mr. Pal place upon _Swaraj_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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