Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
They say:--Can you boycott all the Government offices?
Whoever said that we would? Whoever said that there
would not be found a single Indian to serve the Government
or the European community here? But what we can do is this.
We can make the Government impossible without entirely
making it impossible for them to find people to serve them.
The administration may be made impossible in a variety of
ways. It is not actually that every deputy magistrate
should say: I won't serve in it. It is not that when one
man resigns nobody will be found to take his place. But
if you create this spirit in the country the Government service
will gradually imbibe this spirit, and a whole office may go
on strike. That does not put an end to the administration,
but it creates endless complications in the work of administration,
and if these complications are created in every
part of the country, the administration will have been brought
to a deadlock and made none the less impossible, for the
primary thing is the prestige of the Government and the
boycott strikes at the root of that prestige.... We
can reduce every Indian in Government service to the position
of a man who has fallen from the dignity of Indian citizenship....
No man shall receive social honours because he is a
Hakim or a Munsiff or a Huzur Sheristadar.... No law
can compel one to give a chair to a man who comes to his
house. He may give it to an ordinary shopkeeper; he may
refuse it to the Deputy Magistrate or the Subordinate Judge.
He may give his daughter in marriage to a poor beggar,
he may refuse her to the son of a Deputy Magistrate, because
it is absolutely within his rights, absolutely within legal
bounds.
Passive resistance is recognized as legitimate in England.
It is legitimate in theory even in India, and if it is made
illegal by new legislation, these laws will infringe on the primary
rights of personal freedom and will tread on dangerous
grounds. Therefore it seems to me that by means of the boycott
we shall be able to do the negative work that will have
to be done for the attainment of _Swaraj_. Positive work
will have to be done. Without positive training no self-government
will come to the boycotter. It will (come)
through the organization of our village life; of
our talukas and districts. Let our programme
include the setting up of machinery for popular administration,
and running parallel to, but independent of, the existing
administration of the Government.... In the Providence
of God we shall then be made rulers over many things.
This is our programme.
But Mr. Pal himself admits that even if this programme can be fulfilled,
this _Swaraj_, this absolute self-rule which he asks for, is
fundamentally incompatible with the maintenance of the British
connexion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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