India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947; India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947
leaders to condemn with us and to support us in dealing with
methods of agitation which drive schoolboys to crime and lead to
religious and agrarian disturbance. Now that His Majesty's
Government have declared their policy, reasonable men have
something which they can oppose successfully to the excitement
created by attacks on Government and by abuse of Englishmen,
coupled with glowing and inaccurate accounts of India's golden
past and appeals to race hatred in the name of religion. Many
prominent Indians dislike and fear such methods. A new opportunity
is now being offered to combat them; and we expect them to take
it. Disorder must be prejudicial to the cause of progress and
especially disorder as a political weapon."
We are in general agreement with the sentiments expressed in this
extract but we will be wanting in candour if we fail to point out that,
though the revolutionary movement in India is mainly political, it is
partly economic and partly anarchic also. In the first two aspects it is
at present the product of purely local (Indian) conditions. In the
last, it is the reaction of world forces. While we are hoping that the
change in the policy, now announced, will remove the political basis of
it, we are not quite sure that that will ensure the extermination of the
party or the total destruction of the movement. The growth of democratic
political institutions in India must inevitably be followed by a
movement for social democracy. The spirit of Revolution which is now fed
by political inequalities will, when these are removed, find its
sustenance in social inequalities. That movement may not be
anti-British; perhaps it will not be, but that it will have some
revolutionary element in it may be assumed. The lessons of history make
it clear that the most effective way to prevent its falling into
channels of violence is to have as little recourse to coercion as may be
consistent with the preservation of general order and peace. The
preservation of order and the unhindered exercise of private rights by
all citizens is the pre-requisite condition to good government. Every
government must see to it. It is their duty to use preventive as well as
punitive methods. There are, however, ways of doing these things. One is
the British, the American and the French way.[1] The other is what was
heretofore associated with the name of the late Czar. The third is the
German way. We hope the lessons of Czarism will not be lost on either
party. The governments have as much to learn from it as the peoples. The
best guarantee against the abnormal growth of a revolutionary movement
is to adopt and follow the British methods and to avoid scrupulously
and without fail any approach to the discredited Russian or Prussian
methods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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