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FOUR
Its Methods
THE
essential difference between passive or defensive and active or aggressive
resistance is this, that while the method of the aggressive resister is to do
something by which he can bring about positive harm to the Government, the
method of the passive resister is to abstain from doing something by which he
would be helping the Government. The object in both cases is the same, — to
force the hands of the Government; the line of attack is different. The passive
method is especially suitable to countries where the Government depends mainly
for the continuance of its administration on the voluntary help and acquiescence
of the subject people. The first principle of passive resistance, therefore,
which the new school have placed in the forefront of their programme, is to make
administration under present conditions impossible by an organised refusal to do
anything which shall help either British commerce in the exploitation of the
country or British officialdom in the administration of it, — unless and until
the conditions are changed in the manner and to the extent demanded by the
people. This attitude is summed up in the one word, Boycott. If we consider the
various departments of the administration one by one, we can easily see how
administration in each can be rendered impossible by successfully organised
refusal of assistance. We are dissatisfied with the fiscal and economical
conditions of British rule in
India, with the foreign exploitation of the country,
the continual bleeding of its resources, the chronic famine and rapid
impoverishment which result, the refusal of the Government to protect the people
and their industries. Accordingly, we refuse to help the process of exploitation
and impoverishment in our capacity as consumers, we refuse henceforth to
purchase foreign and especially British goods or to condone their purchase by
others. By an organised
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and
relentless boycott of British goods, we propose to render the further
exploitation of the country impossible. We are dissatisfied also with the
conditions under which education is imparted in this country, its calculated
poverty and insufficiency, its antinational character, its subordination to the
Government and the use made of that subordination for the discouragement
of patriotism and the inculcation of loyalty. Accordingly we refuse to send our
boys to Government schools or to schools aided and controlled by the Government;
if this educational boycott is general and well-organised, the educational
administration of the country will be rendered impossible and the control of its
youthful minds pass out of the hands of the foreigner. We are dissatisfied with
the administration of justice, the ruinous costliness of the civil side, the
brutal rigour of its criminal penalties and procedure, its partiality, its
frequent subordination to political objects. We refuse accordingly to have any
resort to the alien courts of justice, and by an organised judicial boycott propose to make the bureaucratic administration of justice impossible while these
conditions continue. Finally, we disapprove of the executive administration, its
arbitrariness, its meddling and inquisitorial character, its thoroughness of
repression, its misuse of the police for the repression instead of the
protection of the people. We refuse, accordingly, to go to the executive for
help or advice or protection or to tolerate any paternal interference in our
public activities, and by an organised boycott of the executive propose to
reduce executive control and interference to a mere skeleton of its former self.
The bureaucracy depends for the success of its administration on the help of the
few and the acquiescence of the many. If the few refused to help, if Indians no
longer consented to teach in Government schools or work in Government offices,
or serve the alien as police, the administration could not continue for a day.
We will suppose the bureaucracy able to fill their places by Eurasians, aliens
or traitors; even then the refusal of the many to acquiesce, by the simple
process of no longer resorting to Government
schools, courts of justice or magistrates' Katcherries, would put an end to
administration.
Such
is the nature of passive resistance as preached by the
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new
school in
India. It is at once clear that self-development and
such a scheme of passive resistance are supplementary and necessary to each
other. If we refuse to supply our needs from foreign sources, we must obviously
supply them ourselves; we cannot have the industrial boycott without Swadeshi
and the expansion of indigenous industries. If we decline to enter the alien
courts of justice, we must have arbitration courts of our own to settle our
disputes and differences. If we do not send our boys to schools owned or
controlled by the Government, we must have schools of our own in which they may
receive a thorough and national education. If we do not go for protection to the
executive, we must have a system of self-protection and mutual protection of our
own. Just as Swadeshi is the natural accompaniment of an industrial boycott, so
also arbitration stands in the same relation to a judicial boycott, national
education to an educational boycott, a league of mutual defence to an executive
boycott. From this close union of self-help with passive resistance it also
follows that the new politics do not contemplate the organisation of passive
resistance as a temporary measure for partial ends. It is not to be dropped as
soon as the Government undertakes the protection of indigenous industries,
reforms its system of education, improves its courts of justice and moderates
its executive rigour and ubiquity, but only when the control of all these
functions is vested in a free, constitutional and popular Government. We have
learned by bitter experience that an alien and irresponsible bureaucracy cannot
be relied upon to abstain from rescinding its reforms when convenient or to
manage even a reformed administration in the interests of the people.
The possibilities of passive resistance are not exhausted by the refusal
of assistance to the administration. In Europe its more usual weapon is the
refusal to pay taxes. The strenuous political instinct of European races teaches
them to aim a direct blow at the most vital part of the administration rather
than to undermine it by slower and more gradual means. The payment of taxes is
the most direct assistance given by the community to the administration and the
most visible symbol of acquiescence and approval. To refuse payment is at once
the most emphatic protest possible short of taking up arms, and the sort of
attack
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which
the administration will feel immediately and keenly and must therefore parry at
once either by conciliation or by methods of repression which will give greater
vitality and intensity to the opposition. The refusal to pay taxes is a natural
and logical result of the attitude of passive resistance. A boycott of
Government schools, for example, may be successful and national schools
substituted; but the administration continues to exact from the people a certain
amount of revenue for the purposes of education, and is not likely to relinquish
its claims; the people will therefore have doubly to tax themselves in order to
maintain national education and also to maintain the Government system by which
they no longer profit. Under such circumstances the refusal to pay for an
education of which they entirely disapprove, comes as a natural consequence.
This was the form of resistance offered by the Dissenters in England to the
Education Act of the last Conservative Government. The refusal to pay rents was
the backbone of the Irish Plan of Campaign. The refusal to pay taxes levied by
an Imperial Government in which they had no voice or share, was the last form of
resistance offered by the American Colonists previous to taking up arms.
Ultimately, in case of the persistent refusal of the administration to listen to
reason, the refusal to pay taxes is the strongest and final form of passive
resistance.
This stronger sort of passive resistance has not been included by the new
party in its immediate programme, and for valid reasons. In the first place, all
the precedents for this form of resistance were accompanied by certain
conditions which do not as yet obtain in
India. In the Irish instance, the refusal was not to
pay Government taxes but to pay rents to a landlord class who represented an
unjust and impoverishing land system maintained in force by a foreign power
against the wishes of the people; but in India the foreign bureaucracy has
usurped the functions of the landlord, except in Bengal where a refusal to pay
rents would injure not a landlord-class supported by the alien but a section of
our own countrymen who have been intolerably harassed, depressed and burdened by
bureaucratic policy and bureaucratic exactions and fully sympathise, for the
most part, with the national movement. In all other parts of
India
the re-
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fusal
to pay rents would be a refusal to pay a Government tax. This, as we have said,
is the strongest, the final form of passive resistance, and differs from the
method of political boycott which involves no breach of legal obligation or
direct defiance of administrative authority. No man can be legally punished for
using none but Swadeshi articles or persuading others to follow his example or
for sending his boys to a National in preference to a Government school, or for
settling his differences with others out of court, or for defending his person
and property or helping to defend the person and property of his neighbours
against criminal attack. If the administration interferes with the people in the
exercise of these legitimate rights, it invites and compels defiance of its
authority and for what may follow, the rulers and not the people are
responsible. But the refusal to pay taxes is a breach of legal obligation and a
direct defiance of administrative authority precisely of that kind which the
administration can least afford to neglect and must either conciliate or crush.
In a free country, the attempt at repression would probably go no farther than
the forcible collection of the payments refused by legal distraint; but in a
subject country the bureaucracy, feeling itself vitally threatened, would
naturally supplement this legal process by determined prosecution and
persecution of the advocates of the policy and its adherents, and, in all
probability, by extreme military and police violence. The refusal to pay taxes
would, therefore, inevitably bring about the last desperate struggle between the
forces of national aspiration and alien repression. It would be in the nature of
an ultimatum from the people to the Government.
The case of the English Dissenters, although it was a refusal to pay
taxes, differed materially from ours. The object of their passive resistance was
not to bring the Government to its knees, but to generate so strong a feeling in
the country that the Conservative Government would be ignominiously brushed out
of office at the next elections. They had the all-powerful weapon of the vote
and could meet and overthrow injustice at the polling-station. In India we are
very differently circumstanced. The resistance of the American colonists offers
a nearer parallel. Like ourselves the Americans met oppression with the weapon
of boy-
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cott.
They were not wholly dependent on
England
and had their own legislatures in local affairs;
so they had no occasion to extend the boycott to all departments of national
life nor to attempt a general policy of national
self-development. Their boycott was limited to British goods. They had however
to go beyond the boycott and refuse to pay the taxes imposed on them against
their will; but when they offered the ultimatum to the mother country, they were
prepared to follow it up, if necessary, and did finally follow it up by a
declaration of independence, supported by armed revolt. Here again there is a
material difference from Indian conditions. An ultimatum should never be
presented unless one is prepared to follow it up to its last consequences.
Moreover, in a vast country like India, any such general conflict with dominant
authority as is involved in a no-taxes policy, needs for its success a close
organisation linking province to province and district to district and a
powerful central authority representing the single will of the whole nation
which could alone fight on equal terms the final struggle of defensive
resistance with bureaucratic repression. Such an organisation and authority has
not yet been developed. The new politics, therefore, confines itself for the
time to the policy of lawful abstention from any kind of co-operation with the
Government, — the policy of boycott which is capable of gradual extension,
leaving to the bureaucracy the onus of forcing on a more direct, sudden and
dangerous struggle. Its principle at present is not "no representation, no
taxation," but "no control, no assistance".
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