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The Chowringhee Pecksniff and Ourselves
THE
collapse of the Bande Mataram Prosecution and acquittal of Srijut
Aurobindo Ghose, which have been welcomed with relief and joy by our countrymen
all over
India, are naturally gall and wormwood to the opponents of Indian Nationalism; but to
none has the fiasco caused bitterer disappointment than to the Friend of India
in Chowringhee. Sharing the common but mistaken impression that our paper
depends on the writings of one man for its continued existence, the Statesman
had evidently hoped that with the incarceration of Srijut Aurobindo Ghose
the one paper in Bengal which it fears and which has ruthlessly exposed the
falsehood and duplicity of its sanctimonious Liberalism, would be removed out of
its path. It cannot conceal its chagrin and mortification at the disappointment
of its cherished hopes, and as a pis aller it tries to discredit the Bande
Mataram and informs our subscribers that they ought not to support us any
longer because it has been proved that we are either guilty of having put
forward a false defence or of the unpardonable immorality of having an
editorial staff instead of a single Editor. The tone and method of this attack
are worthy of this unctuous and mealy-mouthed Pecksniff of Anglo-Indian
journalism. It unscrupulously supports its malicious insinuations by calling the
witnesses summoned by the prosecution "defence witnesses" as if the
accused had put men into the witness-box to tell a false story: and it shelters
itself from the charge of libel by the use of ‘ifs' and ‘ors'. Yet it has
the impudence to claim a superior sense of honour for English pamphleteers and
editors! "The great English political writers," it says, "have
never been afraid to own their handiwork and we cannot recall a single instance
in which an English pamphleteer or editor has endeavoured to evade the law by
raising technical difficulties as to his share of responsibility." There
are three separate insinuations in this
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carefully
written sentence; first, it is hinted that Srijut Aurobindo Ghose was the real
writer of the correspondence, "Politics for Indians", but falsely
denied his handiwork; secondly, that he was the responsible Editor of the paper
and his denial of responsibility was “technical” and untrue; thirdly, that
any writer for the paper was morally bound to accept responsibility for anything
that might appear in the paper as a part of the political propaganda in which he
was engaged and Aurobindo Ghose, knowing himself to be so bound, evaded his
responsibility out of fear. Certainly the writer of this article need not disown
his handiwork or evade his responsibility, for he has brought the art of safe
slander to its utmost possible perfection.
We have no hesitation in saying that if we had invented a system of
divided responsibility with the object of baffling a possible bureaucratic
prosecution, we should have been entirely within our rights. In
England
a publicist or propagandist has always had the advantage of being tried by a
jury of his own peers and in all but rare cases enjoyed every reasonable chance
of a fair trial, but the reverse is the case in countries circumstanced as
India
is circumstanced today. Where the whole armoury of an absolute power is arrayed
against him, the Judge a servant of his prosecutor, the law an instrument
specially designed for his suppression, the wealth and power of a despotic
executive and the activity of a not over-scrupulous police his pursuers, and his
only supporters are his own patriotism and the sympathy of his people, the
Nationalist is entitled to use any means for his own self-defence which will not
be inconsistent with his mission nor injure his claim to national sympathy and
support. He owes no moral obligation of quixotic candour to antagonists who
themselves recognise no moral obligation in their struggle with him. Whatever he
owes is to his people and the mission he has to discharge. If he will serve his
country best by leaping into the fire, that is his duty; if self-defence is more
to the interests of the country and the cause, no other consideration ought to
weigh with him. The primary object of the Nationalist organs must be to keep up
their propaganda until it is rendered physically impossible by the growing
severity of bureaucratic enactments. Bhupendranath and Basanta deliberately ex-
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posed
themselves to the worst effects of bureaucratic wrath in order to give an
example to the country of heroic self-sacrifice and a living demonstration of
the spirit of Swarajism; but they did it in the full confidence that the Yugantar
would continue undaunted and unchanged in the course it conceived to be its
duty to the nation. Had they exposed themselves with the knowledge that their
disappearance would have meant the death of the paper, their action would have
been heroic but foolish, an outburst of patriotic sentiment but not an act of
patriotic wisdom. To allow the voice of Nationalism to be silenced would be to
play into the hands of the adversary to whom we owe no duty. The gospel of
Nationalism has to be preached with unflinching candour, but Nationalist organs
will be perfectly within their rights if they prctect their writers so long as
it is humanly possible to protect them and so prolong their own career of
propagandist usefulness.
No such arrangement was made in the case of the Bande
Mataram. Had
we intended to protect ourselves, we would have done it by the simple and
convenient Japanese device of a jail editor. The device imputed to us would be
neither illegal nor immoral, but it would be cumbrous and unsafe. It is
perfectly true that it throws great difficulties in the way of the prosecution,
but it is equally obvious that it leaves the bureaucracy free to single out
anyone they choose for harassment, and does not protect him at all, since the
police have only to be clever enough in their choice of witnesses and the
arrangement of the evidence, and the accused, whether really responsible or not,
is doomed. Everybody can feel that if Anukul Mukherjee had had more backbone and
lied more cleverly in the cross-examination, Srijut Aurobindo Ghose would now be
a convict in the Central Jail. Had we thought of putting forward a false defence,
we could have done it very effectively by producing an Editor on the spot. There
were at least three men on the staff who were anxious to immolate themselves in
this manner, and it was only prevented by the refusal of the accused to accept
any such sacrifice and by the singular conduct of the prosecution in calling the
officers of the Company as their witnesses. The moment Srijut Sailendranath
Ghose entered the witness box, there was no course left open to
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the
defence but to take their stand on the facts as elicited by the prosecution. For
a member of the staff to come forward and by a splendid falsehood take upon
himself the responsibility of the matter complained of, if not of the whole
editorial function, would have been morally permissible; but it was obviously
impossible for the Secretary of the Company to perjure himself by fixing a
non-existent responsibility on any particular individual. The one defect in the
conduct of the defence was that the circumstances which brought about the state
of things described by the Secretary, were not elicited in cross-examination.
When we come to deal with the facts of the case in detail, we shall mend that
deficiency and our readers will see that the evolution of that arrangement was
natural and even inevitable.
In the diatribe of the Chowringhee Pecksniff against us there is one bit
of Pecksniffian logic which we fail to appreciate. He seems to think that a
paper cannot be respectable unless it has a single autocratic Editor and that
the readers of a paper not so blessed must be disreputable. Why, pray? We had
always thought that what one man could do in the way of management could be done
as well by a board or committee of men acting in unison and with one clearly
understood policy; we used even to think that such conjoint management was in
politics the characteristic of democratic times. But Chowringhee liberalism
evidently thinks no arrangement respectable which does not involve absolute
control by a single master-mind. It argues that the Bande Mataram policy
being the joint product of several minds must be the result of distracted
counsels, since only an autocrat can think clearly. After that we can hardly be
surprised at the affection of the Friend of India for absolutism and absolutist
methods or the support it has given to the new Grand Mogul who now governs
India
on mediaeval principles from Westminster.
Bande Mataram,
September 26, 1907
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