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Loyalty and Disloyalty in East Bengal THE Englishman
and those who are evidently anxious to set the machinery of relentless state
prosecutions against the leaders of the present national movement in this
province, need not take so much trouble to prove that there is considerable
disaffection and disloyalty in East Bengal which ought at once to be put down
with a strong hand. Our contemporary must be far more simple-minded than what
one should expect him to be, judging both from his general education and
experience and his position as an intelligent observer and critic of current
affairs, if he ever thought that there could be any real affection and loyalty
to an alien despotism, such as the present Government in this country
undoubtedly is, in the minds of the subject populations of India. Lord Curzon
once declared that though differing in colour and culture, the Indians were as
much human as the Britishers, and had the same sentiments and susceptibilities
that the British people had. If the Englishman and his friends believe in
this common humanity of the Indian, they have simply to place themselves
mentally in the position of their "native fellow-subjects", to realise the kind
of affection and loyalty for the present Government that can ever be felt by the
people of this country. Indeed, loyalty as a feeling of personal love and regard
for the Sovereign is an extinct virtue in civilisation, and if it is not found
in countries where the Sovereign belongs to the people, and lives and stands
among them as the head of their State and the fountain of all social honour, and
where the people always participate in his glory, his magnificence and his
wealth, - each according to his status and qualification, - how much more rare
must it be in a country like India, whose Sovereign belongs to a
distant country and an alien race, who professes an alien religion, who is not
related to the people by any ties of tradition or past historical associations,
and in the glories and prerogatives of whose throne, as well as in the wealth
and magnificence of whose empire, these people have
Bande Mataram, August 1906
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neither lot nor part. To believe the barest possibility of any true loyalty in
India is really to take the Indians to be very much less than human. But, in
truth, nobody ever honestly believed in it. Loyalty has ever been a mere
convenient tie in this country, convenient to the ruler because the reputation
for profound loyalty of the Indian people keeps foreign enemies away; convenient
to the ruled because like charity it covered a multitude f political sins. But
in truth no one ever really believed in this much-proclaimed virtue. No
Englishman ever honestly believed e the truth of it. No Indian ever cherished it
honestly himself .Both the rulers and the ruled have been playing at blind-man's
bluff all these years with this great civic virtue, each seeking to make some
political capital out of it.
That the British Government in India never set a two-pence value on the
loyalty of their Indian subject, - though they are Ways anxious to proclaim it
from the housetops, as a magnificent charm to keep away the evil eye, - is
proved by the entire history of their past transactions with us. The Arms Act
surely Des not prove England's faith in India's loyalty. The French-man, the
German, the American, nay, even the Negro and the Hottentot, - indeed every
foreigner can possess arms and bear
'them
in India without a licence, the man who belongs to the country and who is most
interested in its prosperity and peace, alone
cannot do so. The systematic exclusion of the people of the land, however
qualified they may be, from all positions of exceptional trust and
responsibility in what ought, by the law of rod and nature alike, to be their
own Government, surely does not prove that English Statesmen ever honestly
believed in the allegiance of the Indian people to their rule. The methods of
State- regulated education, which carefully eschew every training or text-book
or instruction that is calculated to quicken any genuine love of freedom or any
noble patriotism in the pupils; the extreme
anxiety of the authorities to train the
youths of this country in habits
of gentleness and subordination, while in their own country every form of
manliness and even rowdyism, as long as it does not strike against the very soul
of social and civic orders, are not only tolerated but frequently encouraged by
the leaders of public opinion and the custodians of public morals;
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the denial of the commonest right of free citizenship, - the right of free
participation in public meetings, having for their object the reform of the
Administration, - to the commonest of public servants; the crusade against every
form of patriotic efforts on the part of the people, such as are calculated to
inspire them with devotion to their nation, all these go distinctly to prove at
what value the much proclaimed loyalty of the people of this country is really
rated by their foreign masters. The fact really is that loyalty in the sense in
which the term is usually used, - either in the old sense of loving attachment
to the person or throne of the sovereign, or even in the new and higher sense of
devotion to the State which reveals and realises the highest civic ideals and
aspirations of the subjects, - cannot naturally exist or grow in a country that
is subject to the domination of another. No Englishman therefore honestly
believes in it in India, however much he may be anxious to conjure it up in
times of trouble or difficulty as a saving magic working for his safety and
salvation. Loyalty, in the general acceptance of the term, has been a mere myth
in British India; and the Englishman need not be at so much pains to disprove
the presence of a thing in East Bengal that has never as yet existed in any part
of the country subject to British rule. Disloyalty is want of loyalty, and there
cannot be anywhere an absence of a thing, -
as a new fact, - where that thing
has never existed before.
But if loyalty is not possible in India
in its present condition of servitude, what then is the secret of that
unquestioning obedience to the authority of the present alien Government in the
country, which alone makes it easy and possible for them to rule so vast a
population with such slender means? The answer is plain and obvious; it is not
affection, neither is it disaffection, both of which are active sentiments, but
mere indifference, mere listlessness, the fatuous fatalism of the Hindu and the
Mohamedan populations of India that keeps them so easily under British
subjection. Not loyalty, not allegiance, but mere passive acquiescence, - that
is the word which sums up the real attitude of the Indian people towards their
foreign master and the outlandish civic order they have established in the
country. This acquiescence is due to a general belief, - now rapidly being
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undermined and destroyed by the open excesses and repressions of recent
administrations, - in the benevolence of the British despotism, itself the
result of a strange hypnotic spell that British politicians and statesmen of the
earlier generations had cast over the people. If by loyalty is meant this
passive acquiescence to the existing civic order in the country, there is still
considerable loyalty in the country, though the events of the past five or six
years have done much to disturb even this passive sentiment in the people.
But there has always been another kind of loyalty also in is country, and
that species of loyalty exists still among us, both East Bengal and West Bengal,
though it has been subjected during the last eight or nine months to a strain
which would kill altogether in any other country, and most of all in that
country to which the Englishman himself belongs, and this kind of loyalty
ill last as long as the Government and those whose views the Englishman
represents, do not themselves destroy it with their
own
hand.
Loyalty in the radical sense of the term, derived from lex, law, - and
meaning obedience to law, - has always been cordial characteristic of our
people; and in this sense people have always been loyal in this country. This
loyalty, - this extreme regard for law of the Indian population, - has been the
strongest bulwark of the present foreign despotism in this country. We are still
loyal, as we have been in the past, in the se of law-abiding. Had we not been
loyal in this, the truest sense of the term, the history of British
Administration in every part of India would have had to be very differently
written indeed. In fact, the Englishman ought not to forget that it is
this extreme loyalty of the people that saved the situation created in Barisal
and elsewhere by the lawless excesses of the executive Government
during
the last nine or ten months. Had our people been less law-abiding than
they are, the whole country would have long ago been completely given over to
riots and mob-rule, which would tax the entire strength and resources of the
Government to grapple with and conquer. The lawless excesses of the Executive
and the Police in East Bengal during the last eight or nine months, are matters
of common knowledge; and the Englishman knows it full well that there is
no other country in the world where
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such wanton oppression and injustice would have been so quietly borne by the
people as these have been borne in the New Province. To attribute this to the
cowardice of the people would be an act of fatal folly on the part of the
Government or their advisers. East Bengal, at least, has never been noted for
such cowardice. It is not fear, but self-restraint due to considerations of
larger and higher interests, and the command of their leaders that kept East
Bengal so quiet under all these enormities during the last nine or ten months.
But this loyalty also seems apparently to be giving way now, for it is useless
to conceal the fact that a grim determination has gradually grown among the
people to no longer suffer any illegal excesses, in the way they have been
suffered for so long. But even in this new spirit of resistance in the people
there is no lack of regard for law, for this new determination means not to
outrage but to protect the honour and dignity of the law itself, when both are
openly outraged by those whose duty it is to protect them. If this be
disloyalty, we freely admit this disloyalty exists, and is growing to great
proportions in every part of the country; and the threats of the Englishman
or the setting of the sedition law in motion will not kill, but only increase
this disloyalty the more.
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