The Life of Lokamanya Tilak/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
THE NEW PARTY
Bal Gangadhar Tilak is a Maratha Brahmin, thinker and fighter in one. His is the brain that conceived, his is the pen that expressed, his is the force that has directed the extra-ordinary movement against which the bureaucracy is now calling up all its resources.
The Morning Leader in 1908.
THE year 1905 forms a land-mark in Indian History. In that year was carried out the fatal Partition of Bengal. The whole Province was thrown into a ferment. The Bengalis heartily disliked the odius measure. Appeals were made, monster petitions were sent to the Parliament. Then came the Bycott. It encouraged Swadeshism. The Swadeshi movement quickly out-grew its economic or political nature and became a movement for National Regeneration. The Nation called for Swadeshism in dress, in diet, in habits, in life, in arts, in literature, in science, in religion and philosophy. Swadeshism thus became an all-pervading spiriritual movement directed against the Western Civilisation which the British Government represented and symbolized. The Boycott bade fair to develop into a movement of Passive Resistance. Young men enrolled themselves as National Volunteers for peaceful participation in public life. The Government retaliated with the Risley Circular and the Carlyle Circular. The Nation demanded a National Course of Education, Money flowed in like water; the National University of Bengal was established. These activities provoked the official world. Repression, the favourite weapon of despots, was resorted to. The leaders of the movement were publicity humiliated; meetings were dispersed with regulation lathis. The path of repression is generally perilous and slippery, and it is no wonder that "the Bureaucracy marched from one repression to another." The armoury of repressive measures was replenished. The Deportation Act of 1818 was hunted out and Lala Lajpat Rai and Sirdar A jit Singh were spirited away to Burma (1907). Mr. Tilak was tried for sedition (1908) and transported. The Nationalist Party was routed. Babu Ashvini Kumar and eight other popular leaders were deported. A few crumbs of reforms, niggardly given and avidly accepted, were the reward of the surviving Party of Moderates who had shown their loyalty by rallying round the Bureaucratic banner. Eventually the Partition of Bengal was modified in 1911.
The Partition of Bengal, hateful as it was, consolidated that sense of Indian Nationality which common serfdom, wesstern education and the National Congress had done so much to foster. It is, however, remarkable that outside Bengal, those of the English-educated Indians who had hitherto too much paraded their "All India view" did the least to show in a practical way their sympathy with Bengal. Mr. Tilak, on the contrary, who owing to his Shivaji and Ganapati festivals, was regarded to have encouraged a spirit of particularism, was to the forefront, anxious to do his "little bit" for lacerated Bengal. He had nothing but contempt for those wise-acres, who were ready with their statistics and free-trade theories to throw cold water on popular enthusiasm, who harped on the eternal theme of our weakness and our want of organization and who were afraid of the plentiful resources of the Government. Mr. Tilak, while admitting the force of all reasonable objections, declared that even an ineffectual struggle in the face of tremendous odds was itself no mean achievement. He could never subscribe to the theory of "learning to swim on land."
With the commencement of the anti-Partition agitation, Mr. Tilak emerges from his life of Provincial Leadership and becomes the leader of the "Newborn" Nationalist Party in India. Till IQ05, our public life could hardly be said to have been National. The Press did indeed keep us from relapsing into our provincial ruts, but even the Press or the Congress had not visibly created that fellow-feeling with delights in mutual help, support and encouragement. Most of the leaders in the country were known only in their provinces. A brilliant member of the Imperial Legislative Council, a dominating leader in the National Congress or an unbending fighter with the despotic bureaucracy did indeed get a recognition which was something more than provincial. But that free, swift interchange of thought and that inter-dependence of policies and actions which an organised National Life presupposes was totally absent. The cruel wrong done to Bengal, the solid agitation which the Bengalis started, together with the widespread discontent caused by the reactionary policy of Lord Curzon, afforded Mr. Tilak the longcoveted opportunity of consolidating our feeling of Indian Nationality by leading an All-India Movement for the double purpose of righting the wrong and awakening and organizing the country.
This was a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. In his own province, his immense popularity, due to twenty-five years of courageous, self-sacrificing and single-minded work enabled him to carry the message of Swadeshi and Swaraj down to the most distant hamlets. He had trained up a number of people in the work of organization and agitation. Hundreds of his students, scattered over the Presidency had received incentive to public activities from his personal contact and his weekly writings in the Kesari. His frequent tours in Maharashtra had enabled him to organize his province for National work and so successful was his organization that no sooner did he sound the slogan of Swadeshi and Boycott than the note was echoed and re-echoed throughout the length and breadth of Western India. Not a village in the province but had its Swadeshi meetings; not a town but had its swadeshi shops.
But this was not the only work Mr. Tilak had to do now. There is no work more difficult than of directing, organizing and controlling movements in such distant places as Bengal, the Punjab and Madras. The difficulty lies in the fact that while the initiative in several matters must be left to the leaders on the spot, the whole movement must present a single idea and a single purpose manifested in consistent and uniform activities. The leader of the whole movement must needs be a man who will command respect and obedience and whose instructions would be carried out in spirit. He must act both as a stimulant and a sedative ; he must use spurs or draw reins according to necessity. From all the great NationaHst leaders—Messrs. Bepin Chunder Pal, Arabindo Ghose, Lajpat Rai, G. S. Khaparde, G. Subramanya Ayer — Mr. Tilak received that homage to which his genius, sacrifices and long uninterrupted services of the country fully entitled him. The organization of the Nationalist Party also involved the work of fighting with the Moderates both in and out of the Congress. This was no easy thing; for the Moderate Party, moribund though it was, controlled most of the National organisations of the day; its leaders, with their long record of public service, were capable beyond question, learned beyond compare, resourceful and domineering. They were the last persons to allow themselves to be swept away. It required all Mr. Tilak's genius, aided of course by the powerful ability of his political colleagues, to give a rub to the Moderates. In the Congress he was the only man who could beard the Bombay Lion; and his consumate mastery of ail weapons of intellectual warfare enabled him to measure swords with Sir Pherozeshah Mehta.
Mr. Tilak once said that every such movement ought to be judged by a triple standard (i) The actual work it does (2) the moral force it awakens and (3) by the intellectual revolution it brings about. The anti-Partition movement soon lost its provincial character and became a movement for National Regeneration and the attainment of Swaraj. The swadeshi spirit stimulated the establishment of several industries hitherto starving. Swadeshi shops were opened everywhere; Swadeshi exhibitions were held to popularize the work of the new industries. The Paisa fund, originally started by a Mr. Kale, became under Mr. Tilak's guidance the most popular means of collecting funds for starting suitable industries. Spinning and weaving industries began to thrive. Education and Temperance received a great impetus. In short, the movement was on the right lines and promised brilliant results.
But it is the misfortune of every infant democracy to be called upon to do constructive work with one hand while with the other it is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the powers that be.
The moral force which the movement roused was simply astonishing . We have seen, how under the reactionary regime of Lord Curzon, disappointment and a sense of humiliation hung like a pall over the country. The swadeshi-hoycott movement dispelled all these clouds. It created hope and enthusiasm in the minds of Indians. "Self-reliance, no mendicancy" became the watchword of the people. The National self-respect was fully awakened. People refused to take insults lying down. They refused to allow the foreign Bureaucrats to be arbiters of our destinies. They were willing to suffer for their convictions. They came forward in their hundreds to go to gaol. Young men worked as pickets or volunteers and received sound elementary training in public life. A hopelessly disorganized nation seriously began to organise itself. The land of disunity was slowly closing up its ranks. Even the "depressed" classes joined, heart and soul, the movement and on two occassions, Mr. Tilak was the recipient of their pan-supari. A spirit of unity and equality was abroad. Mr. Tilak was everywhere praised for declaring, in a public lecture, that all castes are equal and that graduation of castes is foreign to Hindu religion and is unsupported by Vedic texts. Meetings were held not in thousands but in hundreds of thousands. Poets sang of patriotism. A truly National Literature was born. The great revival promised to sweep away all barriers and deluge the country.
The intellectual revolution produced by the movement was more remarkable still. When Lord Curzon cut Bengal in twain with a stroke of pen, the centre of gravity of all our activities changed from the Government to the people. It was Ranade who once said that our petitions, though mainly drawn out for Government were also intended to awaken the people. The Nationalist party went a few steps further and declared that all our writings and speeches were intended for the people; Government might, if they wanted, take note of them.
The boycott movement gave a deathblow to all the free-trade theories in which the generation represented by the majority of the then leaders was trained up. People clearly came to realize how England had strangled Indian Industries and they were determined, in the absence of any protective tariff in the interest of Indian manufactures, to boycott British goods.
But the greatest contribution made by the movement to the political life of the country was the fixing of the goal of all our endeavours. Ours is perhaps the first instance in the history of the world, where for a couple of generations, the children of the soil did believe their conquerors to be their deliverers. Mr. Tilak was the first to give a rub to this easy-going faith. His Shivaji festival, with its inevitable suggestion of the ideal of Swaraj was an eye-sore not only to the Anglo-Indians but to the Moderates as well. The former openly called it sedition, the latter probably thought pretty much in the same way and refused to take part in it. It was reserved for the anti-partition agitation to place before the country a definite ideal, freed from the confusing verbiage that characterised our thought till 1905. Mr. Tilak's ideal thus became the ideal of the country and it was "imposed" upon the National Congress by no less a personage than Dadabhai Naoroji. Neither Mr. Tilak nor Mr. Naoroji preached anything beyond the colonial form of self-government. But the bitter disappointment caused by the Partition of Bengal, together with the utter loss of faith of the people in the sincerity of the rulers carried the ideal of self-government to the logical length. If Mr. Tilak has on a few occasions defended absolute autonomy as being a perfectly 'legal' ideal, we should not forget that even Lord Morley has nothing to say against it and that the Hon'ble Mr. Gokhale has in his Allahabad speech (1907) declared that he would not put any limit to the aspirations of the people.
It was not so much the difference of opinion regarding the ultimate ideal that gave birth to the two schools of thought,—'Moderate and Extremist'. Ideals do not so much affect every day work as ways and means. In a word, the two parties were divided on 'Boycott', The attitude of the Moderates was determined by three things (1) They had not utterly lost their faith in the British Government or the Indian bureaucracy. (2) They had not the courage to go to the logical length of propositions conceded by them. (3) They were oppressed with an undue sense of the power of the Government and an inordinate consciousness of India's weakness. Mr. Tilak thought otherwise. He said:—
"We do not believe in philanthrophy in Politics. There is no instance in history where a foreign nation has ruled another without any expectations of profit. We believe in Lord Morley and in the genuineness of his professions as a philosopher. The old school thinks that politics could be governed by the dictates of philosophy; we hold that these are quite different things and ought not to be mixed up together. The old school thinks that concessions could be secured by logical persuation.
"Mr. Gokhale believe in sacrifice. He calls upon the people to be up and doing. He accepts even passive resistance as a constitutional weapon. He admits that the Bureaucracy here is callous and the Democracy at 'Home' is indifferent. He allows that our efforts have not yet borne sufficient fruit. He declares that the situation is critical. In all this he is at one with the New Party. But when it comes to action he will say 'My friends, let us still wait a little. No use flouting the Government. They will suppress us.' It, therefore, comes to this. Mr. Gokhale belongs in theory to the New Party, and in practice to the old one."
One of the greatest defects of the Moderate leaders has been their habit of clinging to unmeaning words and phrases. One such was "Constitutional agitation." Mr. Tilak called upon the Moderate leaders to explain if India had got any constitution. " Can we prevent the violation even of those common rights we have? Can we punish these violations by holding the executive Government responsible? The only 'constitution' we have is the Penal Code!" Mr. Gokhale in his Allahabad lecture admitted in one breath that every form of agitation from the non-payment of taxes down to the sending of petitions is constitutional; and in another he declared that "constitutional agitation is an agitation to bring about changes in the administration through the constituted authorities!" This novel interpretation of a well-known phrase in constitutional law excludes such severe forms of agitation as the non-payment of taxes!
Mr. Tilak held that though our agitation would be law-abiding in the ordinary sense of the term, still it all rested with the Government whether to make it legal or illegal. A movement which was perfectly legal to-day could by a fiat of the Bureaucracy be made illegal to-morrow. We would certainly refrain from rebellion, murder, arson, and the like. But barring this well-understood limit, there was none other which we could put to our endeavours. Our agitation could not be constitutional because we have had no constitution worth the name. It could not be exactly legal as the power of making laws rested with those whose interests clashed with ours. Therefore, said Mr. Tilak, justice, morality and history must be our only guides.
En passant we may note that when last year the question of changing the creed of the Congress came before the chosen leaders of the people, Mahatma Gandhi with his unerring sagacity, rejected both the words "constitutional" and "legal" and in their place put in "peaceful and legitimate methods," an unconscious paraphrase of the triple limitations of justice, morality and history put by Mr. Tilak, Many an admirer of Mr. Tilak has deplored his lack of the gift of the gab. Persons are not wanting who say "Had Mr. Tilak been an orator, he would have vanquished the Moderate party long before he actually did.". .Though not an eloquent speaker, Mr. Tilak was always an effective one. Even so fastidious a critic as the Hon'ble Mr. Chintamani has recorded his praise of Mr. Tilak's speech (at the Calcutta Congress of 1896) on Quinquinnial Provincial Contracts. Another Congress speech of Mr. Tilak was pronounced, by a high authority to have had "a genuine Maratha ring about it." Mr. Tilak's platform speeches, English or Marathi, always produced profound impression on his hearers; for, as Lord Morley says "Political oratory is action not words; action, character, will, conviction, purpose and personality." Mr. Tilak, deficient in words, had enough of character and personality. These made him quite irresistible.
The Indian Patriot describes Mr. Tilak's political oratory in the following judicious words:—
"Of all political thinkers in India, Mr. Tilak has the invaluable gift of shedding dry light on the subject of his discourse, without converting his address into an appeal to our emotions merely. Nor does he desire to reiterate commonplace observations and stale and superficial sentiments. On the other hand, it has been his aim whenever he comes forward to make a public pronouncement, to convince the intellect of his hearers, to overcome the doubts and difficulties of his audience, and to take up the strongest position of his opponents^ and establish his own, in the light of reason and logic, as the more sustainable ground. ... He does not give the impression of one who has been hustled to take up an attitude or who desires to hustle others into an opinion which he has ready for them. He argues out the position logically and unflinchingly and leaves it to others to judge whether his conclusions deserve their assent or not. . .He dissects the position, as a biologist would dissect an organism, and with cold conviction explains the bearing of each dissected part to the rest and is content if he is able to be plainly and unerringly understood."
Another critic (The Indian People) is no less eulogistic:—"As a speaker, Mr. Tilak has nothing of the demagogue or the impassioned platform orator about him. There are no high-sounding phrases, no flights of rhetoric. His manner is subdued and free from gesticulation. The sentences are terse; the language is simple and direct He appealed to the intelligence of his audience and not to their sentiment. The real power lay in the matter of his speech and not in the manner. There were no generalisations, no enunciation of abstract principles in flowery language. Every statement was clear and every point was driven home with a readiness of illustration and power of antithesis that showed the power of the speaker and the subtlety of his intellect. Every issue was put plainly and uncompromisingly. But there was no violence of language or denunciation, not a trace of passion either in word or gesture. After hearing him it was not difficult to understand that he is the most powerful and the most influential leader of the New Party, a party by no means confined to Bengal." It is quite natural that when the Nation had, with grim determination, undertaken to find its own salvation, the powers that be should try to put us down by every means at their disposal. The Bureaucrats determined to separate the Mahomedans from the Hindus, and the Moderates from the Extremists; they resolved. to replenish their armoury of repressive laws, to crush the Extremists and break that solidarity which was growing in various provinces. The Bureaucracy knew that to placate Lord Morley they would have to give their consent to the inauguration of a few political reforms here and there; so they practically entered into a compact with the Liberal but too philosophical Secretary of State by means of which 'honest John' was to acquiesce in their repression and they agreed to tolerate political concessions. England had just concluded an alliance with Japan; our rulers had therefore nothing to fear from any complications abroad. They had thus greater facilities to repress us than their successors in 1914 and 1920, and so with ruthless severity they tried the axe of repression on the tender plant of; the National Movement.
The Swadeshi movement, with its watchwords of self-help and self-government, powerfully affected the imagination of the Indian student world. Students became the greatest bulwark of the National agitation. There were well-meaning persons who held that students ought to stand aloof from the public life of the country. Even Mr. Gokhale, though willing to allow students "to take interests in what was going; on around" them was not in favour of allowing them to take an active part even in the elementary work which. neither breeds nor "leads to dissension and disintegration." Mr. Tilak, on the contrary emphatically held that the "students of to-day are the citizens of tomorrow "and that it was their duty not only to study public questions but to devote part of their leisure in such work as was allotted to them by the trusted leaders of the country. Mr. Tilak said that though it was convenient for the Bureaucracy to forget the part which the youth of England played in the public life of England, India must never neglect to train up her youth in pubHc spirit. If the Risley Circular was to prevent free expression of thought in youth, if the Government Servants' Rules were to prohibit us from participating in public activities in manhood, and if the Pensioners' Code was to guide our actions in old-age, when, indeed was a man independent? Mr. Tilak emphatically condemned the actions of those who, because a particular student attended a swadeshi meeting, fined him in the name of discipline! If, he said, a severe enforcement of false discipline be the price of our acceptance of Government Grant or of the affiliation with the University, why, in the name of patriotism and self-sacrifice should we not break off these chains and declare our educational independence? He accepted the right of elders to guide the students. But he refused to accept the right of any parent, much less teacher, to cut off the light of knowledge and patriotism from the school and college-going children; and when such a prohibition was made only because the parent or teacher had not the courage to assert himself before an unjustifiable fiat of the Bureaucracy, the students were, Mr. Tilak said, fully entitled to disobey. The Students' movement of 1905 was quite different from the educational boycott of the Non-Co-operation Propaganda of to-day. The Non-co-operator would like to empty school and colleges, to mark his protest against the ruinous system of administration. The stimulus which the movement for National Education received in the Anti-Partition days lay entirely in repression. In Bengal, where the student world was harassed and persecuted, the movement of National Education spread like wild fire, and within less than an year since the movement was inaugurated, nearly 10,000 students enrolled their names in the National Schools and colleges, directed by leaders of the Moderate Party like the late Dr. Rash Behari Ghose and the late Sir Gurudas Banerjea. In Maharashtra, on the contrary, repression being comparatively mild (1905-07), there was less opportunity for National Education to grow. The Samartha Vidyalaya established by Prof. Bijapurkar and patronized by Mr. Tilak was a model institution of its kind and would have shown very good results had not the Government with one stroke of the pen suppressed it (1910).
Mr. Tilak was immensely proud of the Mahomedans. He was convinced that the community with its Imperialistic traditions had a great future before it. He was certain that a combination of the Hindu intellect and the Muslim valour (together with the Parsi enterprise) would be irresistible and was bound to bring about the downfall of the Bureaucracy. He was more afraid of the Moslem inertia than of Moslem opposition. When, therefore, Nabob Salli-Mulla Khan held (December 1906) an "Educational Conference" at Dacca and converted it, at the eleventh hour into a Political League to protest against the Boycott and Swadeshi movements, to uphold the Bengal Partition and to praise Sir B. Fuller to the skies, Mr. Tilak was rather delighted than vexed. He foretold that once the great Muslim Community was aroused, it would outstrip the Hindus in political demands. Of course, he severely condemned the attitude of the Mahomedans on the occasion of the disturbances at Comilla and Jamalpur. He fully approved of the Manifesto of fifteen Bengali leaders including (the Hon'ble Sir) Surendranath Banerjea which described how "Hindu shops have been looted; Hindu temples have been desecrated; the images of Hindu deities have been defiled; the Cutcheeries of Hindu Zemindars ransacked; Hindu women have been outraged"; he condemned in scathing terms officers and Mahomedans alike who were responsible for this lawlessness. But he knew that a day would come when the "favourite wife of Sir B. Fuller" would be awakened to a full sense of her duty and would no longer allow the Bureaucrats to "Divide and Rule" us.
With the growing awakening in the Nation, the tide of Repression began to rise. Lord Morley, from his philosophical seat in the India Office was unable to arrest either the one or the other. From his Presidential chair at Benares, Mr. Gokhale had told the world how he "felt towards Mr. Morley as towards a Master " and how his heart leapt "with hope and fear" at the appointment of the Biographer of Gladstone to India Office. Mr. Morley, so trusted and revered, did not hesitate in his budget Speech (June 1907) 'reluctantly to call the Educated Indians as enemies. The student of Mill and Bright repeatedly declared "so long as my imagination could reach, India for a long time to come, must continue to be the theatre of absolute and personal rule;" and yet the Moderates were ready, nay, eager to welcome his reforms as being "generous and just!"
This policy of "hearty repression and halting concessions" created an acute situation, straining almost to the breaking point the already delicate relations between the Moderates and the Extremists. In the next chapter, we shall see how these relations culminated into the unfortunate split at Surat.