Freedom\'s Battle - Mahatma Gandhi
I ask Your Royal Highness and through you every Englishman to
appreciate the view-point of the non-co-operationists.
I beg to remain,
Your Royal Highness's faithful servant,
(Sd.) M.K. GANDHI.
_February_, 1921
THE GREATEST THING
It is to be wished that non-co-operationists will clearly recognise that
nothing can stop the onward march of the nation as violence. Ireland may
gain its freedom by violence. Turkey may regain her lost possessions by
violence within measurable distance of time. But India cannot win her
freedom by violence for a century, because her people are not built in
the manner of other nations. They have been nurtured in the traditions
of suffering. Rightly or wrongly, for good or ill, Islam too has evolved
along peaceful lines in India. And I make bold to say that, if the
honour of Islam is to be vindicated through its followers in India, it
will only be by methods of peaceful, silent, dignified, conscious, and
courageous suffering. The more I study that wonderful faith, the more
convinced I become that the glory of Islam is due not to the sword but
to the sufferings, the renunciation, and the nobility of its early
Caliphs. Islam decayed when its followers, mistaking the evil for the
good, dangled the sword in the face of man, and lost sight of the
godliness, the humility, and austerity of its founder and his disciples.
But, I am not at the present moment, concerned with showing that the
basis of Islam, as of all religions, is not violence but suffering not
the taking of life but the giving of it.
What I am anxious to show is that non-co-operationists must be true as
well to the spirit as to the letter of their vow if they would gain
Swaraj within one year. They may forget non-co-operation but they dare
not forget non-violence. Indeed, non-co-operation is non-violence. We
are violent when we sustain a government whose creed is violence. It
bases itself finally not on right but on might. Its last appeal is not
to reason, nor the heart, but to the sword. We are tired of this creed
and we have risen against it. Let us not ourselves belie our profession
by being violent. Though the English are very few, they are organised
for violence. Though we are many we cannot be organised for violence for
a long time to come. Violence for us is a gospel or despair.
I have seen a pathetic letter from a god-fearing English woman who
defends Dyerism for she thinks that, if General Dyer had not enacted
Jallianwala, women and children would have been murdered by us. If we
are such brutes as to desire the blood of innocent women and children,
we deserve to be blotted out from the face of the earth. There is the
other side. It did not strike this good lady that, if we were friends,
the price that her countrymen paid at Jallianwala for buying their
safety was too great. They gained their safety at the cost of their
humanity. General Dyer has been haltingly blamed, and his evil genius
Sir Michael O'Dwyer entirely exonerated because Englishmen do not want
to leave this country of fields even if everyone of us has to be killed.
If we go mad again as we did at Amritsar, let there be no mistake that a
blacker Jallianwala will be enacted.
Shall we copy Dyerism and O'Dwyerism even whilst we are condemning it?
Let not our rock be violence and devilry. Our rock must be non-violence
and godliness. Let us, workers, be clear as to what we are about.
_Swaraj depends upon our ability to control all the forces of violence
on our side._ Therefore there is no Swaraj within one year, if there is
violence on the part of the people.
We must then refrain from sitting _dhurna_, we must refrain from crying
'shame, shame' to anybody, we must not use any coercion to persuade our
people to adopt our way. We must guarantee to them the same freedom we
claim for ourselves. We must not tamper with the masses. It is dangerous
to make political use of factory labourers or the peasantry--not that we
are not entitled to do so, but we are not ready for it. We have
neglected their political (as distinguished from literary) education all
these long years. We have not got enough honest, intelligent, reliable,
and brave workers to enable us to act upon these countrymen of ours.
IX. MAHATMA GANDHI'S STATEMENT
[The following is the Statement of Mahatma Gandhi made before the Court
during his Trial in Ahmedabad on the 18th March 1921.]
Before reading his written statement Mahatma Gandhi spoke a few words as
introductory remarks to the whole statement. He said: Before I read this
statement, I would like to state that I entirely endorse the learned
Advocate-General's remarks in connection with my humble self. I think
that he was entirely fair to me in all the statements that he has made,
because it is very true and I have no desire whatsoever to conceal from
this Court the fact that to preach disaffection towards the existing
system of Government has become almost a passion with me. And the
learned Advocate-General is also entirely in the right when he says that
my preaching of disaffection did not commence with my connection with
"Young India" but that it commenced much earlier and in the statement
that I am about to read it will be my painful duty to admit before this
Court that it commenced much earlier than the period stated by the
Advocate-General. It is the most painful duty with me but I have to
discharge that duty knowing the responsibility that rested upon my
shoulders. And I wish to endorse all the blame that the
Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the
Bombay occurrence, Madras occurrences, and the Chouri Choura occurrences
thinking over these things deeply, and sleeping over them night after
night and examining my heart I have come to the conclusion that it is
impossible for me to dissociate myself from the diabolical crimes of
Chouri Choura or the mad outrages of Bombay. He is quite right when he
says that as a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share
of education, having had a fair share of experience of this world, I
should know them. I knew that I was playing with fire. I ran the risk
and if I was set free I would still do the same. I would be failing in
my duty if I do not do so. I have felt it this morning that I would have
failed in my duty if I did not say all what I said here just now. I
wanted to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith.
It is the last article of my faith. But I had to make my choice. I had
either to submit to a system which I considered has done an irreparable
harm to my country or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people
bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that
my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it; and I am,
therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest
penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I
am here, therefore, to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can
be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what
appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open
to you, Mr. Judge, is, as I am just going to say in my statement, either
to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe
that the system and law you are assisting to administer are good for the
people. I do not expect that kind of conversion. But by the time I have
finished with my statement you will, perhaps, have a glimpse of what is
raging within my breast to run this maddest risk which a sane man
can run.
WRITTEN STATEMENT
I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England to
placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up that I should explain
why from a staunch loyalist and co-operator I have become an
uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator. To the Court too I
should say why I plead guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection
towards the Government established by law in India. My public life
began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with
British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I
discovered that as a man and as an Indian I had no rights. On the
contrary I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was
an Indian.
But I was not baffled. I thought that this treatment of Indians was an
excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good. I gave
the Government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticising it
fully where I felt it was faulty but never wishing its destruction.
Consequently when the existence of the Empire was threatened in 1899 by
the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer
ambulance corps and served at several actions that took place for the
relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906 at the time of the Zulu revolt I
raised a stretcher-bearer party and served till the end of the
'rebellion'. On both these occasions I received medals and was even
mentioned in despatches. For my work in South Africa I was given by Lord
Hardinge a Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal. When the war broke out in 1914
between England and Germany I raised a volunteer ambulance corps in
London consisting of the then resident Indians in London, chiefly
students. Its work was acknowledged by the authorities to be valuable.
Lastly in India when a special appeal was made at the War Conference
in Delhi in 1917 by Lord Chelmsford for recruits, I struggled at the
cost of my health to raise a corps in Kheda and the response was being
made when the hostilities ceased and orders were received that no more
recruits were wanted. In all those efforts at service I was actuated by
the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status of
full equality in the Empire for my countrymen.
The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlalt Act a law designed to
rob the people of all real freedom. I felt called upon to lead an
intensive agitation against it. Then followed the Punjab horrors
beginning with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and culminating in
brawling orders, public floggings and other indescribable humiliations,
I discovered too that the plighted word of the Prime Minister to the
Mussalmans of India regarding the integrity of Turkey and the holy
places of Islam was not likely to be fulfilled. But in spite of the
foreboding and the grave warnings of friends, at the Amritsar Congress
in 1919 I fought for co-operation and working the Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister would redeem his promise to the
Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would be healed and that the
reforms inadequate and unsatisfactory though they were, marked a new era
of hope in the life of India. But all that hope was shattered. The
Khilafat promise was not to be redeemed. The Punjab crime was
white-washed and most culprits went not only unpunished but remained in
service and some continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue, and
in some cases were even rewarded. I saw too that not only did the
reforms not mark a change of heart, but they were only a method of
further draining India of her wealth and of prolonging her servitude.
I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had
made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and
economically. A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any
aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him. So much
is this the case that some of our best men consider that India must take
generations before she can achieve the Dominion status. She has become
so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the
British advent India spun and wove in her millions of cottages just the
supplement she needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources.
The cottage industry, so vital for India's existence, has been ruined by
incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described by English
witnesses. Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of
Indians are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that
their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work
they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage
are sucked from the masses. Little do they realise that the Government
established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation
of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the
evidence the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have
no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town dwellers of India
will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against
humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. The law itself in this
country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter. My unbiased,
examination of the Punjab Martial Law cases had led me to believe that
at least ninety-five per cent. of convictions were wholly bad. My
experience of political cases in India leads me to the conclusion that
in nine out of every ten the condemned men were totally innocent. Their
crime consisted in love of their country. In ninety-nine cases out of
hundred justice has been denied to Indians as against Europeans in the
Court of India. This is not an exaggerated picture. It is the experience
of almost every Indian who has had anything to do such cases. In my
opinion the administration of the law is thus prostituted consciously or
unconsciously for the benefit of the exploiter. The greatest misfortune
is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in the administration of
the country do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have
attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many English and Indian
officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best
systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow
progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of
terrorism and an organised display of force on the one hand and the
deprivation of all powers of retaliation of self-defence on the other
have emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation.
This awful habit has added to the ignorance and the self-deception of
the administrators. Section 124-A under which I am happily charged is
perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code
designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be
manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person
or thing one should be free to give the fullest expression to his
disaffection so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to
violence. But the section under which mere promotion of disaffection is
a crime. I have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know
that some of the most loved of India's patriots have been convicted
under it. I consider it a privilege therefore, to be charged under it.
I have endeavoured to give in their briefest outline the reasons for my
disaffection. I have no personal ill-will against any single
administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King's
person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a
Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any
previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she
ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to
have affection for the system. And it has been a precious privilege for
me to be able to write what I have in the various articles tendered in
evidence against me.
In fact I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by
showing in non-co-operation the way out of the unnatural state in which
both are living. In my humble opinion, non-co-operation with evil is as
much a duty as is co-operation with good. But in the past,
non-co-operation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil
doer. I am endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent
non-co-operation only multiplies evil and that as evil can only be
sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete
abstention from violence. Non-violent implies voluntary submission to
the penalty for non-co-operation with evil. I am here, therefore, to
invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can he
inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears
to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you,
the Judge and the Assessors, is either to resign your posts and thus
dissociate yourselves from evil if you feel that the law you are called
upon to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent, or to
inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and
the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this
country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.
M. K. GHANDI.