Whether the extreme revolutionaries could have achieved their end of freedom through violent means or not, when the foe possessed such a mighty machinery of countering any such violent activity with ruthless efficiency, is not the pertinent question but what was significant in those turbulent times was that they exhibited rare manhood which ignited the freedom fervour of an entire nation.
The early revolutionaries were right in their diagnosis of the problem. It lay in the disarmament of the entire country post the Revolt of 1857. A disarmed country could not fight a modern army backed by a civil administration that was as efficient in exploitation as it was in keeping its octopus-hold on the subject nation, draining its resources with such surgical precision that the blood transfused from the Indian body to the British barbarian's emaciated the form of the colony till it lost all capacity to resist their perfidious control, or so it was intended to be. That it did not so happen must be attributed to those deathless heroes who laughingly gave up their lives at the scaffold or were tortured to death after they had fired at the Englishman to teach the Crown a lesson in Oriental valour and to remind them of the limits of their oppression that would be tolerated by the patient Indian.
The British treated us like animals, and for us to rationalise that the violent reaction of the revolutionaries, manifest in the form of assassination of the perpetrators of such inhuman treatment of our sons and daughters, was tantamount to the common crime of murder, shows to what degree we have sunk as a nation, being totally shorn of all virility, patriotism and self-dignity, thanks to the constant brainwashing received by us for the last seven decades that freedom was won by non-violence when there is not a shred of evidence to support the thesis that the British actually left their richest colony owing to the pressures of Gandhian truth-force (satyagraha) and non-violence (ahimsa). The contrary evidence of their leaving the country, being forced out of it by the impact of the INA assault and the Royal Indian Navy Revolt among others in its wake, holds ground perfectly and has even been corroborated by none other than Lord Clement Attlee in 1956 when he in a private moment admitted the truth to Justice P.B. Chakrabarty in the Raj Bhavan, Calcutta. Attlee admitted that it was Netaji and his INA's impact on the British Indian forces, subverting their allegiance to the Crown and turning them against their British Indian masters that had made perpetuation of the Raj untenable and that Gandhi's movement had minimal impact in influencing the British decision to leave.
The tears of the mothers and the wives of the revolutionaries, the daughters and the sisters of the valiant ones, shook the foundations of the Empire and burnt its edifice to ashes. Britain, you will yet have to learn the lesson of history, for karma will recoil on you, I say, and all that you have gained at the expense of others through plunder and loot and rapacious exploitation of the subjected masses, all of it will drain out of your hands as your festering grip fails to hold what never was yours. And the tears of the mothers and of the wives and the daughters will haunt your national life till retribution of history visits your cold island nation and, as Swamiji had prophesied, you are swept off your feet into the sea, which will be historic justice indeed, the balancing of your political sheet.
Where was British fair play, justice and civilisation when in someone else's country they stayed as occupying thugs and used their own men to keep them in subjection while looting the coffers of the nation dry? Where was their enlightenment when they heaped injury and insult on a conquered nation and even distorted that nation's historical narrative such that they as a nation sank into oblivion of their heritage and culture? Where was their humanity when they practised the most vicious racism on Indians, treating them like dogs and violating their very spirit, yet sending them to the war zones to combat the adversary in battle or in war as in the case of the two World Wars? How was England an enlightened nation when the lessons of the Enlightenment which centred on liberty, equality and fraternity they chose to conveniently ignore when it came to their dealing with the colonised countries among which India was the biggest cherry the Crown had for its ingestion? On the basis of which civilised principle did Britain barter humanity for their hellish treatment of Indians and how is it that countless Indians still do not have the fire in their belly to stand up to the facts of history and say, "We may forgive them one day in the distant future for their destruction of our motherland but we will never forget what they have done to us. We shall remember each and every act of British barbarism on us and seek inspiration from such to love our country evermore even as we labour to rebuild our motherland."? And how do Indians ever forget and forgive the amputation of their motherland which the British have done in perfidious alliance with the Muslim League and their villainous leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah? How can they forget the horrors of Partition, the 35 million people starved to death by famines caused by British policy and a total apathy to the well being of Indians, the destruction of their industry to facilitate the growth and sustenance of inferior British industry and the mass molestation of a people that reduced them from being one of the two richest nations of the world to becoming one of the poorest within a hundred years of the British Raj during the nineteenth century? These are pertinent questions that need honest answering by Indians before they open their mouths in open criticism of the extreme revolutionaries, basing their arguments along debilitating lines backed up by an unfeeling, dry intellect sharpened to seditious proportions on the rock of historical heresy preached by Congressmen since their moderated antiquity.
Swamiji had spoken of thought vibrations that, emanating from a powerful meditative mind, can travel from the confines of caves to permeate the thought-pool of the world and bring about marvellous transformation in the minds of the people they are directed to. As Swamiji was a rishi (seer of transcendental truth), his words are bound to be true. In a like manner, I think that the collective will-force of the revolutionaries in and through their ordeal in seeking freedom, their terrible suffering and torture at the hands of the British police, their constant meditation on the ideal of freedom, all these must have had a largely positive impact on the eventual outcome of the freedom movement, both in terms of the sympathy they evoked from the common man for the cause and from the standpoint of spiritual vibration, the binding together of thought waves into a mighty current of revolutionary fervour aimed at freedom.
End of Part 1 ... to be continued
The early revolutionaries were right in their diagnosis of the problem. It lay in the disarmament of the entire country post the Revolt of 1857. A disarmed country could not fight a modern army backed by a civil administration that was as efficient in exploitation as it was in keeping its octopus-hold on the subject nation, draining its resources with such surgical precision that the blood transfused from the Indian body to the British barbarian's emaciated the form of the colony till it lost all capacity to resist their perfidious control, or so it was intended to be. That it did not so happen must be attributed to those deathless heroes who laughingly gave up their lives at the scaffold or were tortured to death after they had fired at the Englishman to teach the Crown a lesson in Oriental valour and to remind them of the limits of their oppression that would be tolerated by the patient Indian.
The British treated us like animals, and for us to rationalise that the violent reaction of the revolutionaries, manifest in the form of assassination of the perpetrators of such inhuman treatment of our sons and daughters, was tantamount to the common crime of murder, shows to what degree we have sunk as a nation, being totally shorn of all virility, patriotism and self-dignity, thanks to the constant brainwashing received by us for the last seven decades that freedom was won by non-violence when there is not a shred of evidence to support the thesis that the British actually left their richest colony owing to the pressures of Gandhian truth-force (satyagraha) and non-violence (ahimsa). The contrary evidence of their leaving the country, being forced out of it by the impact of the INA assault and the Royal Indian Navy Revolt among others in its wake, holds ground perfectly and has even been corroborated by none other than Lord Clement Attlee in 1956 when he in a private moment admitted the truth to Justice P.B. Chakrabarty in the Raj Bhavan, Calcutta. Attlee admitted that it was Netaji and his INA's impact on the British Indian forces, subverting their allegiance to the Crown and turning them against their British Indian masters that had made perpetuation of the Raj untenable and that Gandhi's movement had minimal impact in influencing the British decision to leave.
The tears of the mothers and the wives of the revolutionaries, the daughters and the sisters of the valiant ones, shook the foundations of the Empire and burnt its edifice to ashes. Britain, you will yet have to learn the lesson of history, for karma will recoil on you, I say, and all that you have gained at the expense of others through plunder and loot and rapacious exploitation of the subjected masses, all of it will drain out of your hands as your festering grip fails to hold what never was yours. And the tears of the mothers and of the wives and the daughters will haunt your national life till retribution of history visits your cold island nation and, as Swamiji had prophesied, you are swept off your feet into the sea, which will be historic justice indeed, the balancing of your political sheet.
Where was British fair play, justice and civilisation when in someone else's country they stayed as occupying thugs and used their own men to keep them in subjection while looting the coffers of the nation dry? Where was their enlightenment when they heaped injury and insult on a conquered nation and even distorted that nation's historical narrative such that they as a nation sank into oblivion of their heritage and culture? Where was their humanity when they practised the most vicious racism on Indians, treating them like dogs and violating their very spirit, yet sending them to the war zones to combat the adversary in battle or in war as in the case of the two World Wars? How was England an enlightened nation when the lessons of the Enlightenment which centred on liberty, equality and fraternity they chose to conveniently ignore when it came to their dealing with the colonised countries among which India was the biggest cherry the Crown had for its ingestion? On the basis of which civilised principle did Britain barter humanity for their hellish treatment of Indians and how is it that countless Indians still do not have the fire in their belly to stand up to the facts of history and say, "We may forgive them one day in the distant future for their destruction of our motherland but we will never forget what they have done to us. We shall remember each and every act of British barbarism on us and seek inspiration from such to love our country evermore even as we labour to rebuild our motherland."? And how do Indians ever forget and forgive the amputation of their motherland which the British have done in perfidious alliance with the Muslim League and their villainous leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah? How can they forget the horrors of Partition, the 35 million people starved to death by famines caused by British policy and a total apathy to the well being of Indians, the destruction of their industry to facilitate the growth and sustenance of inferior British industry and the mass molestation of a people that reduced them from being one of the two richest nations of the world to becoming one of the poorest within a hundred years of the British Raj during the nineteenth century? These are pertinent questions that need honest answering by Indians before they open their mouths in open criticism of the extreme revolutionaries, basing their arguments along debilitating lines backed up by an unfeeling, dry intellect sharpened to seditious proportions on the rock of historical heresy preached by Congressmen since their moderated antiquity.
Swamiji had spoken of thought vibrations that, emanating from a powerful meditative mind, can travel from the confines of caves to permeate the thought-pool of the world and bring about marvellous transformation in the minds of the people they are directed to. As Swamiji was a rishi (seer of transcendental truth), his words are bound to be true. In a like manner, I think that the collective will-force of the revolutionaries in and through their ordeal in seeking freedom, their terrible suffering and torture at the hands of the British police, their constant meditation on the ideal of freedom, all these must have had a largely positive impact on the eventual outcome of the freedom movement, both in terms of the sympathy they evoked from the common man for the cause and from the standpoint of spiritual vibration, the binding together of thought waves into a mighty current of revolutionary fervour aimed at freedom.
End of Part 1 ... to be continued
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