REVOLUTIONARIES AND THE MAHATMA ... 1

Photo : Sachindranath Sanyal

The foremost characteristics of our revolutionaries were love for the motherland, fearlessness, purity, high idealism and an uncompromising pursuit of complete independence. They did not make common cause with the enemy. Their's was the absolute dedication for the proposed end of freedom and they never cared for half measures to achieve it. The revolutionaries were so committed to the cause of freedom that they were even willing to work with Gandhi along his path for the while to help bolster the overall movement for freedom but Gandhi would never endorse their methods as valid even for them, neither in principle nor in practice, so fanatically and foolishly possessed was he by his fantastic ideas of passive resistance. He would try every means to keep his own support base strong and growing by publicly criticising the methods of armed struggle for freedom and would urge the people not to support the revolutionaries and to shun their methods. Gandhi was more in love with his self-appointed role of World Teacher than he was in love with his motherland. And this is a peculiar psychological aberration of the quasi-spiritual man that is evident on a large scale in human society and this phenomenon of mock-spirituality much marks our polity, too, and is a major cause of our lack of intense feeling for our motherland.

The country was weak then and remains weak now because the people, fed the potion of non-violence, took to the easy way of waging 'war' on their colonial masters using soft feminine means which neither required as much sacrifice as the armed revolutionaries had to make nor did it quicken the country into massive martial strength. The method failed in winning independence, failed to prevent Partition but succeeded massively in keeping the masses hypnotised for good in passive acquiescence with every perfidy committed then by the British and now by the politicians. Gandhi fed the masses his own brand of personal weakness masquerading as the national ideal of non-violence through his celebrated dictum, 'Ahimsa paramo dharma' (Non-violence is the supreme dharma), in the bargain taking care to forget mentioning the remainder of the shloka, 'Dharma himsa tathaiva cha' (So, too, is violence in the service of dharma). 

अहिंसा परमो धर्मः धर्म हिंसा तथीव च

These half-truths were all exposed by Sachindranath Sanyal in his epic newspaper encounter with Gandhi. Sanyal severely criticised Gandhi's methods on the pages of 'Young India' and the votary of non-violence gave facile defences to such artillery attack by the revolutionary. An ardent Hindu, rooted deep in India' ancient spiritual culture which espouses both non-violence and violence as imperatives in specific situations and stations in life, Sanyal tore to shreds Gandhi's commonplace arguments as the experimenter with truth fumbled out poor defences for his proffered form of passive resistance to the tyrannical British regime.