They say:—Can you boycott all the Government offices? Whoever said that we would? Whoever said that there would not be found a single Indian to serve the Government or the European community here? But what we can do is this. We can make the Government impossible without entirely making it impossible for them to find people to serve them. The administration may be made impossible in a variety of ways. It is not actually that every deputy magistrate should say: I won't serve in it. It is not that when one man resigns nobody will be found to take his place. But if you create this spirit in the country the Government service will gradually imbibe this spirit, and a whole office may go on strike. That does not put an end to the administration, but it creates endless complications in the work of administration, and if these complications are created in every part of the country, the administration will have been brought to a deadlock and made none the less impossible, for the primary thing is the prestige of the Government and the boycott strikes at the root of that prestige. … We can reduce every Indian in Government service to the position of a man who has fallen from the dignity of Indian citizenship. … No man shall receive social honours because he is a Hakim or a Munsiff or a Huzur Sheristadar. … No law can compel one to give a chair to a man who comes to his house. He may give it to an ordinary shopkeeper; he may refuse it to the Deputy Magistrate or the Subordinate Judge. He may give his daughter in marriage to a poor beggar, he may refuse her to the son of a Deputy Magistrate, because it is absolutely within his rights, absolutely within legal bounds.
Passive resistance is recognized as legitimate in England. It is legitimate in theory even in India, and if it is made illegal by new legislation, these laws will infringe on the primary rights of personal freedom and will tread on dangerous grounds. Therefore it seems to me that by means of the boycott we shall be able to do the negative work that will have to be done for the attainment of Swaraj. Positive work will have to be done. Without positive training no self-government will come to the boycotter. It will (come) through the organization of our village life; of our talukas and districts. Let our programme include the setting up of machinery for popular administration, and running parallel to, but independent of, the existing administration of the Government. … In the Providence of God we shall then be made rulers over many things. This is our programme.
But Mr. Pal himself admits that even if this programme can be fulfilled, this Swaraj, this absolute self-rule which he asks for, is fundamentally incompatible with the maintenance of the British connexion.
Is really self-government within the Empire a practicable ideal? What would it mean? It would mean either no real self-government for us or no real overlordship for England. Would we be satisfied with the shadow of self-government? If not, would England be satisfied with the shadow of overlordship? In either case England would not be satisfied with a shadowy overlordship, and we refuse to be satisfied with a shadowy self-government. And therefore no compromise is possible under such conditions between self-government in India and the overlordship of England. If self-government is conceded to us, what would be England's position not only in India, but in the British Empire itself? Self-government means the right of self-taxation; it means the right of financial control; it means the right of the people to impose protective and prohibitive tariffs on foreign imports. The moment we have the right of self-taxation, what shall we do? We shall not try to be engaged in this uphill work of industrial boycott. But we shall do what every nation has done. Under the circumstances in which we live now, we shall impose a heavy prohibitive protective tariff upon every inch of textile fabric from Manchester, upon every blade of knife that comes from Leeds. We shall refuse to grant admittance to a British soul into our territory. We would not allow British capital to be engaged in the development of Indian resources, as it is now engaged. We would not grant any right to British capitalists to dig up the mineral wealth of the land and carry it to their own isles. We shall want foreign capital. But we shall apply for foreign loans in the open market of the whole world, guaranteeing the credit of the Indian Government, the Indian nation, for the repayment of the loan, just as America has done and is doing, just as Russia is doing now, just as Japan has been doing of late. And England's commercial interests would not be furthered in the way these are being furthered now, under the conditions of popular self-government, though it might be within the Empire. But what would it mean within the Empire? It would mean that England would have to enter into some arrangement with us for some preferential tariff. England would have to come to our markets on the conditions that we would impose upon her for the purpose, if she wanted an open door in India, and after a while, when we have developed our resources a little and organized our industrial life, we would want the open door not only to England, but to every part of the British Empire. And do you think it is possible for a small country like England with a handful of population, although she might be enormously wealthy, to compete on fair and equitable terms with a mighty continent like India, with immense natural resources, with her teeming populations, the soberest and most abstemious populations known to any part of the world?
If we have really self-government within the Empire, if we have the rights of freedom of the Empire as Australia has, as Canada has, as England has to-day, if we, 300 millions of people, have that freedom of the Empire, the Empire would cease to be British. It would be the Indian Empire, and the alliance between England and India would be absolutely an unequal alliance. That would be, if we had really self-government within the Empire, exactly the relation as co-partners in a co-British or anti-British Empire of the future; and if the day comes when England will be reduced to the alternative of having us as an absolutely independent people or a co-partner with her in the Empire, she would prefer to have us, like the Japanese, as an ally and no longer a co-partner, because we are bound to be the predominant partner in this Imperial firm. Therefore no sane Englishman, politician or publicist can ever contemplate seriously the possibility of a self-governing India, like the self-governing colonies, forming a vital and organic part of the British Empire. Therefore it is that Lord Morley says that so long as India remains under the control of Great Britain the government of India must continue to be a personal and absolute one. Therefore it seems to me that this ideal, the practically attainable ideal of self-government within the Empire, when we analyse it with care, when we study it in the light of common human psychology, when we study it in the light of our past experience of the racial characteristics of the British people, when we study it in the light of past British history in India and other parts of the world, when we study and analyse this ideal of self-government within the Empire, we find it is a far more impracticable thing to attain than even our ideal Swaraj.
I have quoted Mr. Pal's utterances at some length, because they are the fullest and the most frank exposition available of what lies beneath the claim to Colonial self-government as it is understood by "advanced" politicians. No one can deny the merciless logic with which he analyses the inevitable results of Swaraj, and Englishmen may well be grateful to him for having disclosed them so fearlessly. British sympathizers who are reluctant to look behind a formula which commends itself to their peculiar predilections, naturally dislike any reference to Mr. Pal's interpretation of Indian "self-government," and would even impugn his character in order the better to question his authority. But they cannot get over the fact that in India, very few "moderate" politicians have had the courage openly to repudiate his programmes, though many of them realize its dangers, whilst the "extremists" want a much shorter cut to the same goal. It is only by pledging itself to Swaraj that the Indian National Congress has been able to maintain a semblance of unity.
Moreover, if any doubt still lingers as to the inner meaning of Swaraj and Swadeshi, and other kindred war-cries of Indian Nationalism, the language of the Nationalist Press remains on record to complete our enlightenment. However incompatible with the maintenance of British rule may be the propositions set forth by Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, they contain no incitement to violence, no virulent diatribes against Englishmen. It is in the Press rather than on the platform that Indian politicians, whether "extreme" or merely "advanced" are apt to let themselves go. They write down to the level of their larger audiences. So little has hitherto been done to enlighten public opinion at home as to the gravity of the evil which the recent Indian Press law has at last, though