Lala Lajpat Rai

“ Your cotton duties, sir, afford no relief to the Indian poor. It would not have hurt me much, if you had forced or induced the Rajas and the Maharajas, the bankers and the capitalists to contribute even more than 100 million pounds to the war expenses, as it is they who have grown fat, if anyone in India has, under the British regime, but to force the Indian ryot and the Indian wage earner to do it and to continue to pay for it for years to come out of his scanty daily rations is the climax of cruelty. ”

“ All honor to those who, though they cannot speak the whole truth, yet keep the fire burning in India and do as much as considerations of policy and expediency permit. If they do not speak the whole truth, they have at least the consolation of being at home, in the heart of their family and surrounded by their dear ones. For a political exile, however, there is nothing else to do, unless he has to carry on a fight for his living also, in which case he will divide his time between the two, that of earning bread and crying for justice for his country. ”

“ Then you cite the figures of trade in support of your theory that India is prosperous under British rule, but you forget that that trade benefits your country more than it benefits India, if at all. We send you food and raw materials at cheapest prices, making ourselves liable to "famines." You pay us in articles of luxury, of flimsy value, at the highest prices. The balance of trade is always in your favor. We toil and sweat, and your countrymen enjoy the profit. All the paying industries, railways, tea, jute, half of the cotton industry, etc., are in the hands of your countrymen. ”

“ May I ask, sir, if it is not a fact that millions in India die of famine, plague, and malaria? Is it not a fact that the curses and the appalling effects of them, are directly or indirectly traceable to poverty? Many countries on the face of the earth do not grow food sufficient for themselves while India does. Why then should India alone suffer from famines when her food supply, once in a while, falls short of the ordinary year of agricultural [pg 42] "prosperity?" ”

“ Yet if an Indian leader were to point this out and ask the Indian masses to improve their lot by demanding and winning for themselves the right to manage their own affairs, and by driving out those influences that stand in their way, he would be persecuted and imprisoned or transported.
The first axiom for political progress is that the people should throw away their attitude of submission to oppression, tyranny, high-handedness, and conditions of slavery whether imposed by a national or a foreign Government. They have a right to revolt if they have the means to do so successfully. ”

“ Your Government in India estimates an annual charge of £6,000,000 sterling. Where is the balance to come from except from the famished Indian ryot? Is that how you show your love for democracy, for the people at large, for the workingman? Your representatives in India and outside, are proclaiming to the world that India is the most lightly taxed country in the world, withholding the fact that the average income of an Indian is only £2 a year, of which he pays 7 shillings toward taxes. ”

“ If you, sir, are to be the sole judge of the educational requirements of the Indian people, their progress is bound to hang on your convenience. No one in possession is anxious to be dispossessed and if the time and method of his dispossession is to be determined by himself, then woe to the dispossessed! But, sir, you forget that literacy is not education. The Indian masses have a background [pg 55] of centuries of culture which places them in the matter of intelligence and character, in a better position than even the literate millions of European and American countries. ”

“ If the masses are so prosperous, as your officers say, why cannot you tax the people for purposes of education and sanitation? Why is the death rate so high (over 30 per thousand) ? Why can't you force the local bodies to spend money on education and sanitation? Why do your finance ministers say that there is no room for further taxes? Most of your agents in India know the real condition of the people but they have to conceal it from the British public as well as the world, as that [pg 21] enables them and their kin to continue in the enjoyment of that power which means so much to them. ”

“ It is impossible for you to understand how passionately an Indian loves his country. He would rather starve in India than be a ruler of men in a foreign climate. For him, India is the land of Gods—the Deva Bhúmí of his forefathers. ”

“ India is the only part of the Empire which has been forced to give $500,000,000 as a free gift. Even the fabulously rich United States which have made huge war profits from you and your other allies have not thought of a national gift. Yet imperial sophistry represented by your imperial publicists and officials, represents that Great Britain exacts no tribute from India and makes no profit out of her connection with India and that she rules India simply out of philanthropic and humanitarian motives. ”

“ If, then, we have withstood it, it was not because we were in love with your Government in India, but on different grounds. Personally, I do not believe that any liberty is worth having which we cannot win ourselves, because liberty won by the aid of another places us at the mercy of that other. European diplomacy is so crooked that it is futile to place faith in the promises of any of them. ”

“ If then, an Indian decides to be an exile, voluntarily and maybe for life, he only does so either under a grave sense of duty or of danger. The duty lies in speaking the truth about political conditions in India and the danger in being effectively prevented from doing so if he remains [pg 13] there. No Indian can speak the whole truth while in India. The criminal laws of your Government—your Penal and Criminal Codes, Seditious Meetings and Conspiracy Acts, and Press Laws, your tribunals presided over by your own people unaided by jurors—effectively gag his mouth. ”

“ But an Indian cannot help smiling rather cynically when he hears you saying that you are waging the war to make the world safe for democracy. Your conduct in India and in Egypt, and in Persia belies your protestations. ”

“ Even my worst enemies have not been able to point out anything in my life which would give any one even the shadow of a reason to say that, in my private life, I have not been as good and honorable a person as any British politician or diplomat or proconsul, is or has been or can be. My record as a wage-earner is as clean and as honorable as that of the best of Britishers engaged in governing India. ”

“ If left free, we might bring to book the indigenous capitalists whom, in the interests of your own capitalists, you have been supporting and fattening. But even if we fail to do so, we shall at any rate have upon us the burden of only a single weight. Your colleagues say that in refusing self-government to India they are actuated by devotion to India; that they do not want to hand over the millions of India to the tender mercies of a small minority of educated and wealthy men in whose hands the government will inevitably drift. ”

“ Is it not a matter of shame, that of all the grain producing [pg 43] countries of the world India alone should be so miserably situated as to be unable to supply sufficient and nourishing food to her sons and daughters. Don't you think, sir, that the Indians have reason to feel sore when they see that the food grown by them is denied to them; that it is almost snatched from their mouths; that others should eat the food which is grown by them, that even in the best of years millions of them must be contented with only one meal a day, and that of the coarsest grain. ”

“ In reply, you might well ask, why then is India loyal? Why do the people put up with all this? Why don't they rebel? Because they have been emasculated, and emasculated so completely, that they are absolutely helpless against your organized brigandage. They are weak, ignorant and incompetent. Sixty-four years ago they were not so helpless. But now they are completely demoralized and penniless. Your system has ground them into dust. They cannot even protect themselves from wild beasts. ”

“ Recently the Times said that the British were "the trustees of the welfare of India's millions." Who are these millions for whom you are trustees? Are they those homeless, educationless millions who get only one meal a day or are they those who have benefitted from your schools and are wealthy? ”

“ Don't you know, sir, that in India there are millions of widows (much [pg 35] more than in any other country) who have to support their little ones by their own toil and that every penny of additional taxation hits them hard. The hardships and privations imposed in Europe by the war are nothing as compared with what the Indian masses have been putting up with, for the last fifty years or so. The fiscal policy of your Government has ruined Indian industry. ”

“ The Indians have lost their freedom because they oppressed the people under them and as surely as night follows day, the British will lose all that makes them great to-day, if they continue to oppress and exploit the subject races within their Empire. The world cannot be safe for democracy unless India is self-governed. ”

“ The fresh taxation imposed since the war, which by this loan-cum-gift transaction of 100 million sterling threatens to become permanent, has raised the prices of the necessaries of life to an abnormal extent. The wages remain virtually the same. Your Government which employs large numbers of laboring men in railways, canals, and otherwise have not considered it necessary to raise the wages of the workingmen. Will the private employer do otherwise? I know from personal knowledge how frightfully the poor Indian clerk is sweated in the offices of your Government in India on a mere pittance. ”

“ In defending your conduct you urge that India is not a nation. Very well, sir, divide India into small nations and give them self-government separately. You will admit that there are parts of India which are homogenous, entitled to be called small nations in the sense in which Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, and Holland are. The bulk of the population follow the same religion, speak the same language and belong to the same race. ”

“ The masses cannot grasp principles unless one illustrates these principles by their application to the affairs of every day life. Your Government and your courts say that an agitation for home rule is legal and permissible, but any criticism that is likely to create dissatisfaction is illegal and deserves to be suppressed high-handedly. You know from experience, sir, that the masses require to be led. No government is willing to make changes unless compelled from below. ”

“ If even during famine years India can supply food to other nations by exports of wheat and other grains, why can't she keep that food at home and feed her own hungry children? Why should plague have stayed in India so long? Why should malaria exact such a heavy annual toll there? The reason is obvious. Because of the ignorance and poverty of the people.
Let us assume that India has not grown poorer under British rule, though there is abundant evidence to the contrary, that the masses have become poorer and are becoming poorer every day ”

“ You cannot say that Indians are lacking in fighting qualities, because the existence of them in a high degree they have proved conclusively in face of difficulties, by no means light and contemptible. That the Indian soldier can hold his own in Europe, even better than the European soldier in Southern Asia, has been established beyond the shadow of a doubt by the experiences of this war. ”

“ You and your colleagues have used grandiloquent rhetoric in your defense of the increase in the cotton duties in India and over your concern for India and Indian industries, but you are mistaken if you think that anyone in India is likely to be taken in by your hypocritical professions. Pardon me, sir, I mean no insult when I say "hypocritical professions." [pg 36] The practice is a part of a modern statesman's job. He has to create a certain atmosphere before he can make his people believe that what he does is the only correct thing to do. ”

“ The huge allowances made to the heads of the different governments in India for kitchen expenses, for dispensing hospitality, and for traveling in royal style have not been reduced by a penny. The Punjab Government has provided in its current budget a large amount of money for providing palatial residences for its officers in summer resorts, and has sanctioned large pensions, from father to son, for a few of their Indian supporters. These men are mostly wealthy men. They did nothing more than help you in your suppressive and exploiting policy. Your Government naturally rewards them. ”

“ The result is that you will neither educate the masses yourself nor will you let us educate them. Yet you hold their [pg 47] ignorance a valid ground for refusing us our right to manage our own affairs. When, however, you want money for Imperial purposes you raise loans, impose taxes, and reduce public expenditure on education and public works. You have done this not only now, for the purposes of this bloody war, but you have done so in the past in building railways for your merchants and to fight your wars in Africa, in China, in Afghanistan, in fact, all over the old world. ”

“ The apologists of the present system of Government in India say that the Indian people are not sufficiently educated in the principles and practice of politics and that their ignorance and illiteracy make it necessary for the British to continue to rule them from without, until they are fit to establish and maintain a democratic form of government. ”

“ I do not believe that "they also serve who only stand and wait." I am for a manly assertion of our rights, even though blood may have to be spilled in asserting or defending them; yet I would consider it highly improper to encourage bloodshed where there is not a ghost of a chance of success. ”