Gandhi and Anarchy by C. Sankaran Nair

Gandhi and Anarchy by C. Sankaran Nair

Author:C. Sankaran Nair [Nair, C. Sankaran]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2016-08-26T18:30:00+00:00


APPENDIX X

STATEMENT BY SIR L. PORTER

We have been vilified bitterly, every kind of abuse has been showered on us by non-co-operators, every form of insidious agitation has been tried, and we have stayed our hands.

Violent Agitators

I will mention the case of one of the men who has now been arrested and is undergoing imprisonment as a first-class misdemeanant. He made at least ten speeches up and down the country which our legal advisers informed us were clearly actionable. I allude to Mr. Jawahir Lal Nebru. His final effort was a speech, somewhere in the west of the Province, in which he quoted word by word the sedition section, i.e., the promotion, of disaffection against the Government as by law established and the section which deals with promoting hatred between classes of His Majesty's subjects, and he said that the object of his life was to carry out this promotion of sedition and disaffection. Still we did nothing. You may well ask why. We thought that the forces of reason and sobriety would re-establish their sway. We hoped that the great body of moderate opinion of the Provinces would be sufficiently powerful to assuage this movement and to stop the dissemination of poison. We were wrong. So far from losing any strength I do not hesitate to say that the movement has gone on gaining strength. Then came the time in November when we were confronted with reports from our trusted officers all over the provinces which left no doubt whatever in our minds that the situation had very greatly developed, and that there was imminent possibility (I would go further and say probability) of an outburst of violence in more than one district. I have here a big folio of reports. It is quite impossible for me in debate like this to quote them all. There are copies of reports from districts as wide apart and representative as Meerut, Cawnpur, Fyzabad, Etawah, Balia, Barabanki and the peaceful district of Aligarh, which, according to its member, Thakur Manak Singh, is now the scene of this campaign of repression. I should like, as a typical instance, to read out the description of the procedure which was adopted in the Barabanki district. The Barabanki district, as my friend on my right will bear me out, is a particularly difficult one. It is full of a class whom religious fanaticism particularly affects and when it once gets out of hand it is very difficult to deal with. I remember when I first came to India, there was tremendous outbreak of dacoity and violent crime in that and adjacent districts, which it took months to put down, at the cost of immense suffering to the population. This is one of the districts, which was selected as a focus in work on by these (what should I call them?) advocates of soul force.



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