It is to be wished that
non-co-operationists will clearly recognise that nothing can stop the onward
march of the nation as violence. Ireland may gain its freedom by violence.
Turkey may regain her lost possessions by violence within measurable distance
of time. But India cannot win her freedom by violence for a century, because
her people are not built in the manner of other nations. They have been
nurtured in the traditions of suffering. Rightly or wrongly, for good or ill,
Islam too has evolved along peaceful lines in India. And I make bold to say
that, if the honour of Islam is to be vindicated through its followers in
India, it will only be by methods of peaceful, silent, dignified, conscious,
and courageous suffering. The more I study that wonderful faith, the more
convinced I become that the glory of Islam is due not to the sword but to the
sufferings, the renunciation, and the nobility of its early Caliphs. Islam
decayed when its followers, mistaking the evil for the good, dangled the sword
in the face of man, and lost sight of the godliness, the humility, and
austerity of its founder and his disciples. But, I am not at the present
moment, concerned with showing that the basis of Islam, as of all religions, is
not violence but suffering not the taking of life but the giving of it.
What I am anxious to show is that
non-co-operationists must be true as well to the spirit as to the letter of
their vow if they would gain Swaraj within one year. They may forget
non-co-operation but they dare not forget non-violence. Indeed,
non-co-operation is non-violence. We are violent when we sustain a government
whose creed is violence. It bases itself finally not on right but on might. Its
last appeal is not to reason, nor the heart, but to the sword. We are tired of
this creed and we have risen against it. Let us not ourselves belie our
profession by being violent. Though the English are very few, they are organised
for violence. Though we are many we cannot be organised for violence for a long
time to come. Violence for us is a gospel or despair.
I have seen a pathetic letter
from a god-fearing English woman who defends Dyerism for she thinks that, if
General Dyer had not enacted Jallianwala, women and children would have been
murdered by us. If we are such brutes as to desire the blood of innocent women
and children, we deserve to be blotted out from the face of the earth. There is
the other side. It did not strike this good lady that, if we were friends, the
price that her countrymen paid at Jallianwala for buying their safety was too
great. They gained their safety at the cost of their humanity. General Dyer has
been haltingly blamed, and his evil genius Sir Michael O'Dwyer entirely
exonerated because Englishmen do not want to leave this country of fields even
if everyone of us has to be killed. If we go mad again as we did at Amritsar,
let there be no mistake that a blacker Jallianwala will be enacted.
Shall we copy Dyerism and
O'Dwyerism even whilst we are condemning it? Let not our rock be violence and
devilry. Our rock must be non-violence and godliness. Let us, workers, be clear
as to what we are about. Swaraj depends upon our ability to control all the forces
of violence on our side. Therefore there is no Swaraj within one year, if there
is violence on the part of the people.
We must then refrain from sitting
dhurna, we must refrain from crying 'shame, shame' to anybody, we must not use
any coercion to persuade our people to adopt our way. We must guarantee to them
the same freedom we claim for ourselves. We must not tamper with the masses. It
is dangerous to make political use of factory labourers or the peasantry--not
that we are not entitled to do so, but we are not ready for it. We have
neglected their political (as distinguished from literary) education all these
long years. We have not got enough honest, intelligent, reliable, and brave
workers to enable us to act upon these countrymen of ours.