[The historical trial of Mahatma
Gandhi and Shri. Shankarlal Ghelabhai Banker, editor, and printer and publisher
respectively of Young India, on charges under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal
Code, was held on Saturday, 18th March 1922, before Mr. C. N. Broomfield, I. C.
S., District and Sessions Judge, Ahmedabad.]
Sir J. T. Strangman,
Advocate-General, with Rao Bahadur Girdharlal Uttamram, Public Prosecutor of
Ahmedabad, appeared for the Crown. Mr. A. C. Wild, Remembrancer of Legal
Affairs, was also present. Mahatma Gandhi and Shri Shankarlal Banker were
undefended.
Among the members of the public
who were present on the occasion were : Kasturba Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Pandit
M. M. Malaviya, Shri N. C. Kelkar, Smt. J. B. Petit, and Smt. Anasuyaben
Sarabhai.
The Judge, who took his seat at
12 noon, said that there was slight mistake in the charges were then read out
by the Registrar. These charges were of "bringing or attempting to excite
disaffection towards His Majesty's Government established by law in British
India, and thereby committing offences punishable under Section 124 A of the
Indian Penal Code," the offences being in three articles published in
Young India of September 29 and December 15 of 1921, and February 23 of 1922.
The offending articles were then read out : first of them was, "Tampering
with Loyalty"; and second, "The Puzzle and its Solution", and
the last was "Shaking the Manes".
The Judge said that the law
required that the charges should not be read out but explained. In this case it
would not be necessary for him to say much by way of explanation. The charge in
each case was that of bringing or attempting to excite into hatred or contempt
or exciting or attempting to excite disaffection towards His Majesty's
Government, established by law in British India. Both the accused were charged
with the three offences under Section 124 A, contained in the articles read
out, written by Mahatma Gandhi and printed by Shri Banker.
The charges having been read out,
the Judge called upon the accused to plead to the charges. He asked Gandhiji
whether he pleaded guilty or claimed to be tried.
Gandhiji said : "I plead
guilty to all the charges. I observe that the King's name has been omitted from
the charge, and it has been properly omitted."
The Judge asked Shri banker the
same question and he too readily pleaded guilty.
The Judge wished to give his
verdict immediately after Gandhiji had pleaded guilty, but Sir Strangman
insisted that the procedure should be carried out in full. The Advocate-General
requested the Judge to take into account "the occurrences in Bombay,
Malabar and Chauri Chaura, leading to rioting and murder". He admitted,
indeed, that "in these articles you find that non-violence is insisted
upon as an item of the campaign and of the creed," but the added "of
what value is it to insist on non-violence, if incessantly you preach disaffection
towards the Government and hold it up as a treacherous Government, and if you
openly and deliberately seek to instigate others to overthrow it?" These
were the circumstances which he asked the Judge to take into account in passing
sentence on the accused.
As regards Shri Banker, the
second accused, the offence was lesser. He did the publication but did not
write. Sir Strangman's instructions were that Shri Banker was a man of means
and he requested the court to impose a substantial fine in addition to such
term of imprisonment as might be inflicted upon.
Court : Mr. Gandhi, do you wish
to make any statement on the question of sentence?
Gandhiji : I would like to make a
statement.
Court : Could you give me in
writing to put it on record?
Gandhiji : I shall give it as
soon as I finish it.
[Gandhiji then made the following
oral statement followed by a written statement that he read.]
Before I read this statement I
would like to state that I entirely endorse the learned Advocate-General's remarks
in connection with my humble self. I think that he has made, because it is very
true and I have no desire whatsoever to conceal from this court the fact that
to preach disaffection towards the existing system of Government has become
almost a passion with me, and the Advocate-General is entirely in the right
when he says that my preaching of disaffection did not commence with my
connection with Young India but that it commenced much earlier, and in the
statement that I am about to read, it will be my painful duty to admit before
this court that it commenced much earlier than the period stated by the
Advocate-General. It is a painful duty with me but I have to discharge that
duty knowing the responsibility that rests upon my shoulders, and I wish to endorse
all the blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulders in
connection with the Bombay occurrences, Madras occurrences and the Chauri
Chuara occurrences. Thinking over these things deeply and sleeping over them
night after night, it is impossible for me to dissociate myself from the
diabolical crimes of Chauri Chaura or the mad outrages of Bombay. He is quite
right when he says, that as a man of responsibility, a man having received a
fair share of education, having had a fair share of experience of this world, I
should have known the consequences of every one of my acts. I know them. I knew
that I was playing with fire. I ran the risk and if I was set free I would
still do the same. I have felt it this morning that I would have failed in my
duty, if I did not say what I said here just now.
I wanted to avoid violence.
Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of
my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which
I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of
the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my
lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it
and I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest
penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenating act. I am here,
therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be
inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me
to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge,
is, as I am going to say in my statement, either to resign your post, or
inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are
assisting to administer are good for the people. I do not except that kind of
conversion. But by the time I have finished with my statement you will have a
glimpse of what is raging within my breast to run this maddest risk which a
sane man can run.
[He then read out the written
statement : ] I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in
England, to placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up, that I should
explain why from a staunch loyalist and co-operator, I have become an uncompromising
disaffectionist and non-co-operator. To the court too I should say why I plead
guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection towards the Government
established by law in India.
My public life began in 1893 in
South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in
that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an
Indian, I had no rights. More correctly I discovered that I had no rights as a
man because I was an Indian.
But I was not baffled. I thought that
this treatment of Indians was an excrescence upon a system that was
intrinsically and mainly good. I gave the Government my voluntary and hearty
co-operation, criticizing it freely where I felt it was faulty but never
wishing its destruction.
Consequently when the existence
of the Empire was threatened in 1899 by the Boer challenge, I offered my
services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance corps and served at several
actions that took place for the relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906, at the
time of the Zulu 'revolt', I raised a stretcher bearer party and served till
the end of the 'rebellion'. On both the occasions I received medals and was
even mentioned in dispatches. For my work in South Africa I was given by Lord
Hardinge a Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal. When the war broke out in 1914 between
England and Germany, I raised a volunteer ambulance cars in London, consisting
of the then resident Indians in London, chiefly students. Its work was
acknowledge by the authorities to be valuable. Lastly, in India when a special
appeal was made at the war Conference in Delhi in 1918 by Lord Chelmsford for
recruits, I struggled at the cost of my health to raise a corps in Kheda, and
the response was being made when the hostilities ceased and orders were received
that no more recruits were wanted. In all these efforts at service, I was
actuated by the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a status
of full equality in the Empire for my countrymen.
The first shock came in the shape
of the Rowlatt Act-a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom. I felt
called upon to lead an intensive agitation against it. Then followed the Punjab
horrors beginning with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and culminating in
crawling orders, public flogging and other indescribable humiliations. I
discovered too that the plighted word of the Prime Minister to the Mussalmans
of India regarding the integrity of Turkey and the holy places of Islam was not
likely to be fulfilled. But in spite of the forebodings and the grave warnings
of friends, at the Amritsar Congress in 1919, I fought for co-operation and
working of the Montagu-Chemlmsford reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister
would redeem his promise to the Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would
be healed, and that the reforms, inadequate and unsatisfactory though they
were, marked a new era of hope in the life of India.
But all that hope was shattered.
The Khilafat promise was not to be redeemed. The Punjab crime was whitewashed
and most culprits went not only unpunished but remained in service, and some
continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue and in some cases were even
rewarded. I saw too that not only did the reforms not mark a change of heart,
but they were only a method of further raining India of her wealth and of
prolonging her servitude.
I came reluctantly to the
conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she
ever was before, politically and economically. A disarmed India has no power of
resistance against any aggressor if she wanted to engage, in an armed conflict
with him. So much is this the case that some of our best men consider that
India must take generations, before she can achieve Dominion Status. She has
become so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the
British advent India spun and wove in her millions of cottages, just the
supplement she needed for adding to her meagre agricultural resources. This
cottage industry, so vital for India's existence, has been ruined by incredibly
heartless and inhuman processes as described by English witness. Little do town
dwellers how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to
lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the
brokerage they get for their work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the
profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do realize that
the Government established by law in British India is carried on for this
exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures, can explain
away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye.
I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town dweller of India will
have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity, which
is perhaps unequalled in history. The law itself in this country has been used
to serve the foreign exploiter. My unbiased examination of the Punjab Marital
Law cases has led me to believe that at least ninety-five per cent of
convictions were wholly bad. My experience of political cases in India leads me
to the conclusion, in nine out of every ten, the condemned men were totally
innocent. Their crime consisted in the love of their country. In ninety-nine
cases out of hundred, justice has been denied to Indians as against Europeans
in the courts of India. This is not an exaggerated picture. It is the
experience of almost every Indian who has had anything to do with such cases.
In my opinion, the administration of the law is thus prostituted, consciously
or unconsciously, for the benefit of the exploiter.
The greater misfortune is that
the Englishmen and their Indian associates in the administration of the country
do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I
am satisfied that many Englishmen and Indian officials honestly systems devised
in the world, and that India is making steady, though, slow progress. They do
not know, a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display
of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or
self-defense on the other, as emasculated the people and induced in them the
habit of simulation. This awful habit has added to the ignorance and the
self-deception of the administrators. Section 124 A, under which I am happily
charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal
Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be
manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system,
one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long
as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence. But the section
under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have studied some of
the cases tried under it; I know that some of the most loved of India's
patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a privilege, therefore, to
be charged under that section. I have endeavored to give in their briefest
outline the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal ill-will against
any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the
King's person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a
Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system.
India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before. Holding
such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the system. And
it has been a precious privilege for me to be able to write what I have in the
various articles tendered in evidence against me.
In fact, I believe that I have
rendered a service to India and England by showing in non-co-operation the way
out of the unnatural state in which both are living. In my opinion,
non-co-operation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good. But
in the past, non-co-operation has been deliberately expressed in violence to
the evil-doer. I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent
non-co-operation only multiples evil, and that as evil can only be sustained by
violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from
violence. Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for
non-co-operation with evil. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit
cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law
is deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a
citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge and the assessors, is either to
resign your posts and thus dissociate yourselves from evil, if you feel that
the law you are called upon to administer is an evil, and that in reality I am
innocent, or to inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the
system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this
country, and that my activity is, therefore, injurious to the common weal.
Mahatma, Vol. II, (1951) pp.
129-33
This speech is taken from The
Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. VI, The Voice of Truth Part-I Some
Famous Speeches, p. 14-24