ANNIE BESANT’S EXPLANATION REGARDING BENARES INCIDENT

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09415777229, 094055338

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ANNIE BESANT’S EXPLANATION REGARDING BENARES INCIDENT

 

As Mr. Gandhi has made a statement which appears by wire in our columns, I think it well to say that my interruption was due to the fact that the Englishman behind me, who, I concluded, was a C.I.D. officer, made the remark, “Everything he says is being taken down and will be sent to the Commissioner.” As several things said were capable of a construction that I knew Mr. Gandhi could certainly not mean to convey, I thought it better to suggest to the Chairman that politics were out of place in that meeting. I did not suggest to the Princes to leave nor do I know who did. I am well aware Mr. Gandhi would rather be killed than kill. But I do think that his remarks were capable of misconstruction and I feared for his personal safety under conditions existing in Benares. How far from any wish of his is any disturbance of the public peace was shown by his view that we ought not to embarrass the Government even by holding the Congress.

The above came to us from the Madras Mail. Mr. Gandhi telephoned to ask if I would put in a statement from him, and I answered yes. I presume that the above from the Madras Mail is the statement. I regret that I must traverse the first paragraph of the statement. I do not see how, “if Mrs. Besant was almost behind me”, he could have seen me “whispering” to the princes on the far side of the Maharaja of Darbhanga, nor how they could have heard my whispers; there was one prince on my side, who did not move till after all the rest had gone. I did not leave with the princes, but remained with my friends round me, and in fact Mr. Gandhi says, was discussing with them, while he also says that l left along with the princes. I did not leave till some minutes after the meeting was over, and then not even by the way they went, but by a path which led towards my house from the platform. I have no report of Mr. Gandhi’s speech, but he desires me to mention the statements which I thought necessitated the interruption. I answer that I thought that in a non-political meeting, with princes and many others present who would suffer from Government displeasure, he should not have twice spoken of the possibility of the English being driven bag and baggage out of the country and of his being ready, if he thought Indians fit for self-Government which he did not, to march with thousands of his countrymen to the muzzle of English guns and die gloriously; that it was unwise to say bluntly, “I am an anarchist,” without explaining what he meant, and to speak of bombs bringing about the annulment of the partition of Bengal, with praise of the heroism of those who threw them. I know very well how such statements would appear in a C.I.D. report, as I have suffered from such reports, and I appealed to the Chairman. If the meeting had been called by Mr. Gandhi, it would have been no one’s business but his own what he chose to say; as it was, the University Committee, to which I belong, was responsible to those we had invited. It may be that I ought to have left Mr. Gandhi to go his own way, despite the . . . and the complaints all around me. I meant to do him a kindness and prevent the more violent interruption which would have probably taken place, had I remained silent. l am glad that Mr. Gandhi has explained what he meant to say, though I regret his misstatement about myself. Mr. S. S. Setlur’s letter, which I subjoin from the Hindu, gives accurately what occurred.

Those who have read Mr. Gandhi’s statement on his speech, and his request to me to state the remarks, to which I objected, will at once recognize his perfect innocence of all wrong intention. . . . . . . But now that Mr. Gandhi himself has forced my hand, asking for what I had refused to others, I am free to speak out, and to say why words which, from another, would have connoted wrong, were, so far as his intent was concerned, innocent of harm. Moreover, he did not know, as I knew, that the students before him were seething with anger in consequence of the way in which they had been treated by the C.I.D. officers, a number of them interned in the College for the day—a gratuitous and provocative insult—and also of the way in which respectable men in the town had been arrested during previous days, and others, men and even old women, very roughly used. It was a rather “gun-powder” audience, and I feared that some of them, not knowing Mr. Gandhi’s principle of non-resistance, might take his remarks on the results of bomb-throwing as a justification for the use of such means, despite his strictures on them. To consider the remarks themselves, what Mr. Gandhi said as to the English leaving India by compulsion was, I venture to think, unwise, but it did not bear the sense that it would have had in my own mouth, since I am actively working for Home Rule. If I had said it, it would have been a threat, because it would have been naturally connected in the minds of many with my demand that India should be a self-governing nation, and although I work only for the abolition of bureaucratic rule, and hope that many an Englishman will help in the working of the responsible Government of the future, It would naturally have been said: “Why should you suggest such a thing, if you do not want to bring it about?” But no such motive can be imputed to Mr. Gandhi, for he distinctly said: “You are not fit for self-government,” and he told the students not to be led away by himself into the idea that they were which he did not, he would be willing to march up to the mouth of the guns and die. But it must be remembered that from Mr. Gandhi’s lips this does not mean fighting, as it would mean from mine. He has already led a crowd against armed men, willing to die but not to slay. His resistance has always been passive, the heroic endurance of suffering, NEVER the infliction of it. And therefore I say that he cannot be judged as an active politician should be. He has risked the lives of himself and his followers, but never those of his opponents. It was unwise to say boldly: “I am an anarchist”, in a country where “anarchism” connotes bombs. Now Mr. Gandhi is a “philosophic anarchist”, like Tolstoy, whom he closely resembles. Many of the noblest and purest men and women in Europe are anarchists in the sense in which Mr. Gandhi used the word. Prince Kropotkin, Edward Carpenter, Walt Whitman, are all men of this school; they are true mystics, and the God within guides them; they need no outside law. The Madras Mail was annoyed that Mr. Gandhi was, apparently, compared to Tolstoy, but Mr. Gandhi is the greater of the two save from the literary standpoint. Tolstoy lived as a peasant and made shoes for his living; Gandhi lives similarly, and helps in the work of his community. Tolstoy was detested by the Russian Government as Gandhi by the South African; but Gandhi has suffered for his people as Tolstoy never did. Tolstoy lived a long way off, so Anglo-Indians can afford to admire him, but Gandhi is close at hand, so must be reviled. Both are men of the prophet type and are admired by most people at a distance. I have been turning up my speech of 1894, delivered in the pandal of the Madras Congress of that year, and it is curiously applicable, in its remarks on the Prophet, to the philosophic idea of anarchism, the “without Government” of the far-off Golden Age, when none shall teach his brother but “all shall be taught of God”. The Prophets, like Tolstoy, Gandhi, Carpenter, proclaim that far-off ideal, but the work-a-day world is not ready for it, nor will be for many thousands of years. Only when a man is guided by an interior compulsion, the divine law within, can he afford to dispense with the compulsion of outer law. But what outer law does Gandhi need, who leads a life of utter selflessness, of purity, of simplicity, of daily, hourly, self-abnegation? Such men are priceless assets of the nation which gives them birth, and they inspire to heroism and to nobility of character. Hence, I say, that while we may consider some of Mr. Gandhi’s views as suited better for a far-off posterity than for today, and while we regard his politics if we so name them as impracticable, and even as a hindrance in the path of constitutional change, we would, tens of thousands of us, stand round him, in any attack from Anglo-Indians or from the bureaucracy, as one man, and we honour and venerate him for his life and his lofty ideals, even when we think his words unwise in the difficult circumstances of the time.