Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, October 23rd, 1907 }   The Nagpur Affair and True Unity   The Nagpur Nationalists are now being run down in every quarter for having failed to work in unison with the Moderates. The cause of rupture as disclosed by the Indian Social Reformer, a hostile critic of the Nationalist party, will convince every right-thinking man that the Nationalists had ample provocation for what is being denounced as a highly reprehensible conduct on their part. They had a Nationalist majority in the Executive Committee and the Moderates were arranging for a fresh meeting of the Reception Committee to alter this state of things. This unco

The Meaning of Swaraj   Thank you for the welcome you have accorded me, which I do not deserve, because whatever I do is not done by me of my own accord. My actions are dictated by God. I am simply an instrument in His hands. The welcome should, therefore, be presented to Him and not to me. Let us thank Him. I have hitherto been a writer and not an orator, but circumstances forced me to try my hand at oratory. I have not fixed the subject of my speech, but at the request of some friends I will speak to you on Swaraj. Unfortunately I am not accustomed to make speeches and may deviate from the subject. Within the past two or three years, either by a s

Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, July 29th, 1907 }   The Issue   The bureaucracy as usual has overreached itself in instituting a case under the sedition clause against the editor of the Yugantar. The Punjabee prosecution did untold harm to their prestige and helped to shatter the not overabundant remnants of their moral ascendancy; its work was negative and destructive. But the Yugantar prosecution has been a positive gain to the national cause; it has begun the positive work of building up the moral ascendancy of the people which is to replace that of the alien and nullify his mere material superiority. This momentous result the editor of Yug

The Congress Movement   With the opening of the twentieth century there is visible in India— visible at least to a trained political observer who is accustomed to divine the flux & change of inner forces from the slight signs that are the first faintly heard footsteps of the future & does not limit himself to the imposing & external features which are often merely the landmarks of the past— a remarkable & most vital change in the feeling and thought habit of our nation or at least of those classes in it whose thought & action most tells on the future. The life-stream of our national existence is taking a massive swerve towards a far other ocean

Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, May 13th, 1907 }   Government by Panic   One does not know precisely how to take the extraordinary accounts of the charges against Lala Lajpat Rai and the panic among Europeans which have been reaching us from the North. We used to think the English deficient in imagination, but the vivid and fluorescent powers of fancy which this panic has revealed, puts all our preconceived ideas to rout. Not only have the Government given vent to an outburst of poetical fancy beyond all parallel but they have insisted on staging and enacting their dramatic creation in real life. Sir Denzil Ibbetson reminds us of that great a

Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, May 10th, 1907 }   Lala Lajpat Rai Deported   The sympathetic administration of Mr. Morley has for the present attained its records;— but for the present only. Lala Lajpat Rai has been deported out of British India. The fact is its own comment. The telegram goes on to say that indignation meetings have been forbidden for four days. Indignation meetings? The hour for speeches and fine writing is past. The bureaucracy has thrown down the gauntlet. We take it up. Men of the Punjab! Race of the lion! Show these men who would stamp you into the dust that for one Lajpat they have taken away, a hundred Lajpats will

Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, April 18th, 1907 }   Simple, Not Rigorous   The finale of the Punjabee case has converted a tragedy into a farce. The bureaucracy started to crush the new spirit in Punjab by making a severe example of its leading exponent in the Press. They have ended by acerbating public feeling in the Punjab and creating racial hostility— the very offence for which, ostensibly, the Punjabee is punished,— without gaining their ends. The ferocious severity of the sentence passed on Srijut Jaswant Rai has defeated its own object. Reduced in length from two years to six months in the Sessions Court, it has in the final appeal been r

Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, March 15th, 1907 }   The Comilla Incident   The Comilla affair remains, after everybody has said his say, obscured by the usual tangle of contradictions. The Hindu version presents a number of allegations,— specific, detailed and categorical,— of attacks on Hindus, making up in the mass a serious picture of a mofussil town given over for days to an outbreak of brutal lawlessness on the part of one section of the Mahomedan community, a Magistrate quiescent and sympathetically tolerant of the rioters, and the final resort by the Hindu community to drastic measures of self-defence on the continued refusal of British authorit

Unity   An open letter to those who despair of their Country   To the sons of our mother Bharat who disclaim their sonhood, to the children of languor and selfishness, to the wooers of safety & ease, to the fathers of despair and death— greeting. To those who impugning the holiness of their Mother refuse to lift her out of danger lest they defile their own spotless hands, to those who call on her to purify herself before they will save her from the imminent & already descending sword of Death, — greeting. Lastly to those who love & perhaps have striven for her but having now grown themselves faint and hopeless bid others to despair and cease,— t

Bande Mataram { CALCUTTA, September 4th, 1906 } Partition and Petition   There seems to be a recrudescence of the old and decadent praying mood once again in certain quarters, and attempts, we understand, are being made to induce the leaders of public opinion in the mofussil to join the Calcutta clique for sending a fresh representation to the Secretary of State for India, for the revocation or modification of the Partition of Bengal. The recent reply of the British Prime Minister to a question put to him by Mr. O'Donnell seems to be partly responsible for this recrudescence, which, we understand however, is mainly due to wire-pulli