The Hindu National Movement

The growth of the Hindu National Movement is one of the most remarkable contemporary phenomena in the Orient. The diversity of races and religions in India need not to be an insuperable obstacle to national unity. Every county in the world has had to contend with similar difficulties. A common historical tradition is the indispensable basis of national unity. India boasts of a national historical tradition that has been transmitted from generation to generation for more than four thousand years. Again, India’s geographical situation marks her out as a distinct country destined to be the home of a great nation. The struggle with the British Government will weld them into a strong whole. Such conflicts have always been the chief instrument in nation-building.

The British conquered the country by pursuing a policy of cunning and bribery, supplemented by frequent resort to brute force. At present the people of India live in a condition of utter misery and degradation. Seventy million Hindus, who are not directly governed by the British, are more prosperous than the two hundred and fifty millions who are British subjects.

The land revenue has increased by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the English rule. The total land revenue has increased from about seventy five million to hundred million dollars. Salt is taxed 150 percent above its value and its production is a government sole monopoly. Lord Salisbury summed up the whole situation in a single phrase ‘India must be bled.’

The officials pay themselves exorbitant salaries. The amount of money transferred from India to England each year on account of pensions, salaries, interest on debts and so on, records the total of one hundred and seventy five million dollars.

The administration of justice is turned into a source of revenue by the Government. The executive and official functions are combined in the same person. The use of torture to extort confessions is fearfully common. When Englishmen murder Hindus they are generally let off with a fine. There is no justice between the white and the brown.

Education is sadly neglected. Four villages out of five are without a school. Heavy fees are charged at all Universities and colleges run by the Government.

Public sanitation is conspicuous by its absence. A meager sum of a million dollars a year is spent for the sanitation of two hundred and fifty million people. Plague has raged unchecked for sixteen years, and has caused more than eight million deaths. The death rate has risen from 24 to 34 during the last twenty years. These appalling figures speak for themselves.

Barbarous punishments are inflicted on patriotic public men for ‘sedition’. Distinguished men are transferred away to prison without trial. Young men are transferred for life to barren tropical islands for writing seditious poems. Trials are held in camera in many cases. Children are flogged in public squares for reciting ‘seditious’ poems. A government which maintains its power by such terrorism stands self-condemned.

Empires are relics of barbarism, and must disappear in the course of social evolution.

Extracts from:-  Lala Har Dayal and Revolutionary Movement of His Time by Dharmavira.