Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 1st January 1910 — No.26
Facts and Opinions
The Convention President's Address
The most remarkable feature of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya's address is not what he said, but what he omitted to say.
If the accounts telegraphed can be trusted, he said nothing about self-government, nothing about Swadeshi,— the Boycott, of course, the Convention has boycotted,— nothing about the Bengal deportees, only a few words about the Transvaal.
The speech was really a speech about the Reforms and every other great question of Indian politics was ignored or neglected.
The attitude of the Convention on the Reforms is marked by that open insincerity which is the hall-mark of Moderate politics.
The Convention resolution is made up of two parts, an ecstatic tribute of praise and gratitude to the two Lords Morley and 
Minto, for their earnest and “arduous” endeavours, (note the grotesque absurdity of the language), in extending to the people of this country a “fairly liberal” measure of constitutional reform, and a detailed and damning indictment of the measure for restrictions and provisions which are “excessive and unfair”, “unjust, invidious and humiliating”, “arbitrary and unreasonable”, and for the “general distrust” of the educated classes and the “ineffective and unreal” composition of the non-official majority.
If there is any meaning in language, the second part of the resolution gives the lie direct to the first.
The language used is far stronger than any the Karmayogin has ever permitted itself to employ in its condemnation of the Reforms and, if the condemnation is at all justified by facts, the Reforms are a reactionary and not a progressive piece of legislation.
And yet who is the chief mouthpiece of the Convention and the most damaging critic of the Reforms?
A gentleman who has set the seal of approval on Lord Morley's measure by entering the Council of his province as an elected member.
Actions speak more strongly than words, and the Government of India care little for criticism in detail so long as they get acceptation of the whole.
From the Viceroy down to the obscurest Anglo-Indian scribbler the appeal to the Moderates is to criticise details hereafter, if they choose, but to accept the Reforms, the perpetual division of the two Indian communities, the humiliation of the Hindus, the extrusion of the educated classes from their old leading position, the denial of the only true basis of self-government,— to let, as the Indian Daily News persuasively puts it, bygones be bygones.
Anglo-India pats Moderatism on the back and says in effect: “What if we have kicked you downstairs?
Can't you be a good fellow and sit quietly on the bottom step until we take it in our heads to pull you up a little farther?”
And Moderatism must comply if it wishes to be tolerated.