Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Calcutta, August 21^st, 1907

Part Four. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of of Sri Aurobindo (28 May – 22 December 1907)

A Malicious Persistence

The persistence of the Englishman’s attack on Justice Mitter in connection with the Bloomfield Murder Case is worthy of the traditions of Hare Street. The Englishman is perhaps the only Anglo-Indian paper in Calcutta which has a rigidly settled and consistent policy. Others allow themselves to be swayed sometimes by feeling and by calm dispassionate reason, and yield perhaps to some gust of generous feeling or suffer the sense of justice or fair play to overcome the dictates of class interest or policy, but Hare Street is above such weaknesses. Not much brains or political knowledge or discernment is needed to guide its policy, for it is simple and elementary in the extreme. A violent and venomous opposition to every Indian aspiration, to every claim to equality or even to ordinary justice, is the sole, simple and sufficient principle which guides it unerringly through the maze of politics. Legally the excited correspondents who pour out their fury and panic in its sympathetic pages, have not a leg to stand on. Some of them have made clumsy attempts to argue the point of agitation. The attempt is absurd. The position taken by the Judges is unassailable. Intention cannot be argued from the results of an action, but from the nature of the actions and utterances of the doer and from the probable consequences of his act as they may be reasonably supposed to have presented themselves to his mind. Now the actions of the assailants in this case were not such as to raise any certainty of their intention to kill. Men have been beaten by numbers and savagely beaten without being left dead, but have at most had to spend more or less time in hospital recovering from their injuries. The cessation of the beating as soon as the victim fell down, the words of the assailants as they ran away and several other circumstances seem to show that this was the result they aimed at, and the cumulative effect of these indications is very great. At any rate, in the face of such strong considerations in favour of the more lenient view, and in the absence of any positive evidence that the accused premeditated the assault, much less the manslaughter, any Judge knowing his business would feel himself bound to give them the benefit of the doubt so long as the principle of refusing to convict on a mere probability of guilt remains a fundamental principle of law. We can say without any fear of contradiction that the Englishman would not have a word to say against the Judgment if it had been any other than an European who had died: and if it had been an Indian done to death by an Englishman, Hare Street would have yelled itself hoarse over the brutal severity of the sentences. The position taken up is that because an Englishman was killed, somebody ought to have been hanged and all who were not hanged transported for life: otherwise the life of planters in the mofussil cannot be safe. Possibly, but the safety of European life in the mofussil is an extrajudicial consideration with which the Judges of the High Court, or any judges for the matter of that, are not concerned. Their sole business is to do justice, without any regard to the political consequences. The safety of European life is a question for the executive or for the political authorities. If the planters have made themselves so fiercely hated or the bureaucrats have by their policy rendered Europeans such an eyesore to the Indian masses that the latter are ready to murder them without serious provocation and can only be restrained by savage and iniquitous sentences in the law courts, it is for the planters and the bureaucrats to mend their ways and ease the tension: they cannot expect just and upright men to stain their consciences for their sake.

This work was not included in SABCL, vol.1 and it was not compared with other editions.