Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 31st July 1909 — No.6
Facts and Opinions
Shyamji Krishnavarma
The exaggerated view of Mr. Shyamji Krishnavarma as an arch conspirator of malign subtlety and power who has long been inculcating terrorist opinions among young men and building up a secret society, is one which none can accept who has any knowledge of this gentleman's past career.
Mr. Shyamji Krishnavarma is an earnest, vehement and outspoken idealist passionately attached to his own views and intolerant of all 
who oppose them.
He first went to England to breathe the atmosphere of a free country where he could speak as well as think as he chose.
He was then a strong constitutionalist and his chief intellectual preoccupations were Herbert Spencer, Home Rule and the position of the Native States.
When the new movement flooded India it carried Mr. Krishnavarma forward with it.
He became an ardent Nationalist, a confirmed passive resister with an idealistic aversion to violent methods and a strong conviction that, whatever might be the case with other countries, India would neither need nor resort to them.
His conversion to Terrorism is quite recent and has astonished most those who knew him best.
We know that Sj. Bipin1 Pal went to England with the confident expectation of finding full sympathy and co-operation from the editor of the Indian Sociologist.
The quarrel between the two resulting from the change in Mr. Krishnavarma's views is a matter of public knowledge.
We refuse therefore to believe that Mr. Krishnavarma has been a plotter of assassination and secret disseminator of Terrorism or that the India House is a centre for the propagation and fulfilment of the ideas he has himself ventilated in the Times.