Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910 — No.30
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 29th January 1910 — No.30
Facts and Opinions
Anglo-Indian Prescriptions
The Anglo-Indian papers publish their usual senseless prescriptions for the cure of the evil.
The Englishman informs us that it is at last tired of these outrages and asks in a tone full of genuine weariness when the Government will take the steps which Hare Street has always been advising.
It seems to us that the Government have gone fairly far in that direction.
The only remaining steps are to silence the Press entirely, abolish the necessity of investigation and trial and deport every public man in India.
And when by removing everything and everyone that still encourages the people to persevere in peaceful political agitation, Russia has been reproduced in India and all is hushed except the noise of the endless duel between the omnipotent policeman and the secret assassin, the Englishman will be satisfied,— but the country will not be at peace.
The Indian Daily News more sensibly suggests police activity in detecting secret organisations,— although its remarks would have sounded better without an implied prejudgement of the Nasik case.
If the police were to employ the sound detective methods employed in England and France, it would 
take them a little longer to effect a coup, but there would be some chance of real success.
It is not by indiscriminate arrests, harassing house-searches undertaken on the word of informers paid so much for each piece of information true or false, and interminable detention of undertrial prisoners in jail that these formidable secret societies will be uprooted.
Such processes are more likely to swell their numbers and add to their strength.
The Statesman is particularly wroth with the people of this country for their objection to police methods and goes so far as to lay the blame for the murder of Shams-ul-Alam on these objections.
If we had only submitted cheerfully to police harassment, all this would not have happened!
The bitter ineptitude of our contemporary grows daily more pronounced and takes more and more refuge in ridiculously inconsequent arguments.
Is it the objectionable methods or our objections to them that are to blame?
We may safely say that, whatever influences may have been at work in the mind of the assassin, the occasional criticisms of vexatious house-search in the Bengali journals had nothing to do with his action.
The Statesman does not scruple, like other Anglo-Indian papers, to question the sincerity of the condemnations of Terrorist outrage which are nowadays universal throughout the country, and to support its insinuations it has to go as far back as the Gossain murder and the demonstrations that followed it.
Those1 demonstrations were not an approval of Terrorism as a policy, but an outburst of gratitude to the man who removed a dangerous and reckless perjurer whose evil breath was scattering ruin and peril over innocent homes and noble and blameless heads throughout Bengal.
We do not praise or justify that outburst,— for murder is murder, whatever its motives,— but it is not fair to give it a complexion other than the one it really wore.
If it had really been true that a whole nation approved of Terrorism and supported the assassin by secret or open sympathy, it would be a more damning indictment of British statesmanship in India than any seditious pen could have framed.
The Chowringhee paper's libellous insinuation that the secret societies are not secret and their members are known to the public, has only to be mentioned in order to show the spirit of 
this gratuitous adviser of the Indian people.
Nor can one peruse without a smile the suggestion that the Hindu community should use the weapon of social ostracism against the Terrorists.
Whom are we to outcaste, the hanged or transported assassin, or his innocent relatives?