Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910 — No.31
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 5th February 1910 — No.31
Facts and Opinions
The Party of Revolution
Be the fault whose you will, ours or the Government's, the existence of an organised party of armed Revolution in Indian politics is now a recognised factor of the situation.
The enormous strides with which events have advanced and a sky full of trouble but also of hope been overcast and grown full of gloom and menace, can be measured by the rapidity with which this party has developed.
It is only five years since the national movement sprang into being.
The cry was then for self-help and passive resistance.
Boycott, Swadeshi, Arbitration, National Education, were the hope of the future, the means of self-regeneration.
In five years everything has been struck to the earth.
Boycott has almost disappeared, Swadeshi languishes under sentence of arrest, Arbitration died still-born, National Education is committing suicide.
A tremendous disintegration has taken place and we look amazed on the ruins of the work our labour and our sacrifice erected.
It is a huge defeat, an astonishing catastrophe.
And on those ruins grim, wild-eyed, pitiless to itself and to others, mocking at death and defeat with its raucous and careless laughter Revolution rises repeating the language of the old-world insurgents, cherishing a desperate hope which modern conditions deny, grasping at the weapons 
which the Slav and the Celt have brought into political warfare.
The seeds which the Yugantar sowed in its brief, violent and meteoric career have borne fruit in unexpected quarters and new-born journals repeat in foreign lands and in the English tongue the incitations to revolt and slaughter which have been put down in India by the strong hand of the law1.
Money is forthcoming to support a journalism which must obviously be all cost and no profit, young men exile themselves from their native land by openly joining the party of violence and in India itself repeated blows have been struck paralysing the hope and the effort to revive the activity of that broader and calmer Nationalism which, recognising modern conditions, still commands the allegiance of the bulk of the nation.