CHAPTER IX - MAHATMA GANDHI’S STATEMENT
[The following is the Statement of
Mahatma Gandhi made before the Court during his Trial
in Ahmedabad on the 18th March 1921.]
Before reading his written statement
Mahatma Gandhi spoke a few words as introductory remarks
to the whole statement. He said: Before I
read this statement, I would like to state that I
entirely endorse the learned Advocate-General’s
remarks in connection with my humble self. I think
that he was entirely fair to me in all the statements
that he has made, because it is very true and I have
no desire whatsoever to conceal from this Court the
fact that to preach disaffection towards the existing
system of Government has become almost a passion with
me. And the learned Advocate-General is also
entirely in the right when he says that my preaching
of disaffection did not commence with my connection
with “Young India” but that it commenced
much earlier and in the statement that I am about
to read it will be my painful duty to admit before
this Court that it commenced much earlier than the
period stated by the Advocate-General. It is
the most painful duty with me but I have to discharge
that duty knowing the responsibility that rested upon
my shoulders. And I wish to endorse all the blame
that the Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulders
in connection with the Bombay occurrence, Madras occurrences,
and the Chouri Choura occurrences thinking over these
things deeply, and sleeping over them night after
night and examining my heart I have come to the conclusion
that it is impossible for me to dissociate myself
from the diabolical crimes of Chouri Choura or the
mad outrages of Bombay. He is quite right when
he says that as a man of responsibility, a man having
received a fair share of education, having had a fair
share of experience of this world, I should know them.
I knew that I was playing with fire. I ran the
risk and if I was set free I would still do the same.
I would be failing in my duty if I do not do so.
I have felt it this morning that I would have failed
in my duty if I did not say all what I said here just
now. I wanted to avoid violence. Non-violence
is the first article of my faith. It is the last
article of my faith. But I had to make my choice.
I had either to submit to a system which I considered
has done an irreparable harm to my country or incur
the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth
when they understood the truth from my lips. I
know that my people have sometimes gone mad.
I am deeply sorry for it; and I am, therefore, here
to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest
penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not
plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore,
to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can
be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate
crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty
of a citizen. The only course open to you, Mr.
Judge, is, as I am just going to say in my statement,
either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest
penalty if you believe that the system and law you
are assisting to administer are good for the people.
I do not expect that kind of conversion. But by
the time I have finished with my statement you will,
perhaps, have a glimpse of what is raging within my
breast to run this maddest risk which a sane man can
run.
WRITTEN STATEMENT
I owe it perhaps to the Indian public
and to the public in England to placate which this
prosecution is mainly taken up that I should explain
why from a staunch loyalist and co-operator I have
become an uncompromising disaffectionist and non-co-operator.
To the Court too I should say why I plead guilty to
the charge of promoting disaffection towards the Government
established by law in India. My public life began
in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My
first contact with British authority in that country
was not of a happy character. I discovered that
as a man and as an Indian I had no rights. On
the contrary I discovered that I had no rights as
a man because I was an Indian.
But I was not baffled. I thought
that this treatment of Indians was an excrescence
upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good.
I gave the Government my voluntary and hearty co-operation,
criticising it fully where I felt it was faulty but
never wishing its destruction.
Consequently when the existence of
the Empire was threatened in 1899 by the Boer challenge,
I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance
corps and served at several actions that took place
for the relief of Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906
at the time of the Zulu revolt I raised a stretcher-bearer
party and served till the end of the ‘rebellion’.
On both these occasions I received medals and was even
mentioned in despatches. For my work in South
Africa I was given by Lord Hardinge a Kaiser-i-Hind
Gold Medal. When the war broke out in 1914 between
England and Germany I raised a volunteer ambulance
corps in London consisting of the then resident Indians
in London, chiefly students. Its work was acknowledged
by the authorities to be valuable. Lastly in
India when a special appeal was made at the War Conference
in Delhi in 1917 by Lord Chelmsford for recruits, I
struggled at the cost of my health to raise a corps
in Kheda and the response was being made when the
hostilities ceased and orders were received that no
more recruits were wanted. In all those efforts
at service I was actuated by the belief that it was
possible by such services to gain a status of full
equality in the Empire for my countrymen.
The first shock came in the shape
of the Rowlalt Act a law designed to rob the people
of all real freedom. I felt called upon to lead
an intensive agitation against it. Then followed
the Punjab horrors beginning with the massacre at
Jallianwala Bagh and culminating in brawling orders,
public floggings and other indescribable humiliations,
I discovered too that the plighted word of the Prime
Minister to the Mussalmans of India regarding the
integrity of Turkey and the holy places of Islam was
not likely to be fulfilled. But in spite of the
foreboding and the grave warnings of friends, at the
Amritsar Congress in 1919 I fought for co-operation
and working the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, hoping
that the Prime Minister would redeem his promise to
the Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would
be healed and that the reforms inadequate and unsatisfactory
though they were, marked a new era of hope in the
life of India. But all that hope was shattered.
The Khilafat promise was not to be redeemed.
The Punjab crime was white-washed and most culprits
went not only unpunished but remained in service and
some continued to draw pensions from the Indian revenue,
and in some cases were even rewarded. I saw too
that not only did the reforms not mark a change of
heart, but they were only a method of further draining
India of her wealth and of prolonging her servitude.
I came reluctantly to the conclusion
that the British connection had made India more helpless
than she ever was before, politically and economically.
A disarmed India has no power of resistance against
any aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed
conflict with him. So much is this the case that
some of our best men consider that India must take
generations before she can achieve the Dominion status.
She has become so poor that she has little power of
resisting famines. Before the British advent
India spun and wove in her millions of cottages just
the supplement she needed for adding to her meagre
agricultural resources. The cottage industry,
so vital for India’s existence, has been ruined
by incredibly heartless and inhuman processes as described
by English witnesses. Little do town-dwellers
know how the semi-starved masses of Indians are slowly
sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that
their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they
get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter,
that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from
the masses. Little do they realise that the Government
established by law in British India is carried on for
this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry,
no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence
the skeletons in many villages present to the naked
eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England
and the town dwellers of India will have to answer,
if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity
which is perhaps unequalled in history. The law
itself in this country has been used to serve the
foreign exploiter. My unbiased, examination of
the Punjab Martial Law cases had led me to believe
that at least ninety-five per cent. of convictions
were wholly bad. My experience of political cases
in India leads me to the conclusion that in nine out
of every ten the condemned men were totally innocent.
Their crime consisted in love of their country.
In ninety-nine cases out of hundred justice has been
denied to Indians as against Europeans in the Court
of India. This is not an exaggerated picture.
It is the experience of almost every Indian who has
had anything to do such cases. In my opinion
the administration of the law is thus prostituted consciously
or unconsciously for the benefit of the exploiter.
The greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their
Indian associates in the administration of the country
do not know that they are engaged in the crime I have
attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many
English and Indian officials honestly believe that
they are administering one of the best systems devised
in the world and that India is making steady though
slow progress. They do not know that a subtle
but effective system of terrorism and an organised
display of force on the one hand and the deprivation
of all powers of retaliation of self-defence on the
other have emasculated the people and induced in them
the habit of simulation. This awful habit has
added to the ignorance and the self-deception of the
administrators. Section 124-A under which I am
happily charged is perhaps the prince among the political
sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress
the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be
manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no
affection for a person or thing one should be free
to give the fullest expression to his disaffection
so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite
to violence. But the section under which mere
promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have
studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know
that some of the most loved of India’s patriots
have been convicted under it. I consider it a
privilege therefore, to be charged under it.
I have endeavoured to give in their briefest outline
the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal
ill-will against any single administrator, much less
can I have any disaffection towards the King’s
person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected
towards a Government which in its totality has done
more harm to India than any previous system.
India is less manly under the British rule than she
ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider
it to be a sin to have affection for the system.
And it has been a precious privilege for me to be
able to write what I have in the various articles tendered
in evidence against me.
In fact I believe that I have rendered
a service to India and England by showing in non-co-operation
the way out of the unnatural state in which both are
living. In my humble opinion, non-co-operation
with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with
good. But in the past, non-co-operation has been
deliberately expressed in violence to the evil doer.
I am endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent
non-co-operation only multiplies evil and that as evil
can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support
of evil requires complete abstention from violence.
Non-violent implies voluntary submission to the penalty
for non-co-operation with evil. I am here, therefore,
to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty
that can he inflicted upon me for what in law is a
deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the
highest duty of a citizen. The only course open
to you, the Judge and the Assessors, is either to
resign your posts and thus dissociate yourselves from
evil if you feel that the law you are called upon
to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent,
or to inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe
that the system and the law you are assisting to administer
are good for the people of this country and that my
activity is therefore injurious to the public weal.
M. K. GHANDI.