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| JK PSC insults "Father of Indian Unrest" Bal Gangadhar Tilak | | Against Politics Of Political Mendicancy | | Rustam
Jammu, Dec 13: The Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission (JKPSC) has undoubtedly insulted the nationalist of nationalists and patriot of patriots Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak who is called in the history of Indian freedom struggle "Father of Indian Unrest". Tilak had once said "Swaraj is my birthright and I will have it". He was one of the three most important leaders of the Congress who always opposed the Congress' politics of political mendicancy and advocated a radical line in order to achieve political redemption. The other two leaders were Sri Aurobindo Ghose and Bepin Chandra Pal. Lala Lajpat Rai, the Lion of Punjab, also belonged to the school of thought to which Tilak, Ghose and Pal belonged. The JKPSC has not only insulted the "Father of Indian Unrest", but also Ghose, Pal and Rai, who represented the "New Spirit/New Party" and who wanted the British Imperialists to quit India forthwith, by asking a question in a written examination, held on December 9 both at Jammu and Srinagar, for the posts of Assistant Controller in Legal Metrology Department. The outrageous and insulting question read like this: "Who among the following didn't represent the militant school of thought"? The four options included RN Bose, Ashwani Kumar Dutt, MN Roy and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The right answer obviously was RN Bose. He was a moderate or a soft-liner. The other three, including Tilak, were not so.
The PSC displayed intellectually bankruptcy by putting in the category of militants such a great nationalist as Tilak, who not only gave a new orientation to the nationalist movement in Maharashtra by starting Shivaji and Ganapati Festivals and through his papers (the Kesari and the Mahratta), but also deeply influenced the nationalist movement across the country and unnerved and alarmed the Britons, who had destroyed India politically, socially, culturally and economically.
As said, Tilak represented the "New Spirit". He never appreciated the Congress' methodology as well as its aim. Take, for example, the Congress line as advocated by the presidents of the Congress sessions in Banaras in 1905 and Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1906. In 1905, President of Benaras Congress session Gopal Krishna Gokhale, political guru of Mahatma Gandhi, among other things, said: "For better, for worse, our destinies are now linked with those of England and the Congress freely recognizes that whatever progress we seek must be within the (British) Empire itself". Gokhale made this suggestion when the entire country was up in arms against the British Indian Government, which had partitioned Bengal in 1905 on purely communal lines with a view to weakening the Indian freedom struggle. And in 1906, the Congress president, Dadabhai Naoroji, who mostly lived in England and who had been brought all the way from London to Calcutta to preside the Congress session, declared the goal of the Congress as the attainment of "Swaraj" or "self-Government". He favoured "gradual introduction of self-Government in India". The goal, according to the Congress, was to be achieved first by sending a "petition of rights" to the King Emperor, to the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and also by sending a deputation of Congress leaders to England, "to convince the British people" of their claim to "all British Rights of Self-Government".
Tilak opposed this line of the Congress. He criticized as "impossible and futile the aim of the Congress of convincing the British electorate of the justice of its claims to self-Government". In the opinion of Tilak, John Morley (the then Secretary of State for India) "in spite of his love for India, would be the first person to grant the Viceroy (of India) the power of veto". Commenting on the presidential address of Naoroji to the Congress in 1906, he said that it was a "message of trust and hopefulness". At the same time, he expressed the view that "it was too much to expect from a man (Naoroji) of his years to preach any other method than that which he had been preaching all his life". But he failed to understand why Gokhale should follow this path (moderate line) and believe in taking out more memorials". "By the time Gokhale attained the age of Naoroji, he would be disillusioned and a broken-hearted man and sing in the strain of the swan," Tilak believed.
The fact is that he belonged to that school of thought that refused to accept the "position of servitude and subordination for an indefinite period". He was of the firm view that it was impossible to achieve self-governance without breaking the connection with Great Britain. The Congress, he thought, was striving to do the impossible. In January 1907, Tilak in the course of a talk on the "Tenets of the New Party", himself summed up the differences between the two wings of the Congress. "Two new words have recently come into existence", he said, "with regard to our politics, and they are 'Moderates' and 'Extremists'. These words have a specific relation to time, and they, therefore, will change with time. The Extremists of today will be Moderates tomorrow just as the Moderates of today were Extremists yesterday. The Old Party (Moderate wing) believed in appealing to the British nation and the 'New Party' did not. But we are not going to sit down quiet. For, we shall have some other (constitutional) method by which to achieve what we want. We are not disappointed. We are not pessimists. It is the hope of achieving the goal by our efforts that has brought into existence this New Party".
To call such a great leader and committed nationalist "militant" would only mean distortion of history. It would also mean an attempt at lowering the image of Tilak. The JKPSC would do well to rectify its mistake and direct its irresponsible paper-setters to set right questions so that such controversies are avoided. |
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