The Indian Sociologist - 1907: Radicalisation and Repression

1907: Radicalisation and Repression

Starting with quite a mild stance - "India and England should sever their connection peaceably and part as friends.", it became more radical in 1907, actively advocating Swaraj (Home Rule) and organisation of the Society of Political Missionaries of India. This incurred police surveillance, a debate in the British House of Commons (30 July 1907) and a ban on import and sale of TIS in India from 19 September 1907. Krishnavarma had already departed in June 1907, remarking in the September issue: "On the earnest advice of some of our friends, we left England, practically for good, during the early part of June last, seeing that mischief was brewing." It was not banned in England, and continued to be printed there. However two of the printers were arrested for sedition for printing it in 1909. Arthur Fletcher Horsley was arrested and tried for printing the May, June and July issues. He was tried and sentenced on the same day as Madan Lal Dhingra, for the assassination of Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie. The trial was very prominent, with the remarks by the Lord Chief Justice to indicate anyone printing this sort of material would be liable for prosecution. Nevertheless Guy Aldred, a twenty-two-year-old anarchist advocate of the free press, published it bearing his own name. The police obtained a warrant and seized 396 copies of the issue. At the trial the prosecution was led by William Robson, Baron Robson, the Attorney General at the Central Criminal Court. Robson highlighted parts of TIS which Aldred had himself written, particularly focusing on a passage which touched on the execution of Dhingra:

"In the execution of Dhingra that cloak will be publicly worn, that secret language spoken, that solemn veil employed to conceal the sword of Imperialism by which we are sacrificed to the insatiable idol of modern despotism, whose ministers are Cromer, Curzon and Morley & Co. Murder-which they would represent to us as a horrible crime, when the murdered is a government flunkey- we see practised by them without repugnance or remorse when the murdered is a working man, a Nationalist patriot, an Egyptian fellaheen or half-starved victim of despotic society's bloodlust. It was so at Featherstone and Denshawai; it has often been so at Newgate: and it was so with Robert Emmett, the Paris communards, and the Chicago martyrs. Who is more reprehensible than the murderers of these martyrs? The police spies who threw the bomb at Chicago; the ad-hoc tribunal which murdered innocent Egyptians at Denshawai; the Asquith who assumed full responsibility for the murder of the workers at Feathersone; the assassins of Robert Emmett? Yet these murderers have not been executed! Why then should Dhingra be executed? Because he is not a time serving executioner, but a Nationalist patriot, who, though his ideals are not their ideals, is worthy of the admiration of those workers at home, who have as little to gain from the lick-spittle crew of Imperialistic blood-sucking, capitalist parasites at as what the Nationalists have in India.

Aldred also remarked that the Sepoy Mutiny, or Indian Mutiny would be described as The Indian War of Independence. Aldred received a sentence of twelve months hard labour.