The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

latest and most devious scheme has backfired. You yourself used the word blackmail, and the British in general have met the recent threats to their security in precisely the frame of mind of chosen victims of blackmail who refuse to be victimized. I hope that on reconsideration you will reject, if you haven’t already done so, the blackmail theory. It’s a theory that works two ways in any case. We could accuse the British of trying to blackmail us into putting everything into the war effort with false promises of independence when the war is won. You would answer that by saying they are not false, although you cannot prove that to us, and Churchill has made it clear that the rights and freedoms embodied in the Atlantic Charter do not apply to India so far as he is concerned. We, for our part, would answer your charge of blackmail by pointing out that the war is irrelevant to the situation because we are demanding nothing that we have not been demanding for years. The war perhaps has made us demand it with greater insistence and has strengthened your hand in not granting it yet, but it has not changed the nature of the demand, nor the nature of the resistance. It has merely added a different emotional factor and a new set of practical considerations; and on these our natures and our views widen our differences. What I hope you will be in agreement with me over is my belief that had we been allowed to continue at liberty the violent events of the past few weeks simply would not have occurred. You would have been faced with the far more onerous task of seeking a way round the deadlock created by a coordinated, peaceful, passive end tothe co-operation of the Indian people in the war effort. This would have been the type of ‘sabotage’ Congress leaders, and Congress leaders only, could have directed. Perhaps it is Machiavellian of me to glimpse in Government’s prompt arrests of leaders a Machiavellian intention: the intention of turning the onerous task into the simpler one of strong-arm tactics. It is easier to fire on rioters led by undesirable elements than to force resisting workers back into an arms factory, dockers back to the docks and engine-drivers back to the controls of their locomotives. And Government must have realized that the people of India would be incensed by the wholesale arrests and imprisonment of their leaders: incensed, at a loss, anxious to perform what their leaders wanted them to perform, but prey to anger, fear, and all the passions that lead to violence. I find it not at all difficult to accuse Government of deliberate provocation of the people of India: either that or of holding the insulting belief that the people of India are so spineless and apathetic that the disappearance from their midst of the men who have risen to positions of responsibility to them would at once leave them as malleable and directable as dull and unimportant clay.
    That they are neither spineless nor apathetic has been proved all too well. I have read the accounts of the riots, burnings, lootings, acts of sabotage, acts of murder, the accounts of crowds of men, women and children attempting to oppose unarmed the will and strength of Government, and accounts of the firing upon these crowds by the police and the military, of deaths on both sides, of attempts to seize jails, derail trains, blow bridges, seize installations; accounts of what amounts to a full-scale but spontaneous insurrection – but with what a sad difference – for most of it has been conducted with the bare hands or with what the bare hands could pick up. There are Indians, I do not doubt, especially among those of us in prison (and our numbers have been considerably swelled since the morning of August 9th) who are proud of what the nation attempted. I cannot be one of them, for my chief reactions are anger and sorrow, and an emotion that I can’t easily describe but which is probably due to a special sense of impotence, of powerlessness to do