मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

Germany both, battered as they would be in this terrible combat between two mighty foes, not unlike the fight of two powerful elephants joined in life-and-death struggle with each other. Broken, battered, bleeding and exhausted they will lie on the field with victory to neither, and with full advantage to others who knew to profit by the situation. But I also feared that in this grim struggle between two mighty powers the Muslims in India might find their devil's opportunity to invite the Muslim hordes from the North to ravage India and to conquer it, instigated in that effort by the machinations in Russia. Thinking calmly over all these near and remote consequences of the war, I settled my own line of action, and, as the beginning of it, I resolved to send a long letter on the subject to the Government of India. I cannot here give my reader what line of action I had settled in my mind to follow. But I may summarise in outline the letter I had sent to the Government of India. The Superintendent agreed to forward the letter and I wrote in it as follows : I wrote that I felt it my duty, as intimately connected with the revolutionary movement in India, to inform the Government, in its distracted state of mind, what I thought about the present situation in India vis-a-vis the war between England and Germany. It was our ideal, I wrote, to win independence for India, and it remained our ideal even that day. But we were not sworn to violent means alone to achieve that independence. If any other sure means were available to us before for that purpose, we would not have gone in at all for terrorist and revolutionary methods. What was true about the means was equally true about the end. Politics and Government had for their aim to endow man with the rights of citizenship, and to create in each country representative institutions to maintain those rights by the method of law and order. We had for our goal the creation of the parliament of man and the federation of the world. We wanted this federation to be the guardian of freedom and peace, justice and equal rights all over the world. All distinctions of race and language, of creed and colour, of territory and boundaries, ought to be submerged in this parliament and this federation, for the unification of man, and for the promotion of peace and goodwill on earth. Hence, we were friends to all political institutions and arrangements which promoted this cause. We welcomed them as steps on the path leading up to the temple of peace. We were not enemies of the groups of nations or of empires that materially helped the cause by a union of countries in a common bond of loyalty and government. The countries in the Union and the Empire had to be endowed with freedom and self- government as means to their progress and prosperity. These being our principles of action, we were ready and willing to be friends of the British Empire if it equipped India with a form of government vital for her freedom and her progress, and commensurate with her capacity to run such a government in the