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

It was known to all of them that my younger brother was carrying on a propaganda in India under my name to secure the release of all political prisoners in India. And my annual letter to him strengthened his hands to carry on the work. Copies were made of my letter and sent to almost all the leaders in the country. Some of them published it in local newspapers. Patriots made their own copies of the letter and preserved them. That my letter was copied and sent to Paris, where Indians made their own copies and preserved them, was stated in the 'Forward' newspaper by Barrister Asaf Ali himself at the time. In my annual letter I never mentioned the complaints of prisoners in this jail. I emphasized on the kind of agitation that had to be carried on in India for amnesty to political prisoners in the Andamans; I pointed out how our leaders had hesitated to tackle the question; how the Government refused to designate me and other revolutionaries as political prisoners; how it was sheer perversity on the part of the rulers not to call us by that name; and how, therefore, the people ought to take up the question in justice to us. I also expressed in those annual letters, my views on social, religious and political matters of consequence to the whole country. During the war we had a liberal- minded Superintendent in our prison who allowed me to write freely on all these matters in letters sent by me to my brother in India. He only objected to information about happenings in the prison itself. He used invariably to censor such news. Otherwise, he would let them pass inspite of Mr. Barrie's fretting against it. I took the fullest advantage of the facility afforded to me by the generous Superintendent. Matters regarding prison- administration I managed to send on through other sources, and, from time to time, they found due publicity in Indian newspapers. But there was, of course, a world of difference between anonymous news and authenticated letters like mine. My letters travelled in copies from the council-hall to the house of an ordinary citizen, and had greater effect on the public mind. Again, out of ten communications sent on surreptitiously, one would reach India and perhaps half of it could find its place in the newspaper. But my annual letter reached India with the imprimatur of the Government itself, and, therefore, had a wider publicity in the Indian world. I had, therefore, made it a principle not to do anything in the prison which would forfeit my right to indite such communications, for they meant continuous stirring up and awakening in India on behalf of all political prisoners. For these and for other reasons I settled about the strike that those alone of the new political prisoners should go on strike who could stand the strain right through; that we, the old ones, including Mr. Vamanrao Joshi and my elder brother, were to be excluded from it; that others, who were as old in prison as ourselves, were out of question, because they had carried tales to Mr. Barrie and had denied even the knowledge of Bhan Singh being beaten in his cell by tindals and warders. I further arranged that two out of the strikers should present a memorandum to the authorities on the main question that political prisoners shall not be treated as ordinary criminals, and they were to hang their case on the recent incident of Bhan Singh. If the memorandum was refuted by the authorities, the able-bodied among them should threaten to go on hunger-strike, and none should carry their resistance so far as to be locked up in solitary confinement and rot there; and none was to go on hunger-strike to the verge of death. I took upon myself the task of advertising the strike in the whole world, to win moral support in its favour, and to raise an agitation that it might come to a successful termination. I also promised to continue other public work like that of education