द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

60 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE every kind. Moreover, leaders like Mr. B. C. Pal had refused to give evidence before British law courts on the ground that they refused to recognise their jurisdiction. Sri Arabindo Ghosh, the leader of the Extremist section of the Nationalist Movement in Bengal in those days had compared this policy with the policy of the Irish Sinn Fein Party. Several decades earlier, the country had witnessed another movement which could also be regarded as a precursor of Mr. Gandhi's non- co-operation. Before scientists in Europe learnt to produce synthetic indigo, Bengal was an important supplier of indigo. The indigo plantations in those days were owned by Britishers and these foreign landlords were oppressive and brutal in their behaviour towards the tenants. When their brutality became unbearable, the tenants in Jessore and Nadia took the law into their own hands. They refused to pay rent, stopped cultivating indigo and made it impossible for the British landlords to live there and terrorise them. (A graphic description of these incidents can be found in the book Nil-darpan of the well-known Bengali writer, Dinabandhu Mitra.) Thus the people had already learnt to rid themselves of oppression through their own exertions, where they found that the Government neglected its duty. It is a well-known fact that Mr. Gandhi had in his earlier life been considerably influenced by the teachings of Jesus Christ and the ideas of Leo Tolstoy. It cannot therefore be claimed that he was altogether original in his ideas or novel in his practice. But his real merit was a twofold one. He translated the teachings of Christ and the ideas of Tolstoy and Thoreau into actual practice and demonstrated that it was possible to fight for liberty without resorting to violence. Secondly, he used 'non-co-operation' not for remedying local grievances, but for winning national freedom and he well-nigh demonstrated that it was possible to paralyse the civil adminis- tration of a foreign Government thereby and bring the Govern- ment to its knees. A happy combination of factors helped to bring Mr. Gandhi to the forefront in 1920. The attempted revolution during the Great War had failed and the Revolu- tionary Party had been crushed. There was consequently no possibility of another revolution in 1920. Nevertheless, the