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Reports of this kind were well calculated to alarm both the Zemindars, who had waxed fat on the Permanent Settlement, and the credulous rayats, whose labour is indispensable to the zemindar squirarchy.
Like all Tilak's schemes in those days it was carefully designed to conceal as far as possible any direct incitement to the withholding of land revenue. His missionaries went round with a story that Government had issued orders not to collect taxes where the crops had fallen below a certain yield. The rayats believed them, and when the tax-gatherer arrived they refused payment. Trouble then arose.
The Afghan sank back on his cushion, but his gaze remained riveted on his narrator's face. "One day I was seated in my home, casting up my books of account, for I had only that morning completed the taking of taxes from the crops of the rayats, the tenants of my lord. All of a sudden a white-robed figure entered the doorway and threw himself prostrate before me.
Tilak commanded the allegiance of barristers and pleaders, schoolmasters and professors, clerks in Government offices in fact, of the large majority of the so-called educated classes, largely recruited amongst his own and other Brahman castes; and his propaganda had begun to filter down not only to the coolies in the cities, but even to the rayats, or at least the head-men in the villages.
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