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Swadeshi and the boycott were now merely an accompaniment to the deeper and more menacing trumpet-call of open revolt, but they helped "to keep the country awake" even where the true spirit of Swaraj had not yet been kindled.
Famine and plague and disease are rife, and unrighteousness triumphs. Awake, Oh Goddess Durga! I see the lightning flashing from the point of thy bow, the world quaking at thy frowns, and creation trembling under thy tread. Let a river of blood flow, overwhelming the hearts of the demons. The Kalyani chides the Hindus for breaking their Swadeshi vows to Durga:
"I think Swadeshi is good, and if the outcome of the changes I have laid before the Council result in some encouragement of Indian industries, I for one shall not regret it."
But I have ventured to place before you four very important and forcible steps any one of which if fully taken up contains in it possibilities of success. Swadeshi is preached as an item of non-co-operation, as a demonstration of the spirit of sacrifice, and it is an item which every man, woman and child can take up. August 1920.
His examination of the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him much more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people during the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and it was upon the race question that his attention concentrated. The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India.
Amongst the "moderate" section outside Bengal there was a disposition to confine its action to platonic expressions of sympathy with the Bengalees and with the principle of Swadeshi in itself perfectly legitimate as a movement for the encouragement of native industries.
But what will happen to law and order? We shall evolve law and order through the instrumentality of these very lawyers. We shall promote arbitration courts and dispense justice, pure, simple home-made justice, swadeshi justice to our countrymen. That is what suspension of practice means.
The religious character with which the leaders sought to invest the boycott propaganda showed how far removed was the swadeshi which they preached from a mere innocent economic propaganda for the furtherance of native industries.
It was the "sun-dried bureaucrat" again who in regard to Indian industries as well as to Indian agriculture preached and practised sound Swadeshi before the word had ever been brought into vogue by the Indian politician. The veteran Sir George Birdwood, Sir George Watt, Sir Edward Buck, and many others have stood forth for years as the champions of Indian art and Indian home industries.
In the old Indian National Congress the desire not to estrange the sympathies of the Liberal party in England, and the lack of interest then taken by Indian politicians in economic questions, kept the issue somewhat in the background until the Extremists raised it in the form of Swadeshi and in an attempt to organise a boycott of British imported goods.
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