PSYCHOLOGY OF TERRORISM
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Stn,—In his remarkable book Dawn in India, Sir Francis Younghusband has an interesting chapter on Terrorism in India. He gives long extracts from the highly inflammable series of articles published in the Yugantar, a paper published in 1905, in Calcutta. The articles were written by the great Bengali patriot Aurobindo Chose, thirty years ago, and the paper was edited by his brother, Barindra Kumar Chose. Your readers may read the terrible extracts for themselves. I inay only say here, that the immediate result of the publica- tion of the murderous screeds was that the awful spirit that they sought to arouse quickly flamed up. Dacoits, outrages and deeds of great violence grew in numbers.
In recent months, the Statesman of Calcutta has published some remarkable articles by Barindra Kumar Ghose, the ex-terrorist, and he has given us some very interesting remedies for the curse of terrorism. In his last article, he examines the "psychology of Terrorism." In his opinion, the Government and the police in India have a more correct and workable idea about the terrorist movement and its adherents, than anyone else. " Their idea is built on personal contact, experience and deep study."
According to this distinguished ex-terrorist : " One must study the leaders and deep thinkers of the movement and the rank and file separately. One must compare their nature and temperament with those of their cousins abroad—take their mental and emotional charts, so to say—before statistics of external accidents like birth, caste, occupation and avowed motives will help conclusions.. . . Terrorists are blind or half conscious instruments in the hands of adroit thinkers. Can any amount of statistics account for an Aurobindo and myself ? Yet we were the root of all sub- . versive activities in Bengal, which spread later on, like heath fire all over India. If men of vision, faith, emotional fire, and education like us, sit down today assiduously to sow the seeds of discontent, of another violent movement, say, like Communism of the Moscow Brand, in about ten years' time or even less, you can well expect another whirlwind carrying havoc and death in its career all over India. The power of faith, prophetic vision, sincerity, and profound erudition in Aurobindo, is almost beyond comparison. At the same time, my brother is gentle by nature, highly aesthetic, a poet of a very high order, and as such extremely averse to bloodshed. You can search in vain for a hidden strain of dare-devilry in the great spiritual sage of Pondicherry. And yet, that master mind, whether consciously or unconsciously, gave the powerful impetus to this cult of violent revolution. His ardent and sin- cere love of country made him utter the gospel of Indian inde- pendence, the implications and consequences of which he could . hardly realize himself. I have never hurt a fly with my own hands, and yet blind passion of patriotism turned me into the first active leader of the cult of the bomb. If Mahatma Gandhi was to turn to violence now, can we imagine the magnitude of the catastrophe he can precipitate ? Will he stand in need of emotional, easily gullible and neurotic followers in hundreds and thousands ? Some great and cultured minds, too, will be affected, and swept off their feet, by the very glamour and dare-devilry of the conception. It is wholly absurd to say that unemployment and starvation is the sole cause of terrorism. Mere unemployment does not do it, as Aurobindo, the idealist, had very high employment, and I the practical leader of the violent movement had none. Even I rejected an appointment offered by the Galkwar of Etaroda. . . A Dhingra, a Sawarkar, a Mohendra Protap, a Rash Behari, or a M. N. Ray—each is a separate study in himself. They come from castes as wide apart as the two poles. Take care of these terribly high ea-plosives of humanity, and you have taken care of the whole world. A Karl Marx buried deep in a London library could by no stretch of the imagination be guessed to be a sleeping volcano, and yet he proved to be one. And so did Lenin.
" Western education and culture have Made stagnant India politically conscious. Ideas of liberty and Nationalism from that source have taken deep root in the susceptible and emotional mind of Indians. Fanned by economic and other causes, these are spreading into the- masses, creating unrest. In this fruitful soil impracticable and dangerous visionaries, and impatient idealists, are deliberately sowing seeds of violence, and it is no wonder that the country has to reap the whirlwind now and then. India cannot be sent back to sleep and stagnancy. She needs safety-valves in the shape of true self-governing institutions, for her ardent passion for national fulfilment. I have been watching with great interest the efforts of public leaders to organize opinion and canalize resources and energy towards eradication of terrorism. It is a happy augury,- so far as it goes. But how far these efforts are due to political expediency, and how far to sincere aversion to violence, it is difficult to judge. . . . An idea cannot be fought except by an equally cogent and powerful idea. And such an idea to be effective, and subversive of the other, must, incarnate in an utterly sincere man. A Mahatma Gandhi, the Rishi of non-violence as he is, pitted against insidious or organized violence, can alone hope to succeed against a poison of this nature, which is almost world-wide. Nothing short of a healthier and purer move- ment, of a constructive nature, can combat subversive ideas."
In their efforts to eradicate terrorism the British Parliament can assist the Government of India by supplying those " safely valves, in the shape of true self-governing institutions" for India, without delay. The Constitutional Reforms, proposed in the White Paper, are overdue by at least thirty years, and this is largely the cause of the present chronic unrest, and hatred against the present " system."—Yours,
Previous page
