The trial speech (Ahmedabad, March 1922) MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI (1869–1948)

The trial speech (Ahmedabad, March 1922) MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI (1869–1948)

After the violence at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, Gandhi called off

the Non Co-operation Movement, the first all-India protest against British

rule. Gandhi had insisted that the movement should be non-violent and the

killing of policemen in Chauri Chaura came as a shock to him. He expected

to be arrested and the arrest came on March 10 when he was in his

Sabarmati ashram. e trial began on March 18 before C.N. Broomfield,

ICS, District and Sessions Judge, Ahmedabad. J.T. Strangman, the

advocate-general conducted the prosecution. Gandhi, who told the court

that he was a farmer and a weaver by occupation, was undefended. He was

charged for writing three articles in Young India, which had excited hatred

and disaffection towards His Majesty’s Government in British India. e

three offending articles were, Tampering with Loyalty, e Puzzle and its

Solutions and Shaking the Manes. Gandhi pleaded guilty to the charges and

proceeded to make a statement on record to the court. In this speech,

Gandhi spoke about his deep commitment to nonviolence and his refusal to

accept British rule. Maniben Patel, the daughter of Vallabhbhai, was

present in the court. She recalled the silence and the sadness in the court

room as the speech was made and the verdict delivered: ‘It was as if the

birds and animals too were still, and people had stopped breathing…When

asked why they were looking sad, people broke down and wept.’

Before I read this statement

 I would like to state that I entirely endorse the

learned Advocate-General’s remarks in connection with my humble self. I

think that he was entirely fair to me in all the statements that he has made,

because it is very true and I have no desire whatsoever to conceal from this

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court the fact that to preach disaffection towards the existing system of

government has become almost a passion with me, and the learned

Advocate-General is also entirely in the right when he says that my

preaching of disaffection did not commence with my connection with Young

India, but that it commenced much earlier and in the statement that I am

about to read, it will be my painful duty to admit before this court that it

commenced much earlier than the period stated by the Advocate-General.

It is the most painful duty with me, but I have to discharge that duty

knowing the responsibility that rests upon me, and I wish to endorse all the

blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulders in

connection with the Bombay, the Madras and the Chauri Chaura

occurrences. inking over these deeply and sleeping over them night after

night, it is impossible to dissociate myself from the diabolical crimes of

Chauri Chaura or the mad outrages in Bombay and Madras. He is quite

right when he says that, as a man of responsibility, a man having received a

fair share of education, having had a fair share of experience of this world, I

should know the consequences of every one of my acts. I knew that I was

playing with fire. I ran the risk and, if I was set free, I would still do the

same. I know that I was feeling it so every day and I have felt it also this

morning that I would have failed in my duty if I did not say what I said here

just now.

I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Nonviolence is the first

article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make

my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done

an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my

peopl bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know

that my people have sometimes gone mad; I am deeply sorry for it. I am,

therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I

do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for any extenuating act of clemency. I am

here to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be

inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to

me to be the highest duty of a citizen. e only course open to you, the

Judge, is as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your

post, or inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the system and

the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this

country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the public weal. I do

not expect that kind of conversion, but by the time I have finished with my

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statement, you will, perhaps, have a glimpse of what is raging within my

breast to run this maddest risk that a sane man can run.

e statement was then read out.

STATEMENT

I owe it perhaps to the Indian public and to the public in England, to

placate which this prosecution is mainly taken up, that I should explain why,

from a staunch loyalist and co-operator, I have become an uncompromising

disaffectionist and non-co-operator. To the court, too, I should say why I

plead guilty to the charge of promoting disaffection towards the

government established by law in India.

My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first

contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character.

I discovered that as a man and Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I

discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.

But I was not baffled. I thought that this treatment of Indians was an

excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good.

I gave the government my voluntary and hearty co-operation, criticizing it

freely where I felt it was faulty, but never wishing its destruction.

Consequently, when the existence of the empire was threatened in 1899 by

the Boer challenge, I offered my services to it, raised a volunteer ambulance

corps and served at several actions that took place for the relief of

Ladysmith. Similarly in 1906, at the time of the Zulu revolt, I raised a

stretcher-bearer party and served till the end of the rebellion. On both these

occasions I received medals and was even mentioned in despatches. For my

work in South Africa I was given by Lord Hardinge a Kaiser-i-Hind Gold

Medal. When the War broke out in 1914 between England and Germany, I

raised a volunteer ambulance corps in London consisting of the then

resident Indians in London, chiefly students. Its work was acknowledged by

the authorities to be valuable. Lastly, in India, when a special appeal was

made at the War Conference in Delhi in 1918 by Lord Chelmsford for

recruits, I struggled at the cost of my health to raise a corps in Kheda and

the response was being made when the hostilities ceased and orders were

received that no more recruits were wanted. In all these efforts at service, I

was actuated by the belief that it was possible by such services to gain a

status of full equality in the empire for my countrymen.

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e first shock came in the shape of the Rowlatt Act, a law designed to rob

the people of all real freedom. I felt called upon to lead an intensive

agitation against it. en followed the Punjab horrors beginning with the

massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and culminating in crawling orders, public

floggings and other indescribable humiliations. I discovered, too, that the

plighted word of the Prime Minister to the Mussalmans of India regarding

the integrity of Turkey and the holy places of Islam was not likely to be

fulfilled. But, in spite of the forebodings and the grave warnings of friends,

at the Amritsar Congress in 1919, I fought for co-operation and working

the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister would

redeem his promise to the Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound

would be healed and that the reforms, inadequate and unsatisfactory though

they were, marked a new era of hope in the life of India.

But all that hope was shattered. e Khilafat promise was not to be

redeemed. e Punjab crime was white-washed and most culprits went not

only unpunished, but remained in service and some continued to draw

pensions from the Indian revenue, and in some cases were even rewarded. I

saw, too, that not only did the reforms not mark a change of heart, but they

were only a method of further draining India of her wealth and of

prolonging her servitude.

I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made

India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically.

A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any aggressor if she

wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him. So much is this the case

that some of our best men consider that India must take generations before

she can achieve the dominion status. She has become so poor that she has

little power of resisting famines. Before the British advent, India spun and

wove in her millions of cottages just the supplement she needed for adding

to her meagre agricultural resources. is cottage industry, so vital for

India’s existence, has been ruined by incredibly heartless and inhuman

processes as described by English witnesses. Little do town-dwellers know

how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness.

Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage

they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and

the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the

government established by law in British India is carried on for this

exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain

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away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked

eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town-dwellers

of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against

humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. e law itself in this

country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter. My unbiased

examination of the Punjab Martial Law cases has led me to believe that at

least ninety-five percent of convictions were wholly bad. My experience of

political cases in India leads one to the conclusion that in nine out of every

ten cases the condemned men were totally innocent. eir crime consisted

in the love of their country. In ninety-nine cases out of hundred, justice has

been denied to Indians as against Europeans in the courts of India. is is

not an exaggerated picture. It is the experience of almost every Indian who

has had anything to do with such cases. In my opinion, the administration

of the law is thus prostituted consciously or unconsciously for the benefit of

the exploiter.

e greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their Indian associates in

the administration of the country do not know that they are engaged in the

crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many English and

Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best

systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow

progress. ey do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism

and an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of

all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, have emasculated the

people and induced in them the habit of simulation. is awful habit has

added to the ignorance and the self-deception of the administrators. Section

124 A under which I am happily charged is perhaps the prince among the

political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty

of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one

has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest

expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote

or incite to violence. But the section under which Mr Banker and I are

charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I

have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know that some of the

most loved of India’s patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a

privilege, therefore, to be charged under it. I have endeavoured to give in

their briefest outline the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal ill

will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection

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towards the King’s person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected

towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India

than any previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she

ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have

affection for the system. And it has been a precious privilege for me to be

able to write what I have in the various articles tendered in evidence against

me.

In fact, I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by

showing in non-co-operation the way out of the unnatural state in which

both are living. In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as

much a duty as is co-operation with good. But, in the past, non-cooperation

has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evil-doer. I am

endeavouring to show to my countrymen that violent non-co-operation

only multiplies evil and that, as evil can only be sustained by violence,

withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence.

Non-violence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for non-cooperation

with evil. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to

the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a

deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.

e only course open to you, the Judge, is either to resign your post and

thus dissociate yourself from evil, if you feel that the law you are called upon

to administer is an evil and that in reality I am innocent; or to inflict on me

the severest penalty if you believe that the system and the law you are

assisting to administer are good for the people of this country and that my

activity is, therefore, injurious to the public weal.