One Year of Non-cooperation: From Ahmedabad to Gaya

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Communist Party of India, 1923 - India - 184 pages
Criticism of Gandhi and the non-cooperation movement from a Marxist viewpoint.

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Page 59 - 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 would be failing in my duty if I do not do so.
Page 59 - I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, 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.
Page 140 - ... attainment of Swarajya the people of India, though holding themselves liable for all debts and liabilities rightly or wrongly incurred hitherto by the Government, will not hold themselves bound to repay any loans or discharge any liabilities incurred on and after this date on the authority or sanction of the so-called legislatures brought into existence in spite of the national boycott.
Page 37 - The choice before the people is mass civil disobedience with all its undoubted dangers and lawless repression of the lawful activities of the people. I hold that it is impossible for any body of self-respecting men for fear of unknown dangers to sit still and do nothing effective when looting of property and assaulting of innocent men are going on all over the country in the name of law and order.
Page 59 - 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.
Page 40 - That which arrests, tortures, floggings, imprisonments, massacres, fines and police-zoolums (oppression) could not quell — the blind struggles of a starving nation to save itself from utter annihilation — Mr. Gandhi, by the simple magic of love and non-violence, reduced to impotence and inactivity... The Congress had committed suicide by repudiating the revolutionary action of his own followers.
Page 36 - ... consequences on the one hand, and on the other, the maintenance of those principles which lie at the root of all civilized Governments. Mass civil disobedience is fraught with such danger to the State that it must be met with sternness and severity.
Page 166 - We have delayed the matter already too long. If the Congress fails to do its duty, you may expect to find organisations set up in the country by Labourers and Peasants detached from you, dissociated from the cause of Swaraj which will inevitably bring within the arena of the peaceful revolution, class struggles and the war of special interests.
Page 51 - Swaraj by non-violent means can therefore never mean an interval of chaos and anarchy. Swaraj by nonviolence must be a progressively peaceful revolution such that the transference of power from a close corporation to the people's representatives will be as natural as the dropping of a fully ripe fruit from a well-nurtured tree. I say again that such a thing may be quite impossible of attainment. But I know that nothing less is the implication of Non-violence.
Page 160 - Order," and who think that the development of the great Indian nation must follow the lines laid down in that history. For myself I oppose the pretensions of " Law and Order," not on historical precedent, but on the ground that it is the inalienable right of every individual and of every nation to stand on truth and to offer a stubborn resistance to the promulgation of lawless laws. There was a law in the time of Christ which forbade the people...

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