[Indian Unrest by Valentine Chirol]@TWC D-Link book
Indian Unrest

CHAPTER XVI
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This is the society of "The Servants of India," founded by Mr.Gokhale at Poona.

Mr.Gokhale's career itself exemplifies the cross-currents that are often so perplexing a feature of Indian unrest.

He is chiefly known in England as one of the leading and certainly most interesting figures in Indian politics.

A Chitpavan Brahman by birth, with the blood of the old dominant caste of Maharashtra in his veins, he has often been, both in the Viceroy's Legislative Council and in that of his own Presidency, a severe and even bitter critic of an alien Government, of which he nevertheless admits the benefit, and even the necessity, for India.

On the other hand, though he proclaims himself a Nationalist, and though, on one occasion at least, when he presided over the stormy session of the Indian National Congress at Calcutta in December, 1906, which endorsed the Bengalee boycott movement, he lent the weight of his authority to a policy that was difficult to reconcile with constitutional methods of opposition, his reason and his moral sense have always revolted against the reactionary appeals to religious prejudice and racial hatred by which men like Tilak have sought to stimulate a perverted form of Indian patriotism.


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