Yogendra Bali

Stupidity and hysteria, lack of a sense of history and reason, have become sickly features of slander politics of today. Whether it is Sonia Gandhi today, Lal Krishan Advani tomorrow and Dr. Manmohan Singh day after, the smear artists of the contemporary politics of rant and rage always try to score on one another to fan non-issues and non-sensible platitudes to prove that they are cleaner, wiser and more moral than the others. The dirty word and aggressive body language has become the forte of the verbal terrorists and moralists polluting the political scene. I do not care to name any one of them or even take a lid off their motives. People of India have known such gadflies in the past and dealt with them and I am sure will give them the ‘reward’ they deserve when time comes. Whether it is a remark about Jinnah or the contribution of the British, sick minds shall always find something to crib and carp about. Of course, they were entitled to nurse their disease as a moral quality. And today I dare them all to be ready with their brickbats and stones to pelt me, for, I am writing these in lines as an Independence Day tribute to a man who was British, and obviously a foreigner of well established foreign origin, who literally fathered the modern Indian nationalist movement which ultimately resulted in the Independence of India.

Instead of starting with my own assessment of this man, Allan Octavian Hume, ICS – to the Indian freedom movement, I would like to quote the great Indian patriot and freedom fighter, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya who had called Hume a “Truly Great Soul”. Pandit Modan Mohan said, “Hume inspired, elevated and educated those who came under his influence by the nobleness of his nature, his world-wide sympathies, his profound earnestness, his selfless, ceaseless devotion to the cause which he espoused, and by his unshakeable faith that tight and justice would eventually triumph. He was truly a great soul – one of the noblest Englishmen ever born. He was one of those benefactors of mankind who come to initiate movements of great potentiality for the good of their fellowmen. Hume combined in him the large-hearted love of freedom, justice and equality of treatment between man and man. He hated oppression and wrongdoings, and sincerely and earnestly desired the good of all his fellowmen.”

Interestingly, Hume, born in 1829, was the product of the same 19th Century which produced Karl Marx and Fredric Ebgles, the profounder of Modern Marxism. But Hume was in India while Marxism was yet to arrive to produce the 20th century generation of Indian Communists and socialists of many varieties and shades influenced by diverse power and ideology centres. This reference is just to show that those who nurse the deliberate and cultivated “foreigner complex” are themselves the votaries of ideas and ideologies and beneficiaries of ism which were born outside India but were found useful by the makers of modern India.

To quote a political historian of India, “It was very rarely, if ever that a country’s leading political organization and the main instrument of its freedom, was the handiwork of a foreigner. It was the singular privilege and supreme triumph of a retired member of the Indian Civil Service to have brought the Indian National Congress into being – at one end to organise the scattered elements of public life and focus them into an institution for political articulation, and at the other to enable the British Government to be in touch with popular feeling and profit by the increasing association of the people’s representatives with the management of affairs. Allan Octavian Hume was the man, as subsequent events indubitably established, he sowed the seeds of a larger growth and passed into history as one of Britain’s noblest sons and India’s greatest benefactors.”

I ask the wise men of 2005, should we reject freedom of India because a foreigner, a Britisher at that, helped trigger the movement for it? Many of today’s political messiahs and the parties that fathered them were not even born at that time. What right have they got to pass permanent judgments hastily and rashly, without rhyme and reason on history, which is not static and shall go on. Can you call mama’s names because she gave you birth?

It was Hume’s destiny to make Calcutta after retiring from the ICS and refusing the plum job of the Lieut. Governorship of Punjab. The first seed of the Indian nationalist movement were sowed by his famous circular to the Gradiates of Calcutta University, as he thought that, as the largest body of the most highly educated Indian, they should “constitute the also most important source of all mental, moral, social and political progress in India.” He argued in that appeal to the educated elite, that however much “aliens” like himself “love India and her children” and give their time, money and thought for her good, and even struggle and sacrifice in her cause, they lacked the essentials of nationalist” and that “the real work must ever be done by the people of the country themselves.” It was out of this fervent appeal by Hume that the “Indian National Union was born, which was subsequently renamed the “Indian National Congress”. “The Congress at that time was distinct from the political party it is today. It was a movement which provided a common mainstream for all Indian freedom fighters and revolutionaries who organised themselves into parties of the right, left and centre after Independence to become beneficiaries of the freedom movement led by Nehru, Gandhi, Patel, Azad and several famous revolutionary leaders like Subhash Chandra Bose and Raj Behari Ghose from Bengal.

This Independence Day, while remembering those who pioneered the Indian national movement, we must remember that Britain not only gave us the East India Company and an atrocious Raaj but also Hume who led us to replace the British with instruments like modern education and democratic institutions.

I would like to end this tribute to the great “foreigner who was among the pioneers of Indian freedom movement” by none less than the famous Indian Raj Behari Ghose. He said India was Hume’s Tomb, or final resting place, because he loved India so much. He said, “When the voice of blind passion and vulgar strife is hushed, the name of Allan Hume will find a conspicuous place in the roll of those good servants of England who are imperial in the true sense of the term, for the true imperialist is not the man who shouts the loudest about the imperial destiny of England, but the man who is conscious of the great trust which has been laid on England and which a great and righteous nation alone can discharge. Hume’s tomb is the whole of India and his most lasting memorial will be found, not in marble or bronze, but in the hearts of those for whom he lived and died.”

Yes, if England produced a notorious Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, it also produced a noble Allan Octavian Hume whose memory I greet today with joy, gratitude and respect.