A SEDITIOUS MIDDLE TEMPLE LAWYER

In times when everything around us is dark and hopeless and our dreams seem far and impossible, we give a pitiful importance to what is said about us. Words assume a significance that hitherto did not exist or that we never recognized. Criticism then attains a potency not just to injure but even destroy. I recently read the following extract from one of Sir Winston Churchill’s speeches. In this piece, he had only ‘naked’ insults for the Mahatma Gandhi. It dawned on me that these mordant comments camouflage Sir Winston’s unseen dread of two things- the justness of Gandhiji’s cause and the moral superiority of his means. At the bottom of it, his words are a grudging acceptance that the Indian Independence, however fatal it would be to the King’s empire, was merely a matter of time and any opposition to it, futile.

This speech was rendered on 23^rd February 1931 at Winchester House, Epping.

“Now I come to the administration of India. In my opinion we ought to dissociate ourselves in the most public and formal manner from any complicity in the weak, wrong-headed and most unfortunate administration of India by the Socialists and by the Viceroy acting on their responsibility. It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the King- Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India.”

This speech is relevant today as Britain disowns Sir Winston from its textbooks. Perhaps, this would remind us that history judges us by the causes we espouse and the means that we adopt and not the ostentation of our facade.

Let us try to emulate Gandhi and rediscover his simplicity and firmness of convictions within us.