Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c5.s2.15

c5.s2.15

Regarding the people’s own view of the unarmed resistance they had put up, the collector reported: ‘Open violence does not seem their aim, they seem rather to vaunt their security in being unarmed in that a military force would not use deadly weapons against such inoffensive foes. And in this confidence they collect and increase, knowing that the civil power cannot disperse them, and thinking that the military will not.’ (p.71) The taking of such steps seems to have come to them naturally. Further, their protesting in this manner in itself did not imply any enmity between them and state power. It is in this context that the rejected petition quoted some prevalent saying: ‘to whom can appeal for redress of what I have sustained from you, to whom but to you who have inflicted it.’ The concept of ruler-ruled relationship which they seem to have held, and which till then had perhaps been widely accepted, was of continuing interaction between the two. Such a dialogue seems to have been resorted to whenever required, and its instrumentalities included all that the people of Benares employed in this particular protest.