Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c6.s3.25

c6.s3.25

Rs.3,00,000 and subsequently experience has not shown that its produce was materially underrated. Considered therefore as a source of revenue, the pecuniary advantages arising from it to Government was trivial compared with the general dissatisfaction which it has occasioned, the actual opposition which it had excited at Benares and Bhaugulpore, and the apprehensions that the same disposition might manifest itself in similar excesses at other stations. Arguments indeed were not wanting for the continuance of the tax, founded on the necessity of supporting the authority of Government and repressing the spirit of resistance which had been manifested to the exercise of its legitimate powers. The inhabitants of Benares however had long ago yielded an unconditional submission to public authority: and exclusively of that consideration it will be observed, that we neither intended to proceed to the immediate abolition of the tax, nor to extend the benefits of that measure to any places at which (to use the terms of our instructions to the Board of Revenue) ‘commotions originating in a resistance to the operation of the tax might exist at the period of the receipt of those orders’.