The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c12.s2.9

c12.s2.9

¹ In the controversy raised by the Montagu-Chelmsford Report the nationalist sentiment is officially represented by Sir C. Sankaran Nair, who quotes Rhys Davids, Havell, Aiyangar, Banerjea, Bhandarkar, and Jayaswal in the *Minute of Dissent to the Government of India's Despatch of* March 5, 1919, secs. 2, 3, 4 (*Indian Review*, July 1919), while the Anglo-Indian opinion is non-officially voiced by Mr. Vincent Smith in *Indian Constitutional Reform viewed in the Light of History*, pp. 18—21. According to the methodology followed in the present treatise both these viewpoints, in so far as they have bearing on the political tradition or genius of India, are fallacious extremes. The English historian of Hindu and Mohammedan politics manages, as usual, to ignore the despotism in occidental tradition and forget the fact that down to 1789 European masses, no less than the Indian, were as innocent of "elective councils and diarchies" as is the man in the moon of the binomial theorem. On the other hand, the Hindu *svarâjist* is almost inclined to minimize the unprecedented character of the cumulative assertion of the human spirit in politics from the American revolution to the Russian revolution. The problem before the descendants of Vajjians and Yaudheyas is today as easy or as difficult as that before the inheritors of Greek and Roman democracies. An appeal to history at the present juncture is irrelevant and useless.