56 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
be the correct path. While anticipating many elements of Mahatma
Gandhi’s methods, Aurobindo argued from a different ethical stand-
point. He was certainly not prepared to regard other methods as “in all
circumstances criminal and unjus ti fied.” “It is the common habit of
established Governments and especially those which are themselves
oppressors,” he wrote, “to brand all violent methods in subject peoples
and communities as criminal and wicked.” The refusal to listen to “the
cant of the oppressor,” who was attempting to lay “a moral as well as a
legal ban on any attempt to answer violence by violence,” had the ap-
proval of “the general conscience of humanity.” Passive resistance could
well be transformed into a battle in which the morality of war ruled
supreme. In those situations, to “shrink from bloodshed and violence”
deserved “as severe a rebuke as Sri Krishna addressed to Arjuna” on the
battlefield of Kurukshetra in the great ancient Indian epic Mahab-
harata.^19 This interpretation of Krishna’s message of strength and dis-
interested action, as embodied in the holy book Bhagavad Gita, ap-
pealed to the votaries of anticolonialism in Bengal.
In late 1920, Das had arranged a meeting of some of Bengal’s revolu-
tionaries with Gandhi, who had persuaded them to renounce violence
temporarily and give his method of nonviolent noncooperation a try.
Once Gandhi suspended the mass movement in 1922, the revolution-
aries felt they were no longer bound by that tacit agreement. The
difference in the perspectives of Das and Gandhi on terrorism was
evident in the controversy over Gopinath Saha, a young man who had
attempted to assassinate Charles Tegart, the police commissioner of
Calcutta, but had instead killed a certain Mr. Day in a case of mistaken
identity. During his trial, Saha stated in court that he had intended
to kill Tegart, was full of remorse that he had fired at the wrong man,
and was prepared to pay for his deed with his life. He was duly found
guilty and executed. In May 1924, the Bengal provincial conference
in Sirajganj, presided over by C. R. Das, passed a resolution that read
as follows: “This conference, whilst denouncing (or dissociating itself
from) violence and adhering to the principle of non- violence, appreci-
ates Gopinath Saha’s ideal of self- sac ri fice, misguided though that is in
respect of the country’s best interest, and expresses its respect for his
great self- sac ri fice.”^20 Gandhi’s supporters narrowly defeated the same