Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) states, ‘Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government shall be punishable with Life Imprisonment’.
This wide and capacious section is called the law of Sedition—included in the IPC in 1870—and was used to try many freedom fighters, including Mahatma Gandhi. In 1897, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, known for his criticism of the British, was charged under Section 124A for his views in Kesari, his Marathi-language newspaper.
This was an important moment in India’s political history as it marked the criminalisation of dissent as a grand spectacle of a political trial, narrativised by the press across British India. More importantly, it set the pattern for legal engagement with discursive violence in the years to come.
Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak was perhaps the first political leader in modern India to appreciate the importance of identity issues. He realised that these could be a tool to make inroads in the minds of an otherwise docile society. Once that was done, people could be motivated to join the struggle for independence, which explains Tilak’s clarion call for swaraj and swadeshi.
Striving for self-dependence, in Tilak’s strategy, was the stepping-stone for Independence. Tilak wanted to inculcate both collective thinking as well as action. For the cultivation of an enlightened mind, he used the media in the form of two newspapers, Kesari and Maratha, and national education through Deccan Education Society, an institute he established. His formula for preparing the ground for political activism through culture, education and media was so powerful that later on Mahatma Gandhi, Babasaheb Ambedkar and others adopted this path.
Tilak belonged to the rare category of philosopher-politician. His ideas of swaraj and swadeshi were anchored in making every Indian conscious of the insults and injustice meted out by the British. He prepared a fertile ground for swaraj through his home-rule movement. He was clear on the aim of the home rule movement. The tone and tenor of his demand were strategically conciliatory. He wrote: “India was like a son who had grown up and attained maturity. It was right now that the trustee or the father should give him what was his due. The people of India must get this effected. They have a right to do so.”
Tilak wanted to promote manufacturing in India. To that end, Tilak started collecting funds for a corpus, known as Paisa Fund. Through this, Tilak supported Ishwar Das Varshney, an entrepreneur who was greatly inspired by Tilak’s speech in the Surat Congress. Varshney later started Paisa Fund Glass Works at Talegaon near Pune. In Tuticorin, Chidambaram Pillai led a fairly successful swadeshi campaign. His initiative of starting the Indian-owned shipping company, the Swadeshi Shipping Company in October 1906, posed a challenge before the mighty British India Steam Navigation Company. Later, when his seminal work Geetarahasya , which he wrote while under imprisonment at Mandalay was to be published, he ensured that the paper to be used was indigenously manufactured by D Padamji and Sons, a swadeshi paper mill.
Lokmanya Tilak founded and edited two newspapers – Kesari in Marathi and The Mahratta in English. He used his pen as a weapon to criticise the colonial rulers.
He was imprisoned a number of times including a long stint at Mandalay in Myanmar. During his years in prison, he spent his time reading and writing. He wrote the famous ‘Gita Rahasya‘ – an analysis of the Karma Yoga which finds its source in The Bhagavad Gita.
Tilak was charged for the publication of two texts—‘Shivaji’s Utterances’, a poem authored under an alias, and an unsigned report on the June 1897 Shivaji festival, at which Tilak and C.G. Bhanu, a notable Pune intellectual, spoke.
This, the Bombay government claimed, incited ‘disaffection’ against the regime. The prosecution was probably prompted by the assassination of officers W.C. Rand and Charles Ayerst shortly after the festival.
A careful perusal of the two texts, however, illuminates Tilak’s political thought—as he stood on the radical side of liberalism—which is relevant for studying anti-state violence in modern Indian thought. Following the example of their historical hero then, Tilak offered people the morality of the Bhagvad Gita to justify their own political actions undertaken for the national community. Creating a complex philosophy of political action, Tilak articulates ‘a bold refusal of the political abjection enforced by colonial law,’ according to scholar Sukeshi Kamra.
Tilak’s 1897 trial offers an important example of the success of a local government in convicting the Indian press, in this case the Kesari, under Section 124A. It anchored the view that discursive violence was, in fact, an offence with criminal bearings. It also established that a purely discursive determination of militancy was sufficient for the law.
While Jawaharlal Nehru called him the ‘father of Indian revolution’, Mahatma Gandhi described Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak as ‘the maker of modern India’.
