Page:Gandhi - Freedom's battle.djvu/24

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12
FREEDOM'S BATTLE

Where in any case negotiations have failed and the enemy is neither corruptible nor incapable of being divided, and a resort to violence has failed or would certainly be futile the method of Upeshka remains to be applied to the case. Indeed, when the very existence of the power we seek to defeat really depends on our continuous co-operation with it, and where our Apeskha its very life, our Upeskha or non-co-operation is the most natural and most effective expedient that we can employ to bend it to our will.

No Englishman believes that his nation can rule or keep India for a day unless the people of India actively co-operate to maintain that rule. Whether the co-operation be given willingly or through ignorance, cupidity, habit or fear, the withdrawal of that co-operation means impossibility of foreign rule in India. Some of us may not realise this, but those who govern us have long ago known and are now keenly alive to this truth. The active assistance of the people of this country in the supply of the money, men, and knowledge of the languages, customs and laws of the land, is the main-spring of the continuous life of the foreign administration. Indeed the circumstances of British rule in this country are such that but for a double supply of co-operation on the part of the governed, it must have broken down long ago. Any system of race domination is unnatural, and can be kept up only by active