Sri Aurobindo

Bande Mataram

Early Political Writings. 1890 — May 1908

Bande Mataram. 22 August, 1906

National Education and the Congress

National Education received the seal of approbation from united Bengal at the Barisal Conference. It should be the aim of the nationalists to elicit from the Congress this year a solemn expression of the national will recognising the new movement and recommending it to all India. It is possible that there may be some difficulty in carrying the motion, for the small-minded and fainthearted figure largely in the Congress ranks. At Benares this element disgraced the nation by excluding Swadeshi, the universal national movement, from the purview of the national assembly. This time there should be no repetition of such pusillanimity. Such exhibitions of moral cowardice are one reason more why the Congress should be reconstituted on a basis sufficiently popular to prevent the sentiment of the people from being outraged or caricatured by self-constituted representatives. If the Congress had not been hopelessly out of date in its form and spirit, it would by this time have organised itself for work, with a department for the organisation of National Education on a basis of voluntary self-taxation figuring prominently in its list of national duties.

This work was not reprinted in the CWSA and it was not compared with other editions.