Sri Aurobindo
Bande Mataram
Calcutta, June 6th, 1907
Part Four. Bande Mataram under the Editorship of
of Sri Aurobindo (28 May – 22 December 1907)
Law and Order
The Government of India is up and doing to restore law and order in the land.
What is this law?
What is this order which seems to have disappeared from our midst and which the bureaucracy is calling back with deportation and prosecution and almost daily ordinances and ukases?
The Britisher’s word is law, his very presence and existence in the land a signal for the suppression and suspension of manly or patriotic activities.
Reconciliation with foreign despotism is perfect order.
Doing the Britisher’s bidding is law.
It is the height of impertinence to be begging and asking.
It is criminal to insist on the undoing of bureaucratic actions.
To cry “Thy will be done” is loyalty and patriotism.
To wish for our eternal serfdom is prudence and peacefulness.
To think ourselves irremediably unfit is wisdom and moderation.
To imagine ourselves a nation is madness.
To love our country is superstition.
To work for its emancipation is treason.
To harbour any such sentiment is sedition.
Thus the new nationalism is subversive of law and order, religion and morality, justice and fair play, obedience and discipline.
The law again is that some shall sow and others reap, that some shall buy and others sell, that some shall bleed and others fatten, that some shall order and others obey, that some shall rule and 
others submit, that some shall teach and others learn.
The new nationalism with its boycott and Swadeshi, national education and Swaraj, seeks to invert this order and needs to be put down.
It is here in our non-conformity to the bureaucratic conceptions of our duties that law and order have been disturbed and not in Eastern Bengal and Rawalpindi as they have been trying to make out.
There were riots before this more fearful and far-reaching in their consequence but not followed by such systematic repression supported by everyone from the Secretary of State to the commonest civilian.