Freedom Through Disobedience

Book excerpt: The following is the full text of the Presidential Address of Desabhandhu C. R. Das at the thirty-seventh session of the Indian National Congress held at Gaya on 26th December 1922: - Sisters and Brothers, - As I stand before you to-day, a sense of overwhelming loss overtakes me, and I can scarce give expression to what is uppermost in the minds of all and everyone of us. After a memorable battle which he gave to the Bureaucracy, Mahatma Gandhi has been seized and cast into prison; and we shall not have his guidance in the proceedings of the Congress this year. But there is inspiration for all of us in the last stand which he made in the citadel of the enemy, in the last defiance which he hurled at the agents of the Bureaucracy. To read a story equal in pathos, in dignity, and in sublimity you have to go back over two thousand years, when Jesus of Nazareth, "as one that perverted the people" stood to take his trial before a foreign tribunal. "And Jesus stood before the Governor: and the Governor asked him saying, Art thou the king of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, Thou sayëst.