The Collected Works of Lala Lajpat Rai (Volume 7)

Lala Lajpat Rai was one of the outstanding leaders of modern India, a contemporary of Dadabhai Naoroji, Tilak Gokhale and Gandhi. His public life spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. He practised law at the Lahore Chief Court and built up a lucrative practice, but was drawn very early into public activities pertaining to religious, educational and social reforms and then into nationalist politics. His arrest and deportation without trial to Burma in 1907 created a great sensation in India. He spent the war years (1914-18) in the United States propagating the Indian case for self government. He returned to India in 1920 and had the honour of presiding over the Calcutta Session of the Indian National Congress which approved of Gandhi’s campaign for non-cooperation with the government. He was deputy leader of the Swaraj Party in the Central legislative Assembly and played a prominent role in provincial as well as national politics in the 1920s. While leading a demonstration against the Simon Commission at Lahore in 1928 he received injuries in an assault by the police which hastened his death. The seventh volume in this series covers two years, from the beginning of 1917 to the end of 1918, when the world war was on, and Lajpat Rai remained in the United States, having arrived there in November 1914. the year 1917 opened and closed in India with the magic slogan, ‘Home Rule’. Annie Besant founded the Home Rule League in September 1916; in April of the same year Bal Gangadhar Tilak set up a Home Rule League in Poona. In 1917 Lajpat Rai established the ‘India Home Rule League of America’ in New York to support the Home Rule movement back home in India and started a monthly journal, Young India. Stepping up his campaign for mibilising the support of the progressive opinion in the United States and Britain, Lajpat Rai wrote a pamphlet on ‘Self-Determination for India’ and a damning historical narrative of British fiscal policy in India. In a hard-hitting and closely reasoned ‘Open Letter’ addressed to British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Lajpat Rai dwelt on the seamy side of British rule in India. The world, he wrote, ‘cannot be safe for democracy unless India is self-governed.’