Page 28 - Swatantrata to Atmanirbharta : Lokmanya Tilak’s legacy

Two British Officers, Walter Charles Rand, then the Assistant
collector of Pune and in charge of the Plague Commission and
his assistant Lieutenant Ayerst had just moved out and were on
their way to their quarters, the Chapekar brothers were waiting
for them at Ganesh Khind, they had weapons with them,
Balkrishna heard secret call of “Gondya ala re ala” and he shot
the person in the carriage thinking it was Rand, but actually it
was Ayerst, Vasudev who was following Rand’s carriage then
shouted again and this time, Damodar got into the carriage
and shot Rand thus avenging the humiliation that Rand had
wrought upon Pune families.

The three brothers were inspired by the strong language
that Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak used in his newspaper
“Kesari”. They decided to take action and bring down Rand
who had ashamed hundreds of families in Pune.
Thus, we can say that it was Lokmanya Tilak’s words that
inspired the Chapekar brothers but there were consequences
of the incident. The British Government believed that Tilak’s
articles instigated the murder. Tilak was arrested on 27th July
1897 on charges of sedition. His trial at the Bombay High Court
took place in September 1897.

There were arguments placed and counter arguments, but
Justice Arthur Strachey who was presiding over the matter
observed that, a man was free to strongly condemn the
government’s attempts to suppress the plague. However, it was
sedition, he continued, for a journalist to make his readers hate
the government. He explained that an article “published at a
time of profound peace, prosperity and contentment” could be
ignored, but not one which was written “at a time of agitation
and unrest”. He said that if a person commented on government
measures in “violent and bitter” language, such that “ignorant
people at a time of great public excitement” would “become
indisposed to obey and support the Government”, it amounted
to sedition. He advised the jury to consider “the state of things
existing in June 1897, when these articles were disseminated”,
and to bear in mind that the readers of the Kesari were not
“Englishmen or Parsis or even many cultivated and philosophic

Swatantrata to Atmanirbharata 26