THE ARMS ACT.
Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, who was asked by the President, to speak on the Resolution on the ‘‘Arms Act’’ at the Lucknow Congress of 1916, said:—
Your Honour, President and unarmed citizens of India,— It may seem a kind of paradox that I should be asked to raise my voice on behalf of the disinherited manhood of the country, but it is suitable that I who represent the other sex, that is, the mothers of the men whom we wish to make men and not emasculated machines, should raise a voice on behalf of the future mothers of India to demand that the birthright of their sons should be given back to them, so that tomorrow’s India may be once more worthy of its yesterday, that their much-valued birthright be restored to the Hindus and Mussalmans of India, to the disinherited martial Rajput and the Sikh and the Pathan. The refusal of the privilege, that gifted privilege and inalienable right to carry arms, is to insult the very core of their valiant manhood.
To prevent today millions of brave young men willing to carry arms in the cause of the Empire is to cast a slur on the very ideals of the Empire. (Hear, hear.) In your name, O citizens of India, I appeal to the representative of the great Emperor of this great Indian Empire to plead for our rights, to support us in our claims, to grant to the children of tomorrow the right that their forefathers of yesterday possessed. (Cheers) Who but a woman shall raise a voice for you who have not been able in all these years to speak for yourselves with any effect. (Cries of ‘Shame’) I come from a city where every man is privileged to carry arms—the African, the Rohilla, and the Sikh do carry arms there—and never has it been said in my city of Hyderabad that all these various armed elements have ever been disloyal to the sovereign power. Shall not the greater portion of India, British India, take a lesson from that one native state that knows how to trust the loyalty of its subjects. (Hear, hear.) Have we not, the women of India, sent our sons and brothers to shed their blood on the battlefields of Flanders, France, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia? When the hour comes for thanks, shall we not say to them for whom they fought ‘when the terror and tumult of hate shall cease and life is refashioned, and when there is peace, and you offer memorial thanks to the comrades that fought in the dauntless ranks, and you honour the deeds of deathless ones,’ remember the blood of martyred sons, and remember the armies of India and restore to India her lost manhood. (Loud cheers).