The Swarajya Party’s resolutions

Judging from the important resolutions adopted by the Executive Committee of the Swarajya Party at its recent meeting in Nagpur, we are evidently on the eve of another change in the programme and policy of the party. It has travelled a long way already from the programme and policy it chalked out for itself at its inception — that of consistent, uniform and continuous obstruction. Its present policy may be said to be one of cooperation, if and so far as it may be practicable, with other progressive wings of the national party, and of strong and determined opposition to the government, amounting in some cases to either total or partial obstruction. If we have been able to follow the drift of the latest resolutions, obstruction will now cease to be a part of the actual policy and programme and will be what it ought to have been from the first, merely the last step in the process of opposition, to be worked up to only when all other and less drastic methods have failed, and the conditions for successful resort to it are more or less completely satisfied. The actual policy and programme will probably differ from the orthodox Liberal policy only in being directed to the sole purpose of winning self-government at the earliest opportunity, and stopping short of no means which may be calculated to attain that end that may be justified by the circumstances of the case. This is also the policy to which the more advanced among the Liberals themselves have now for some time been slowly moving forward, while it has always been the professed policy of all those Nationalists who have remained faithful to the teachings of Bal Gangadhar Tilak.