मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

Germany both, battered as they would be in this terrible combat between two mighty
foes, not unlike the fight of two powerful elephants joined in life-and-death struggle with
each other. Broken, battered, bleeding and exhausted they will lie on the field with
victory to neither, and with full advantage to others who knew to profit by the situation.
But I also feared that in this grim struggle between two mighty powers the Muslims in
India might find their devil's opportunity to invite the Muslim hordes from the North to
ravage India and to conquer it, instigated in that effort by the machinations in Russia.
Thinking calmly over all these near and remote consequences of the war, I settled
my own line of action, and, as the beginning of it, I resolved to send a long letter on the
subject to the Government of India. I cannot here give my reader what line of action I had
settled in my mind to follow. But I may summarise in outline the letter I had sent to the
Government of India.
The Superintendent agreed to forward the letter and I wrote in it as follows : I
wrote that I felt it my duty, as intimately connected with the revolutionary movement in
India, to inform the Government, in its distracted state of mind, what I thought about the
present situation in India vis-a-vis the war between England and Germany. It was our
ideal, I wrote, to win independence for India, and it remained our ideal even that day. But
we were not sworn to violent means alone to achieve that independence. If any other sure
means were available to us before for that purpose, we would not have gone in at all for
terrorist and revolutionary methods.
What was true about the means was equally true about the end. Politics and
Government had for their aim to endow man with the rights of citizenship, and to create
in each country representative institutions to maintain those rights by the method of law
and order. We had for our goal the creation of the parliament of man and the federation of
the world. We wanted this federation to be the guardian of freedom and peace, justice and
equal rights all over the world. All distinctions of race and language, of creed and colour,
of territory and boundaries, ought to be submerged in this parliament and this federation,
for the unification of man, and for the promotion of peace and goodwill on earth.
Hence, we were friends to all political institutions and arrangements which
promoted this cause. We welcomed them as steps on the path leading up to the temple of
peace. We were not enemies of the groups of nations or of empires that materially helped
the cause by a union of countries in a common bond of loyalty and government. The
countries in the Union and the Empire had to be endowed with freedom and self-
government as means to their progress and prosperity.
These being our principles of action, we were ready and willing to be friends of
the British Empire if it equipped India with a form of government vital for her freedom
and her progress, and commensurate with her capacity to run such a government in the