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

apologised and withdrew its statement. This affair laster for a few days since my arrival
at Ratnagiri, and I also received parcels sent to me by members of my family.
The trouble of the Khilafat
Some convicts from Sindh and other parts of the country, involved in the Non
cooperation movement and the Khilafat agitation, both Hindus and Mussulmans, came to
the Ratnagiri jail soon after my arrival there. Their notions of the Khilafat movement, of
Hindu-Muslim Unity and of politics in general struck me as vitiated and eccentric. And I
had to carry on endless discussion with them on these topics and vigorously attack their
misconceptions. A few days after, I arranged in that jail for talks and for weekly lectures
and meetings on the line I had followed in the Andamans. We were together at Ratnagiri
for a year and a half. When I happened to meet them for the first time, I happened to hear
one of them shouting that "the Mussulmans had not done the atrocities in Malabar that
were being fathered upon them." Another friend echoed loudly that "it did not matter in
the least if they had done them; whatever had happened should be treated as dead past;
Hindus may convert themselves to Islam; what mattered most was Swaraj and it must be
won." There was no end to the perversion of the definitions of truth and non-violence
among them. I may narrate here an episode of a political convict in this prison as a
specimen of the mentality of almost all the non-cooperating and the Khilafatist patriots I
came across in this jail during that time.
The confusion of Gandhism
We used the devices that we had employed in the Andamans to get at news in the
jail at Ratnagiri. We could thus procure scraps of newspaper from outside carried to us
through dust bins or by prisoners sent on work outside the prison. My friends among the
non-cooperators often used to read these scraps as I read them also. Twice or thrice some
of them were found reading them while moving about in the open court-yard. One of us
warned them against this practice, as we were forbidden to read newspapers in prison,
and if noticed by officers., our secret would be out, and all means of getting them would
be instantly stopped. To this a non-cooperator replied, "Do you mean to say that I should
read this in secret? I am a non-cooperator. Whatever is done secretly is against the
doctrine of truth and I will not do it." We did not argue the matter with him. We only
stopped giving him any scrap of paper to read. He was in rage with us. And he told us
that he would report the matter the next day to the officer, telling him that they were
smuggling newspapers in the jail in the same manner that some prisoners were smuggling
tobacco. To hide a fact was sin, which no non-cooperator, as a follower of truth, would
commit.
We told him that he knew when he was reading those scraps that he got them
from a secret source. Why did he read them then if he felt that it went against his concep-