AN INDIAN FANATIC.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9574, 21 August 1909, Page 7

AN INDIAN FANATIC.

Nadar Lai Dhingra, the murderer I of Sir Ctirzon Wyilie, and whose execution has just been reported, is stated by "one who knew him" (in the "Dally Chronicle") to have come from a family well known and highly respcted at Amritaar, his father being a prosperous doctor, and a benefactor to h}s community, and a brother a barrister practising in the Punjaub. The writer firgt became acquainted with Nadar Lai in March last, and they "broke the ice" by conversing) on the congenial theme of engineering, the young Indian being an engineering student and the other deeply interested in the study. "But I noticed that he preferred to turn the conversation into political channels." He spoke of the Bengal extremists, the writer relates, with only qualified approval. But that was not because they went too far, but because they did not go far enough. "The Bengalis," he said, "are very fond of using strone language, but they do not back it up with deeds. The Government' do not care what hard words are used against them—the only thing that would move them is physical force." "Ah!" he exclaimed, "if only the Sikhs were equally excited, then the results might be disastrous to. the English. If I joined in his movement, I would do more than talk." In a subsequent conversation he spoke very stronerly, as he had done before, on Indian affairs, and used familiar terms such as "the miserable gulf that is daily widening between Anglo-Indians and the Indian people," and "the isolation of British officials, leading to the deplorable result ot increasing racial hatred." He made no reference to individuals certainly not to Sir Curzon Wyilie. The writer thinks that just prior to the murder, the young man went to one of the lodgings in Westbourne Grove where the Indian extremists live. There was apolitical discussion; they talked —in no moderate key, as niay toe imagined —of the wrongs of India, of how they could be redressed Dhingra's mind was fertile soil for the plant of sedition. One can reconstruct the sct:ne. "Here is a man who will readily do something if we can persuade him," they would say They would tell him that he would be a hero, immortal in the memory of his down-trodden countrymen, and that a statue would he, raised to Shim, on wnich a free India would 'hang garlands on every anniversary ■| of July Ist—the beginning of the era of emancipation. Then, having poisoned his mind, the conspirators, in the opinion of this writer, poisoned his body. "When Dhingra committed thele murders he was drunk with bhang." The effect of that drug is to make a man perfectly callous of w"hat he does, and outwardly calm and self-possesses, although his brain may be on fire. A