  All of us are now striving for "Swaraj" or Home Rule. We wish to be masters of our own destiny. We want sooner or later the representatives of the people of the country to govern it. There are some amongst us who consider that Home Rule, is an immediate necessity. Others believe that Home Rule, at present without the fulfilment of certain preliminary conditions would be attended with disastrous results. But all are agreed that we should work for it. The practical difficulties in the way of its attainment due, partly to the relations between the various communities in India, partly to the opposition of powerful interests and the period that must therefore elapse before we overcome them render the discussion This will be clear once the nature of his agitation is realised. For that purpose, it is necessary to understand his mentality and his real views on the problems of life and the various questions now in debate. These are given in various books which have been published and in his paper "Young The book is in the form of a dialogue between a Reader and the "Editor" the latter being Gandhi himself. Mr. Gandhi wishes to know the necessity of driving away the English, Reader:—"Because India has become impoverished by their Government. They take away our money from year to year. The most important posts are reserved for themselves. We are kept in a state of slavery. They behave insolently towards us, and disregard our feelings." Gandhi:—"Supposing we get Self-government similar to what the Canadians and South Africans have, will it be good enough?" Reader:—"That question also is useless. We may get it when we have the same powers. We shall then hoist our own flag. As is Japan so must India be. We must own our navy, our army, and we must have our own splendour. Then will India's voice ring throughout the world." Gandhi:—"You have well drawn the picture. In effect it means this: that we want English Rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger's nature but not the Nothing can be clearer. He does not want the dominion status of Canada or South Africa for India. He does not claim the independence of Japan for India as he points out a few lines below, "What you call swaraj is not truly swaraj." What is then the real "Swaraj" according to Mr. Gandhi? He proceeds to develop his views by illustrations. He gives his views on the poverty of India. He says Railways, Lawyers and Doctors have impoverished the country, so much so that, if we do not wake up in time, we shall be ruined. About railways he says as follows:— "Man is so made by nature as to require him to restrict his movements as far as his hands and feet will take him. If we did not rush about from place to place by means of railways and such other maddening conveniences, much of the confusion that arises, would be obviated. Our difficulties are of our own creation. God set a limit to a man's locomotive ambition in the construction of his body. Man immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit. God gifted man with intellect that he might know his Maker. Man abused it so that he might forget his Maker. I am so And he advises all his friends to go into the interior of the country that has yet not been polluted by the railways and live there in order to be patriotic. I shall not insult the intelligence of my reader by attempting a defence of the railways which have knit India together. I will only observe that according to Mr. Gandhi, the construction and use of railways for locomotion not possible for man in his natural condition, is an abuse of God's gift. And why? Because if he comes into contact with different natures, with different religions he might try to serve others than his neighbour whom alone God intended him to serve!!! As to lawyers, he will have none of them; without lawyers, courts could not have been established or conducted and without them the British could not hold India. He has yet to He is even more harsh on doctors. His opinion is quoted below as any statement of it in my own words might be regarded as travesty:— "Let us consider; the business of a doctor is to take care of the body, or, properly speaking, not even that. Their business is really to rid the body of diseases that may afflict. How do these diseases arise? Surely by our negligence or indulgence. I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine. I am cured, I overeat again, and I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first "I have indulged in vice, I contract a disease, a doctor cures me, the odds are that I shall repeat the vice. Had the doctor not intervened, nature would have done its work, and I would have acquired mastery over myself, would have been freed from vice, and would have become happy. "Hospitals are institutions for propagating sin. Men take less care of their bodies, and immorality increases". He says therefore that a doctor should "give up medicine, and understand that rather than mending bodies, he should mend souls", and he must also understand that "if, by not taking drugs, perchance the patient dies, the world will not come to grief and he will have been really useful to him". There is no use in arguing with him and his dupes on this subject after this. But his views must be borne in mind when we come to deal with the present agitation. About education, his views are equally remarkable. If, he says, education simply means knowledge of letters it is merely an "We daily observe that many men abuse it and very few make good use of it". He will not give any education to a raiyat or poor peasant:— "The ordinary meaning of education is a knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education". "What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? Do you wish to make him discontented with his cottage or his lot?" So much for primary education. As to higher education he says he has learnt Geography, Astronomy, Algebra, Geometry etc., but neither has that learning benefited him nor any body about him. As to knowledge of English, it is only useful to enslave people:— "The foundation that Macaulay laid of education", he says: "has enslaved us. It is worth noting that by receiving English education, we have enslaved the nation. Hypocrisy, tyranny etc. have increased; English-knowing Indians have not hesitated to cheat and strike terror into the people. Now, if we are doing anything for the people at all, we are paying only a portion of the debt due to them". I shall have to deal with this question of After all this, it will not surprise any one to be told that we must have nothing to do with machinery:— "It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre. They, therefore, after due deliberation, decided that we should only do what we could with our hands and feet. They saw that our real happiness and health consisted in a proper use of our hands and feet." He would not therefore have mills for the reason that machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilisation and it has already begun to desolate Europe. In his opinion it were better for us to send money to Manchester and to use flimsy Manchester cloth than to multiply mills in India. I wonder why he does not ask Lancashire to pay him his crore of rupees. Lancashire would no doubt do so in consideration of the monopoly of supplying India with manufactured goods and India would, according to Mr. Gandhi, get Swaraj. India does not want manufactured goods; he asks:— Mr. Gandhi wrote his book in 1908 after a visit to England when the Liberal and the Labour parties were carrying on their great campaign in favour of the working men and against the capitalists and Lloyd George was about to launch his great land campaign. He seems to have been impressed with the horrors of the condition of the wage earners which was then portrayed in dark colours in order to support that campaign. His mind, emotional and ill balanced, seems to have been entirely upset by the descriptions that he had then read. He is on the fringe of a large question about which he seems to have been singularly ill informed. In England there is not at this time and there was not when he wrote, any question of the destruction of machinery which is a necessary adjunct to the industrial system. It is unnecessary to say that he hates Parliaments:— "The condition of England at present is pitiable. I pray to God that India may never be in that plight. That which you consider to be Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute. Both these are harsh terms, but exactly fit the case. That Parliament has not yet of its own accord done a single good thing; hence I have compared it to a sterile woman. The natural condition of that Parliament is such that without out-side pressure it can do nothing. It is like a prostitute because it is under the control of ministers who change from time to time. To-day it is under Mr. Asquith; tomorrow it may be under Mr. Balfour." "If the money and the time wasted by Parliament were entrusted to a few good men, the English nation would be occupying to-day a much higher platform. "That you cannot accept my views at once is only right. If you will read the literature on this subject, you will have some idea of it. The Parliament is without a real master, under the Prime Minister, its movement is not steady, but it is buffeted about like a prostitute. The Prime Minister is more concerned about his power than about the welfare of the Parliament. His energy is concentrated upon securing the success of his party. His care is not always that the Parliament shall do right. Prime Ministers are known to have made the Parliament do things merely for party advantage. All this is worth thinking over." It is no wonder that he called upon all his followers to boycott the Indian Councils. I shall deal with this when dealing with the boycott question. After all this one would naturally think that if we expel the English from India we would be happy. Not a bit, says Mr. Gandhi whose views about independence are peculiar. Look, he says, at Italy. He thinks that Italy has not gained anything by independence of Austrian domination. He adds:— "If you believe that because Italians hold Italy, the Italian nation is happy, you are groping in darkness. What substantial gain did Italy obtain after the withdrawal She must not therefore use force to fight the English. But what is it she has to do. She must obtain Swaraj or Home Rule by 'soul force'. What is it?:— "When we are slaves we think that the whole universe is enslaved. Because we are in an abject condition, we think that the whole of India is in that condition. As a matter of fact, it is not so, but it is as well to impute our slavery to the whole of India. But if we bear in mind the above fact we can see that if we become free, India is free. And in this thought you have definition of 'swaraj.' It is 'swaraj' when we earn to rule ourselves. It is therefore in the palm of our hands. Do not consider this 'swaraj' to be like a dream. Hence there is no idea of sitting still. The 'swaraj' that I wish to picture before you and me is such that, after we have once realised it, we will endeavour to the end of our lifetime to persuade others to do likewise. But The assumption made by a few persons that Mr. Gandhi is only condemning parliamentary government for its inutility is unfounded. The extracts already given might lend some colour to that view. But such is not the fact. In England Parliamentary government is denounced by certain persons on the ground that it will always be under the influence of a capitalist Press and therefore unable to redress the evils from which the people of the country other than the capitalists are suffering. Mr. Gandhi's objection is not based on any such ground; he is against not only Parliamentary Government but practically against any Government in any form as is apparent from the extracts given above. The doctrine that Governments have very little to do with our happiness which depends upon self-control or 'soul force' has many advocates, but to deduce it as a doctrine from the alleged failure of Parliamentary Government in England is ludicrous. I shall not stop here to justify Parliamentary government which has justified itself by its results; it is only ignorance of the Towards the end of the book he says:— Before I leave you, I will take the liberty of repeating:— 1. Real Home Rule is Self Rule or control; 2. The way to it is Passive Resistance; that is soul force or love force. In my opinion, we have used the term "Swaraj" without understanding its real significance. I have endeavoured to explain it as I understand it, and my conscience testifies that my life henceforth is dedicated to its attainment. Such is the real Gandhi. Railways, lawyers, courts, doctors, education on Western lines, machinery of every kind or manufacturing industries, parliamentary government should disappear. He is singularly ill informed on every one of the questions he has discussed. 'Soul force' alone should be relied upon. No resistance should be offered to violence. No resistance should be offered to robbery and the robbers are to be left to cut one another's throats. No resistance to be offered to murderers or to those who might want to enslave you. Briefly, no protection There is no harm perhaps as long as such fantastic visionaries restrict the application of these principles to themselves, to their own persons or properties. But it becomes a serious matter when their general application is sought for. These are the sentiments he expressed in 1908, and it was with these sentiments that he came to India. As it is well to be definite and clear, I will quote from a letter addressed by him in 1909 to a friend in India:— "Bombay, Calcutta and the other chief cities of India are the real plague spots". "If British rule were replaced tomorrow by Indian rule based on modern methods, India would be no better, except that she would be able then to retain some of the money that is drained away to England; but then India would only become a second or fifth nation of Europe or America". "Medical science is the concentrated essence of black magic. Quackery is infinitely preferable to what passes for high medical skill". "Hospitals are the instruments that the devil has been using for his own purpose, in order to keep his hold on his kingdom. They perpetuate vice, misery and degradation and real slavery". But he soon found that it was hopeless to carry out his theories in the face of the determination of the people of India to attain Home Rule preached by the Indian National Congress and the Indian politicians. He had accordingly to put on a new garb. Therefore, in 1917, the year of the famous declaration made by the British Government about the progressive realisation of self government, he found it necessary, to obtain a hearing, to accept the Home Rule programme. In his Presidential address at the First Gujarat Political Conference in 1917 he said that without going into the merits of the scheme of reforms approved by the Congress and the Muslim League he will do all that is necessary to get it accepted and enforced. Though the scheme itself is not 'swaraj', he admitted it was a great step towards 'swaraj'. At the same time he said that though he is acting on the propriety of the current trend of "But I would warn the reader against thinking that I am to-day aiming at the Swaraj therein (spiritual swaraj as described in his 'Indian Home Rule'), I know that India is not ripe for it. It may seem an impertinence to say so. But such is my conviction. I am individually working for the self-rule pictured therein. But to-day my corporate activity is undoubtedly devoted to the attainment of Parliamentary Swaraj in accordance with the wishes of the people of India. I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction. Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of a high and pure civilisation. At best they are a necessary evil. Neither adds one inch to the moral stature of a nation. Nor am I aiming at a permanent destruction of law courts, much as I regard it as 'a consummation devoutly to be wished for,' still less am I trying to destroy all machinery and mills. It requires a higher simplicity and renunciation than the people are to-day prepared for". "Not to defend the weak is an entirely effeminate idea, everywhere to be rejected. In order to protect our innocent sister from the brutal designs of a man we ought to offer ourselves a willing sacrifice and by the force of Love conquer the brute in the man. But if we have not attained that power, we would certainly use up all our bodily strength in order to frustrate those designs. The votaries of soul force and brute force are both soldiers. The latter, bereft of his arms, acknowledges defeat, the former does not know what defeat is". It was a consequence of this acceptance of Parliamentary Swaraj that he should try to work the Montagu Chelmsford Council reforms. Though these reforms may be inadequate yet for one who accepts the goal of Parliamentary Government it was his bounden duty to avail himself of the available Parliamentary scheme to carry out those reforms which were then I have already pointed out that he entirely disagreed with the system of Parliamentary government and his acceptance was one of necessity. At the earliest opportunity at the special sessions of the Indian National Congress held at Calcutta in September 1920 and at the National Congress held at Nagpur in December 1920 he took steps to destroy the Montagu Reform Scheme of Parliamentary Swaraj and everything else to which he had given a reluctant assent and to bring the country to adopt his wild theories already stated by me and in order to do so, he brought into prominence forces entirely opposed to his own principles which he proved himself unable to control with disastrous consequences and had to resort willingly or unwillingly to dishonest methods. What was the reason for his throwing overboard the Montagu Reform Scheme? The following resolution which at his insistence was |
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