BY GEORGE JOSEPH, M.A., BAR-AT-LAW

The subject of this paper, as I conceive it, is important; and in some moods it strikes me as more important than any that can engage the attention of this generation. At the same time, I find it difficult to state what exactly it is or why exactly and how exactly it is important. Rama Rajyam is an ideal and inspiration to millions: its implications are manifold and stretch far: in society, economics, the political order, methods of Government and the general trend and orientation of thought, the conception is immense and can be vital. The description of Rama Rajyam, therefore, and the apprehension of its features are a difficult business. As it happens, I think that Rama Rajyam, always wrong and defective, is dangerous and hopelessly inadequate for our time, and that any attempt to revive it is a blind reversion to futility, atavistic and reactionary, however popular it may be for the moment on account of its advocacy by Gandhiji and the enormous prestige of his name. The criticism of Rama Rajyam is consequently an unpopular, thankless and disturbing task. Fully then though I realise the complexity of my undertaking, both description and criticism are ventured in double confidence. Rama Rajyam as an ideal is invalid, and in practice leads to manifest absurdity; secondly, it is against history.

What is this Rama Rajyam? The word is that of Gandhiji. Sometimes he calls it Dharma Rajyam, sometimes Swarajyam, sometimes Poorna Swarajyam; but essentially and throughout it is Gandhi Rajyam, the kingdom of truth and non-violence. It means self-contained villages, a primitive rural economy, ploughing by men and spinning by women, no machinery. In the relations amongst villages and Provinces and, in a wider sphere, between India and the rest of the world, there will be an all-pervading doctrine of Swadeshi, whereby each village should be content with the articles it produces and the handicrafts-men who produce them; each Province will be self-contained in a similar fashion, and the ideal of an India that is economically complete and coherent, cutting itself off as far as possible from the rest of the world, will be supreme. India will then be like she was before the disastrous contact with Europe began, like what China was before the Opium War, and Japan was before the guns of Comodore Perry's battleships broke on her coasts. There will be no such thing as foreign trade or the enormous fortunes made by merchant-princes or industrial magnates. Machinery being discouraged and non-violence being the creed of the nation, the Indian Army (if India continues to possess so destructive an instrument of violence) will not be equipped with modern arms whose efficiency and technical perfection will be possible only amongst a people believing with religious fervour in modern science and machinery. There will be no modern hospitals because medicine and surgery, as we know it today, is based on investigations and experiments which cause enormous suffering to human beings and lower animals. Lawyers and Law Courts there will be none, because the Jurisprudence, we know, is a foreign importation and Lawyers are parasites on society, and the ideal to be aimed at by Rama Rajyam will be simple arbitration under the village banyan tree. As far as the State is concerned, Government will vest in the hands of moderately-paid men who will be just and wise and with a continuous regard to the poor and oppressed; over them all, there will be a man of greater wisdom and justice than all the rest. Standards of comfort and luxury will not be permitted to increase in the modern European fashion; on the other hand, the definitely right purpose will be to reduce the demands of material comfort to an irreducible minimum of simplicity. In the matter of religion also, there will be a doctrine of Swadeshi in virtue of which men and women will be encouraged to continue under the outer labels into which they might be born; a Hindu that sees beauty or finds satisfaction in Islam being counselled to engraft such elements of Islam into his own religious life as a Hindu and not to call himself a Muslim. The theory at the back of this position is a fundamental latitudinarianism which says that each religion is as good as another and that in the matters of spirit no one vision of God-head can be superior to any other. State and society will therefore discourage inter-religious conversions, and institutions like hospitals and colleges and schools which are run by Missionaries of religion will not be permitted. But curiously enough, though all religions are regarded as of equal value, there is a hierarchy of merit, inequality of virtue in civilisations and culture. Far from counting all civilisation as one and entire, a common heritage of humanity, Indian civilisation is contrasted with European civilisation and a definite effort made to exorcise the methods and standards of value of Europe out of India, out of Rama Rajyam, as an evil thing beyond the pale of toleration. In the deepest analysis, this conception of State and society is founded on a repudiation of the State and on the patient evolution of individual selves which, by the discipline of Varna and Ashrama, through a series of incarnations, will be beyond the necessity of any order from outside,–a magnificent ideal of anarchy of the spirit. No room is allowed in this scheme for the common human experience that the vast majority of men and women are prone to sin and error, greed and personal self-seeking, and that they can be kept in order and decent behaviour only by an external authority that is pledged to the laying down of laws and their enforcement.

I have said that it is Gandhiji who has made the ideal popular in our day. But the readiness and universality of the response to his appeal is due to the circumstance that, in spite of modern education and the last 350 years of contact with Europe and the thousand years of struggle with Islam, India is essentially and persistently Hindu, medieval and inexorably hostile to other values.

Indian Medievalism has cost her the loss of Empire and political liberty, and made her subject to a succession of alien Rulers, Muslim and Christian, who repudiated her values and departed from her methods. Though it may be going too far to say that political subjection was due to Hinduism or Empire was due to Islam or Christianity, it is a remarkable circumstance, worthy of careful pondering, that during the last 500 years of the world's history, power and vitality, strength and influence, wealth and the good things of the earth have fallen to the lot of the fighting races, of peoples who believed in violence and perfected the organised use of force. The political centre of gravity of the world has remained in Europe which, by a singular combination of military might, free institutions and the Christian Church that believed itself the repositary of a superior religion and sought after Universal dominion. The two generations of Indians who built up the Indian Nationalist movement and continued it, represented a break-away from the traditional Indian spirit and the growth of a feeling that power need not always be the monopoly of Europeans and that they should organise themselves for wresting it from alien hands. Indian Nationalists saw in other countries, similarly dominated by the Governments of Europe, movements for political freedom. They saw Europe rich and asked themselves why India remained poor; why Europe conquered the whole world and India with a variety of resources and an enormous population was ruled by a hundred thousand Englishmen; why Europe was irresistible and India miserably weak.

The problem being thus defined, one solution is fairly obvious, and according to my belief, the right one. India should develop the ideal of physical assertion and power to the end that other Powers, themselves the embodiments of physical assertion and power, might not endanger her freedom. The ideal is to break away from the medieval ideology and political institutions, that were swept away by the Mahomedan invaders of a thousand years ago and the later European Powers. The right thing is to learn European arts and science so that we might beat Europe by its own methods and retain India's liberty. The classical instance of this method was furnished by Japan. Japan did not want any traffic with Europe or America; but the modern world would not let her abide in peace, and in the face of the threat issued to her by American battleships, Japan had to take a crucial decision. She was convinced that she had an admirable civilisation, a humane religion and exquisite ideals of beauty and well-being. She was convinced that the interference of the West in her affairs, because Europe and America had heavier guns and more effective physical force, was wrong and morally indefensible. But the interference was there and no reasonable means of diplomacy and persuasion seemed capable of putting an end to it. Their civilisation and honour and self-respect being put in peril, Japanese statesmen had to decide how best to preserve the inherited elements of her well-being and national honour.

If Europe would not listen to reason but only to superior guns, the only thing left for Japan was to manufacture the superior guns (however crude and wrong the method of guns might be), and Japan decided, in spite of instinctive revulsion against the use of force, to learn modern military science and to undergo the long, hard discipline of European scientific schools. She deliberately sacrificed her ideals of rural beauty (prettier far than anything conceived by Gandhiji), and reconciled herself to modern machinery and industrial organisation, because she saw that only by handling machinery and developing foreign trade she would be able to manufacture heavy guns and battleships and munitions, and make use of the wealth accumulated in industry and commerce to keep the fighting nations at bay and maintain her honour and self-respect. The Chinese experiment is later in point of time, but in spirit and essence China is following the example of Japan. Chinese civilization and institutions are nearly as old as the Vedas, and her political history covers a longer period of continuity than that of Rome. In spite of it all, she has not been prevented by any wrong notion of national egoism from putting herself to school at the feet of Europe, if only thereby she could learn the methods and forge the instruments of modern Government whereby she could save herself from exploitation by Europe. The victory of Japan over Russia was dramatic and visible to all the world, as also her emergence as one of the Great Powers of the world. But the resuscitation of China and her steady progress to freedom and the assertion of self-respect are no less real. If we turn to the Islamic countries, this process of modernisation so that their liberties may not be endangered by the undoubted might and organising power of Christian Europe, is in full swing. Turkey overthrew an effete Khilafat and renewed herself as a republic on the morrow of her defeat in war and humiliation in the Treaty of Severes. Her statesmen took refuge in Angora and they modernised her in the middle of the war against the Greeks. Ghazi Mustapha Kemal Pasha has converted Turkey into a modern State; he has reclothed her people in European habiliments, taught them Roman script, abolished the purdah; he has made Europe and his own people understand that Turkey is a modern State and will insist on being respected as a modern State, capable of diplomacy and of war, having wealth and industry and all the conveniences and luxuries of the present age. Though Amanulla Khan was driven away from Afghanistan on account of the rapid pace of his experiment in modernisation, King Nadir Shah is of the same spirit in spite of his caution and clearer understanding of his people. The moral of all these examples is that, though Europe has been an evil during recent years, she was an evil to herself and to others because of the disparity of her strength and their weakness, her efficiency and their inadjustability to modern needs. The conditions of her strength are free institutions, Government by debate, and the unhesitating use of force in the furtherance of national policy. If other nations, including India, can secure for themselves political freedom by these methods and maintain them and make it clear to Europe that they would not tolerate any interference by her in their affairs, the supremacy of Europe in science, arts, methods of war and diplomacy need not be a curse to humanity. This solution necessarily presupposes that non-European peoples will, in the interests of their efficiency and the peaceable development of the world, learn of Europe all that Europe has got to teach and use that learning to preserve the balance of power amongst the nations of the earth. However good or pathetically beautiful other philosophies and social ideals may be, we have to frankly acknowledge that for the time being Europe has the secret of power and she can be beaten only by those who share the secret with her. There may be an evil magic in it; but it is an evil only to those who are ignorant of it. If India is to secure release from political slavery, and maintain freedom as a precious possession of her children, and as long as Governments should subsist, amongst other things, on war and wealth, and as long as the standards of fighting and opulence are set by Europe, it is an idle dream to imagine that we can survive on any other terms.

It is from this point of view that I wish to analyse Rama Rajyam.

There is one preliminary suggestion that should be mentioned to be dismissed. Friends have suggested that Gandhiji believes in machinery, the use of an army, the diplomacy of wealth and the exploitation of demagogic forces, in violence. They say that his preaching of truth and non-violence is a device which he has adopted on account of the force of circumstances and that he refrains from organising a rebellion on the accustomed military lines only because there is not the slightest prospect of his winning through. Let me say at once that I do not believe in this theory. I know Gandhiji fairly well and had the honour at one time of being in his confidence. I am convinced that he believes in love or non-violence as the final and exclusive term of human and Divine endeavour, and that he equates truth with non-violence. Though the truth is that life is maintained by a precarious balance between force and love, destruction and benevolence, individual life being impossible for a second without the destruction of other lives, and Gandhiji is guilty of heresy in his interpretation of Christianity, I am bound to state my conviction that his doctrine of truth and non-violence is of the very fibre of his being. To think otherwise will amount to accusing him of insincerity and hypocrisy, which will be a shocking thing to do. To be frank, if I were convinced that my friends were right, I should not be alarmed at his preaching Rama Rajya; if he should organise India on modern lines with schools, hospitals, and machinery, and an invincible army and secret diplomacy as soon as he gets the power to do so, I should not worry. The trouble is that it is his originality and force and warped reaction against the Christian culture of Europe which may make him, in my humble judgment, a danger to civilisation and the safety of India. To me civilisation is whole and single. In social institutions and methods of Government, language and religion, there are differences; some are Indian, some European, Muslim, Hindu. In the matter however of civilisation and science and culture and philosophy, in the highest achievements of the race, I cannot think of any division. Truth, love, a railway train, the radio, a machine-gun, a bombing plane, a yard of cloth, St. Francis, Einstein, Mussolini, Gandhiji himself–all these belong to civilisation; I cannot think of any of them excepting as symbols, preservers and enrichers of the civilisation that belongs to the whole of mankind.

If, indeed, the pre-condition of liberty and power in a modern State is the learning of European science and the use of European machinery, the pursuit of Rama Rajyam is a dangerous delusion. Poverty is a danger; low standards of economic well-being are a danger; the abolition or discouragement of foreign trade by Indian Nationalists whether of cloth or any other thing is a danger; asceticism and the denial of plain human appetites is a danger; the condemnation of violence, even though for noble and unselfish purposes, is a danger; the propagation of the idea that suffering, going to prison, being beaten and humiliated without resistance, are virtues is a danger; that assertion is blameworthy and self-abnegation in the face of the enemy is a virtue, is a danger.

Take, for instance, this business of the boycott of foreign cloth. In normal years cloth to the extent of 60 crores was imported into India. The 60 crores was paid for by export of materials to the same value and it is a pure mistake to suppose, as is expounded in street corners, that 60 crores of silver rupees are sent out of India in payment of this cloth. Gandhiji says that import must be stopped. If he succeeds in doing it, see what will follow. To begin with, 120 crores of foreign trade will come to an end (60 crores of foreign cloth and 60 crores of exports which pay for foreign cloth). The cloth affects (as far as India is concerned) the foreign cloth merchants, the producers of Indian cloth with which the foreign cloth competes, the labourers and middlemen who make a living by handling the foreign cloth, and, more than all, the consumer who buys and uses the imported cloth. Since Gandhiji says that there will be no import of foreign cloth even under Swaraj or Rama Rajyam, it will be well to leave out of account the fact that today Lancashire is interested in the trade.

The dealers in foreign cloth will at once loose their occupation, with the consequence that a business that had been hitherto legitimate and flourishing will be completely ruined. It is not only their bankruptcy that is in issue but you must also consider the reaction of it on the strength of the State. When, in times of war, Governments want money, they rely on the ability of the rich merchants to finance them. The trade in foreign cloth being of its present magnitude, the Government of India had been looking to Bombay merchants to finance them in peace and war. If we look at the producers of the cloth which competes with foreign cloth, the Mill-owners and the All-India Spinners' Association, it will be perceived at once that, as a result of the prohibition of foreign cloth, the price of indigenous cloth will go up and swell the profits of the local producers. No doubt, it will be an excellent thing for the Mill-owners in Bombay and Ahmedabad, and we know as a matter of fact, that as a result of the current boycott, the Mills which, but a short while ago, were on the point of collapse, are now working all the 24 hours of day and night. We can therefore easily understand the enthusiasm of Bombay merchants for the Congress, and their readiness to finance its operations. For, all that the merchants were doing was to pay to the Congress a small fraction of the profits which fell to them by Congress penalisation of foreign cloth. It may be questioned whether the Mill-owners passed on a share of the additional profits to the labourers working in the Mills. The truth probably is that the workmen, who had been caught in a series of strikes and faced with a threat of unemployment, were more than thankful to have regular work and wages. In the matter of Khaddar, I have often expressed the view that it is a species of sweating to make spinners work for 10 hours a day and pay them three annas, which is very much less than a living wage. Especially is this noteworthy in view of one of the articles of the recent Congress Resolution as to the content of Swaraj. That article demands for all workmen in factories a living wage. It will be altogether odd if, after laying down the proposition about a living wage in factories and workshops, the All India Spinners' Association, which is integrally associated with the Congress and in a special measure the creature of Gandhiji, should proceed to violate an article of the Karachi Resolution. The gravest injustice, however, is that done to the consumer of cloth. Foreign cloth is presumably bought in India because it is cheaper or more durable or more beautiful than any which the Mills or All-India Spinners' Association can produce. Till a short while ago, such cloth came from Lancashire. But during the last decade, Japan has displaced, in an appreciable degree, Lancashire in the Indian Market. As a result of competition, the Indian consumer was able to get cheap and beautiful things. The prohibition of foreign cloth will mean that the consumer will have to buy Indian cloth which is ex hypothesi less satisfactory or pay more for foreign cloth. For instance, Japanese cloth of 30 counts costs 5 annas a yard; and if you want Khaddar of the same quality you have to pay 15 annas; and however much hand-spinners might try with their present instruments, there is no prospect of their selling it at a smaller price. In other words, the use of Khaddar will tax the consumer of cloth 200 per cent. Indian Mill-cloth of the same quality costs between 7 and 8 annas, leading to a levy of 50 to 60 per cent. When we remember that by far the largest majority of people are poor consumers, the magnitude of the injustice caused by the prohibition of foreign cloth will be obvious. The advantage will be that the Mill-owners of Bombay and Ahmedabad will be profited at the cost of the consumer. It is not as if I am pleading for the use of foreign cloth because it is foreign cloth. All that I urge is that the consumer should not be penalised for the inefficiency of Indian Mills and their inability to compete with world production. If they should be able to produce stuff of as good quality and at as cheap a price as that from other countries, the consumer will readily buy Indian stuff and it may be taken that the preference will be all for the Indian stuff. All that I object to and infer as one of the incidents of Rama Rajyam is the penalisation of trade in foreign articles including cloth.

Now I come to the cult of non-violence. As long as we are content to be ruled by outsiders, Mussalmans from Afghanistan or Turkey, or by Christians from Europe, as long as India left it to them to protect her from external aggression or internal disorder, the cult of non-violence was a dilettante diversion or religious speculation; anyway it was harmless. But now the position is altogether different. The Englishman who, though a fighter, is more a trader than a fighter, finding that there is no profit in ruling India, has made up his mind to withdraw from the country and is slowly doing so. The responsibility therefore of protecting the people from unlawful violence, from foreign invaders and unscrupulous men amongst ourselves, falls on the young men of India. They will not be able to do either, without arming themselves under the authority of the State and learning how to use arms effectively. It is arming for military purposes that I have in mind. It involves trained soldiers, expert officers, modern artillery, battleships, fighting aeroplanes and mechanised warfare. More important still, it means a new spirit and attitude of thought in the nation towards violence and warfare. We shall require to teach the youth in our schools to train itself in the arts and sciences making for physical fitness, courage, hardihood and assertion. We certainly shall not countenance the teaching that non-violence is the final virtue. No doubt, we shall praise the courage involved in non-violence. But we should be equally clear that it is a man's duty as much to kill on occasion as to refrain from killing. To use a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita, the Lord happens from age to age not merely to protect the good but also to destroy the evil. It may be right for Gandhiji to preach non-violence to a fighting people so that in the pursuit of war they might not forget its limiting term, which is peace or non-violence. But it is dangerous not to remind weak and peace-loving Indians that the condition of true peace is the readiness to offer battle and to destroy the enemy. This can be done only by asserting the right of violence justified by law, and of a righteous war. Young people must be taught that freedom can be secured and maintained only as long as they are ready to fight for it. Militarism can be an evil thing but it is not always so. It can be a high and noble endeavour to inspire a people with the ideal virtues of a Kshatriya. Under modern conditions, every citizen has to fulfill the duties of national defence, and to that extent he has to be a Kshatriya. All-important as the spirit and readiness to fight is, it will be wasted unless the nation can forge the instruments of modern warfare. Modern warfare and its weapons are highly technical things and will be available only for a people saturated in scientific methods and the tradition of modern science. It is well-known that in the last war the manufacture of guns and munitions on a large scale became possible by the diversion and adaptation of machinery originally meant for pacific purposes. In the background, therefore, of an India that proposes to protect herself against foreign powers in war and in peace, there must be a culture and organised life based on science and machinery. In chemistry, physics, engineering in all its branches, the science of explosives and of chemical warfare, there must be trained people and adequate apparatus which can be made available to the State in times of emergency. Though the situation is most clearly apparent in times of war, the competition of peace is quite as rigorous and searching. The power of a country can arise only from wealth. Wealth can increase under modern conditions from the right use of machinery. How can these results, which are generally acknowledged to be desirable and necessary, be secured in Rama Rajyam founded on a primitive economy? In war and peace, an honourable existence will be possible only on the basis of the highest achievements of modern science, and the continuous search after the secrets of Nature.

Nor can we aspire to these heights of technical achievement, if we are cut off from continuous contact with Europe. Gandhiji's disposition to cast off all European things as evil is a profound mistake. Rightly or wrongly, Europe is there, an unescapable fact and a problem almost insoluble for the rest of the world. If, indeed, it is a cup of poison that she forces on us, we can secure safety only by boldly handling it and making ourselves immune, just as Europe has done. I myself do not believe that it is poison; it is strong meat for men and it is only a queasy stomach that it does not suit. The Ramarajist might for the moment throw Europe out of the front door; but she will presently be in through the back window. Europe stands for certain fundamental convictions and methods and processes of vital energy and religion. India has to make terms with her and it is idle to hope that by the barren formula of truth and non-violence you can arrive at a settlement. The gift of Government by discussion and debate, minorities though not convinced surrendering to majorities, is something that has come from Europe. In Rama Rajyam the Ruler is a wise man who by his wisdom is accepted and his orders are obeyed, though subjects may fail to be convinced. He follows his conscience and sense of what is right. In the modern State of which we have received the pattern from England, the Ruler is he who has a majority behind him; even if he has misgivings as to the rightness of a policy or method approved of by his party, he does not erect his doubt into a matter of conscience but has the humility to believe that they may be right and himself wrong.

The fundamental assumption of such a method is equality, and I doubt very much whether people living under a social system founded on a hierarchy of castes can work the method. If we consider current political experience, in India, it will be seen that the tendency is to erect a succession of Dictators instead of a series of Prime-Ministers. I am not now canvassing the question whether dictatorship is a justifiable method of Government or no. The remarkable thing is that dictatorship being so nearly universal, there has come out of Europe the method of Government by discussion and majority. My belief is that the characteristic strength of Europe has issued from the method of debate and that it could have grown only out of a people brought up in the Christian tradition of the West. In this matter, I am speaking by the book. See what has happened recently. There was first the incident of the black flower landed over to Gandhiji at Karachi by the Red-shirts angry at the execution of Bhagat Singh and thinking in a muddle-headed way that he was responsible for the execution. Gandhiji was obviously upset at the incident: but he was too brave and fine a gentleman to let anybody else know then how deeply he had been moved. The final upshot of it was remarkable. He called into conference the Red-shirts: but the talk yielded no result. Gandhiji was not able to convince them that the Settlement was right. Instead of disregarding them or accepting their judgment, his was a bold and successful but unjustifiable counter-stroke. He said that if he was convinced that his leadership (mark this) on his own terms was not acceptable to them, he would retire into some corner and fast himself to death. I say this was wrong for two reasons. It was terrorisation pure and simple. He was not able to convince them: his next step was to tell them that he would kill himself if they did not accept his Settlement. The fact that the violence was directed against himself did not make it any the less an act of terrorisation. Secondly, I think suicide is a mortal sin; and his threat as much as the easy manner in which it was taken by my Hindu friends made it clear to me what profound gulfs asunder they and I were. The point however I urge is that this species of getting away from the consequences of an unsuccessful argument in debate raises the grave question whether Rama Rajyam is consistent with ordered free Government as we have taken it from Europe and which we profess ourselves ready to adopt and work. Secondly, take the affair of the election of the Working Committee. I have not a word to say against the present composition of the Committee: but the method of its construction was a flat negation of the principles of ordered free Government. The Constitution provides that the Working Committee is an elected body: but in spite of the most earnest appeals made to him, Gandhiji challenged the Committee to accept his nominees or nobody at all. It is highly probable that a free election may have led to a similar result; the point is that there was no free election. It was the method of Rama Rajyam, not the method of a modern State. The essential thing is that the Ramarajist lacks the conviction of egalitarian Europe that one citizen is as good as another and will be able to carry out the nation's business as long as the nation's confidence is reposed in him. This is not a proposition that can be proved: it is in the nature of a religious dogma and has to be accepted or rejected in a positive fashion. If you accept it, you can work the method of Government which has come to us from Europe: otherwise you cannot. India can reject it, but at her peril; since the truth is that this overwhelming efficiency of European civilization and Government arises from the fact of her Egalitarianism, and the readiness of her people to pour out their blood in support of policies and civilisations that each of them approves of by virtue of his common citizenship.

What we all come to at the end is this. Is there such a thing as an Indian civilisation, or is civilisation the heritage of all mankind, the highest expression of thought and action at which humanity has arrived at a given moment? Are we to excommunicate Europe, or ourselves from her, because for two centuries we were too weak to resist her and she in her strength took advantage of our weakness and corrupted herself in the process? What is the best way of saving ourselves and her? For, it is a pure illusion to imagine that she can go her way and ourselves another. For good or evil we are too closely tied up and entangled, the ends of the earth being brought together. You may repudiate machinery and call it names: you may say science is of the devil. But machinery will destroy you and your country unless you can make it save both, and you have to grapple with the devil at close grips, and then you may find that he is your good angel. Is truth and non-violence going to save you? What is truth as a political formula and what are its limitations? How far will non-violence avail in a world that is armed to the teeth, and will not hesitate to use it against you as long as there are millions of workers in India, and as long as the Indus and the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Kistna and the Cauvery pour wealth down your thirsty lands? What did non-violence avail you in Cawnpore when hooligans, Hindu and Mohammedan, butchered and raped, looted and set on fire? I have often wondered what would have happened if Ganesh Sankar Vidyarthi, instead of going out to the futile quest that overwhelmed him, had used his magnificent courage to organise a group of brave men and put down with blood and iron the cowards that insulted women and looted property. It was not cowardice that wrought disaster in Cawnpore, but the wrong ideology that the final virtue of the citizen was to observe non-violence. If, on the other hand, citizens had observed the duty laid on them by curiously blood-thirsty and tender law we have got from Christian Europe, Christian as well as machine-ridden, and shot down a few of the looters, hundreds would not have slaughtered one another, the streets and lanes of Cawnpore need not have been turned into shambles. I do not see how Rama Rajyam or Dharma Rajyam would have offered us release.

Our generation has to decide whether by getting out of the hands of Britain we shall be strong enough to keep our political freedom. If we are to do it, we have to learn the whole business of fighting from Europe. We cannot do it without modern science, and habitual use and manufacturing of machinery in times of peace. We cannot do it without wealth, without foreign trade, without increasing the standards of life and luxury, without continual assertion, without grasping, without desire and the fulfillment of desire, without the power and willingness to put down those who come in the way of the national will. I have profound misgiving whether Rama Rajyam is not in the heart of Hinduism as an ineradicable danger and delusion, and whether India will ever march to strength and assertion till its ideal ceases to move her.

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