Everyone's Blog Posts - The Gandhi-King Community2024-03-19T10:01:05Zhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?xn_auth=noEnvironmental Diplomacytag:gandhiking.ning.com,2021-01-26:2043530:BlogPost:1674932021-01-26T17:58:28.000ZRabbi Michael M. Cohenhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/RabbiMichaelMCohen
<p>Article on Environmental Diplomacy:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/cross-border-cooperation-for-tu-bishvat-the-environment-is-essential-656543">https://www.jpost.com/opinion/cross-border-cooperation-for-tu-bishvat-the-environment-is-essential-656543</a></p>
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<p>Environmental Engagement: Bringing Peace to the Middle East: session:…</p>
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<p>Article on Environmental Diplomacy:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/cross-border-cooperation-for-tu-bishvat-the-environment-is-essential-656543">https://www.jpost.com/opinion/cross-border-cooperation-for-tu-bishvat-the-environment-is-essential-656543</a></p>
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<p>Environmental Engagement: Bringing Peace to the Middle East: session:</p>
<p><a href="https://bigbold.jewishclimatefest.org/events/3850199b-a88b-40ff-895d-66c46b42be71">https://bigbold.jewishclimatefest.org/events/3850199b-a88b-40ff-895d-66c46b42be71</a></p>Political Discourse learned form the Environmenttag:gandhiking.ning.com,2020-12-07:2043530:BlogPost:1385552020-12-07T20:29:32.000ZRabbi Michael M. Cohenhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/RabbiMichaelMCohen
<p>Trees and life<br></br> Michael M. Cohen JPost Dec. 6, 2020</p>
<p>The trauma of the Akeida, Isaac’s binding on the sacrificial altar by his father, Abraham, scars Isaac for the rest of his life.<br></br> That wound is passed on to his son Jacob, who calls God “Pahad Yitzhak,” “the fear of Isaac” (Genesis 31:42).</p>
<p>Does the Jewish people continue to carry that wound?<br></br> In his poem Heritage, Haim Gouri writes, “But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are born with a knife in their…</p>
<p>Trees and life<br/> Michael M. Cohen JPost Dec. 6, 2020</p>
<p>The trauma of the Akeida, Isaac’s binding on the sacrificial altar by his father, Abraham, scars Isaac for the rest of his life.<br/> That wound is passed on to his son Jacob, who calls God “Pahad Yitzhak,” “the fear of Isaac” (Genesis 31:42).</p>
<p>Does the Jewish people continue to carry that wound?<br/> In his poem Heritage, Haim Gouri writes, “But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are born with a knife in their hearts.”<br/> Human pathos emerges from reading the Akeida. Expanding from that response, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai challenges us: “The real hero of the Binding of Isaac was the ram, who didn’t know about the collusion between the others. He was volunteered to die instead of Isaac.”<br/>
Echoing Amichai’s sentiment, Jeremy Benstein asks, “Who is the Tanach’s first killer? If you said Cain, you’re off by a few verses. It was Abel, who slaughtered lambs for his sacrifice.”<br/>
Both writers ask us to expand our vista outside our human silo. What would that mean for this week’s parasha? A river, sunrise, and trees.</p>
<p>As Jacob approaches his brother, Esau, he “was greatly frightened” (ibid. 32:8) and “crossed the point of crossing/the ford/ma’avar of the Jabbok” (ibid. 32:23).<br/> Rivers are boundaries. River crossings in religious and secular texts often symbolize leaving one status, one identity, for another. Think of the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. For Rabbi Norman Cohen, “The Jabbok was to be Jacob’s Rubicon!” Shortly after Jacob reaches the other side, he wrestles with “a divine being” (ibid. 32:29), who changes his name from Jacob to Israel. Jacob’s wrestling match lasted “until the break of dawn” (ibid. 32:25), when he received his new name.</p>
<p>Bob Dylan sings, “They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” That popular concept was first coined in 1650 by English theologian and historian Thomas Fuller in his religious travelogue “A Pisgah sight of Palestine and the confines thereof: with the history of the Old and New Testament acted thereon.”<br/> While a popular concept, it is not true. The darkness of night is the period when the sun is 18 degrees or more below the horizon. There are, in fact, seven stages of dawn from the time the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon until the sun rises above the horizon. When our parasha (Torah portion) talks about “until the break of dawn” (ibid. 32:25), “dawn is breaking” (ibid. 32:27), and “the sun rose” (ibid. 32:32), it acknowledges some of those stages.<br/> In the Mishnaic (Berachot 1:3) and Talmudic discussions (Berachot 9b) regarding when the morning Shema prayer can be recited, the answers given reflect those different stages of dawn. The question for the rabbis is when is there enough light in the unfolding dawn so that the Shema can be recited. They conclude this to be “from the time that one can distinguish one’s friend at a distance of four cubits.”</p>
<p>Commenting on Jacob’s wrestling match, Jungian analyst and Episcopal priest John Sandford writes in his book The Man Who Wrestled With God: Light from the Old Testament on the Psychology of Individuation:<br/> “Evidently it was the kind of spiritual encounter that vanishes with the light of day, for it is a fact that our minds are different at night, closer to the primitive level, and there are psychological experiences that occur in the darkness but vanish with the dawn....<br/> “Jacob refused to part with his experience until he knew its meaning, and this marked him as a person of spiritual greatness. Everyone who wrestles with their spiritual and psychological experience and, no matter how dark or frightening it is, refuses to let go until they discover its meaning is having something of the Jacob experience.”<br/>
Later in the parasha, trees are introduced, juxtaposed with God reaffirming Jacob’s name change. “God said to him, ‘You whose name is Jacob, You shall be called Jacob no more, but Israel shall be your name” (Genesis 35:10). In the lines immediately preceding that pronouncement, we read, “Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died, and was buried below Bethel under the oak, and its name was called Allon-bacuth/Oak of Weeping” (ibid. 35:8).<br/>
Four lines earlier we find another tree, “the terebinth near Shechem” (35:4), mentioned. In fact, many trees are mentioned in the area of Shechem. There, Joshua “took a great stone and set it up at the foot of the oak” (Joshua 24:26), and Abimelech was crowned king “at the terebinth of the pillar” (Judges 9:6). In addition, near Shechem was “the terebinth of the soothsayers” (ibid. 9:37) and “the terebinth of Moreh/Teaching” (Genesis 12:6), which Abraham came to as he arrived there.</p>
<p>South of Shechem “between Ramah and Bethel,” the Prophetess Deborah would judge the people while “sitting under a palm tree of Deborah” (Judges 4:4-5).</p>
<p>Trees play an important role throughout the Bible, beginning with the Garden of Eden and its tree of life and tree of knowledge of good and bad (Genesis 2:9).</p>
<p>Associating trees with knowledge, life, wisdom, power, and judgment is intentional. We see trees as an axis mundi, a cosmic connection between the heavens and the earth, if you will: an umbilical cord with its branches connected to the life-affirming placenta of the heavens; the trunk of the tree the umbilical cord itself; and its roots in the soil, nurturing us, as we are formed by God “of dust from the soil” (ibid. 2:7).</p>
<p>Trees, sunrise and a river’s ford, which we have examined in the context of this week’s parasha, all act as bridges connecting one domain, one reality, to another.</p>
<p>By stepping outside our human orientation as we focus on those three elements, we gain deeper insights into the world we inhabit and what it means to be human. Think what we can learn, in this age of polarization, if we allow ourselves to step outside our comfort zones. A new day might dawn in the shadow of a tree on a river’s edge.■</p>
<p>The writer is rabbi emeritus of the Israel Congregation, Manchester Center, Vermont, and a faculty member of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Bennington College.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/trees-and-life-651340">https://www.jpost.com/opinion/trees-and-life-651340</a></p>Herstory of Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture Series by Prof. Vibhuti Pateltag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-09-30:2043530:BlogPost:800732015-09-30T10:20:04.000ZProf. Dr. Vibhuti Patelhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/ProfDrVibhutiPatel
<p align="center"><b><u>Herstory of Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture</u></b></p>
<p align="center"><b><u>Vibhuti Patel</u></b></p>
<p><b><u> </u></b></p>
<p>Research Centre for Women’s Studies (RCWS) instituted of Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture in memory of its founding Director and received generous donations for corpus funds from Neeraben’s friends, fellow travelers in social movements, colleagues and well-wishers in women’s studies and women’s movements.</p>
<p>From the very beginning…</p>
<p align="center"><b><u>Herstory of Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture</u></b></p>
<p align="center"><b><u>Vibhuti Patel</u></b></p>
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<p>Research Centre for Women’s Studies (RCWS) instituted of Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture in memory of its founding Director and received generous donations for corpus funds from Neeraben’s friends, fellow travelers in social movements, colleagues and well-wishers in women’s studies and women’s movements.</p>
<p>From the very beginning Department of Economics, Gujarat Research Society and Advocate Mihir Desai have collaborated in making this lecture series a grand success by identifying guest speakers, mobilizing friends and fellow travelers in women’s studies and women’s movement, colleagues and scholars and also in terms of cost sharing. Basic philosophy of women’s studies in India as articulated by Dr. Neera Desai revolved around concepts such as “Theory-as-Practice”, “Trans-disciplinarily”, Feminist critiques of “objectivity,” and “Philosophies of power-knowledge”, and plural perspectives in knowledge production.</p>
<p>1st Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2010 Prof. Susie Tharu, Professor Emeritus, Cultural Studies Department, English and Foreign Language Studies, Hyderabad delivered lecture titled, “Once Again, What is literature-Notes from Dalit Literary Movements from Kerala and Tamilnadu”. Prof. Suzie Tharu highlighted the fact that there has been no methodological inventiveness, no passion or drive, leave alone richness in mainstream sociological discourses for long. The non-canonical writers, on the contrary come up with completely different, often shocking, articulation of issues. It is like the elephant telling the story of the blind men.”</p>
<p>2nd Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2011: Prof. Jayati Ghosh, senior economist of JNU, Delhi on “Women’s Work in India- Has Anything Really Changed?” Main thrust of her lecture was on accentuated adverse effect of jobless growth on women. She pointed out that 2000s were a decade of unprecedented rapid GDP growth for the Indian economy. In this decade, the number of women aged 15 years or more increased by 86.5 million. But only 8.9 per cent of them joined the labour force, and only 7.5 per cent of them were described as gainfully employed. This relative lack of increase in the number of working women in a period of major economic expansion is not just unusual; it is also hard to explain in terms of most standard economic approaches.</p>
<p>3rd Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 25-9-2012: Prof. Patricia Oberoi on “Androgyny-Is it Relevant for Feminist Theory and Practice?-An Illustrated Lecture”. She showed stunning visuals from calendar art to demonstrate the intersection of sacred and secular feminine iconography. She speculated whether the concept of androgyny, the fusion of male and female, can serve as an emancipatory ideal for feminists.</p>
<p>4th Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2013: Prof. Nabneeta Deb Sen on "Ladies Sing the Blues: Women Retelling the Rama Story”. She examined Ramayana with gender lens and said, “Out of the thirty-eight basic things upon which most epic narratives of the world are based, only nine are associated with women. The ideals of the epic world obviously do not have much to share with women, nor do the women enjoy the heroic values. There is little they can do there - other than get abducted or rescued, or pawned, or molested, or humiliated in some way or other. So, what happens when women choose to retell an epic? There are many alternatives.</p>
<p>1) You could tell it like it is, by borrowing the traditional eyes of the male epic poet, as Molla does in her 16th century Telugu Ramayana. Or</p>
<p>2) You could tell it like it is, looking at it with your own women's eyes, as Chandrabati does in her 16th century Bengali Ramayana. Or</p>
<p>3) You could tell it like it is by borrowing an ideological viewpoint as Ranganayakamma does in Ramayana Vishabriksham, rewriting the Rama tale from the Marxist point of view. Or</p>
<p>4) You could tell your own story through the story of Sita, as the village women of India have been doing for hundreds of years.</p>
<p>5th Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 23-9-2014: “Archival Photographs as Memory Banks” by Prof. Malavika Karlekar, Editor, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, CWDS, Delhi. With the help of rare collection of archival photographs accompanied by explanatory captions she depicted women’s lives during the period 1875- 1947. Her lecture also included a comprehensive, well-researched, yet lucid introduction placing in context the photographs which have been gleaned from private collections of families and friends, as well as from archives sections of various institutions, originally presented in an exhibition held by the Centre for Women s Development Studies. Her lecture generated great interest among students and scholars of gender studies, history, sociology, culture and media studies photographers, photo-journalists, archivists, and art historians.</p>
<p>6th Neera Desai Memorial Lecture on 24-9-2015: Prof. Maxine Berntsen, Prof. Emerita, Center for Education, Tata Institute of Social Science, Hyderabad on 'Sharda: A Dalit Woman Reconstructs Her Self'. Prof. Maxine lucidly constructed the story of Sharda, a Dalit woman caught in the confusions of change in these words: “Inspired by Ambedkar her father decided to educate his children, including his daughter Sharda. However, when she was in the third standard he suddenly arranged her marriage. Shortly afterwards, he sent her to study in an ashram in Pune. When she came met her husband, she fell completely in love with him. Meanwhile, she was imbibing the ethos of the ashram, that a woman’s husband was her all-in-all. After leaving the ashram she went to live with her husband and his family. For several years she stayed there, but with frequent visits to her maternal home. Finally, however, her husband refused to take her back. For twenty years she struggled to get him to acknowledge her as his wife, but to no avail. Meanwhile she learned tailoring, got a bank loan and set up a shop. The nadir of her life occurred, when she was informed that her husband had remarried; and the same week her shop was burned to the ground in a caste riot. The question Prof. Maxine has tried to answer is how Sharda coped with this crisis – not only immediately but from then on. Borrowing informally from the conceptual framework of Erik Eriksen and Robert Kegan, Prof. Maxine has attempted to trace the process of Sharada defining and redefining her identity in the dialogue with herself, her family, and her social environment.”</p>
<p>An appeal is made to contribute generously for fund raising drive to Dr. Neera Desai Memorial Lecture Series so that RCWS can organize such memorable event year after year in memory of Dr. Neera Desai, mother of women’s studies in India.</p>Obituary for Veteran Journalist and Human Rights Activist, Praful bidwai by Vibhuti Patel, 25-6-2015tag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-06-28:2043530:BlogPost:787012015-06-28T17:58:24.000ZProf. Dr. Vibhuti Patelhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/ProfDrVibhutiPatel
<p>It is difficult to accept that Praful is no more. Two days back he passed away in Amsterdam, The Netherland. Now, who will spontaneously respond to right wing onslaught on the masses in these difficult times, both globally and within India?</p>
<p><span class="spip_document_1974 spip_documents spip_documents_center"><img alt="" height="540" src="http://www.europe-solidaire.org/IMG/jpg/praful_bidwai_passed_away_on_23-6-2015.jpg" width="485"></img></span></p>
<p>I got to know Praful in 1974 in Mumbai in a meeting organised by the New Left group of young revolutionaries to which he belonged, when Com. Ernest…</p>
<p>It is difficult to accept that Praful is no more. Two days back he passed away in Amsterdam, The Netherland. Now, who will spontaneously respond to right wing onslaught on the masses in these difficult times, both globally and within India?</p>
<p><span class="spip_document_1974 spip_documents spip_documents_center"><img width="485" height="540" alt="" src="http://www.europe-solidaire.org/IMG/jpg/praful_bidwai_passed_away_on_23-6-2015.jpg"/></span></p>
<p>I got to know Praful in 1974 in Mumbai in a meeting organised by the New Left group of young revolutionaries to which he belonged, when Com. Ernest Mandel, a noted Marxist economist visited India for lecture series. At that time, all of us known as “the New Left” believed that revolution was round the corner. Praful was intellectually versatile and spoke on any political issue with passion, data base, logic and aggression. Thougth he came from science and technology stream, Praful was strongly grounded in political economy. During 1970s, he was a star of New Left Group called MAGOVA (English meaning of this Marathi word is Road Map) had a convincing style of speaking. While studying at Indian Institute of Technology, Praful and his friends got influenced by international youth radicalization shaped by anti-Vietnam war struggles, liberation struggles in Africa and Latin America, youth movement in Sri Lanka .During 1975-1977, most of us met in the informal study circles as the Emergency Rule did not allow any public gatherings.</p>
<p>In the millennium year, after nuclear testing in Pokhran, along with Com. AchinVanayak, Praful founded the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace. Both of them also co-authored a book <i>South Asia on a Short Fuse-Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament</i> for which they were awarded the Sean McBride International Peace Prize by the International Peace Bureau in recognition of their work challenging development of nuclear weapons in South Asia.</p>
<p>In 1977, when I moved to Mumbai and got active in the women’s movement and trade union movement, Praful had become prolific in his journalistic career and was always, always politically correct and wrote and spoke with unassuming courage of conviction. He wrote on wide range of strategically important issues- industrialization, human development, vested interests of sectarian forces, caste and communal conflicts, human rights, turmoil in the North East India, environmental issues, climate change, nuclear policy, national politics and arrest of a woman smuggler. He was never sensational or titillating in his writings.</p>
<p>Praful had thorough understanding of grammar of Indian classical music and regularly attended concerts. During 1977-1979, Praful, Gayatri Singh and me, all three of us, homeless activists, used to attend several cultural events in Mumbai city together. I was staying in a working women’s hostel, Gayatri and Praful has taken refuge in Sonal and Himanshu Shukla home.</p>
<p>In 1982, when his mother was detected with cancer, Praful was shaken. I got to meet his sisters who came from Nagpur with his ailing mother and got to see sensitive aspect of his personality. In his mother’s memory, he made contribution to Medico Friends Circle in which my husband, Dr. Amar Jesani was active.</p>
<p>In 1986, as a full-timer of Women’s Centre I was entrusted with responsibility of organizing Asian Conference on Women, Religion and Family Laws in which delegates from 14 Asian Countries had registered to participate. Even after making several trips to various government offices in Delhi, I could not get visa clearance for most of the delegates. I was running from pillar to post to get visa for the delegates from Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka without any success. When I told my difficulties to Praful who at that time was a senior journalist with the <i>Times of India</i>, Delhi office, he threw his weight around and got visa clearance for our delegates.</p>
<p>The most crucial contribution Praful made was after 1992 riots that gave major blow to the secular fabric of our country. He took head on confrontations with the cultural nationalists. He stared speaking from public platforms against TNC-MNC controlled economic globalisation, neo- liberalism, capitalist crisis, nuclearisation of economy, communal tension, caste riots, violation of human rights, displacement in the name of mega development projects so on and so forth. His column for <i>Frontline</i> and <i>The Hindustan Times</i> created ripple effects among the activists of social movements.</p>
<p>Last time, I met him in May, 2014 at the Press Club to discuss the book he was planning to write on the Indian Left for which he interviewed me at length. During the interview, he was calm, asking questions on trade union movement, women’s movement, left movement, Dalit and tribal struggles------. He asked me about our common friends and co-travelers in the people’s movements since 1970s. Both of us were nostalgic about our revolutionary past. When I told him, “How much proud we all are of your writings!” he coyly smiled.</p>
<p>Praful had a large fan following in Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Banglore, Hyderabad, Agartala, Guwahati. Whenver he happended to be in these cities, he would invite his buddies to discuss with him volatile political issues.</p>
<p>Untimely passing away of Praful Bidwai has created an irreparable loss for the cause of social justice, secular humanism, human development and human rights.</p>SEX WORSHIP FOUND IN ISRAEL & THE SACRED PHALLLUStag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-05-26:2043530:BlogPost:785912015-05-26T18:36:46.000ZRev. Dr. Chad Dunnhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/RevDrChadDunn
BY REV. DR. CHAD DUNN<br />
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In Northern Israel archaeologists have discovered an ancient Stone Age village and while the findings show how agricultural revolution was happening in Stone Age, they have also discovered sex symbols depicting the phallus and female genitals.<br />
The symbols may have been used by cults for ceremonies related probably to fertility. Phallic cult worship is something that was found widespread in the Mediterranean and Middle East civilizations.<br />
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Furthermore, during the Stone Age…
BY REV. DR. CHAD DUNN<br />
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In Northern Israel archaeologists have discovered an ancient Stone Age village and while the findings show how agricultural revolution was happening in Stone Age, they have also discovered sex symbols depicting the phallus and female genitals.<br />
The symbols may have been used by cults for ceremonies related probably to fertility. Phallic cult worship is something that was found widespread in the Mediterranean and Middle East civilizations.<br />
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Furthermore, during the Stone Age there were male prostitutes who were called ‘The Holy Ones’ and references on that can be found in the Scriptures and specifically in the Book of Kings.<br />
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In the Scriptures there are many references of phallic worship, although not in a clear way. Esoteric Christianity teaches the divinity of sex as an important part of the worship of God.<br />
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imageAmong many Esoteric Christians, sex as ritual is seen as divine. They recognize the sexuality of Christ and, like many cultures and religions around the world, see sexual energy as a path to God. The transgenderism in many religions is held as sacred, especially a transgender woman who still has her penis. They are objects of veneration.<br />
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If we look at any culture we see evidence of the sacred veneration of the transgender soul. There is something divine and even more sacred about the woman with a penis under her skirt. She can not be penetrated for procreation, but was born with a female soul and given the ability of a male to plant her seed. This is goddess power in many cultures.<br />
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The patron god of intersex and transgender people is Dionysus, a god gestated in the thigh of his father Zeus, after his mother died from being overwhelmed by Zeus’s true form. Aphroditus was an androgynous Aphrodite from Cyprus, with a religious cult in which worshipers cross-dressed, in later mythology became known as Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite who merged bodies with the water nymph Salmacis, transforming him into an androgynous being. In Phrygia there was Agdistis, a hermaphroditic being created when Zeus unwittingly impregnated Gaia. The gods feared Agdistis and Dionysus castrated her, she then became the goddess Cybele.<br />
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imageIn addition, Norse Gods were capable of changing gender at will, for example Loki, the trickster god, frequently disguised himself as a woman and gave birth to a foal while in the form of a white mare, after a sexual encounter with the stallion Svaðilfari. Comparison of a man to a child-bearing woman was a common insult in Scandinavia, and the implication that Loki may be bisexual was considered an insult.<br />
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I am a new monastic member of the Oikos Intentional Community. The dasa is androgynous and our prioress is transsexual. The draw to the community because of this unique and mysterious spiritual energy is irresistible. What makes it a spiritual experience unlike no other has been the teachings of sacred sexuality. Christ becomes your lover in a way the world can not understand and male or female we all become genderless as we become his bride.<br />
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The recent findings in Israel show a connection between what they knew then and how it has survived in the esoteric teachings on sex. In our community you can see God revealed as the One who created us in the image of the divine.<br />
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According to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Christ’s circumcision was performed in a cave on the eighth day, in accordance with Old Testament Law. Jesus’s brith milah served a two-fold purpose: first to maintain the genealogical covenant commanded by God of Abraham and his descendants; secondly to imageprove that, in fact, God had been rendered in human flesh. The anonymous author(s) of the Gospel of Thomas had little to say about the actual bris. They described instead an “old Hebrew woman” who took the discarded holy foreskin “and preserved it in an alabaster-box of oil spikenard.” The old woman then passed it to her son “a druggist, to whom she said, ‘Take heed thou sell not this alabaster box of spikenard-ointment, although thou shouldst be offered three hundred pence for it.’”<br />
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The druggist son apparently only heard the latter half of his mother’s strange and contradictory instructions, and sold the spikenard some decades later to Mary Magdalene. There is some satisfying irony in the most famous of biblical prostitutes buying the Holy Prepuce, in part because it would foreshadow the relic’s central place in the ecstasies of Christ’s brides in the church. But after the foreskin was purchased by the Magdalene, it disappeared for nearly eight centuries.<br />
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The first historic documentation of the foreskin was in the year 800, when it was given to Pope Leo III by Charlemagne. The Pope had just crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Carolingian Empire, a newly forged state carved out by Charlemagne’s successful military conquests through most of Europe. It was the least the Pope could do. Charlemagne had protected him when his Byzantine enemies ousted him from Rome and tried to cut out his tongue. The Pope was weak, but his gift allied him powerfully with the symbol of God’s earthly reign. How the Holy Prepuce ended up in Charlemagne’s hands is still a mystery (three equally ridiculous stories have been offered to explain the relic’s origins). But handled by Charlemagne, a king as much regarded for his considerable stature as his battlefield prowess, the foreskin was engorged with meaning.<br />
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Once brought to light, the Holy Prepuce reproduced itself at a rapid rate. In a few hundred years, dozens of churches, including Saint John Lateran in Rome (the seat of the Pope) claimed to own a piece or all of the Holy Prepuce. Some suggested that there were so many different Holy Prepuces because it could, like the fish and loaves, multiply to feed hungry pilgrims. In the official liturgy, the foreskin performed wonders on barren women, filling their wombs, and eliminating pain from subsequent delivery. Queen Catherine of England borrowed the relic at the Abbey Church of Coulombs in the early 15th century. Like Rasputin’s penis, the redeemer’s foreskin apparently was miraculous: An heir to the throne appeared nine months later, and the Queen built a sanctuary to house the relic once she was done with it. The Holy Prepuce worked miracles in service of the state, reproducing the physical bodies of kings.<br />
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imageIn the visions of nuns, however, the official narrative of the Holy Prepuce held little sway. After all, a good nun would have little need for either sex or its procreative results. As a bride of Christ, her union with spouse would be spiritual and transcend any physical needs or desires. But it wasn’t, of course, that simple. For nuns—particularly mystics—the holy member represented instead a different kind of power. In the hands of and under the gaze of these women, the Holy Prepuce morphed into an object of desire where repressed sexual cravings could find an outlet. The languages of veneration and sexuality intersected, attaching themselves to the fantastical totem of Christ’s foreskin.<br />
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By the 15th century, the Holy Prepuce had become the desirous object of many mystics’ visions. Bridget of Sweden recorded the revelations she received from the Virgin Mary, who told the saint that she saved the foreskin of her son and carried it with her until her death. Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of Italy, imagined that her wedding ring—exchanged with the Savior in a mystical marriage—had been transmuted into the foreskin. In her Revelationes (c. 1310), Saint Agnes Blannbekin recounts the hours she spent contemplating the loss of blood the infant Christ must have suffered during the circumcision, and during one of her contemplative moments, while idly wondering what had become of the foreskin, she felt the prepuce pressed upon her tongue. Blannbekin recounted the sweet, intoxicating taste, and she attempted to swallow it. The saint found herself unable to digest the Holy Prepuce; every time she swallowed, it immediately reappeared on her tongue. Again and again she repeated the ritual until after a hundred gulps she managed to down the baby Jesus’ cover.<br />
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The piece of Christ’s flesh became a stand-in for his whole body, a body which could be lusted after by chaste women. In the visions of these women, Christ’s penis was no rigid signifier of monarchical power. Transferred to the hands of his brides, the foreskin came alive. It enveloped bodies and danced sweetly on tongues, demanding to be swallowed and consumed. The eroticism of religious ecstasy, fantasy, and desire played out over the body of Christ.<br />
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In these nuns’ religious transports, metaphysical union played out in the language of desire and strained metaphors for orgasm. Eating and hunger were figures of a never-satiated desire to be filled. In their reveries, women rarely eat ordinary food, as the flesh of Christ alone can fulfill them. Instead they drink and feast on the blood and body of the Eucharist, the food of Christ’s suffering and his physicality. But they can’t be satiated: Blannbekin swallows over and over again. Catherine of Siena, too, whose Dialogues (1377) were dictated in an ecstatic state, spoke of visions in which consumption and consummation became interwoven terms:<br />
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“My beloved,” [Christ said], “you have now gone through many struggles for my sake. . . . Previously you had renounced all that the body takes pleasure in. . . . But yesterday the intensity of your ardent love for me overcame even the instinctive reflexes of your body itself: you forced yourself to swallow without a qualm a drink from which nature recoiled in disgust [i.e., pus from the putrefying breast of a dying woman]. . . . As you then went far beyond what mere human nature could ever have achieved, so I today shall give you a drink that transcends in perfection any that human nature can provide. . . .” With that, he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her toward the wound in his side. “Drink, daughter, from my side,” he said, “and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated with its overflowing goodness.” Drawn close . . . to the outlet of the Fountain of Life, she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound, and still more eagerly the mouth of her soul, and there she slaked her thirst.<br />
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In the midst of Catherine of Siena’s rapturous state, the saint gave the body of Christ a feminine form, homologizing the wound to a woman’s breast and vulva. Drinking and sucking is “enraptured delight.” Catherine’s chastity and self-abnegation is rewarded in homoerotic fulfillment. In other passages, the saint likens the “affection of love” in Christ with the “pleasure [of] sensual self-love” as though searching for relief of painfully frustrated physical desire with spiritual fulfillment.<br />
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With this unruly erotic attachment to His body, it’s no surprise that by the nineteenth century, the Church wanted to end this kind of sexualized mysticism. Such veneration had already become an object of ridicule among Protestants—reformers like John Calvin joked and Voltaire took witty aim at the foreskin and its worshippers. In response, the Church began calling the foreskin relics “curious,” and demanded that the Holy Prepuce be put away. After enjoying the light of desire, it was hidden in the dank vaults of cathedrals and churches, removed from the gaze and fantasies of those who would seek to worship the object. To keep the body of Christ pure and restrict its temptations of women, their outlet for sexual fantasy needed to be purged. Hastily recast, the mystics were no longer visionaries, but hysterics.<br />
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At the end of the 19th century, when women’s sexual desires were more openly discussed, and anti-Semitism loomed large in the Catholic Church, the prepuce threatened the official line with a material reminder of the disruptive power of female sexuality and of the redeemer’s Judaism. So the Vatican issued a decree declaring the object forbidden. Anyone who wrote or spoke of the foreskin was threatened with excommunication, and the Holy Prepuce virtually disappeared. Once purged, the erotic gaze of women could be blocked and blinded.<br />
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In addition to exhuming the sexual history of the prepuce, Joyce’s joke pointed to another problem: a small church twenty miles outside of Rome, in the town Calcata where the last remaining Holy Prepuce was held. In defiance of the Pope, the town proudly kept their relic in an elaborate, jeweled box and annually paraded it through Calcata’s crumbling streets. But in 1983, the venerated relic disappeared. By then, Calcata had become a hotspot for young Roman gentrifiers who found the annual foreskin festival amusing. They too began writing about it, inviting their friends to come and see the local show. The Pope demanded, once and for all, that the prepuce must be put away. And so it was conveniently stolen, most likely by the local priest. When questioned by the media, the priest demurred, citing the decree of excommunication.<br />
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The Church, it seems, finally decided that the Holy Prepuce was not as valuable nor as important as other shriveled body parts. An arm, a femur, a tuft of hair preserved from corpse of a mere saint were fine to venerate, to even talk about; they never inspired erotic visions or rapturous physicality. But Christ’s dick was dangerous—too obviously fleshy, too desired, too erotically malleable. Once the gift of kings, later the object of women’s erotic desire, the relic could not survive the puritan melding of sexuality with sin. That tiny piece of shriveled foreskin, was persistent reminder of Christ’s flesh incarnate which, to its Protestant detractors, was proof of Catholicism’s pagan licentiousness.<br />
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So the Catholic Church reformed; it put away the foreskin, denied its existence, and rewrote the history of the erotic pleasures of mystics. Severed from any remainder of his flesh on earth, Christ’s body was safe during the metaphorical consumption of communion. Christianity was now on the same page: The idea of Jesus’ sexuality was heresy; the erotic earthly pleasures of his body were purged. Phallic desires were for heathens, the object only of scorn and ridicule.Tribute for Dr. Jyotiben Trivedi (Vice Chancellor of SNDT Women's University, Mumbai during 1980-1986)tag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-05-19:2043530:BlogPost:785032015-05-19T11:24:45.000ZProf. Dr. Vibhuti Patelhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/ProfDrVibhutiPatel
<p><br></br> Dr. JyotibenTrivedi was the Vice Chancellor of SNDT Women’s University from 1980 to 1986. Jyotiben passed away on 14-4-2015. She was kind, sensitive to the problems of all the employees of SNDTWU and took genuine interest in our lives. She helped and guided us at times of difficulty, and was generous in sponsoring education and health expenditure of the needy. Often were the times when she would be heard to ask an employee, "Have you sent money order to your mother? Never neglect your…</p>
<p><br/> Dr. JyotibenTrivedi was the Vice Chancellor of SNDT Women’s University from 1980 to 1986. Jyotiben passed away on 14-4-2015. She was kind, sensitive to the problems of all the employees of SNDTWU and took genuine interest in our lives. She helped and guided us at times of difficulty, and was generous in sponsoring education and health expenditure of the needy. Often were the times when she would be heard to ask an employee, "Have you sent money order to your mother? Never neglect your mother. If you don't have enough cash, I will give it to you.” For her everyone working for SNDTWU family. She did not differentiate them on the basis of their designation or position. To her all of them were equally.</p>
<p>To subsequent vice chancellors of the university also, she gave constructive suggestions. She and always stood by me. Jyotiben was very gracious and had a generosity of heart. She was an intellectually alert citizen and always gave serious thoughts to larger issues of society-community health, social change, and social justice. She was duped by her beneficiaries so many times in her life, but she never stopped her philanthropic work.</p>
<p>Once when she asked me,“What should be our goal?" I said, "Academic excellence”. She said, "The most important goal should be hand-holding and enabling young women to enter institutions of higher learning and building their lives.” When I as selected for post-doctoral fellowship at The London School of Economics and Political Science, I was hesitant to go as my eight year old daughter refused to come with me to London.It was Jyotiben and the then Vice Chancellor, Dr.Suma Chitnis who boosted my morale and encouraged me to make the best of the opportunity.</p>
<p>Jyoti Trivedi was always happy when we achieved recognition and laurels in our career. She was also interested in our work in the women's movement and community health. She played a crucial role in the development of Lady Thakersey College of Nursing with her visionary leadership, networking with medical and nursing community and patrons.</p>
<p>At a function to mourn her death at the University, Vasudha Kamath, Vice Chancellor of SNDTWU presided and said, “Dr. Jyoti Trivedi has had a lasting impact on my personality. She was Hon. Vice Chancellor, when I joined as a young teacher in Education Dept. She had interviewed and selected me. M.Ed. lectures used to be in the evening, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. One day, a student started bleeding and fainted in the class. I was zapped and was running around and security guards of our university told me to contact Madam VC, Dr. Jyoti Trivedi. I said, at this hour?Will she be in her office? When I went to her chambers and told her about the medical emergency, she immediately contacted Bombay Hospital and told me to take the student there. The student got medical care and I was in the hospital till her family members arrived at 9 p.m. This sensitive handling by the head of the institution was a great learning for me in the initial period of my teaching career. Jyotiben had great dreams for SNDTWU. During Golden Jubilee Year of L.T. College of Nursing, she asked me, 'Why can't SNDTWU have a medical college? Start efforts in that direction.”</p>
<p><span>As a Vice-Chancellor,</span>Dr. Jyotiben was always cordial and took interest in personal, professional and Institutional development and carried everybody along. She acknowledged talent and hard work. With her vision and sharp intellect, keenly looked at the development of the SNDT Women’s University in diverse ways, introducing Technology, new programmes in home Science, Pharmacy and Polytechnic. Jyotiben was also keen on creating career paths for people. Hundreds of teachers grew under her guidance as decision makers, education administrators and institution builders. Jyotiben was always keen that every opportunity should be given on merit and would not mind standing alone for upholding her values.</p>
<p>Her honesty of purpose and determination with respect to empowerment of women through higher education made her role model for thousands of university educated graduate and post graduate students as well as education leaders of our country.</p>Published Today: My Trip to the Land of Gandhi: A Mexican-American’s Journey to the Legacy of Nonviolent Resistancetag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-05-17:2043530:BlogPost:786732015-05-17T17:48:39.000ZErik Olson Fernandezhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/ErikOlsonFernandez
<div class="ContentRight WithRightRail FullView"><div class="ContentRightInner t_mbgc t_qtc t_urtc"><div class="v-ReadMessageContainer slideOnResize" id="inboxControl0fv-ReadMessageContainer"><div class="c-ReadMessage"><div class="rmMessages ClearBoth" id="ReadMessageScrollableSection"><div class="c-ReadMessagePart ReadMsgContainer HasLayout ClearBoth HideShadows SinglePart NoHistory Read RmIc" id="readMessagePartControl1034f"><div class="c-ReadMessagePartBody"><div class="readMsgBody"></div>
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<div class="ContentRight WithRightRail FullView"><div class="ContentRightInner t_mbgc t_qtc t_urtc"><div id="inboxControl0fv-ReadMessageContainer" class="v-ReadMessageContainer slideOnResize"><div class="c-ReadMessage"><div class="rmMessages ClearBoth" id="ReadMessageScrollableSection"><div id="readMessagePartControl1034f" class="c-ReadMessagePart ReadMsgContainer HasLayout ClearBoth HideShadows SinglePart NoHistory Read RmIc"><div class="c-ReadMessagePartBody"><div class="readMsgBody"><div id="bodyreadMessagePartBodyControl1036f" class="ExternalClass MsgBodyContainer"><div dir="ltr"><p><b>NEWS RELEASE</b><b> </b><b> </b></p>
<div>For Immediate Release<br/>Friday, May 17, 2015</div>
<div><span><b>Book Release:</b></span><b> My Trip to the Land of Gandhi: </b></div>
<div>A Mexican-American’s Journey to the Legacy of Nonviolent Resistance</div>
<div><span><b>Watch Book Video Trailer:</b></span><span> <span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXEAJL9v-X8" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXEAJL9v-X8</a></span></span></div>
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<div><img id="ecxB9A8CDFB-AACF-4F1E-AAFB-C3ABE7EA3387" height="267" width="200" src="https://blu181.afx.ms/att/GetInline.aspx?messageid=60912d07-fcab-11e4-95df-6c3be5a769c8&attindex=0&cp=-1&attdepth=0&imgsrc=cid:17CAD6B0-BE48-4AD3-AEDB-C65ED299E45B%40attlocal.net&cid=1e33f23ed7e671d0&shared=1&hm__login=erikolsonfernandez&hm__domain=hotmail.com&ip=10.148.86.8&d=d3859&mf=0&hm__ts=Sun%2c%2017%20May%202015%2017:46:47%20GMT&st=%2800067FFE96E413F3%29&hm__ha=01_01c5ba3919f56241c55c81b98be6c990f6a313095508c397dd911f0f0e61902e&oneredir=1"/></div>
<div><span>SAN DIEGO – As we approach the end of the public school year and college graduations that leave students with thousands of dollars in student loan debt, it is important to remember where we stand as a country on the human right to education. Today, Sunday, May 17, 2015, the 61st anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the book <i>My Trip to the Land of Gandhi: A Mexican-American</i></span><i>’</i><span><i>s Journey to the Legacy of Nonviolent Resistance</i></span> has been published as an eBook on <span><a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/539910" target="_blank">www.smashwords.com</a>, Apple iBooks, <a href="http://http//www.barnesandnoble.com/w/my-trip-to-the-land-of-gandhi-erik-olson-fern-ndez/1121869627?ean=2940151902779" target="_blank">barnesandnoble.com</a>, <a href="http://https//store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/my-trip-to-the-land-of-gandhi-a-mexican-american-s-journey-to-the-legacy-of-nonviolent-resistance" target="_blank">Kobo.com</a>, and other major distributors. It is also available as a </span>print book at <span><a href="http://www.thebookpatch.com/BookStore/my-trip-to-the-land-of-gandhi-a-mexican-americans-journey-to-the-legacy-of-nonviolent-resistance/e3640123-c9b4-4fb1-a75d-1231304c60b4?isbn=9781310177217" target="_blank">www.thebookpatch.com</a></span>. <span>The book is a memoir about a Mexican mother’s son growing up in poverty in America and his pursuit of the human right to education through the legacy of Gandhian nonviolence. In 1959, after the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. King wrote an important article in Ebony magazine about his journey to India to study the work and life of Gandhi and the Indian freedom struggle and how to apply those lessons back home to redeem America’s democracy. The article was entitled “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi.” In the article, King states, “I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.” </span></div>
<div>This book is about this young son’s metaphoric “Trip to the Land of Gandhi” and how this journey helped him confront the great issues of today with this great legacy of nonviolence resistance. The first item on the agenda was the $90,000 in student loan debt that was handed to him along with his law school degree. Erik Olson Fernández’s journey and his strategic insights are a call to action to finish the “unfinished business” of the 1960s with a nonviolent struggle for the human right to quality free public education in the Americas.</div>
<div>Sadly, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board, public school students are still plagued by stark racial and economic segregation and misguided education reform efforts led by some of the wealthiest people on the planet. In California, for example, it’s once proud, mostly white, public school system was the envy of the globe in the 1950s and 60s but it is now one of the worst in the country and criminally underfunded. In 2004, PBS made a film documentary on California’s public schools appropriately entitled “From First to Worst.” (<a href="http://learningmatters.tv/blog/documentaries/watch-first-to-worst/651/" target="_blank"><span>http://learningmatters.tv/blog/documentaries/watch-first-to-worst/651/</span></a>) Education Week’s Quality Counts 2014 report ranked California 49 out of 51 in its state rankings on per-pupil spending – below all the Southern states, including Mississippi. Black and Latino students today make up at least 59% of the student population in California. According to a February 4, 2015 article from <i>Capital & Main</i> entitled “The California Chasm” by Manuel Pastor and Dan Braun, California[…]is the home to more super rich than anywhere else in the country-and it also exhibits the highest poverty rate in the nation, when cost of living is taken into account. Income disparities in the state of California are among the highest in the nation, outpacing such places as Georgia and Mississippi in terms of Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality.” After much legislation, many public referendums, and high profile lawsuits, California’s students are still denied their state constitutional right to a quality, free public education. The time has come to give life to lifeless laws with the great legacy of nonviolent resistance. </div>
<div>All proceeds from the book will go to fight for the human right to education through Nuevo SNCC. Visit <a href="http://www.nuevosncc.net/" target="_blank"><span>www.nuevosncc.net</span></a> for more details. </div>
<div><span><b>ABOUT THE AUTHOR</b></span></div>
<div><span> </span></div>
<div><img id="ecxFC40F3ED-1301-43DC-B0F3-396A4A88805E" height="136" width="102" src="https://blu181.afx.ms/att/GetInline.aspx?messageid=60912d07-fcab-11e4-95df-6c3be5a769c8&attindex=1&cp=-1&attdepth=1&imgsrc=cid:B7D56701-9494-4F9C-8D60-68E8DBB9460C%40attlocal.net&cid=1e33f23ed7e671d0&shared=1&hm__login=erikolsonfernandez&hm__domain=hotmail.com&ip=10.148.86.8&d=d3859&mf=0&hm__ts=Sun%2c%2017%20May%202015%2017:46:47%20GMT&st=%2800067FFE96E413F3%29&hm__ha=01_3b46df5b619a739318a51efa25af54c76a13ad366a8ed4cc78dcc8fe2e042210&oneredir=1"/></div>
<div><span>Erik Olson Fernández has many years of experience organizing for nonviolent social change as a Community Organizer and in the labor movement as an Organizer, Labor Representative, and Field Director with public education and health care unions. Motivated by the experiences of growing up with a single mother from Mexico, he has a long commitment to economic and social justice through nonviolent resistance. Like Gandhi, Erik has a law degree but has instead focused and devoted his life to organizing workers and community residents for justice. He is currently working to create Nuevo SNCC, the modern equivalent of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a project that seeks to revive SNCC’s nonviolent legacy in the 1960s to challenge today’s human rights violations around the right to education. Erik holds a Bachelor of Arts in Urban and Regional Planning from Miami University and a Juris Doctor from Northeastern </span><font face="Times New Roman">University School of Law. </font></div>
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<div><div><b><u><font face="Times New Roman">CONTACT INFORMATION:</font></u></b></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman">Erik Olson Fernández</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman">(619) 309-7111 cell </font></div>
<div><span><a href="mailto:contact@nuevosncc.net"><font face="Times New Roman">contact@nuevosncc.net</font></a></span></div>
<div><a href="http://nuevosncc.net/book.html" target="_blank"><font face="Times New Roman">http://nuevosncc.net/book.html</font></a></div>
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</div>Obituary for Dr. Jyotiben Trivedi (1922-2015)tag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-05-15:2043530:BlogPost:784962015-05-15T17:39:29.000ZProf. Dr. Vibhuti Patelhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/ProfDrVibhutiPatel
<p>This is the html version of the file <a href="http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/Download.aspx?fname=A20155417029_19.docx&fcategory=Articles&aid=6756">http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/Download.aspx?fname=A20155417029_19.docx&fcategory=Articles&aid=6756</a>. Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web. eSocialSciences</p>
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<p>Obituary Jyotiben Trivedi Vice Chancellor SNDT Women’s University, 1980-86</p>
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<p>Dr.…</p>
<p>This is the html version of the file <a href="http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/Download.aspx?fname=A20155417029_19.docx&fcategory=Articles&aid=6756">http://www.esocialsciences.org/Download/Download.aspx?fname=A20155417029_19.docx&fcategory=Articles&aid=6756</a>. Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web. eSocialSciences</p>
<p></p>
<p>Obituary Jyotiben Trivedi Vice Chancellor SNDT Women’s University, 1980-86</p>
<p></p>
<p>Dr. Jyotiben Trivedi, was the Vice Chancellor of SNDT Women’s University from 1980 to 1986. Jyotiben passed away on …. . She was kind, sensitive to the problems of all the employees of SNDTWU and took genuine interest in our lives. She helped and guided us at times of difficulty, and was generous in sponsoring education and health expenditure of the needy. Often were the times when she would be heard to ask an employee, "Have you sent money order to your mother? Never neglect your mother. If you don't have enough cash, I will give it to you.” For her everyone working for SNDTWU family. She did not differentiate them on the basis of their designation or position. To her all of them were equally. To subsequent vice chancellors of the university also, she gave constructive suggestions. She and always stood by me. Jyotiben was very gracious and had a generosity of heart. She was an intellectually alert citizen and always gave serious thoughts to larger issues of society-community health, social change, and social justice. She was duped by her beneficiaries so many times in her life, but she never stopped her philanthropic work. Once when she asked me,“What should be our goal?" I said, "Academic excellence”. She said, "The most important goal should be hand-holding and enabling young women to enter institutions of higher learning and building their lives.” When I as selected for post doctoral fellowship at The London School of Economics and Political Science, I was hesitant to go as my eight year old daughter refused to come with me to London. It was Jyotiben and the then Vice Chancellor, Dr Suma Chitnis who boosted my morale and encouraged me to make the best of the opportunity. Jyoti Trivedi was always happy when we achieved recognition and laurels in our career. She was also interested in our work in the women's movement and community health. She played a crucial role in the development of Lady Thakersey College of Nursing with her visionary leadership, networking with medical and nursing community and patrons. At a function to mourn her death at the University, Vasudha Kamath, Vice Chancellor of SNDTWU presided and said, “Dr. Jyoti Trivedi has had a lasting impact on my personality. She was Hon. Vice Chancellor, when I joined as a young teacher in Education Dept. She had interviewed and selected me. M.Ed. lectures used to be in the evening, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. One day, a student started bleeding and fainted in the class. I was zapped and was running around and security guards of our university told me to contact Madam VC, Dr. Jyoti Trivedi. I said, at this hour? Will she be in her office? When I went to her chambers and told her about the medical emergency, she immediately contacted Bombay Hospital and told me to take the student there. The student got medical care and I was in the hospital till her family members arrived at 9 p.m. This sensitive handling by the head of the institution was a great learning for me in the initial period of my teaching career. Jyotiben had great dreams for SNDTWU. During Golden Jubilee Year of L.T. College of Nursing, she asked me, 'Why can't SNDTWU have a medical college? Start efforts in that direction.” Her honesty of purpose and determination with respect to empowerment of women through higher education made her role model for thousands of university educated graduate and post graduate students as well as education leaders of our country. Vibhuti Patel eSS Obituary, Patel on Trivedi April 2015</p>ACCEPTING MEMBERS TO THE GLOBAL PEACE & JUSTICE CONGRESS NOWtag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-05-12:2043530:BlogPost:782562015-05-12T19:00:00.000ZRev. Dr. Chad Dunnhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/RevDrChadDunn
i invite you to join the GLOBAL PEACE AND JUSTICE CONGRESS here at the Gandhi-King Community.nwe are also looking for candidates for the 2016 leadership elections of the Congress.<br />
<br />
Please visit the link provided and let your voice be heard.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://gandhiking.ning.com/group/global-peace-justice-congress">http://gandhiking.ning.com/group/global-peace-justice-congress</a>
i invite you to join the GLOBAL PEACE AND JUSTICE CONGRESS here at the Gandhi-King Community.nwe are also looking for candidates for the 2016 leadership elections of the Congress.<br />
<br />
Please visit the link provided and let your voice be heard.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://gandhiking.ning.com/group/global-peace-justice-congress">http://gandhiking.ning.com/group/global-peace-justice-congress</a>The Hidden History of the Church Confessionaltag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-05-10:2043530:BlogPost:783622015-05-10T04:59:52.000ZRev. Dr. Chad Dunnhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/RevDrChadDunn
iBY CHAD DUNN<br />
<br />
In many modern churches, a small, enclosed booth is used by the penitent and priest to mutually engage in the Sacrament of Penance. The very personal oral exchange that occurs between two sides of a concealing wall is similar to an act partaken at a glory hole, where a penis, aching for relief, is attended to anonymously by another who kneels. The similarity of a dark, private church confessional to an adult video booth is no coincidence.<br />
<br />
It is thought by certain kink historians…
iBY CHAD DUNN<br />
<br />
In many modern churches, a small, enclosed booth is used by the penitent and priest to mutually engage in the Sacrament of Penance. The very personal oral exchange that occurs between two sides of a concealing wall is similar to an act partaken at a glory hole, where a penis, aching for relief, is attended to anonymously by another who kneels. The similarity of a dark, private church confessional to an adult video booth is no coincidence.<br />
<br />
It is thought by certain kink historians that the very first glory hole (or gloryhole) was established in ancient Greece. The Oracle of Delphi, hidden in the shadows of a small temple, would provide relief to travelers seeking aid and advice. The Oracle was a priestess who would enter a divine frenzy when using her unique talent. In homoerotic Greece, this skill quickly became adopted by eager male counterparts.<br />
<br />
During the reign of Pope Saint Gregory VII, the Catholic Church of the Holy Roman Empire built cathedrals throughout Europe that were fairly jammed with confessionals. Gregory was the first pope in many centuries to rigorously enforce the Church’s ancient policy of celibacy. A typical Medieval cathedral was overflowing with horny priests. This required numerous confessionals.It' What They Dotag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-05-10:2043530:BlogPost:782522015-05-10T04:56:02.000ZRev. Dr. Chad Dunnhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/RevDrChadDunn
BY CHAD DUNN<br />
<br />
Here is what ‘They’ did:<br />
<br />
Women Perform Sexual Act with Priests<br />
A strange religious practice has been traced as far back as the 5th century B.C. It was common in India, Babylonia., Arabia, Africa and Greece. The prostitutes dedicated themselves to fertility gods and goddesses.<br />
<br />
The women performed sexual act with priests, or in some instances with worshippers inside the temple. On this basis, it is believed that prostitution itself may have started as a sacred right connected with…
BY CHAD DUNN<br />
<br />
Here is what ‘They’ did:<br />
<br />
Women Perform Sexual Act with Priests<br />
A strange religious practice has been traced as far back as the 5th century B.C. It was common in India, Babylonia., Arabia, Africa and Greece. The prostitutes dedicated themselves to fertility gods and goddesses.<br />
<br />
The women performed sexual act with priests, or in some instances with worshippers inside the temple. On this basis, it is believed that prostitution itself may have started as a sacred right connected with religion and later it became secularized.<br />
<br />
They Dance to arouse Sexual Interest<br />
Throughout the world dance is an integral part of religious rites. Some societies use it to arouse the sexual interest of women for strange men, after which their husbands arrange a meeting at an agreed time with the man of their choice.<br />
<br />
The ‘Buffalo dance’ of American Indians required the women to have intercourse which was viewed as a means of drawing power from the Primal Bison, to ensure large herds and prosperity.<br />
<br />
They Perform ritual Baths<br />
In some societies customs of ceremonial bathing is prescribed as a religious ritual to be performed before intercourse or after menstruation . In many cultures, water is regarded as a purifying and erotic agent for the body as well as sexual bahaviour in the mind ritual bathing also includes showers, shared hot baths and washing the sex organs.<br />
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They are famous for Liberal Sexual Attitudes<br />
Oneida community of America is a 19th century Utopian community located in North western New York state. They believe in the perfection of everything. These people were well known for their liberal sexual attitudes. Their women were always ready to volunteer to help young men to learn the technique of controlling ejaculation.<br />
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They Celebrate the Arrival of puberty<br />
In certain under developed societies, ceremonies are performed to celebrate the arrival of puberty and the beginning of adulthood. The formal rites usually include teaching of ‘tribal legends’ and laws. Legend is the story handed down from the past, especially one that may not be true. Sexual practices and responsibilities expected of an adult in the particular society are also taught.<br />
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In many societies the rites for boys involve circumcision as well as severe physical tests such as flogging, body scarring and teeth pulling.<br />
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Coming of age ceremonies for girls are usually less elaborate and more private and may involve deflowering, introcision and clitoridectomy.<br />
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Public rites are also performed in various societies in which the genitals may be sacrificed or mutilated.<br />
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Sex is a Taboo after childbirth<br />
In certain curlers there is ban or prohibition to do or heal touch taking on various things for religious reasons.<br />
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Several types of taboos are prevailing in the world. In many societies there is a taboo against adultery during ritual seclusion of the father of a new born child.<br />
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They Insert metal rings in the nipples<br />
In many parts of the world, some people in backward societies perforate various parts of the body and insert rings or studs either for ornamentation or for adornment. Some people insert metal rings or rods in the nipples, in the head of the penis, the prepuce, the scrotum, the perineum, the labia, or the hood of the clitoris.<br />
<br />
They use metallic device to make coitus unlikely<br />
In ancient Egypt and East Africa a strange custom prevailed. To prevent sexual intercourse the foreskin or labia majora of the wife was stitched together or may have a metallic device, such as a ring inserted between the folds of tissue of make the coitus unlikely. The steps are believed to be taken to ensure fidelity on the part of the wife.<br />
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They Worship Phallus<br />
In some societies phallus is worshipped as the source of life and a symbol of fertility and power. The Hindus worship Shivlinga. In such a culture the phallus is represented in art forms such as pictures which play in essential part in religious rituals and ceremonies.<br />
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They wear penis Holders to protect the penis<br />
In various societies of South America and Papua New Guinea, people wear a protective penis holder. Sheaths of this kind are generally made of gourds, cloth, or metal and decorated with feathers, or flowers.<br />
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They Hold the Penis of a visitor as a form of Greeting<br />
Early Hebrews are well know for the Phallic Oath. It was the ritual act of a man touching another man’s penis to solemnize an oath.<br />
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Penis holding has also been found in Central Australia. In some tribes, people hold the penis of a visitor as a form of greeting equivalent to shaking hands.<br />
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They Rub Noses for sexual expression<br />
In western societies kissing is a way of greeting, expression of affection, sexual desire, love, friendship, or reverence. But in some societies such as Trobrianders, Eskimos, Andamanese, Thai and Vietnamese where kissing is not the custom, people rub noses as a form of greeting or sexual expression.<br />
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Their Intercourse is a cut and dried affair<br />
Lepcha is a society of Sikkim, state of India. It is situated in the Himalayas. The Lepchas are generally hunters and fishers who permit polygamy, though monogamy is more common.<br />
<br />
They do not involve sex with love. Intercourse is an out and dried affair in new trend without kissing, courtship, extended foreplay or emotional involvement. With the advancement of communication system their life is also changing gradually.Review of my book Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924-25 Vykom Satyagraha and the Mechanisms of Changetag:gandhiking.ning.com,2015-03-25:2043530:BlogPost:778052015-03-25T19:29:05.000ZMary Elizabeth Kinghttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/MaryElizabethKing
<p><strong><span class="font-size-5">Vykom: Nonviolent Action against Untouchability</span></strong></p>
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<div class="article-view-meta"><span class="font-size-3"><strong>25.03.2015</strong> - <a href="http://www.pressenza.com/author/robert-burrowes/">Robert Burrowes</a></span></div>
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<div class="article-view-content"><p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Why does nonviolent action work? And how good was Mohandas K. Gandhi as a nonviolent strategist? If you…</strong></span></p>
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<p><strong><span class="font-size-5">Vykom: Nonviolent Action against Untouchability</span></strong></p>
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<div class="article-view-meta"><span class="font-size-3"><strong>25.03.2015</strong> - <a href="http://www.pressenza.com/author/robert-burrowes/">Robert Burrowes</a></span></div>
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<div class="article-view-content"><p><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Why does nonviolent action work? And how good was Mohandas K. Gandhi as a nonviolent strategist? If you want high quality evidence in your search for answers to these two questions then I encourage you to read Professor Mary E. King’s latest book on the struggle against untouchability, unapproachability and unseeability in the south Indian village of Vykom during the 1920s. See ‘Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and the Mechanisms of Change’</strong> <a href="http://www.oup.co.in/product/academic-general/sociology/111/gandhian-nonviolent-struggle-untouchability-south-india-192425-vykom-satyagraha-mechanisms-change/9780199452668">http://www.oup.co.in/product/academic-general/sociology/111/gandhian-nonviolent-struggle-untouchability-south-india-192425-vykom-satyagraha-mechanisms-change/9780199452668</a></span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">History is not always considered instructive and yet the major achievements, and failures, of nonviolent activists throughout the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries can be better understood if we understand what happened at Vykom.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">King’s book describes the nonviolent struggle that took place to open the roads surrounding the local Brahmin temple to everyone. For centuries, any person or animal could walk on those roads except those Hindus without caste – the ‘untouchables’ – whose proximity was considered ‘polluting’ to higher castes. From April 1924 to November 1925, upper caste Hindus and others conducted a satyagraha (loosely, a nonviolent campaign) to put an end to this blatant discrimination but relied heavily on strategic guidance from Gandhi.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">The Vykom struggle was designed by Gandhi to eliminate untouchability by ‘converting’ the high caste Hindus ‘by sheer force of character and suffering’. Within a decade of the Vykom campaign the narrative that emerged, and which has persisted to this day because of its unquestioned promulgation in several well-known books on nonviolence, is that this was achieved.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">However, after protracted research in sometimes obscure places, including the morgues of newspapers no longer published, the viewing of colonial and archival records, and interviews of a diverse and extensive range of scholars, Professor King presents new evidence that the suffering of activists – whether untouchable or caste Hindu – was ineffective in ‘converting’ orthodox upper-caste Hindus in Vykom.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">So what actually happened? What did the settlement achieve? King tries to correct historical misunderstandings and argues that conversion (as distinct from accommodation and coercion, for example) is rarely the mechanism of change in a nonviolent campaign. She also identifies and evaluates shortcomings in Gandhi’s leadership, particularly on this point.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">King is well qualified to undertake this study of the previously neglected Vykom satyagraha. She participated in the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr and has been a prominent scholar in the field of nonviolence ever since. Moreover, she is thorough, as the extensive footnotes in her book illustrate.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">The Vykom satyagraha was an early example of the strategic application of nonviolent action even if it was some twenty years after Gandhi started using it strategically. And while he emphasised the importance of moral suasion to ‘melt the heart’ of opponents, and this is an emphasis that appears throughout his writing, King points out that Gandhi was also politically astute and, by 1905, was well aware that ‘even the most powerful cannot rule without the co-operation of the ruled’. Power in any struggle is important and must be wielded, albeit nonviolently.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Nevertheless, in relation to Vykom, as King points out and documents, the perseverance of the satyagrahis in self-suffering – for example, by standing in flood waters for hours at a time, withstanding without retaliation the atrocities inflicted by hooligans and the police (which led to some deaths and serious injuries, such as blindness), and imprisonment – on which Gandhi insisted, cannot be said to have ‘melted’ the hearts of the caste Hindus who controlled access to the temple roads. Moreover, Gandhi’s strategic guidance limited the satyagraha in other ways too. So understanding why a settlement was eventually achieved requires a more sophisticated analysis, which she then offers.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">I would be less critical of Gandhi than King, however. I do not disagree with her documented shortcomings of his strategic guidance and, given my own research into human fear, agree with her that ‘melting hearts and minds’ is often a forlorn hope, especially if someone is terrified. A terrified individual clings with phenomenal tenacity to what makes them feel safe. And most orthodox caste Hindus, like conservative Buddhists, Christians, Jews and Muslims, cling to a belief set they were given no choice but to adopt as a child. In short, if you have been terrorised into adopting certain beliefs (about untouchability or anything else), they are not accessible to change without profound psychological healing from the fear that holds those beliefs in place. Realistically, melting hearts and minds can only happen with those who are not (unconsciously) terrified.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">But Gandhi did understand the need to use power. He was just engaged in a lifetime effort to work out how to do this both ethically and effectively. His solution was nonviolent action designed to maximize the chance of ‘melting hearts and minds’. Even if he was wrong, it seems to me he was working from a sound orientation: that is, his ongoing experimentation was valuable. If he wasn’t ‘hard line’ about certain points that he thought he had learned, then he couldn’t later discover their weaknesses and abandon them. And the liberation of India after thirty years of strategically applied nonviolent action is evidence of his capacity as a strategic thinker, even if he made mistakes. What might other stalled liberation struggles achieve if they boasted a leader of Gandhi’s calibre?</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Since his time, in virtually all contexts, nonviolent leaders have adhered strictly to certain principles while still being more flexible than was Gandhi. Partly, this has been due to the collective nature of most nonviolent leaderships. For example, Martin Luther King Jnr had many colleagues on whom he relied, several of whom had travelled to India to learn from or about Gandhi, as Professor King documents. Gandhi had no forebears (in the strategic application of nonviolence) or genuine peers, even if several of his fellow satyagrahis were trusted colleagues.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">My own sense too, is that Gandhi had a ‘deep strategy’ in which his strategies to liberate untouchables or even India were, ultimately, only subsets. What was this ‘deep strategy’? The transformation of each individual into a fearless Self-realized human being. And it is only if we recognize this ‘deep strategy’ that apparently inexplicable tactics, like insisting that Hindus fight their own internal battles without support from people of other faiths, can be understood. My own sense is that Gandhi would have happily lost many political and cultural ‘battles’ if his ‘war’ to liberate the human spirit could be won.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">So you can see why I like Mary King’s book so much: it got me thinking, deeply. It is invaluable precisely because of its sophistication in raising important but subtle questions about nonviolence, social change and Gandhi in a most unusual way. Given the carefully documented historical evidence of nonviolent struggles that is increasingly available, what does nonviolence mean, ultimately, to you? And what is your sense of how nonviolent action should be applied?</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">If you want to read more about Mary King’s efforts as both an activist and scholar of nonviolence, then you can find out more on her website: <a href="http://maryking.info/">http://maryking.info/</a> You won’t be wasting your time.</span></p>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Categories: <a href="http://www.pressenza.com/-/topic/disarmament/">Peace and Disarmament</a></span></p>
<div class="article-view-meta-bottom"><span class="font-size-3">Tags: <a href="http://www.pressenza.com/tag/non-violence-en/" rel="tag">non-violence</a>, <a href="http://www.pressenza.com/tag/vykom/" rel="tag">Vykom</a></span></div>
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<h2><span class="font-size-3">About the author of the book review</span></h2>
<h2><span class="font-size-3"><strong><a href="http://www.pressenza.com/author/robert-burrowes/" rel="author">Robert Burrowes</a></strong></span></h2>
<p><span class="font-size-3">Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of <strong><a href="http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence">'Why Violence?'</a></strong> His email address is <a href="mailto:flametree@riseup.net">flametree@riseup.net</a> and his website is at <strong><a href="http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com">http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com</a></strong></span></p>Caste versus Class – Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-08-12:2043530:BlogPost:767102014-08-12T12:29:34.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
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<p><b>Caste versus Class – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi did…</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
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<p><b>Caste versus Class – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
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<p>Mahatma Gandhi did a beautiful comparison between caste and class. He told Man being a social being has to devise some method of social organization. We in India have evolved caste: They in Europe have organized class. Neither has the solidarity and naturalness of a family which perhaps is a God-ordained institution. If caste has produced certain evils, class has not been productive of anything less.</p>
<p>If class helps to conserve certain social virtues, caste does the same in equal, if not greater, degree. The beauty of the caste system is that it does not base itself upon distinctions of wealth-possessions.</p>
<p>Money, as history has proved, is the greatest disruptive force in the world. Even the sacredness of family ties is not safe against the pollution of wealth, says Shankaracharya. Caste is but an extension of the principle of the family. Both are governed by blood and heredity.</p>
<p>Western scientists are busy trying to prove that heredity is an illusion and that milieu is everything. The sole experience of many lands goes against the conclusion of these scientists; but even accepting their doctrine of milieu, it is easy to prove that milieu can be conserved and developed more through caste than through class. The Anglo-Saxon is temperamentally incapable of appreciating any outlook but his own. One can understand his violent opposition to everything that goes against his grain. But Indians, whether Hindus or Christians, ought to be able to see that the spirit behind caste is not one of arrogant superiority; it is the classification of different systems of self-culture. It is the best possible adjustment of social stability and progress. Just as the spirit of the family is inclusive of those who love each other and are wedded to each other by ties of blood and relation, caste also tries to include families of a particular way of purity of life (not standard of life, meaning by this term, economic standard of life).</p>
<p>Only, it does not leave the decision, whether a particular family belongs to a particular type, to the idiosyncrasies or interested judgment of a few individuals. It trusts to the principle of heredity, and being only a system of culture does not hold that any injustice is done if an individual or a family has to remain in a particular group in spite of their decision to change their mode of life for the better. As we all know, change comes very slowly in social life, and thus, as a matter of fact, caste has allowed new groupings to suit the changes in lives. But these changes are quiet and easy as a change in the shape of the clouds. It is difficult to imagine a better harmonious human adjustment.</p>
<p>Caste does not connote superiority or inferiority. It simply recognizes different outlooks and corresponding modes of life. But it is no use denying the fact that a sort of hierarchy has been evolved in the caste system, but it cannot be called the creation of the Brahmins. When all castes accept a common goal of life a hierarchy is inevitable, because all castes cannot realize the ideal in equal degree. If all the</p>
<p>castes believe that vegetarian diet is superior to animal diet, the vegetarian caste will naturally be looked up to. There are certain sub-castes in India that have ever stood on a par with each other, and yet have not interdined or intermarried. Just as a Hindu or a Mohammedan does not think himself an inferior of the other because</p>
<p>of his differences of faith, or just as a Brahmin or a Lingayat in Southern India mutually refuse to inter drink, all castes can confine their food and drink to their own caste. Only by accepting the standard of the Brahmin or the Vaishnavas as the best, have the other castes consented to dine at the hands of the ‘purer’ castes. Touch, drink, food and marriage are progressively private affairs. But by refusing to touch a man, you practically refuse all intercourse with him. He is thus denied all the fruits of social development. The touchable, for instance, can all attend the kathas, the kirtans (religious sermons). They can visit temples and thus get the</p>
<p>free education of religion, rituals and arts. In the temple, all the touchable exchange their love and service and the fruits of civilization. The ‘untouchables’ are automatically barred from all that. In many places, being required to live outside the village, they are deprived of even the protection of their life and property. In the social division of labour they do one of the most important duties to society, and they are deprived of the fruits of the great social life which is evolved by the family of castes. Untouchability has made the ‘depressed’ classes the Cinderella of Hindu society. The question of food and drink has or ought to have no social value. It is merely the satisfaction of physical wants. It is, on the other hand, an opportunity for the control of the senses. Inter dining has never been known to promote brotherhood in any special sense. But the restraints about inter dining have to a great extent helped the cultivation of will-power and the conservation of certain social virtues.</p>
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<p><b>Reference:</b></p>
<p>Young India, 29-12-1920</p>
<p> </p>Discussion Aboard The Gurkha with Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-08-12:2043530:BlogPost:769012014-08-12T09:38:33.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Discussion Aboard The Gurkha with Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>December 16, 1920</p>
<p>I: The…</p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Discussion Aboard The Gurkha with Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>December 16, 1920</p>
<p>I: The immediate aim of non-co-operation, then, is to protest against injustice, isn’t it?</p>
<p>G: No, it is not protest, but purification. Through self-purification, purification of the other party.</p>
<p>G. Quite so.</p>
<p>E. Well, do you feel that you have succeeded in bringing about such purification in any degree?</p>
<p>G. I have been touring the country these days and I am quite surprised to observe how people are learning self-restraint and self-reliance. Even the peasants are developing both these qualities and I feel that British officers, too, have not remained unaffected. Their minds, too, are being purified.</p>
<p>E. Through this purification, what would you have the British do? In what respect do you want their conduct to change?</p>
<p>G. I wish to bring about a state of affairs in which every Englishman would look upon every Indian as his equal. I want to bring down the Englishman from the superior heights from which he talks and to make him think of even the most ordinary Indian labourer as his equal. I want to create a state of affairs in which he</p>
<p>would not slight an Indian in any dealings with the latter, would, on the contrary, in all affairs deal with him as with an equal partner. On no other terms can the Englishman have a place in India. The moment the British and the Indians both come to feel this sense of equality, feel it as a reality, my country will have won its freedom. And to bring about this result, it will be enough if the fetish they make of prestige and dignity is destroyed. What do you find today on all sides? Indians</p>
<p>afraid of the British—Indians concealing their thoughts from others. What can be more degrading than this?</p>
<p>E. Don’t you think you are asking too much when you say that every Englishman should look upon even a labourer in India as his equal? Does every Indian gentleman do so? It would be reason if you merely asked that an Englishman should behave towards Indians as he would towards other Englishmen. He should behave towards an Indian labourer as any English squire would behave towards his farmers.</p>
<p>G. Wonderful. You have put it so much more beautifully than I. That is just what I mean.</p>
<p>I. So, then, you say even the immediate aim of non-co-operation with an unjust Government is purification irrespective of whether purification does or does not bring any material benefits?</p>
<p>G. When we have gone through a full measure of untainted self-suffering, material benefits will follow as a matter of course. For instance, nothing will then remain to be done in regard to the Punjab atrocities. Not only will none of those guilty of the Punjab crimes have any place in India, it will also be impossible to pay salary or</p>
<p>pension to any of them from our treasury.</p>
<p>E. Have you, then, reserved punishment only for the British? Crimes were committed even by Indians—common Indians. What about them?</p>
<p>G. This is an astonishing question. We have been punished for our crimes a thousand times more severely than we deserved. I assure you that not only have all the guilty been punished, but hundreds of innocent people also have been killed. Innocent people have had to suffer imprisonment. Even children suffered. Innocent women were humiliated. The victims of the Jallianwala massacre, too, were innocent people. What punishment more severe than this can you think of? However, I have said nothing about punishing British officers. All that I have suggested is that they should not still continue to receive Indian money and to hold any titles or posts. As for punishing them, the only punishment for some of them</p>
<p>can be hanging. My religion has no room for this. I do not know what India wants.</p>
<p>Talking of this subject, I remember an incident. When Mr. Andrews compared the Jallianwala Bagh massacre to the massacre of Glencoe1, I hastened to publish in Young India even an account of the latter. I did that only in order to show the revulsion Mr. Andrews must have felt at the cruelty of the Jallianwala massacre. But on rereading the account, I felt that Mr. Andrews had been a little unjust and I felt quite unhappy about the matter. I saw Principal Rudra2 had a talk with him; he also thought as I did. But I realize today the aptness of Mr. Andrews’ comparison. I now feel that the Jallianwala massacre was even more wicked, more reprehensible than the other one, for there is a whole world of difference between the state of civilization then and now.</p>
<p>I. Why do you say that the Government has attacked our religion? It was but one partner in the Grand Council of the victorious Allies.</p>
<p>G. I am surprised to hear a man like you asking such a question at this hour of the day. The leading part in planning the dismemberment of Turkey was taken by England. The Prime Minister’s actions are now recoiling on himself. Having outraged his nonconformist conscience, he has, in order to satisfy it, had to go back</p>
<p>on his promise5 and has hurt the Muslims thereby.</p>
<p>I. Well, let’s turn to another matter. You have been asking the students to leave their schools, but do you make any alternative arrangements for their education?</p>
<p>I. Is the present educational system bad, then?</p>
<p>G. The question doesn’t arise at all. But I have no objection to replying to it. I say, “Yes, it is bad.” The medium of education being English has doubled the load on the students’ brains. How should I explain to you what is in my mind? Men like Professor Jadunath Sarkar say that the class educated under the system of a foreign</p>
<p>medium has lost its intellectual vigour. Our imaginative and creative faculties have been completely destroyed. The whole of our time is taken up with learning the pronunciation and the idiom of a foreign tongue. From its very nature this is mere drudgery, and the result has been that we function like blotting-paper before Western civilization; instead of imbibing the best from it, we have become its superficial imitators. The second result is that a gulf has been created between us</p>
<p>and the masses. We cannot explain to them in a language which they will understand even the elements of hygiene and public health, let alone politics. We have become the modern counterparts of the Brahmins of old days; in fact, we are worse, for the Brahmins didn’t mean ill. They were the trustees of the nation’s culture. We are not even that. Actually, we have been misusing our education, behaving towards the common people as if we were superior. I should like you</p>
<p>to cross-examine me on this matter. Let me say, however, that these views of mine are not recent but are the fruit of many years’ experience.</p>
<p>E. We have never thought about this aspect of the matter, and so all we can say</p>
<p>is that we shall now think about it.</p>
<p>G. That’s right. I forgot one thing. I forgot to say that the system has killed us spiritually. Since you have been worshippers of secular education, the Hindus did not get any religious education. In England, the result has not been quite so bad. There the priests arrange to provide some religious education.</p>
<p>I. The thing is that you do not want your children to be educated with robbed</p>
<p>money; am I right?</p>
<p>G. Yes, not only not with robbed money, but not under the robber’s flag either. I have said that we should have nothing to do with schools controlled by a Government which has forfeited our loyalty and our love. I shall tell you a simple thing. There was a time when not only did I myself use to sing “God save the King” with the greatest fervour but had even got my sons, who did not know English, to learn it by heart. When I returned from Africa to Rajkot, I taught the anthem to the students of the Training College also, for I thought that every loyal citizen must know it. But what is the position today? I certainly cannot lay my hand on my heart and sing it or ask anyone else to sing it. I would say that as a good man, King George should live long. But I cannot bring myself to pray that an Empire which has debased itself before man and God should live a moment longer.</p>
<p>I. You said you did not care what the actual system of education was.</p>
<p>G. Yes, that is so.</p>
<p>I. Our universities are run by Indians; their policies are also determined by Indians.</p>
<p>G. Yes, that is true. If the people who run the universities would listen to me, I would simply ask them to tear up their charters. Then I would say that the universities were mine. If they protest that in that case Government grants would stop, I am prepared to give them a guarantee that I would get the funds. All that I am asking them to do is to make the universities national. What did I tell even Panditji? “Return the charter to the Viceroy and, if the Maharajas want their</p>
<p>money back, return even that. We shall meet the deficit by begging. If you have an incomparable gift of begging from Maharajas, I have some gift of begging from the common people.”</p>
<p>I. But what harm has the “charter” done?</p>
<p>G. Why, with the charter comes all that the Government means. It is because of its charter that the Hindu University will honour the Duke of Connaught. How can I stand this? No; I tell you the truth. Mrs. Besant was right when she once said that I wanted a political revolution. Only, the revolution should not be a simple revolution but an evolutionary revolution. But a revolution, I think, there must be.</p>
<p>There is no alternative. Just see how the Government has lost all sense of decency. Look at the shameless public statement it has issued recently. Weaving an elaborate web of big phrases, the Government say that at present they have given freedom to the Press, that they do not intend to gag anyone. But actually what are they doing? Why did they gag the silent worker of the Punjab, Aga Sufdar? He has nothing of the fanatic in him; I have not seen another silent worker like him in the Punjab. And only the other day, Babu Shyam Sunder Chakravarti of The Servant told me that he had received a warning from the Government. Why? Is it for reproducing Mr. Rajagopalachari’s article “Suggestion to Voters” published in Young India? This is an intolerable situation.</p>
<p>I. Let us now turn to courts. What do you have in mind when you ask lawyers to</p>
<p>leave courts and give up practice?</p>
<p>G. I want to shatter the Government’s prestige. It is these courts and schools that strengthen the foundation on which its prestige rests. It is with them that the Government has ensnared the people.</p>
<p>I. How will disputes be settled, then?</p>
<p>G. Shall I tell you my experience? In the course of my practice, I got 75 per cent of my cases settled out of court, and I was considered an expert in getting cases settled in this way. I had earned a name there for my impartiality. And, therefore, as soon as the party received a notice from me, he came running to me and requested a settlement. Many people felt obliged for this reason to engage two solicitors. If they did not get things their way with me, they would approach another solicitor to fight their case. I accepted only clean cases.</p>
<p>E. Do you think there will be many litigants who will have such trust?</p>
<p>G. If 50 per cent of the litigants avoid going to courts, the number of cases will be reduced by 50 per cent. I have been told that 50 per cent of the cases are created by touts. Mr. Das said that this was not so in Calcutta but others told me that he had no experience about this.</p>
<p>A Calcutta pleader who had been following the conversation intervened at this</p>
<p>point to remark that mofussil courts were full of touts.</p>
<p>I. Maybe, but I am talking about cities. The Bengal Chamber of Commerce has</p>
<p>set up an “Arbitration Tribunal”. The Chamber is said to be an influential body, bat</p>
<p>the number of business men’s cases going to courts has not gone down.</p>
<p>G. It is possible, for the number of lawyers has not decreased.</p>
<p>I. What effect will it have if a solitary individual gives up practice?</p>
<p>G. It is bound to have some; effect, relatively speaking. I would certainly say that the tottering structure of the Government’s prestige has received one more push by Pandit Motilal Nehru’s giving up practice. You may ask Sir Harcourt Butler.</p>
<p>E. You have been dissuading intending litigants, too, from going to courts; haven’t you?</p>
<p>G. Yes.</p>
<p>E. But how will that be? In your case, the litigants trusted you. You could only</p>
<p>settle the affairs of those who approached you with a clean conscience and with clean hands. You didn’t even look at others with unclean hands who might come to you. What will you do about such people? There will hardly be any cases in which both the parties have clean consciences and clean hands.</p>
<p>G. Without the least hesitation, I would make a gift of the unclean ones to the Government.</p>
<p>I. I hope you know that we have not come to you to quarrel with you, but only</p>
<p>to understand. We will ask only one more question. Isn’t it true that the</p>
<p>non-co-operation of your followers rests on malice and hatred?</p>
<p>G. Yes. An English friend from Madras has also written to me about this.</p>
<p>E. I understand your principle, but the tongues of your followers utter undiluted</p>
<p>poison.</p>
<p>G. Yes, yes, but my position is that a noble action, whether done with love or hatred, cannot but yield fruit. Whether truth is spoken out of fear or purposefully, it cannot but have its fruit.</p>
<p>I. Your principle is: hate the sin, but not the sinner. But that of your followers seems to be the reverse of this—hate the sinner; there is no need to hate sin.</p>
<p>G. Are you not being unjust? Some hate both sin and the sinner. It is because they hate sin that they have been renouncing so much, have come forward to make such heavy sacrifices. Do you think anyone who merely hated the sinner could make these sacrifices? Never.</p>
<p>E. Your fundamental principle is not to associate yourself with sinners. Then</p>
<p>how can you work with ungodly colleagues? How can a man working from the exalted position that you take work with impure instruments?</p>
<p>G. Will you compare the Government’s ungodliness with the imperfections of my colleagues? Consider a little further and you will understand. Any reformer—and I am a reformer—is bound to carry on with whatever instruments are available to him—not impure instruments, but, say, imperfect instruments.</p>
<p>I. We have given you so much trouble today. Kindly excuse us. I have been till now opposing non-co-operation, but today I realize that the non co-operation I opposed was not non-co-operation as I understand it from you today. We are both grateful to you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Reference:</b></p>
<p>Navajivan, 29-12-1920</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Dyerism in Champaran – Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-08-12:2043530:BlogPost:767072014-08-12T09:02:07.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b> Dyerism in Champaran – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Champarn is that made famous to Mahatma Gandhi.…</p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b> Dyerism in Champaran – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Champarn is that made famous to Mahatma Gandhi. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi became Mahatma here. Everybody called him Mahatma during Styagraha. During Non-Co-Operation movement, he read this news by a paper, inquired about it, and then wrote this article.</p>
<p>India is a land full of tragedies. Champaran probably contributes the largest number of them. The Searchlight of Patna has just reported one such awful tragedy. It is being investigated by a local Congress Committee of which Mr. Mazharul Haq is the chairman. I do not propose to anticipate the verdict. I understand that the matter is also engaging the Bihar Government’s attention. But as I happened to be in Bettiah, together with Maulana Shaukat Ali in connection with our non-co-operation tour, I venture to give my own impressions gathered from a hurried visit to the spot.</p>
<p>The tragedy took place about fourteen miles from Bettiah, about the 30th November, 1920 last. I do not think that the Government, i.e., the high officials, had any part in its enactment nor had the English planters. This seems to have been peculiarly a police matter, in which the police have acted in an irresponsible manner and without the knowledge of the higher authorities.</p>
<p>Its origin lies in a petty dispute between villagers that resulted in a petty assault. In connection with it a local man of influence was arrested by the police. The villagers appear to have resented it and rescued the man, and even surrounded the constables who arrested him. This proved too much for the wounded dignity of the police. The local Daroga, i.e., Sub-Inspector of Police, is said to have organized a loot in which, under the guidance and direction of the police, men from a neighboring village also are said to have taken part. Houses were denuded of their contents—grain and ornaments.</p>
<p>Women are reported to have been molested and robbed of their jewellery. One woman told me that she was made naked and dust was thrown into her eyes. Another was equally grossly maltreated while she was in the act of easing herself. The villagers had fled in a cowardly manner. Houses were shown to us in which the grain kothis were found to be emptied and broken, grain scattered about, big</p>
<p>boxes unlocked and opened—with the contents removed. Needless to say that the rescued man was almost immediately rearrested and several other men, too, were arrested by the police.</p>
<p>Among them is a local brahmachari. He is a man of considerable influence. He has succeeded in organizing Panchayats settling local disputes. His activity bids fair to popularize the principle of arbitration among the villagers. The police, naturally wanting to undermine his influence and suspecting him of having had a hand in</p>
<p>inciting the people to defy their authority (so it appears from the evidence given to me), have arrested the brahmachari who is now out on bail.</p>
<p>I am unconcerned with the result of the trials that will now probably take place. Some of the arrested men will no doubt be convicted on concocted evidence. Of all the places in India, the most perjury committed on either side is in Champaran. Incredible as it may appear, the occurrence I have reported is not the first of its kind.</p>
<p>The Champaran peasantry is the most helpless and the most terror-stricken of all I have seen. They dread the approach of the police and leave their villages as soon as they appear on the scene. The police have become equally demoralized: bribery and corruption are rampant among them. And each time the people have resented the police treatment, as in the case in point, they have been reduced to greater helplessness by a system of terrorism, in which the magistracy has taken no mean part on behalf of the local Dyers. At times the police have been reprimanded by magistrates or the Government. That they do not mind. The lower police never even know anything about such reprimands; and they care less. The system of terrorism continues and flourishes.</p>
<p>How are the people to be helped? How is the corruption to be removed? Certainly not by courting an official inquiry. That must result in only strengthening the police. Already the police is fortifying its position. Certainly not by the villagers seeking the protection of the courts. It is my settled conviction, based on a study of the records of cases, that in the vast majority of them the people have lost both in</p>
<p>money and in power. An isolated discharge of an innocent man is all they can show as a result of paying fortunes to the lawyers and the bribe-takers.</p>
<p>This police, composed mainly of our own men, must be reformed and won over by non-resistance. We have unnecessarily vilified them instead of pitying them. They are victims of a vicious and even inglorious system. I decline to believe that the Indian policemen are inherently bad and that the Government are powerless to reform them. On the contrary, the system of the Government is such as to corrupt even the most honest of men. It is based upon the practice of securing the greatest immunity for itself. It has made of prestige a fetish and has arrogated to itself the position of infallibility and protection.</p>
<p>Local men everywhere must therefore befriend the police, and the best way of befriending them is to cease to fear them or their authority. In the present case, the village must be advised to forget the wrong. If they can recover stolen property by seeking the intervention of friends, they must do so. They must patiently suffer imprisonment. As defendants, they must resolutely decline to be represented by</p>
<p>pleaders. They must give an unvarnished version to the court. They must submit to misrepresentation, even to the taunt of having no case.</p>
<p>And in future, if and when such incidents happen, they must be prepared to defend themselves. It is better if they can manfully stand persecution and allow themselves to be robbed, instead of hitting in defence of their persons or property. That would indeed be their crowning triumph. But such forbearance can only be exercised out of strength and not out of weakness. Till that power is acquired, they must be prepared to resist the wrongdoer by force. When a policeman comes not to arrest but to molest, he travels beyond his authority. The citizen has then the inalienable right of treating him as a robber and dealing with him as such. He will therefore use sufficient force to prevent him from robbing. He will most decidedly use force in order to defend the honour of his womanhood. The doctrine of non-violence is not for the weak and the cowardly; it is meant for the brave and the strong. The bravest man allows himself to be killed without killing. And he desists from killing or injuring, because he knows that it is wrong to injure. Not so the villagers of Champaran.</p>
<p>They flee from the police. They would strike and even kill a policeman if they had no fear of the law. They gain no merit of non-violence but on the contrary incur the reproach of cowardice and unmanliness, they stand condemned before Government and man. But the workers among a people so fallen as in Champaran will have to be most careful about what they do. They and the people will put themselves in the wrong if they resist the police in the lawful execution of their office, even though the execution may prove or appear to them to be unlawful. The police must not be resisted if they arrest without a warrant. They must not take the law into their own</p>
<p>hands but scrupulously obey it. The safeguard against any serious blunder lies in the fact that on no account are they to seek the protection of the law. If, therefore, they are in the wrong, they will invariably suffer punishment. And when they are in the right, they will most probably not suffer punishment, and they will always have the satisfaction of having saved, or attempted to save, the property, or, what is infinitely better, the honour of their women. In the case in point, it was wrong to rescue the man who was arrested even though in the opinion of the villagers he was innocent. It was wrong because thepolice had the authority in law to effect arrests. It was cowardly on their part to have fled on the approach of the police; it would have been right for them to have defended their women and their goods. If they had not fled, they, being so numerous, would easily have saved their property and protected their women merely by standing their ground. In no case would the villagers have been justified in doing more bodily injury than was needed on the occasion. It is invariably a sign of cowardice and madness to use excessive force. A brave man does not kill a thief but arrests him and hands him to the police. A</p>
<p>braver man uses just enough force to drive him out and thinks no more about it. The bravest realizes that the thief knows no better, reasons with him, risks being thrashed and even killed, but does not retaliate. We must at any cost cease to be cowardly and unmanly.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Reference:</b></p>
<p>Young India, 15-12-1920</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>On The Wrong Track – Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-08-12:2043530:BlogPost:767052014-08-12T07:31:54.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>On The Wrong Track – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi was very busy during movement, but he was…</p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>On The Wrong Track – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi was very busy during movement, but he was aware to every activity of it. When he saw that there were some mistakes done by people of India, He told to everybody that our movement is going on wrong track. He wrote an article on it in Young India.</p>
<p>Lord Ronaldshay has been doing me the favor of reading my booklet on Indian Home Rule which is a translation of Hind Swaraj. His Lordship told his audience that if Swaraj meant what I had described it to be in the booklet, the Bengalis would have none of it. I am sorry that the Swaraj of the Congress resolution does not mean the Swaraj depicted in the booklet; Swaraj according to the Congress</p>
<p>Means the Swaraj that the people of India want, not what the British Government may condescend to give. In so far as I can see, Swaraj will be a parliament chosen by the people with the fullest power over the finance, the police, the military, the navy, the courts and the educational institutions.</p>
<p>I am free to confess that the Swaraj I expect to gain within one year, if India responds, will be such Swaraj as will make practically impossible the repetition of the Khilafat and the Punjab wrongs, and will enable the nation to do good or evil as it chooses, and not be ‘good’ at the dictation of an irresponsible, insolent, and godless bureaucracy. Under that Swaraj, the nation will have the power to impose a heavy protective tariff on such foreign goods as are capable of being manufactured in India, as also the power to refuse to send a single soldier outside India for the purpose of enslaving the surrounding or remote nationalities. The Swaraj that I dream of will be a possibility only when the nation is free to make its choice both of good and evil.</p>
<p>I adhere to all I have said in that booklet and I would certainly recommend it to the reader. Government over self is the truest Swaraj. It is synonymous with moksha or salvation, and I have seen nothing to alter the view that doctors, lawyers and railways are no help, and are often a hindrance to the one thing worth striving after. But I know that association with a satanic activity, such as the Government is engaged in, makes even an effort for such freedom a practical impossibility. I cannot tender allegiance to God and Satan at the same time.</p>
<p>The surest sign of the satanic nature of the present system is that even a nobleman of the type of Lord Ronaldshay is obliged to put us on a wrong track. He will not deal with the one thing needed. Why is he silent about the Punjab? Why does he evade the Khilafat? Can ointments soothe a patient who is suffering from corroding consumption? Does his Lordship not see that it is not the inadequacy?</p>
<p>of the reforms that has set India aflame but that it is the infliction of the two wrongs and the wicked attempt to make us forget them? Does he not see that a complete change of heart is required before reconciliation?</p>
<p>But it has become the fashion nowadays to ascribe hatred to non-co-operations. And I regret to find that even Colonel Wedgwood fallen into the trap. I make bold to say that the only way to remove hatred is to give it disciplined vent. No man can —I cannot—perform the impossible task of removing hatred so long as contempt and despise for the feelings of India are sedulously nursed. It is a mockery to ask India not to hate when in the same breath India’s most sacred feelings are contemptuously brushed aside. India feels weak and helpless and so expresses her helplessness by hating the tyrant who despises her and makes her crawl on the belly, lifts the veils of her innocent women and compels her tender children to acknowledge his power by saluting his flag four times a day. The gospel of non-co-operation addresses itself to the task of making the people strong and self-reliant. It is an attempt to transform hatred into pity.</p>
<p>A strong and self-reliant India will cease to hate Bosworth Smiths and Frank Johnsons, for she will have the power to punish them and therefore the power also to pity and forgive them. Today she can neither punishes nor forgive, and therefore helplessly nurses hatred. If the Mussulmans were strong, they would not hate the</p>
<p>English but would fight and wrest from them the dearest possessions of Islam. I know that the Ali Brothers, who live only for the honor and prestige of Islam and are prepared any moment to die for it, will today make friends with the hated Englishmen, if they were to do justice to the Khilafat, which it is in their power to do.</p>
<p>I am positively certain that there is no personal element in this fight. Both the Hindus and the Mohammedans would today invoke blessings on the English if they would but give proof positive of their goodness, faithfulness, and loyalty to India. Non-co-operation then is a godsend; it will purify and strengthen India; and a strong India will be strength to the world, as an India, weak and helpless, is a curse to mankind. Indian soldiers have involuntarily helped to destroy Turkey and are now destroying the flower of the great Arabian nation. I cannot recall a single campaign in which the Indian soldier has been employed by the British Government for the good of mankind and yet Indian Maharajas are never tired of priding themselves on the loyal help they have rendered the English! Could degradation sink any lower?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Reference:</b></p>
<p>Young India, 8-12-1920</p>
<p> </p>Save the Cow – Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-08-10:2043530:BlogPost:768042014-08-10T10:06:49.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Save the Cow – Mahatma…</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Save the Cow – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy was based on villages of India. Main occupation of villages is farming and farming depends on son of cows. And there need depend on cow milk. They made many things by cow milk, So mahatma Gandhi always</p>
<p>Professor Vaswani has unfurled the banner of the cow’s freedom. The danger has come sooner that I had expected. I had hoped that it would come when India could regard it with equanimity. In my humble opinion, Professor Vaswani might have started the movement under better auspices. Any movement started by Hindus for protecting the cow, without whole-hearted Mussulman co-operation, is doomed to failure.</p>
<p>The Hindus’ participation in the Khilafat is the greatest and the best movement for cow-protection. I have therefore called Khilafat our Kamadhuk. The Mussulmans are striving their utmost to respect Hindu susceptibilities in this matter of life and death to the Hindu. The Muslim League under Hakin Ajmal Khan’s presidentship carried a cow-protection resolution at Amritsar two years ago. Maulana Abdul</p>
<p>Bari has written upon it. The Ali Brothers, for the sake of their Hindu countrymen, have given up the use of beef in their house. Mian Chhotani saved hundreds of cows in Bombay alone during the last Bakr-i-Id. We could not accuse our Mussulman countrymen of apathy in the matter.</p>
<p>The surest way of defeating our object is to rush Mussulmans. I do not know that Mussulman honour has ever been found wanting. With them, as with everyone, prejudices die hard. We have got enlightened Mussulman opinion with us. It must take time for it to react upon the Mussulman masses. The Hindus must therefore be</p>
<p>patient.</p>
<p>There is nothing strange about all the Shikarpur Hindus’ having voted unanimously in favour of the prohibiiton of cow-slaughter. Is there a Hindu who will not vote for it? The use of that unanimous opinion for bearing down Mussulman opposition is the way to stiffen it. The Hindu members must have known, must have ascertained, Mussulman feeling. And they should have refrained from going to a</p>
<p>division., so long as the Mussulman opinion was against them. Let us recognize that there is an interest actively working to keep us—Hindus and Mussulmans—divided. That very interest is quite capable of developing regard for Hindu susceptibilities in this respect. I should beware of it, and distrust it. I strongly advise the Shikarpur friends to wait for their Mussulman brethren.</p>
<p>Let them by all means abstain from all meat, so that their Mussulman brethren may have other meat cheaper than beef. Let them consider it a shame to have a single cow or her progeny in distress, or undergoing ill-treatment at the hands of Hindus themselves.</p>
<p>Let them develop their Goshala so as to make it a model dairy farm as well as a home for aged and infirm cattle. Let them breed the finest cattle in their Goshala. They will do real service to Gomata1. Let the Shikarpuris one and all beocme true non-co-operators, and hasten the redress of the Khilafat wrong. I promise they will save the cow when they have done their utmost to save the Khilafat. It must be an article of faith for every Hindu that the cow can only be saved by Mussulman friendship. Let us recognize frankly that complete protection of the cow depends purely upon Mussulman goodwill. It is as impossible to bend he Mussulmans to our will as it would be for them to bend us to theirs. We are evolving the doctrine of equal and free partnership. We are fighting Dyerism—the doctrine of frightfulness.</p>
<p>Cow-protection is the dearest possession of the Hindu heart. It is the one concrete belief common to all Hindus. No one who does not believe in cow-protection can possibly be a Hindu. It is a noble belief. I endorse every word of what Professor Vaswani has said in praise of the cow. Cow-worship means to me worship of innocence. For me the cow is the personification of innocence. Cow-protection</p>
<p>means the protection of the weak and the helpless. As Professor Vaswani truly remarks, cow-protection means brotherhood between man and beast. It is a noble sentiment that must grow by patient toil and tapasya. It cannot be imposed upon anyone. To carry cowprotection at the point of the sword is a contradiction in terms. Rishis of old are said to have performed penance for the sake of the cow. Let us follow in the footsteps of the rishis, and ourselves do penance, so that we may be pure enough to protect the cow and all that the doctrine means and implies.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Reference:</b></p>
<p>Young India, 8-6-1921</p>
<p> </p>Swaraj is self-reliance – Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-08-10:2043530:BlogPost:768012014-08-10T06:58:47.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Swaraj is self-reliance – Mahatma…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Swaraj is self-reliance – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi wanted Swaraj for India, not independent. It meant complete independent. He wanted to make it self-reliance also. He thought if it is not self reliance, it has no value - An esteemed friend, referring to the Viceregal interview, writes: In my humble opinion, these interviews by non-co-operation leaders are, in</p>
<p>the present circumstances, a political mistake, and may react on the movement. Back of the Punjab and the Khilafat wrongs is the question of Swaraj; and India's Swaraj means the death of the Empire. Such a death may, in happy circumstances, mean its rebirth as a commonwealth of nations. But where is the statesman today, with a free and generous view of world politics, to look beyond British interests to the deeper values of humanity? Victory of the Swaraj movement I conceive in terms of self-reliance, not of snatching some concessions from Lord Reading. As far as I can see, the hope for an escape from further confusion lies in escape from negotiations with the Government and becoming as a Nation strong in the will to suffer. A crucified India will be an India emancipated.</p>
<p>Whilst I do not agree with the writer that the interviews were a political mistake, the statement of our attitude is perfect. Our concern is not with what British statesmen will or will not do. Our business is always of endeavor to keep ourselves on the right track. Our aloofness must not be a sign of our haughtiness or disinclination to explain our view-points to our opponents. We must be prepared to</p>
<p>approach the world, if we are firm in our own purpose. But I recognize, too, the force of the objection that there is danger in these interviews. Not being in the habit of having always a reserve of minimum on which there can be no surrender, we may easily slip.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Reference:</b></p>
<p>Young India, 8-6-1921</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Pilgrimage to Maharashtra – Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-08-10:2043530:BlogPost:767022014-08-10T06:34:48.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Pilgrimage to Maharashtra – Mahatma…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact only on mail</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Pilgrimage to Maharashtra – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi spent a lot of time in Maharashtra. He did his maximum activities here. There are so many political leaders, who inspired him. He loved Maharashtra very much, So he gave pilgrimage to Maharashtra - A visit to the province in which Lokamanya Tilak Maharaj was born, the province which has produced heroes in the modern age, which gave Shivaji and in which Ramdas and Tukaram flourished, is for me nothing less than a pilgrimage. I have always believed that Maharashtra, if it wills, can do anything. Its skepticism, however, is</p>
<p>every a cause of grief to me. I always feel that he province in which the best work can be done has done the least. I gather that the workers in Maharashtra hold the same view. After leaving simla, I went to Kalka and then to Ambala. From there I proceeded to Khandwa in the Central Provinces and thence to Bhusaval, Sangamner and Yeola. I am writing these notes on my way to Kurduwadi. For going there, one has to go from Yeola to Dhond and change trains there. As our train arrived late at Dhond and the connecting train had already left, I got some experience of Dhond as well. I felt that the masses everywhere had the same faith but there were not enough workers. people lack capacity for organization, there is no end to noise and bustle and they get crowds of people to fill station platforms. As for the result, however, I found it poor in Bhusaval, Sangamner and Yeola at any rate, though he people who had invited me to these places were capable workers.</p>
<p>Where have we now the time for all this fuss and shouts of victory and bending to touch my feet in reverence? If we can spare time to go to station platforms, why not spend it in plying the spinning-wheet? Why not use it in collecting contributions to the National Fund? Do we not have to enrol a large number of Congress members? The position now is that we shall be able to complete the programme before the end of June, as decided, only if we work round the clock. Though two months have elapsed, we have not done even two-thirds of the work, not even one-half. If we fail to complete the programme of work by the end of June, it will only show that our will and capacity to win swaraj are not great.</p>
<p>The collections at Bhusaval and Sangamner could be taken as on the whole satisfactory, but at Yeola, I must say, the collections came almost to nothing. Yeola is a rich town. It has Gujarati business men settled there for the last 200 years and yet the amount collected there for the Tilak Swaraj Fund was the smallest. It is true, of course, that one person alone in Yeola gave Rs. 20,000 for a national school. But, then negotiations for the donation had been going on for a long time.</p>
<p>The donor, besides, is well known for his charitable disposition. For the Tilak Fund, however, contributions were to be collected from the general public. The total collections from all, men and women, must have come hardly to Rs. 300, while a small village near Yeola, which we passed on the way, gave the same amount.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Reference:</b></p>
<p>Navajivan, 29-5-1921</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>We are habituated to pass resolutions without acting on them – Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-07-07:2043530:BlogPost:762032014-07-07T09:35:44.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>We are habituated…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>We are habituated to pass resolutions without acting on them – Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi declared to oppose Simon Commission. He went to every part of India for aware to the people. He reached Hardoi, one of the famous district of Uttar Pradesh on dated 11 October, 1929 and spoke at Political Conference that “We are habituated to pass resolutions without acting on them. I advise you to give up this mentality. This is one main obstacle in our path of progress. Had we fulfilled our promises of 1921, we should have attained swaraj long before. Another occasion is approaching on the people of this province as it is your province which has given the President of the next Congress. The responsibility is all the greater on the youth. Pandit Jawaharlal belongs to your province. At the same time, he is a youth. If you want to preserve your prestige and his too, you have to act as you say. You have already passed a resolution on untouchability. I hope you will pass similar resolutions on Hindu-Muslim unity and boycott of foreign cloth, which is possible only if you use khaddar. If you pass these resolutions, you have to abide by them. I hope and pray that you be prepared for the great struggle before us. 1</p>
<p>Next day Mahatma Gandhi spoke on subject Khaddar and Untouchability: Duty of Indian Municipalities on behalf of this question “What can Indian municipalities do in the matter of khaddar and untouchability?</p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi spoke:</p>
<ol>
<li>By prescribing the use of khaddar for the uniform of its employees. This will be effective only if the members will themselves wear khaddar.</li>
<li>By making all purchases of cloth for hospitals and the like in khaddar only.</li>
<li>By introducing the takli and carding-bow in all the schools under its control.</li>
<li>by removing all duty upon khaddar and by giving grants to khaddar depots within municipal limits.</li>
</ol>
<p>In the matter of untouchability a municipality can help…</p>
<ol>
<li> by promoting the reform by insisting upon inspectors of municipal schools securing admission therein of a minimum number of ‘untouchable’ boys and girls.</li>
<li> By opening model schools especially for the instruction of ‘untouchable’ children.</li>
<li>By opening night schools for grown-up ‘untouchables’ in its employ.</li>
<li> By inducing trustees of temples to open them to ‘untouchables’, and where this is not possible, by building attractive temples in suitable places, specially for the use of ‘untouchables’, but generally for public use, and encouraging the public to make use of these temples in common with the ‘untouchables’.</li>
<li> By giving grants to schools, temples and clubs, etc., that would specially cater for ‘untouchables’.</li>
</ol>
<p>But this untouchability will soon be a thing of past. Hindu society has become conscious of the hideous wrong done to man by this sinful doctrine. Hundreds of Hindu workers are devoting themselves to the uplift of these suppressed classes. Among them may be named late Swami Shraddhanandji and the late Lala Lajpat Rai. These, however, may not be regarded as orthodox. Pandit Madan Mohan Malviyaji, who is accepted by all Hindus as an orthodox Hindu, has thrown in the weight of his great influence on the side of reform. Everywhere one sees the process of emancipation silently but surely and steadily going on. The so called higher-class Hindus are conducting schools and building hostels for them, giving them medical relief and serving them in a variety of ways. The effort is absolutely independent of the Government and is part of the process of purification that Hinduism is undergoing. Lastly, the Indian National Congress adopted removal of untouchability as a vital part of its constructive programmed in 1920. It may not be superfluous to add that while untouchability is undoubtedly a grave social wrong, it has no legal sanction behind it. So far as I am aware, there is no legal disability against the ‘untouchables’.</p>
<p>The reformer has still a stiff task before him in having to convert the masses to his point of view. The masses give intellectual assent to the reformers’ plea, but are slow to grant equality in practice to their outcaste brethren. Nevertheless, untouchability is doomed, and Hinduism is saved. And, as I have indicated above, our municipalities can do much to bring about this salvation. 2</p>
<p>He honored in Regional High School and spoke to women also. He inaugurated Khadi Bhandar, Hardoi on same day.</p>
<p>Mahatma Gandhi wrote letters to Amal Hom – Editor of Kolkata Municipal Gadget, Fredrik Stuntmen – Austria, Hariji Govil – United State of America, Tag Vend Guard – Denmark, Eleanor M. Hug – Washington, USA, Hennery S. Salt – England, K. V. Swami – Parla khimedi, Edle Kaufman, C. Vijyaraghavachariyar – Selam, Chhaganlal Joshi – Ahmadabad. </p>
<p>References:</p>
<ol>
<li>The Bombay Chronicle, 14-10-1929</li>
<li>The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Fifth Anniversary Number, Saturday, 23rd</li>
</ol>
<p>November, 1929</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>INVITATION: The Global Peace Museum welcomes you...tag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-04-22:2043530:BlogPost:754292014-04-22T10:25:20.000ZJohn R. Nauglehttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/ATLpeace
<p>Greetings from Atlanta: City of Peace. We invite every sister and brother of our beautiful global family to help us establish the Global Peace Museum. Please "Like" & "Share"...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GlobalPeaceMuseum">http://www.facebook.com/GlobalPeaceMuseum</a></p>
<p>Greetings from Atlanta: City of Peace. We invite every sister and brother of our beautiful global family to help us establish the Global Peace Museum. Please "Like" & "Share"...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GlobalPeaceMuseum">http://www.facebook.com/GlobalPeaceMuseum</a></p>ATLANTA - Mandela Memorial at Gandhi Statue...tag:gandhiking.ning.com,2014-01-10:2043530:BlogPost:749682014-01-10T22:30:00.000ZJohn R. Nauglehttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/ATLpeace
<p>Good News!</p>
<p>GFUSA Hosts Nelson Mandela Memorial at Gandhi Statue In Atlanta!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nripulse.com/gfusa-hosts-nelson-mandela-memorial-at-gandhi-statue/">http://www.nripulse.com/gfusa-hosts-nelson-mandela-memorial-at-gandhi-statue/</a></p>
<p>Good News!</p>
<p>GFUSA Hosts Nelson Mandela Memorial at Gandhi Statue In Atlanta!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nripulse.com/gfusa-hosts-nelson-mandela-memorial-at-gandhi-statue/">http://www.nripulse.com/gfusa-hosts-nelson-mandela-memorial-at-gandhi-statue/</a></p>Shiromani Gurudwara and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-27:2043530:BlogPost:744612013-10-27T01:55:24.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Shiromani Gurudwara and Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>I have also received and studied your resolution condemning the manner in which the Government enquiry into the Nankana tragedy is being conducted, expressing want of confidence in it and appointing an unofficial Committee of Enquiry. The resolution appoints me as Chairman of the Committee. Whilst I appreciate the honour done to me, I very much fear that I shall not be able to render any useful service to the Committee or the community so long as the appointment of the Committee is intended merely to counteract any mischievous effects that might be produced by the Government enquiry. The resolution of non-co-operation passed by the Sikh League and the other national organizations really precludes the Sikh community from taking part in or assisting any investigations by the Government. I should therefore have thought that you would dissociate yourself from the enquiries solely on the ground of non-co-operation, even though such investigations might be calculated to bring temporary or partial relief in special matters. To me your want of confidence in the Government enquiry is one more illustration of the hopelessness of any association with a Government which we are seeking to destroy, if it will not mend. I would therefore urge you to reconsider your resolution and come to a decision in terms of non-co-operation or relieve me from the responsibility you have imposed on me. 1</p>
<p>The Sikh cup of sorrow is evidently not yet full. Here is a wire from Amritsar: Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee has received harrowing details of beating not excluding pulling of bears and keshas of members 2nd Shahidi Jatha in Camp Jails Nabha on 16th April. Beating inflicted to exact apologies. Committee has also received some hair and beards pulled out. There are now in Nabha one hundred and fourteen cases of sufferers of this beating. Composition as under: serious seven, contusion of head two, face eight, arm ten, thigh seven, shin eight, private parts eight, back five, minor hurts fifty one. Kindly arrange immediate visit Nabha Camp Jail. Either the statement is true or it is untrue. If it is true, it calls for an open and impartial inquiry. The Government of India cannot plead neutrality. Their own officer is administering the State. To the Sikh friends I can only say every wrong has a remedy. And this wrong, if the allegations can be sustained, will not long remain without a remedy. As a journalist as well as President of the Congress, I plead my present helplessness to render aid beyond giving publicity and tendering my sympathy, but God willing I shall not remain long helpless. Every wound inflicted on innocence is a wound cut deep into every Congressman and every journalist. And these wounds are winged messengers who carry their own tale to the four corners of the earth, pierce through the heavens and reach the great white Throne of Justice. 2</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>References:</b></p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>The Tribune, 13-3-1921</li>
<li>Young India, 23-4-1925 </li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Scindia Steam Navigation and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-27:2043530:BlogPost:744572013-10-27T01:55:07.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Scindia Steam Navigation and Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>I shall read the Note as soon as I have energy enough for taking up my normal activities. For the time being what I have of it I devote to only those matters on which I must express an Christ cannot be different. The words and the forms can differ, but the living essence is the same. And there is nobody in this world today whose words and deeds could better express this truth than yours. In you I see the personification fo all truth which was ever given to mankind.” S.N. 8303 opinion without delay. I hope you have received my letter1 posted at Poona. At present I am in Mr. Narottam’s bungalow near Andheri. It is delightfully situated, faces the sea, and the waves wash its boundary. Narottam Morarji, Agent of Scindia Steam Navigation Company. 1 Very well done, indeed! May you live long, may your virtues grow from day to day, may you always do good deeds, and may you render ever greater service to the country. Shantikumar Narottam Morarji, a Gujarati businessman of Bombay connected with the Scindia Steam Navigation Company 2</p>
<p>The ceremony performed by Sjt. Vithalbhai Patel at the launching of Jalabala, the Scindia Steam Navigation Company’s new ship, does not evoke any feeling of national pride or rejoicing. It only serves as a reminder of our fallen state. What is the addition of one little ship to our microscopic fleet? The sadness of the reminder is heightened by the fact that our mercantile fleet may at any moment be turned into a fleet warring against our own liberty or against that of nations with which India has no quarrel and with whose aspirations India may even have every sympathy, as for instance, China. There is nothing to prevent the Government from commandeering any one of the ships belonging to the swadeshi companies for carrying soldiers to punish China for daring to fight for liberty. There is no wonder, therefore, that Vithalbhai Patel, who in spite of his being the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly cannot cease to be an ardent nationalist, recalled the history of the calculated destruction of India’s mercantile marine. He pointed out to his audience that “there was a time when first-rate vessels built, owned, manned and managed by Indians used to carry the rich products of India to distant lands.” “A combination of circumstances,” which the speaker did not think it worth while to mention, “made it extremely difficult for Indians to pursue it, killed that industry outright, and subsequently made it extremely difficult for Indians to revive their past glory.” Sjt. Vithalbhai went on : “It is again interesting to note that shipping companies were started during the last 50 years in India, but they were all wiped out of existence by the rate war and other methods, about which the less said the better.” But even as a patient derives comfort, if anything gives him a little hope and a little energy, and the whole family joins him rejoicing over the acquisition of slight unexpected strength, so did Vithalbhai Patel derive joy and hope from the launching of this new enterprise of the Scindia Steam Navigation Company. Let us hope that Jalabala will be a precursor of many other steamers and that in the near future it would be possible to revive the old ship-building trade of India, and for some patriot to perform the ceremony of launching an India-built ship on Indian waters free of the fear of its being used for warring against ourselves or any other nation and free from the greed of exploitation of any other country. 3</p>
<p>Gandhiji has your letter of the 8th instant. The contents surprised him, inasmuch as an educated man like you does not understand the reason why the price of khadi has slightly gone up. It has been increased in order to enable the poor spinner to have something like a living wage. We are far yet from giving him a real living wage, but the recent increase in khadi prices ensures him a wage just enough to secure him two full meals a day. Do you, poor as you are, grudge the little increase to the men and women who are much poorer than you? The addressee, a clerk of the Scindia Steam Navigation Company, had written to Gandhiji protesting against the increase in the price of khadi. In reply Mahadev Desai wrote to him. 4</p>
<p>Three representatives of the Scindia Steam Navigation Company had an interview with Gandhiji at Segaon.... They seemed to be worried by the following among a number of things:</p>
<p>(1) The discrimination clauses. They cited from Gandhiji’s article in Young India entitled “The Giant and the Dwarf” the following statements: “To talk of no discrimination between Indian interests and English or European is to perpetuate Indian helotage. What is equality of rights between a giant and a dwarf? . . .” And again: “In almost every walk of life the Englishman by reason of his belonging to the ruling class occupies a privileged position.... The cottage industries of India had to perish in order that Lancashire might flourish. The Indian shipping had to perish, so that British shipping might flourish.” Is the shipping not to revive and rise to its full height in a free India?</p>
<p>(2) What are Indian or swadeshi companies? It has become a fashion nowadays to bamboozle the unwary public by adding “(India) Limited” to full-blooded British concerns. Lever Brothers “(India) Limited” have their factories here now. They claim to produce swadeshi soap, and have already ruined several large and small soap factories in Bengal. Then there is the Imperial Chemicals (India) Ltd. which has received valuable concessions. This is dumping foreign industries instead of foreign goods on us!</p>
<p>(3) Then there are companies with Indian Directorate with British Managing Agents who direct the Directorate. Would you call a company with a large percentage of Indian capital and a large number of Indian Directors on the Board, but with a non-Indian Managing Director or non-lndian firm as Managing Agents, a swadeshi concern? Gandhiji dealt with these points fairly exhaustively in his reply which may be summarized below in his own words:</p>
<p>(1) On this point I am glad you have reminded me of my article written in 1931. I still hold the same views, and have no doubt that a free India will have the right to discriminate—if that word must be used—against foreign interests, wherever Indian interests need it.</p>
<p>(2) As regards the definition of a swadeshi company I would say that only those concerns can be regarded as swadeshi whose control, direction and management either by a Managing Director or by Managing Agents are in Indian hands.</p>
<p>I should have no objection to the use of foreign capital, or to the employment of foreign talent, when such are not available in India, or when we need them, but only on condition that such capital and such talents are exclusively under the control, direction and management of Indians and are used in the interests of India. But the use of foreign capital or talent is one thing, and the dumping of foreign industrial concerns is totally another thing. The concerns you have named cannot in the remotest sense of the term be called swadeshi. Rather than countenance these ventures, I would prefer the development of the industries in question to be delayed by a few years in order to permit national capital and enterprise to grow up and build such industries in future under the actual control, direction and management of Indians themselves. (3) Answer to this is contained in my answer on the second point. 5</p>
<p>I am in receipt of your letter. As Rajendra Babu is going [to Vishakhapatnam] there should be no necessity of a message from me. In view, however, of my old association with the late Sheth Narottam3, I can quite understand that you would expect my blessings on this occasion. May your enterprise succeed and may it benefit the whole country. Chairman, Board of Directors, Scindia Steam Navigation Company. 6</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>References:</b></p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>Letter to H. S. L. Polak, March 15, 1924</li>
<li>Nore to Shanti Kumar Morarji, Before May 28, 1924</li>
<li>Young India, 4-8-1927 </li>
<li>The Hindu, 20-4-1936</li>
<li>Harijan, 26-3-1938</li>
<li>Letter to Walchand Hirachand, June 13, 1941</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Somnath Temple and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-27:2043530:BlogPost:748782013-10-27T01:54:46.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Somnath Temple and Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>A gentleman writes to me about the renovation of the Somnath temple.1 This needs money and the Provisional Government at Junagadh, formed by Shamaldas Gandhi, has sanctioned Rs. 50,000 for it. One lakh is promised from Jamnagar. When the Sardar came here I asked him whether even though he was in the Government, he would acquiesce in its giving as much money as it liked for Hinduism from its treasury. After all, we have formed the Government for all. It is a ‘secular’ government, that is, it is not a theocratic government, rather, it does not belong to any particular religion. Hence it cannot spend money on the basis of communities. For it, the only thing that matters is that all are Indians. Individuals can follow their own religions. I have my religion and you have yours to follow. Another gentleman has written well in a note. He says that it would be gross adharma if either the Junagadh Government or the Union Government gives money for the renovation of the Somnath temple.</p>
<p>I think he has made an absolutely correct point. I then asked the Sardar if that was tue. He said that that was not possible so long as he was alive. He said not a single pie could be taken out from the treasury of Junagadh for the renovation of the Somnath temple. If he was not going to do it, he said, what could poor Shamaldas do alone? There were enough number of Hindus who could donate money for the Somnath temple. If they became miserly and did not part with money, let the temple remain in its present state. There were already a lakh and a half rupees and Jamsaheb had already given a lakh. They would be able to manage for more. I have learnt one thing more. You must have known that the Muslims in Pakistan have abducted our young girls. Attempts are being made and must be made to rescue them. Let us try to get back every abducted girl who is still alive there. If these girls have been raped, have they lost everything by it? At least, I do not think so. I had even talked about it yesterday. Coercion cannot make one change his religion. But I hear that there is some talk of making some payment to reclaim these girls. Some hoodlums come forward to bring back the girls if they are paid Rs. 1,000 per girl. Has this thing become a business then? If somebody kidnapped one of these three girls with me and then demanded at least a hundred if not a thousand rupees, I would tell him that he had better kill the girl. My daughter would return if God wished to save her. Why should he bargain with me for her? Not only did he abduct the girl but he also indulged in bullying. Having abandoned his own religion he had come to bully me because she was my daughter. I would refuse to give him even a cowrie. Similarly no parent should make such bargains for his daughter.</p>
<p>They must think that their daughters are with God and God is everywhere. If a girl loses her husband, where would she go? It is of course a different matter if the girl wants to come over from there and we give her the fare if she does not have it. But if a hoodlum comes and demands ransom money, his demand just cannot be accepted. I give such instances from there and also from here, because on our side too we have done such things and abducted Muslim girls. Would our Government indulge in such meanness? Should the East Punjab Government or the Union Government ask Jinnah Saheb to pay one lakh rupees for the return of Muslim girls in its custody? I would not give a single cowrie to the Government. How could it demand money as a reward for such abominable deeds? The Government should admit its mistake, make a solemn promise never to repeat it and return the girl along with a compensation. We are not going to achieve anything if we ourselves do not become pure and brave. I had discussed Kathiawar yesterday. I told you whatever I had read in the Pakistani newspapers and subsequently heard from some Hindus. But today I consulted the Sardar when he came to me. I told him that when he went there he had made big speeches assuring that no one would touch a single Muslim boy or girl there, but then I heard that Muslims were being looted and beaten up, their property was burnt and their young girls kidnapped. He said that as far as he was aware, certainly not a single Muslim was killed nor a single Muslim house looted or burnt.</p>
<p>All these things happened there in the chaos prevailing before he visited the place. There were some cases of looting and probably one house was burnt. But as for killing and abducting, these two things did not take place there even then. An agent of the central Government or some Commissioner was always present there. He had been ordered to see that such things were not allowed. He had been instructed to have perfect bandobast so that nobody even touched any Muslim, let alone robbing or killing. Subsequently, no such thing happened. I asked the Sardar if I could mention the thing in the prayer meeting in the evening. He said I could certainly do so. He said that if something had happened there, he would have pursued the matter. He also said that the Hindu Congressmen there at great risk to their lives saved the Muslims and their property. No hooliganism could persist there. The Sardar said that as long as he was there and was in charge of the Home Department, he would not allow such a thing to happen. I was very happy to hear all that and asked his permission to refer to it in public. He said that I could gladly do so and also mention his name. I was so happy that yesterday I had talked about it and today itself I got this information. 1</p>
<p>A correspondent wants money to be made available for the renovation of the Somnath temple. The Sardar had agreed that the temple should be renovated but that the money should not be taken from the Junagadh treasury or the treasury of the Government of India. The correspondent asks why the money should not thus be made available. I do not wish to go into the question in any detail. All I can say is that if money is taken from the Government for this purpose, then the same rule should apply to other cases also. It will have far-reaching consequences.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>References:</b></p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>Prarthana Pravachan—II, pp. 131-8</li>
<li>Prarthana Pravachan—II, pp. 199</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Salaries and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-26:2043530:BlogPost:748742013-10-26T15:48:34.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Salaries and Mahatma Gandhi </b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The railways depend on the poor for their existence and you owe your salaries largely to the money received from them. Some booking clerks abuse the poor, address them slightingly, and on top of that delay issuing tickets to them as long as they can. This is no way of showing one’s importance. Issuing a ticket without delay to anyone asking for it saves the latter’s time and you lose nothing by doing so. 1 Yes, it is quite right to pay the salaries from the Ashram reserves. We shall see what to do when some one donates money for the school. The teachers’ quarters will also be constructed out of the Ashram funds. They should, if they can, pay rent at the rate of six per cent, or any other rate which may be considered reasonable, onthe cost of the land and all the other expenses. This answers all your points. 2</p>
<p>Childhood is the most important period of one’s life. Knowledge received during this period is never forgotten. But this is the period during which the child is allowed the least time for learning and is held prisoner in no matter what manner of school. I hold that, in our equipping high schools and colleges, we incur expense which this poor land can hardly bear. If, instead, primary education were to be given by well-educated and experienced teachers of high character, in surroundings which would reflect some regard for the beauty of Nature and safeguard the health of the pupils, we would see good results in a short time We would not succeed in bringing about the desired change even if we double the monthly salaries of the present teachers. Big results cannot be brought about through such small changes. The very pattern of primary education must change. I know that this is a difficult proposition and that there are several obstacles in the way. All the same, it should not be beyond the power of the Gujarat Kelavani Mandal to find a solution to this problem. 3</p>
<p>If you send a reply to this letter address it to Sabarmati. I write this from Bombay. The teachers’ salaries are undoubtedly low. But I do not know if you have taken the steps that ought to be taken before launching satyagraha. It is necessary moreover to know whether those who wish to experiment with Satyagraha have the requisite strength. It is better not to start a satyagraha thoughtlessly and without the strength for it than to abandon it in the middle out of cowardice and give it a bad name. I cannot find anything special or meritorious in teaching without a salary. Teachers do not teach for the sake of teaching but for earning a livelihood. If they do not get a salary at all or are inadequately paid, they can give up their jobs without bothering about what would become of the pupils. Normally a month’s notice should be given before quitting service for starting a satyagraha or for any other reason. If I take up only your two questions then I feel certain that you should tender your resignation after giving due notice. In a satyagraha of this kind, the result hoped for cannot be achieved without unity. Perhaps it would be better for you not to resign if a majority of the teachers are not of one mind. But before giving any positive opinion on the subject, I should know many more things. Before taking any step it would be better if as many of the teachers as possible could see me at the Ashram. 4</p>
<p>It is not suggested at all in our friend’s scheme that no salaries should be paid. It provides for the teacher’s livelihood, but a teacher who cannot fix a limit for his income cannot identify himself completely with the school. If anyone from the educated classes of Gujarat wish to devote their life to such education, they should write to the Secretary, the National Education Section. If we get teachers of the right kind, we shall shortly see in Ahmedabad such a school imparting national education. The children attending this school will live in their homes; they will attend school only during school hours. The same may be understood for the teachers. The National School running as part of the Satyagraha Ashram will have no connection with our friend’s scheme save that the same educational pattern will obtain in both. In the Satyagraha Ashram school, the aim is to obtain complete control of the pupils and train teachers from among them. The object of the school now under consideration will be merely to impart primary education to children in Ahmedabad. 5</p>
<p>Our teachers have indeed lost manhood. They do under force what, otherwise, they would not do. No physical force is used on them, but they are subjected to a subtle kind of pressure. Teachers get frightened by threats from their superiors, by threats or hints of cuts in their salaries or stoppage of increments. We are now faced with a situation in which teachers both men and women should risk their lives, their belongings and their salaries and, courageously, put the situation before the students as it is. If they cannot do so, they should give up teaching as their means of livelihood. My task for the day will be done when I have explained this to the teachers. A great teacher like Shri Shastriar is in the opposite camp. Even Pandit Malaviya, founder of an institution like the [Benares] Hindu University, is of the opinion that I am leading the public on the wrong path. Those who belong to the nationalist camp also have their doubts. Even so I believe I am right. Gujarat will be as good as free today if teachers come to be fired with heroism and feel that they cannot accept salaries from a Government which does not do justice and does not feel penitent for its misdeeds. If they courageously declare that they would impart only such education as is truly national, even though they may have to beg for the purpose, the very gods in heaven would come down to witness what they did and rain money on them. 6</p>
<p>Personally, I am convinced that the present salaries of primary school teachers are very low. All the same, I cannot at present advise them to agitate for higher salaries. Even if teachers were to be paid adequately, to my mind all schools run by the Government deserve to be shunned like poison, by both teachers and pupils. If, therefore, the primary school teachers have sufficient national consciousness and moral strength, they should leave, at any cost to themselves, these schools in which the pupils are educated, above everything else, for slavery and should work to educate the people, even begging for their maintenance, as teachers used to do in ancient times. But, personally, I am certain that, if teachers give up Government service in all sincerity and with full faith in themselves, the public will not fail to provide for them. 7 </p>
<p>And that brings me to the existing system of government. The country is the poorer for the Reforms. The annual expenditure has grown. A deeper study of the system has convinced me that no tinkering with it will do. A complete revolution is the greatest need of the time. The word revolution displeases you. What I plead for, however, is not a bloody revolution, but a revolution in the thoughtworld, such as would compel a radical revision of the standard of life in the higher services of the country. I must frankly confess to you that the ever-increasing rate of salaries paid to the higher branches of the Civil Service fairly frightens me, as I hope it would frighten you. Is there any correspondence between the life of the governors and of the governed millions who are groaning under their heels? The bruised bodies of the latter are a standing testimony to the truth of my statement. You now belong to the governing class. Let it not be said that your heels are no softer than your predecessors’ or your associates’. Must you also rule from Simla? Must you also follow the policy that, only a year ago, you criticized adversely? It is under your regime that a man has been sentenced to transportation for life for holding certain opinions. 8</p>
<p>On the basis of its capacity to pay, Gujarat’s share cannot be just 10 lakhs. If it has not contributed towards public work in the past, the reason is that it did not want to. It has had its eyes always fixed on Bombay and, therefore, lacks faith in itself. How can Viramgam rest satisfied with a contribution of Rs. 12,000? And Wadhwan with six or seven thousand? These figures are indications of our apathy towards public work. There was, however, a time when it wold have been difficult to collect even these amounts in Viramgam or Wadhwan. If it has been possible to collect them, it should be possible to collect even more in these two places and so too in other towns. Every big town should estimate its capacity and collect the amount falling to its share. In any case, the standards for collectiong which, after consulting friends, I have recommended to the public must be applied. No person wih a fixed salary should give less than 10 per cent of his monthly pay. People getting big salaries should of themselves give more and thus cover others whose salaries are low. Business men, lawyers, doctors and others like them should pay not less than 12 per cent. For top men among lawyers and doctors, though, how can there be a fixed percentage? 9</p>
<p>The councillors want their fares and extras, the ministers their salaries, the lawyers their fees, the suitors their decrees, the parents such education for their boys as would give them status in the present life, the millionaires want facilities for multiplying their millions and the rest their unmanly peace. The whole revolves beautifully round the central corporation. It is a giddy dance from which no one cares to free himself and so, as the speed increases, the exhilaration is the greater. But it is a death dance and the exhilaration is induced by the rapid heartbeat of a patient who is about to expire. 10</p>
<p>if we calculate the salaries of all of them at market rates. they will surely amount to at least Rs. 1,000 a month. That works out to Rs, 60,000 for five years. Now you will see that a saving of Rs. 50,000 is no very big achievement. If the number of subscribers to Navajivan were not as small as it is, if there were no loss in the publication of books as at present, if Young India and Hindi Navajivan were to pay their way, a sum larger than Rs. 50,000 could easily have been saved. If any profits should accrue hereafter, we intend to distribute them every year. Swami Anandanand does not like to deposit even a pie in the bank. He believes, and I agree with him, that public insti-tutions should accumulate no surpluses with them. He tries to act in obedience to God’s law, as far as possible. God always provides daily food for all created beings. If many people had not hoarded food in excess of their needs, no one would have died of hunger in this world. Moreover, public institutions have no right to subsist on reserves. A public institution ought to exist only as long as it is popular. When the people stop supporting it, it must close down. 11</p>
<p>The salaries paid to them are included in the sum of Rs. 3,50,000 I have mentioned. We nave two colleges, and also a Puratatva Mandir. I have heard in this connection that such work is being done nowhere else in the country. There are three living institutions which support us and are being supported by us. These are the Dakshinamurti Vidyarti Bhavan, the Charotar Kelavani Mandal and the Broach Kelavani Mandal. Their founders and managers will grant that, if those institutions have, by joining the Non-co-operation movement, added to its prestige, they have also gained vitality from it. I have been informed that the Navajivan Prakashan Mandir has brought out a number of books. People do not know that I am not its proprietor. It belongs to Swami Anandanand. He informs me only after everything has been printed off. I have received complaints that Anandanand has deceived Gujarat, that he has persuaded Navajivan to donate Rs. 50,000, but do I know, they ask me, how much he has swallowed? To that I shall reply that I have no such swindlers staying with me and that, if there are any, I do not know them. In this institution, some draw no salaries and some take as much as they need; if, however, I allow a reasonable rate of payment, I estimate that the figure would exceed Rs. 50,000. 12</p>
<p>If it is so, how can we expect that the teachers’ worth will ever rise? Can anyone raise the salaries of seven lakh teachers in seven lakh villages? If the salaries of so many teachers do not rise and if it is considered necessary to raise them, we should rest content with employing high-paid teachers in a few villages and allowing the rest to go without education. We have been doing this since the establishment of British rule. We realize that this practice is wrong. Hence let us find out a scheme which can cover all villages. Under this scheme, teachers will not be valued according to their salaries and work. Teachers themselves will place more value on their teaching work than on their salaries. In short, teaching should be regarded as the teachers’ dharma. The teacher who takes his food without performing that sacrifice should be looked upon as a thief. If that is done, there will be no shortage of teachers and yet they will be valued a million times higher than millionaires. By changing his outlook, every teacher can enjoy that position even today. 13 Salaries of the civil and military service should be brought down to a level compatible with the general condition of the country. 14</p>
<p>All these young men are educated. Many of them were professors and drew big salaries. They do not regret their sacrifice. On the contrary, they feel joy in it. Were it not so, they would not be able to keep up the extremely difficult sacrifice they have made. When I think of their sacrifice, Gujarat’s sacrifice, what little there has been, seems insignificant by comparison. The sacrifices which I see here made by the educated class can only be compared with similar sacrifices in Maharashtra. 15 I thank God for giving me the strength to attend this function. This is one of the few surviving national schools and I congratulate its teachers on their selfless dedication to the work. Just now I have learnt that the teachers have voluntarily reduced their salaries by fifteen per cent. It is also extremely gratifying that the principal works entirely gratis. I hope that the public will appreciate and encourage this school. 16</p>
<p>The teachers are inspired by a spirit of self-sacrifice. They have voluntarily agreed to a cut of fifteen per cent in their salaries. The head master himself serves in an honorary capacity There is an Educational Association too, with Shri Revashankar Jagjivan Jhaveri as its President. The accounts of the Association seem to be well maintained. It is but proper that people should help a school such as this in which the education is liberal, the teachers are patriotic and the accounts in proper order by giving it financial assistance and by enrolling pupils in it. 17 A sixth tells me that money is being freely used which can only be described as bribery. Men who were never worth much are today getting handsome salaries merely because they can speak and because they are supposed to wield some influence in their own districts. They have no opinions of their own. Some of them are brazen-faced enough to own that they are only acting as agents and that they would champion any policy, as a lawyer champions for money any cause that he gets, irrespective of morals. 18</p>
<p>The second question that came up for anxious consideration was that of remuneration. The Khadi Service is designed for meeting the need of paupers. It is impossible to hold out bright pecuniary prospects in such a service. I have no doubt whatsoever that the scale of salaries devised by the Government is out of all proportion to the condition of India’s masses. It has relation to the requirements of the inhabitants of a rich island and therefore means an almost unbearable burden upon the poor millions. Let no one, therefore, compare the remuneration offered under the Khadi Service with that obtainable under the Government service. At the same time, I make bold to say that the start offered is as good as that offered by the Government. Where the Khadi Service fails in comparison is in the ultimate prospect. The maximum attainable under the Government may reach four figures whereas Khadi Service offers an increase amounting to Rs. 20 at the most. For those, therefore, who have received an English education to enter this service is undoubtedly a sacrifice. But is it too much to ask the English-educated youths of the country to make what after all is a very small sacrifice? I consider it to be very small, for it should be remembered that they have received their English education at the expense of the masses. It is an exclusive education which the masses can never get. And it is an education which, if it has given us a few self-sacrificing patriots, has also produced many more men who have been willing accomplices with the Government in holding India in bondage. 19</p>
<p>My own reason refuses to work in this matter. You may therefore use your reason and come to a decision leaving the responsibility to me. About Gariyadhar, do what you think best on the whole. As regards the Panch Talavadi matter, if your reason does not approve of either Maneklal or Chhaganlal, pay them their due salaries and ask them to stand on their own feet. About Vajeram, do what you think proper. Draw the money that you may need from the khadi account in the Ashram. If the total amount exceeds Rs. 1,000, ask me. 20 In some cases, he says, the salaries of municipal teachers are in arrears. Their incomes are really inadequate for the work before them. Their sanitary measures have to be held in abeyance for want of funds. Compulsory education schemes are shelved for similar reasons. He adduces in support of many of his statements his own painful experience, and he severely criticizes the Government’s niggardly policy in connection with Municipalities. 21</p>
<p>If I was the editor-in-chief of your magazine, nine-tenth of what I read in the specimens you sent me I should score out, and I would require you to rewrite fortifying it with concrete facts, and then I would perhaps still further condense it. Just think what a saving of time it would mean for the busy reader and saving of expense in printer’s ink, compositors’ and proof-readers’ salaries, etc., and the matter thus printed would pass muster even in scientific scale and if it was reasonable, it would sell like hot cakes. 22 Let the defaulters please realize that each reminder costs at least half an anna over and above the salaries of men employed in attending to the writing and despatch of reminder cards. It has been suggested that some postpone sending their quota till several months’ contributions are collected, so as to save postage. The saving of postage is a proper consideration. But those who would save postage should send their contributions in advance. To spin 12,000 yards in a month’s time is not a very great strain as must be abundantly clear to every reader of these pages. And if after having sent one lot in advance, the spinners continue to give 30 minutes regularly to the wheel, they will never be in arrears, and they will never feel the strain of the work, no matter how busy they may be otherwise. And if punishment has any appeal to them, let them remember that at the end of the first five years of the existence of the All-India Spinners’ Association, it will descend surely and swiftly upon them, when the time comes for revising the constitution and conferring further privileges upon members. 23</p>
<p>Today I wish to write about one point in your previous letter. Why should Nimu not do independent work? You know that millions of our poor people work like that. We have become sweepers and scavengers! What about Ramjibhai and Gangabehn? In countless peasant families both husbands and wives earn. In factories both men and women work. Here both Anna and his wife Gomatibehn take salaries and also do the Hindi work. By following this practice your family life will become not difficult but smooth and you will become an ideal couple. Thousands of people have children while they work. Yes, it is true. that they are not able to live in comfort. But you must ask me for further clarification on this point. I wish you to have a happy, simple, useful and interesting life. The circumstances are also favourable. Everything depends on your education and Nimu’s. I wanted to train her but could not manage it. There were obstacles in the way. I fell ill and on returning to the Ashram could not cope with three obstacles at the same time. But Nimu is herself a good girl and hence I am not worried. The only question is how far your body will co-operate. 24</p>
<p>The salaries amount in all to Rs. 2,300 per month, the house rent is Rs. 425 per month. The total monthly expenditure is Rs. 4,800. The regular income, including boarding fees Rs. 1,300, is Rs. 2,700. There is thus a deficit of Rs. 2,100. This was somehow met whilst Hakim Saheb was alive. Before the teachers create for themselves a name and a prestige enough to command help, the deficit must be met by the public. And the memorial cannot be considered lasting till the Jamia has a building of its own. The subscribers will, therefore, in deciding the amount of donation bear in mind what is required. 25 In Government primary schools, their teachers, with the minimum amount of knowledge, are employed without regard to their character and on the minimum salaries possible, whereas in national primary schools, the teachers being self-sacrificing and persons of character and learning (and not because they are in in a sorry plight), should accept the smallest salaries. 26</p>
<p>All this amounts to a policy of bheda. I do not mean to say that anyone specifically plans this so. But a policy based on these four tactics operates by itself. All those who are in the Government’s service know that rise in their salaries and their position is implicit in their being amenable to the policy of the Government. Bhishma, Drona and others too had to point to their stomach before Yudhishthira. Hence, as the movement gathers momentum, the policy of alienation will be intensified. All satyagrahis should avoid this snare. They should give credence to no rumour. They should put before Sardar whatever they come to hear and should then forget all about it. A satyagrahi should have only one consolation. His task is accomplished when his pledge is fulfilled. More he should not ask for and with less he should not be satisfied. He should be resolved to sacrifice what is dearest to him at the altar of his pledge. What could such an individual have to do with rumours? Moreover, need he be misled or tempted by the words of anyone who has the audacity to make an outsider of their beloved Sardar? Sardar will tell them when a settlement is about to be made. 27</p>
<p>The main thing was to rid the agriculturists of their fear by making them realize that the officials were not the masters but the servants of the people, inasmuch as they received their salaries from the taxpayer. And then it seemed well nigh impossible to make them realize the duty of combining civility with fearlessness. Once they had shed the fear of the officials, how could they be stopped from returning their insults? And yet if they resorted to incivility it would spoil their satyagraha, like a drop of arsenic in milk. I realized later that they had less fully learnt the lesson of civility than I had expected. Experience has taught me that civility is the most difficult part of satyagraha. Civility does not here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good. These should show themselves in every act of a satyagrahi. 28</p>
<p>As an old English adage says you cannot eat your cake and have it. Similarly you cannot leave off service in a mill and yet have your one hundred per mensem. A close scrutiny of all highly remunerative professions in India will reveal the fact that they are almost all of them essentially products of British rule in India, and aresuch as serve in a more or less degree to sustain that rule. A country where the average daily income per head is seven pice cannot afford to pay high salaries, for the simple reason, that it would mean so much additional burden upon the toiling millions of the land who are already well-nigh crushed by their poverty. It follows therefore that the only course for a person, who wants to escape from the system of exploitation which the mills represent, would be drastically to reduce his family budget. This can be done in two ways: by a radical simplification of one’s life and by reducing the number of dependants that one has to support. Every grown-up, able-bodied member of a family ought to be made to contribute his or her quota towards the upkeep of the family by honest industry. We have a number of domestic crafts that can be easily learnt and practised at home without the investment of any large capital. If he is not prepared to do any of these two things, he had better stick to the job in which he is engaged and do whatever service he can. Let him, if he is employed in a mill, try to make a close and sympathetic study of the hardships and miseries that are a mill-labourer’s lot and do whatever is possible in the circumstances to alleviate them. Let him cultivate an exemplary purity, honesty and uprightness of conduct, and infect his fellow-employees with his ideals. If the subordinate employees are all upright in their conduct, they will thereby create a pure atmosphere which is bound to tell on their masters in the end and enable them to obtain justice from them for the mill-labourers. 29 </p>
<p>As a result of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, officers have increased their salaries, consolidated their own positions, added to the expenditure of the army and strengthened the roots of their own businessmen. Hence caution will be necessary to see to it that the hopes that the letter from the Government has raised in regard to reforms in the land revenue system are realized. Bardoli has shown the way and cleared it. Swaraj lies on that route alone and that alone is the cure for starvation. 30 I do think that the association of high salaries with efficiency and public honesty is an hypnotic effect produced by the rulers. The sooner we get out of it the better it will be for us. The present civil service is open to influences which are far more subtle and deadly than open bribery. Nor do I consider the administration to be efficient except in so far as it guarantees at the point of the bayonet safety for the lives of the European population but certainly not of the masses. I think that we have patriotic men and women enough in the country who, when we come to our own, will gladly give their services for maintenance money that will easily bear comparison with the average income of the toiling but starving millions. Poverty, if it is due to ignorance, is no less due to heartless unparalleled exploitation. 31</p>
<p>Complaints have come to me to the effect that the Spinners’ Association in Tamil Nadu has been monopolized by Brahmin employees. The unprejudiced sceptic may know that recruitment is never being made on grounds of caste but workers are employed purely on grounds of fitness. As things stand, there are 53 sale and production centres in Tamil Nadu. Of these the managers of 28 are non-Brahmins, as against 25 wherein the managers are Brahmins. Excluding servants drawing a monthly salary of less than Rs. 15 who are almost all non-Brahmins, the salaries paid by the A.I.S.A. in Tamil Nadu are shown below: Rs., 50 and above : 10 Brahmins; 5 non-Brahmins. Below Rs. 50 : 53 Brahmins; 121 non-Brahmins. Total : 63 Brahmins; 126 non-Brahmins. The total amount of the salaries distributed per month among Brahmins is Rs. 2,576; non-Brahmins: Rs. 3,102. The total amount disbursed to hands drawing less than Rs. 15 per month is Brahmins:Rs.31; non-Brahmins: Rs. 725. Of the ten Brahmin hands drawing salaries over Rs. 50, two have put in a service of over seven years and six have put in a service of five years and over. The other two have served three years. Of the five non-Brahmins drawing salaries over Rs. 50, three have put in five years’ service and two have put in three years’ service. But for the fact that there is the Brahmin-non-Brahmin question in the South, I should have declined to publish these statistics. The readers in the South should know, if it is of any consequence, that the Association is manned chiefly by non-Brahmins, for the chief workers it is a labour of love. What is more, it exists purely and simply to serve the dumb and starving millions who are overwhelmingly non Brahmins and include Mussalmans and Christians also. 32</p>
<p>This correspondent seems to have taken it for granted that, as high salaries will be reduced, the small ones also will go down. The existing position is that while the big salaries are excessively high, the small ones are too low for the employees’ livelihood. Under swaraj the low salaries will probably be raised, instead of being reduced. In one way at any rate they will seem to have increased. As a result of the reduction in salaries, there will be simplicity in people’s way of living. The effect of this will be felt universally and the earners of small salaries will feel a sense of contentment. The fear of increase in corruption expressed by the correspondent will not be shared by those who know the salary scales in Japan and other countries. There is very little connection between corruption and the size of salaries. When the consciousness of dharma spreads and people are inspired by a sense of public service, they do not demand or accept bribes. Giving high salaries for fear of spread of corruption would be, as the saying goes, like killing the buffalo for its skin. In other words, it means that for preventing a man from taking a bribe occasionally, he should be paid a permanent bribe in the form of a big salary! 33</p>
<p>No item of the Fundamental Rights resolution passed by the Congress at Karachi has come in for so much notice as the resolution limiting the salary of Government servants to not more than Rs. 500 per month or Rs. 6,000 per year. Had we not been accustomed by this foreign Government to high salaries for servants in the Public Department, the limit of Rs. 500 would not have produced any shock. There is no sanctity about the high-ruling salaries. All the 46 Congress Presidents and the 46 Congresses have mourned over the ever-growing public expenditure both military and civil. Many Presidents have laid special emphasis on the high salaries. The Karachi Congress gave concrete shape to the half-century old complaint. The way to examine the justness of the Congress conclusion is to find the proportion between the salaries and the average income of India’s millions, and secondly to compare both with the salaries and the average income of other countries. I have been trying to secure the figures for the principal countries of the world. The readers of Young India have had the average income of the principal countries but not the salaries. I have now before me some figures about the Japanese Public Service, both superior and subordinate. Its Governor-General gets less than Rs. 1,000 per month, that is to say, anything between Rs. 10,000 and 10,700 per year, a Governor less than Rs. 600 or Rs. 800 per month, the Secretariat staff anything between Rs. 150 and Rs. 500 per month, President of the Supreme Court less than Rs. 1,000 per month, other judges anything between Rs. 150 to Rs. 700 per month, Chief of Police slightly over Rs. 700 per month, subordinate services Rs. 250 to slightly over Rs. 300 per month, a Police Constable from Rs. 60 to Rs. 80 per month, a Police Sergeant from Rs. 70 to Rs. 80. The average daily income of the Japanese per head is about four annas. Compared then with the Japan figures, the Rs. 500 limit put by the Congress is over-generous. 34</p>
<p>So far as the salary is concerned, you will laugh, naturally, but the Congress does believe that it is an impossible thing for the Congress, which represents a nation of dwarfs, to vie with the English nation, which represents today giants in wealth. India, whose average income is 2d. per day, can ill afford to pay the high salaries that are commanded here. I feel that it is a thing which we will have to unlearn if we are going to have voluntary rule in India. It is all very well, so long as the British bayonet is there, to squeeze out of these poor people salaries of Rs. 10,000 a month or salaries of Rs. 5,000 a month or salaries of Rs. 20,000 a month. I do not consider, however, that my country has sunk to such an extent that it will not be able to produce sufficient men who will live somewhat in correspondence with the lives of the millions and still serve India nobly, truly and well. I do not believe for one moment that legal talent has to be bought if it is to remain honest. I recall the names of Motilal Nehru, C. R. Das, Manomohan Ghosh, Badruddin Tyabji and a host of others, who gave their legal talent absolutely free of charge and served their country faithfully and well. The taunt may be flung in my face that they did so because they were able to charge princely fees in their own professional work. I reject that argument, for the simple reason that I have known every one of them with the exception of Manomohan Ghosh. It was not that they had plenty of money and therefore gave freely of their talent when India required it. It had no connection with their ability to have ease and luxury. I have seen them living the life of poor people and in perfect contentment. I can point out to you several lawyers of distinction who, if they had not come to the national cause, would today be occupying seats on the High Court Benches in all parts of India. I have therefore absolute confidence that, when we come to conduct our own affairs and so on, we will do so in a patriotic spirit and taking account of the miserable state that the millions of India occupy. 35 </p>
<p>And now about the expenses on the salaries and travelling allowances of the workers engaged in propaganda activities. Most of such workers would be caste Hindus. They, however, would never ask for any payment. What effect can the speeches of paid workers have on the people? Their travelling expenses should not have to be borne by the institution employing them but should be met by the people. That is to say, the reception committees of the places which have invited them should bear the expenses. The permanent body may arrange these things but should not bear their expenses. And lastly about the office expenses, the salary of the accountant, the travelling expenses of the secretary, the rent for the building, etc. This expenditure should not exceed ten per cent of the total budget. Any institution whose administrative expenses total up to more than ten per cent should be looked upon as a self-destroying and useless organization. 36 The agent is of the opinion that the bhandar does not have the capacity to bear the burden of the number of workers employed there. The award I have given above does not preclude any changes in the bhandar, reduction in the number of workers engaged or in their present salaries. I myself wish to make some suggestions regarding the way in which all khadi bhandars are being run, and it has become necessary to state them now. 37</p>
<p>The best way is for those who have grown accustomed to the new policy to train workers from among villagers and persons who do not know English. We shall need innumerable workers if the policy of self-sufficing [khadi] is to be made widespread. This poor country cannot afford them salaries if these happen to be large. If workers are trained only from amongst the English-educated persons they would demand large salaries as their needs have increased. They no longer possess a hardy constitution. And, in a sphere where a knowledge of the English language is not essential they cannot be said to be particularly useful. Very often, their usefulness has indeed declined. For instance, they do not like living in villages and they try to import city-life into the villages. Their bodies are less supple and only in rare cases can they become skilled craftsmen. Even when they learn a craft, they can seldom compete with ordinary craftsmen. I only want to suggest here that we should give up the craze of looking for workers who know English. This does not mean that we should boycott or despise those who know English. We should welcome any such person who is available. They are all right where they belong. The only purpose of saying this is to rid ourselves of the false notion that only those who know English are fit to be workers. If a village worker’s services are available, he will bring in greater returns than the amount paid to him. An allowance of not more than Rs. 10 to 15 should be required for such a worker. And he can easily bring in by way of return that amount every month. Organizers should train such workers wherever there are khadi centres and to that extent enlarge their field of work. Workers should acquaint themselves with all the processes starting from growing cotton right up to making khadi. And if those who are in charge of these centres are themselves efficient, they can readily produce such workers at no cost. 38</p>
<p>Of course, we have not the staff of teachers who can cope with the new method. But that difficulty applies to every new venture. The existing staff of teachers, if they are willing to learn, should be given the opportunity of doing so, and should also have the immediate prospect of a substantial increase in their salaries if they will learn the necessary subjects. It is unthinkable that for all the new subjects that are to become part of primary education separate teachers should be provided. That would be a most expensive method and so wholly unnecessary. It may be that some of the primary school teachers are so ill-equipped that they cannot learn the new subjects within a short time. But a boy who has studied up to the matriculation standard should not take more than three months to learn the elements of music, drawing, physical drill and a handicraft. If he acquires a working knowledge of these, he will be able always to add to it while he is teaching. This presupposes, no doubt, eagerness and zeal on the part of the teachers to make themselves progressively fit for the task of national regeneration. 39</p>
<p>It is reported to me by persons of status that money is being spent like water in the name of the war. Men who have enjoyed fat salaries in their respective jobs are being taken up for the war at much higher salaries and given ranks to which they have never been used before. The largest number of these are said to be Europeans or Anglo-Indians. If patriotism is the deciding factor, these gentlemen should take, and be given, no more than just enough to keep them and their dependants. 40 Soldiers too are covered by the present programme. I do not ask them just now to resign their posts and leave the army. Soldiers come to me, Jawaharlal and to the Maulana and say: “We are wholly with you. We are tired of the governmental tyranny.” To these soldiers I would say: “You may say to the Government, ‘Our hearts are with the Congress. We are not going to leave our posts. We will serve you so long as we receive your salaries. We will obey your just orders, but will refuse to fire on our own people. 41</p>
<p>After finishing your training here you will go back to your respective Provinces to propagate this New Education. You will keep this ideal of devotion to Truth before you. Your work will be that of pioneers. There will be no one to help or guide you with his previous experience. You shall have to grope your way all by yourselves. It is, therefore, not an easy task that you have before you. Then this New Education will not help you to get big jobs carrying high salaries and emoluments. But yours will be the privilege to go among and serve the villagers in their villages. Palatial buildings and costly equipment can, therefore, have no place in your scheme of work. The school of my conception is one where classes are held in the open under the shade of a tree. I know that it cannot be realized at present. Some shelter will be necessary, perhaps always for protection against the sun, wind and rain. True education can only be given under conditions of utmost simplicity. 42</p>
<p>Ministers and members of the provincial assemblies are in their respective places as servants of the people in every sense of the term. The British scale of pay cannot be copied by them except at their cost. Nor need all draw payments because a certain scale is allowed. The scale fixes the limit up to which they may draw. It will be ludicrous for a monied man to draw the full or any payment. The payments are meant for those who cannot easily afford to render free service. They are representatives of the poorest people in the world. What they draw is paid by the poor. Let them remember this salient fact, and act and live accordingly. 43</p>
<p>I have to pay heavily for the caution with which I wrote the other day the paragraph in Harijan1 in regard to increase in ministerial salaries. I have to go through long letter bewailing my caution and arguing with me to revise my view. How can ministers make large increases in their own original fat salaries when the poor chaprasis and clerks get an increase which hardly meet the occasion? I have reread my note and I claim that the short note includes all that various correspondents desire. But, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I expand my meaning. I have been twitted for not referring to the Karachi Resolution. The lower scale of ministers’ salaries rests on much higher ground than the authority of a resolution. In any event, so far as I am aware, the Congress has never varied that resolution. It is as binding today as it was when it was passed. I do not know that the increases in the salaries is justified. But I must not offhand condemn the increase without knowing the case of the ministers. Critics should know that I have no authority over them or anyone else except myself. Nor am I present at all the meetings of the Working Committee. I attend only when required by the President. I can only give my opinion for what it is worth. And, if it to have any weight, it must be well-conceived and based on ascertained facts. The question of the hideous inequality between the rich and the poor and the lower services and the higher is a separate subject requiring drastic and well-thought-out method and could not be merely incidental to the lowering of the salaries of the few ministers and their secretaries. Both subjects require to be dealt with on merits. The question of salaries could be and should be easily disposed of by the ministers concerned. The other is a much vaster subject requiring a thorough overhauling. I would any day agree that the ministers should tackle the subject in their provinces without delay and that the lower ranks should before everything else have their salaries fully considered and increased wherever necessary. 44</p>
<p>I personally feel that a barrister and a scavenger should get equal wages. But it is easier said than done. And it is not something that can be accomplished through strikes. We should for the time being accept and assimilate the rise in salaries recommended by the Pay Commission1 and then proceed to build up public opinion in favour of the principle of equality of wages. Strikes too are governed by a logic. Nothing is gained by indiscriminate strikes. Today unfortunately strikes are sweeping the country. There are strikes even where people have their own governments. I think that under British rule we did not have so many strikes. Today I have received a telegram from Calcutta and I also see from newspapers that the employees of the Accountant-General’s office have gone on a pendown strike. The strike includes the employees of the Post and Telegraph department which operates not for the good of any particular individual but for the good of the community. It is true that it has some big officers getting huge salaries and it is unjust that the members of the subordinate staff should be paid such low salaries. Why should the difference in salaries be so great as it is? This was started by the British and we liked it and continued it. But if people were to put down their pens, what would become of India? If through strikes they bring about a little rise in salaries it would not be a great thing. The method is wrong and is harmful to the country. The present plight of India brings to my mind the story of the goose that laid golden eggs. The owner of the goose wishing to have all the eggs at once killed her. As a result not only did he get no more eggs but he lost the goose as well. The administration that has come into our hands in somewhat like that goose. If we want to get out of it all the eggs together it will surely die and so shall we. 45</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>References:</b></p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>Mahatma Gandhini Vicharsrishti</li>
<li>Letter to Maganlal Gandhi, June 1, 1917</li>
<li>Mahatma Gandhini Vicharsrishti</li>
<li>Letter to Bhimjibhai Naranji Nayak, February 7, 1919</li>
<li>Navajivan, 21-9-1919</li>
<li>Navajivan, 3-10-1920</li>
<li>Navajivan, 10-10-1920 </li>
<li>Young India, 8-6-1921</li>
<li>Navajivan, 12-6-1921</li>
<li>Young India, 9-3-1922</li>
<li>Navajivan, 6-4-1924</li>
<li>Navajivan, 3-8-1924</li>
<li>Navajivan, 10-8-1924</li>
<li>Young India, 26-12-1924</li>
<li>Navajivan, 24-5-1925 </li>
<li>Navajivan, 13-12-1925</li>
<li>Navajivan, 13-12-1925</li>
<li>Young India, 4-11-1926</li>
<li>Young India, 23-12-1926</li>
<li>Letter to Narandas Gandhi, After April 25, 1927</li>
<li>Young India, 21-7-1927</li>
<li>Letter to J. W. Petavel, July 24, 1927</li>
<li>Young India, 11-8-1927 </li>
<li>Letter to Ramdas Gandhi, December 22, 1927</li>
<li>Young India, 19-1-1928</li>
<li>Navajivan, 20-5-1928</li>
<li>Navajivan, 10-6-1928</li>
<li>Chaper XXIV : ‘The Onion Thief’</li>
<li>Young India, 1-8-1929</li>
<li>Navajivan, 21-7-1929 </li>
<li>Letter to Surendra Singh, April 26, 1931</li>
<li>Young India, 16-7-1931 </li>
<li>Navajivan, 26-7-1931 </li>
<li>Young India, 30-7-1931</li>
<li>Indian Round Table Conference: Proceedings of Federal Structure Committee and Minorities Committee, Vol. I, pp. 267-8 </li>
<li>Harijanbandhu, 26-3-1933</li>
<li>An Award, June 18, 1935</li>
<li>Harijanbandhu, 20-10-1935</li>
<li>Harijan, 11-9-1937</li>
<li>Letter to Lord Linlithgow, July 26, 1940</li>
<li>Mahatma, Vol. VI, pp. 164</li>
<li>The Hindu, 5-12-1944</li>
<li>Harijan, 14-4-1946 </li>
<li>Harijan, 9-6-1946 </li>
<li>Prarthana Pravachan–I, pp. 281</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Salt Tax and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-26:2043530:BlogPost:746722013-10-26T15:48:07.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Salt Tax and Mahatma Gandhi </b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The recommending of the laws for civil disobedience is a most difficult task. In the present state of the country, when it is highly debatable whether the spirit of civil disobedience replacing and entirely superseding criminal disobedience has been understood by the masses, I am unable to advise civil disobedience of the revenue laws, i.e., the salt tax, land tax and the forest laws. I also feel that the satyagrahis may not disobey any orders issued by the Government regarding processions and mass meetings. 1 Why is there this chorus of condemnation of the doubling of the salt tax and other taxes on the necessaries of life? Wonder is expressed that now there is no apology even offered for the terrific military charges of sixty-two crores. The fact is, it is impossible to offer apology for the inevitable. The military charges must grow with the growing consciousness of the nation. The military is not required for the defiance of India. But it is required for the forcible imposition of the English exploiters upon India. That is naked truth. Mr. Montagu has bluntly but honestly stated it. The retiring President of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce has said it and so has the Governor of Bombay. They want to trade with us not upon our terms, but upon their terms. It is the same thing whether it is done with the kid glove on or without it. The Councils are the kid glove. We must pay for the glove. The reforms hang upon us like an incubus. They cover a multitude of defects including the blood-sucking salt tax. 2 </p>
<p>What are the workers of Kathiawar doing about this? Is not this one task enough to engage their energy produce khadi and see that people wear it? If they give up busying themselves with other activities, things will soon get right. If population of twenty-six lakhs spins, cards and weaves to the value of no more than Rs. 10 per head every year, even then its work would produce goods worth two crore and sixty lakhs rupees. This would come to less than two pice per head daily. But drop by drop the lake is filled, as they say; in like manner, the result which can be brought about by an increase of two pice in everyone’s earnings should be seen to be believed. A postcard costing a pice, a tax of two pies on a rupee-worth of salt, railway fares at the rate of three or four pies a mile, this is how Government’s Postal Department makes a profit and the Post Master General gets an annual salary of thousands, the salt tax yields crores and the railway company earns lakhs from railway fares calculated at the rate of a few pies a mile. 3</p>
<p>If we only think how much everyone will suffer by the increase of a pie in a rupee in the salt tax, we shall see no reason to be seriously upset. But when we calculate the total revenue yielded by this impost, we shall be astounded by the figures. Loss of this kind is like a prick by the cobbler’s needle. It is felt by the society as a whole. We can deduce from this the effect on every individual. 4 The supersession of Sir Abdur Rahim, the passage of the Supplementary Ordinance, the restoration of the salt tax, tell us in plainest language that the British rulers propose to rule in spite of our opposition. In fact, they tell us by their action as clearly as possible, that they can and will rule without our assistance. Shall we not have the negative courage of doing without their assistance? We have seen that we can, when we do not quarrel. It is possible, if we have some courage, to do without that assistance even if we quarrel. It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head than to crawl on one’s belly in order to be able to save one’s head. I can see Hindu-Muslim unity issuing out of our street fights without Government intervention. I should despair of real unity if we would fight under the shadow of the British uniform and perjured evidence before British Courts. We must be men before we would rule ourselves. 5</p>
<p>Needless to say the hartal in Bombay was a complete success. Full preparation had been made for starting civil disobedience. Two or three things had been discussed in this connection. It was decided that civil disobedience might be offered in respect of such laws only asT3 easily lent them to being disobeyed by the masses. The salt tax was extremely unpopular and a powerful movement had been for some time past going on to secure its repeal. I therefore suggested that the people might prepare salt from sea-water in their own houses in disregard of the salt laws. My other suggestion was about the sale of proscribed literature. Two of my books, viz, Hind Swaraj and Sarvodaya (Gujarati adaptation of Ruskin’s Unto This Last), which had been already proscribed, came handy for this purpose. To print and sell them openly seemed to be the easiest way of offering civil disobedience. A sufficient number of copies of the books were therefore printed, and it was arranged to sell them at the end of the monster meeting that was to be held that evening after the breaking of the fast. 6</p>
<p>India has been ruined economically. The revenue derived from our people is out of all proportion to our income. Our average income is seven pice (less than 2 pence) per day. The taxes we pay are 2.5 pies per day and of these the land revenue derived from the peasantry is 20% and the salt tax, which falls heaviest on the poor, is 3% of the total. 7 A paragraph appeared in the Press that I would advise non-payment of the salt tax to begin with. The manufacturer of the canard did not know, perhaps, that the salt tax was so ingeniously devised that it would not yield to easy non-payment. Nevertheless there was this truth in it, that I was contemplating some method of attacking this nefarious monopoly. The garbled report has however resulted in most valuable information having been supplied to me by known and unknown writers. Among the publications thus received is the monograph issued by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce on salt. It is a valuable publication giving an authentic history of the process of killing by wicked methods salt manufacture in Bengal and dumping down Liverpool salt on a soil which could produce good salt for only a little labour. This history of the evolution of the salt tax furnishes by itself complete condemnation of the British Government. Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor. Cattle cannot live without salt. Salt is a necessary article in many manufactures. It is also rich manure.</p>
<p>There is no article like salt outside water by taxing which the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes therefore the most inhuman poll tax that ingenuity of man can devise. The wholesale price per mound of 82 lbs. is according to Government publications as low as 10 pies, and the tax, say, twenty annas, i.e., 240 pies. This means 2,400 per cent on sale price! What this means to the poor can hardly be imagined by us. Salt production like cotton growing has been centralized for the sake of sustaining the inhuman monopoly. The necessary consequence of the willful destruction of the spinning-wheel was destruction of cottage cultivation of cotton. The necessary consequence of salt monopoly was the destruction, i.e., closing down of salt works in thousands of places where the poor people manufactured their own salt. A correspondent writes to me from Konkan, saying that if the people had freedom, they could pick up salt from the deposits made by the receding tides on the bountiful coast. But he sorrowfully adds that officers turn the salt over into the sea as fast as nature deposits it. He adds however, that those who can successfully evade the salt police do help themselves to this sea salt. Gujarat workers report the existence of many places where, but for the prohibition; people can get their salt as easily as they can dig out earth for many household purposes. Bengal free can today manufacture all the salt she can ever need. And yet she is forced to import all the salt she eats. Here is what a retired salt officer writes without disclosing his name:</p>
<p>Under the law the manufacture of salt includes every process by which salt is separated from brine or earth or any other liquid or solid substance and also every process for the purification or refinement of salt. Contraband salt means salt or salt earth which has not paid duty, Interior and retaining it. The people of the presidency or at least the men and women of the older generation firmly believe that locally manufactured sea salt is healthier than Kharaghoda salt, and they would love to have it, while everyone would like to have cheap salt. The poor people on the coast will join to get salt from Government salt-works without paying duty would be stealing or robbery, an act of First Class Himsa that would justify even shooting down of the offenders if they persisted in the act. I have given the letter as it was received. When salt can be manufactured much more easily than it can be taken from salt depots, I am not likely to advise people to help themselves to the article from salt pans or storehouses. But I do not share the salt officer’s characterization of such helping as first-class himsa. Both the helping from pans and manufacturing contraband salt are statutory crimes heavily punishable. Why is the manufacturing without license a virtue and taking salt from a manufacturing pan a vice? If the impost is wrong, it is wrong whether in connection with manufactured salt or the crude article. If a robber steals my grain and cooks some of it, I am entitled to both the raw and the cooked grain. I may draw a distinction for the sake of avoiding inconvenience between in the collection of salt spontaneously in these days of unemployment. Trying manufactured and crude salt, and adopt the easier method of manufacturing salt. But that does not alter the legal position in the slightest degree. When therefore the time comes, civil resisters will have an ample opportunity of their ability to conduct their campaign regarding the tax in a most effective manner. The illegality is in a Government that steals the people’s salt and makes them pay heavily for the stolen article. The people, when they become conscious of their power, will have every right to take possession of what belongs to them. 8</p>
<p>This seasonable item is from the public Press. Eight annas fine for poor people is no joke. The magistrate might have discharged the men with a caution or he might, as magistrates have done before now, have paid the fine from his own pocket, and if he felt that he was bound to impose a penalty. It is likely of course that in that case, he might have laid himself open to the charge of cowardice under the Salt Act. Be that as it may, the fact that the men “threw themselves at the mercy of the court,” and “submitted that they were too poor to buy salt,” and that the magistrate rejected the plea of the villagers, is eloquent testimony in favour of the civil disobedience campaign. No milder agitation would have answered the purpose. Moreover, the salt tax is but a sample from the mountain of such grievances, from which it is the duty of every Indian who knows the wrongs being done to India to strain every nerve to free her. A correspondent writes to say that there is no salt tax in Portuguese India, that Daman is quite near Pardi, that salt is sold at 2 annas per mound in Daman, and that any quantity may be imported from Daman and payment of tax refused on passing the British border. A similar suggestion has come too from Kathiawar. There also there is no tax, though there is the State monopoly which makes the salt dearer than the cost price. Nevertheless it is much cheaper than in the British territory. Thus a maund (cutcha) costs, I understand, Rs. 1-4 in Ranpur whereas the same quantity outside Ranpur will cost probably no more than 10 annas, if that. Anyway, when the instructions for civil disobedience on a mass scale are issued, there is no doubt that the salt law is the easiest to break. The Government is naturally preparing to combat the civil law breakers after its usual fashion. Every police officer above the rank of a constable in the Bombay Presidency except in Sind and Aden has been appointed a salt officer. These men, armed with new powers, may be fully expected to give a good account of them. And when they have stained their hands with innocent blood, there will be no doubt the usual inquiry followed by a repeal of the Salt Act. But this time the object of civil disobedience is double—the repeal of the tax and the repeal of the British bondage of which the salt tax is but an offshoot. No inquiry merely into the Salt Act followed by its repeal can stop the campaign of civil disobedience. It behooves all who want the repeal of the salt tax to join the agitation at least to that extent, unless they would have the tax rather than success of civil disobedience even for a specific grievance. 9 </p>
<p>The sense of the word Ramarajya is this that under such a rule the poor will be fully protected, everything will be done with justice, and the voice of the people will always be respected. But in order to attain Ramarajya all must help. But in order to achieve this khadi alone is the universal and constructive instrument. But in order to increase the power of the people something else with a wider appeal was needed. That something is salt tax. Both the poor and the rich use salt equally and because a tax is levied on this universally useful thing, one that is necessary for everyone, one and all can offer civil disobedience against the salt tax law and thus strengthen their power. The power that we shall gain by this sort of civil disobedience will, because of its civil and peaceable nature, help us in securing Ramarajya. There are many other taxes like the salt tax which weigh heavily on the people and in resisting which people can get a good training, and their strength can increase. Ramarajya, by such means, will become easy to establish. No one can predict when we shall attain full Ramarajya. But it is the duty of every one of us to contemplate it day and night. And true contemplation is that in which proper methods also have been used for the establishment of Ramarajya. It should be remembered that in order to establish Ramarajya no learning is necessary. The necessary talent is found in all—men and women, young and old, and in people of all religions. The only sad thing is that not all perceive its presence now. Cannot every one of us, if we want, today give proof of qualities such as truth, non-violence, propriety of conduct, bravery, forbearance, courage, etc.? The fact is we are under a delusion and for this reason we are not able to perceive what is in us, and instead we strive, in vain, to understand things that are beyond us. Undoubtedly this is a very sad thing. But even then I shall request the readers of Hindi Navajivan that in this great yajna which has been started in the country today they should be prepared to do their full share. 10 </p>
<p>The Chaukidari tax laws have been suggested for possible disobedience. This tax does not in my opinion comply with the conditions that the salt tax fulfils. The idea is to disobey such laws as are bad for all time as far as can be seen today. We do not want the salt tax even under Swaraj. Chaukidari tax is perhaps not such a tax. We may need chaukidars even under Swaraj. If such is the case, it may be wise not to touch that tax so long as we have other taxes or other laws to combat. 11 If we are to depend for Swaraj on what has been done so far, it will take us very long to win it, because it cannot be secured by mere attendance at meetings or by large numbers joining the civil disobedience movement against the salt tax. The achievement in the field of constructive work is very meagre in other districts indeed, but here also it is just as poor. We have not achieved complete boycott of foreign cloth and have not succeeded in popularizing khadi. The entry in the column for the quantity of khadi produced is nil. You have a rich crop of cotton in this district, but you put it to no use yourselves. Consumption of liquor has spread widely. Even in these circumstances, however, I have the hope that this movement will bring about a great awakening among us. The use of khadi is spreading widely in the whole of India. If, in consequence of this, there is shortage of khadi, you can even help in producing more of it. After I leave this place they may or may not let me reach Dandi, but take it from me that the salt tax is gone. If you start doing all that I have suggested, I believe we shall have stormed and won not merely the fort of the salt tax but many other forts as well. As I have the blessings of you all, this monstrous salt tax—no adjectives can be strong enough to describe it—is bound to be abolished. If you produce and spread the required climate by boycotting foreign cloth, we will win the next fort. That is, we shall win Rs. 60 crores. Through liquor and opium we have been throwing away Rs. 25 crores for the privilege of becoming mad. That third fort also we will certainly win, but only if you give up drinking. Rs. 60 crores for foreign cloth, Rs. 25 crores for intoxicants and Rs. 6 crores for the salt tax if we save all this money our faces will beam with luster and Swaraj will be won in no time. The salt tax is as good as gone, and hence those of you who do not wish to join the present movement should all co-operate and help in these two matters. I request all brothers and sisters here to give up foreign cloth and wear khadi. Understand what your true duty is. 12</p>
<p>Tomorrow we shall break the salt tax law. Whether the Government will tolerate that is a different question. It may not tolerate it, but it deserves congratulations on the patience and forbearance it has displayed in regard to this party. If the civil disobedience movement becomes widespread in the country and the Government tolerates it, the salt law may be taken as abolished. I have no doubt in my mind that the salt tax stood abolished the very moment that the decision to break the salt laws was reached and a few men took the pledge to carry on the movement even at the risk of their lives till Swaraj was won. If the Government tolerates the impending civil disobedience you may take it for certain that the Government, too, has resolved to abolish this tax sooner or later. If they arrest me or my companions tomorrow, I shall not be surprised; I shall certainly not be pained. It would be absurd to be pained if we get something that we have invited on ourselves. What if I and all the eminent leaders in Gujarat and in the rest of the country are arrested? This movement is based on the faith that when a whole nation is roused and on the march no leader is necessary. Of the hundreds of thousands that blessed us during our march and listened to my speeches there will be many who are sure to take up this battle. That alone will be mass civil disobedience. We are now resolved to make salt freely in every home, as our ancestors used to, and sell it from place to place, and we will continue doing so wherever possible till the Government yields, so much so that the salt in Government stocks will become superfluous. If the awakening of the people in the country is true and real, the salt law is as good as abolished. But the goal we wish to reach is yet very far. For the present Dandi is our destination but our real destination is no other than the temple of the goddess of Swaraj. Our minds will not be at peace till we have her darshan, nor will we allow the Government any peace. Those Headmen who have resigned their posts should prove themselves true to their word and should regard it as a sin to serve this Government till freedom is won. For the last four or five days, I have been speaking about other constructive activities also, and they should be taken up immediately in this Jalalpur taluka. Surat district is notorious for the drink habit, and the Jalalpur taluka is particularly so. Now that the wind of self-purification is blowing here, it should not be a difficult task to eradicate the drink evil altogether.</p>
<p>There is sin in every leaf of the palm tree. Its only value lies in the ruin it brings us. This plant is like poison to us. All palm trees should therefore be cut down. There should not be a single person in Jalalpur taluka wearing foreign cloth. Everyone who comes to Dandi should come with the intention to participate in, and offer his mite to, this Swaraj yajna. I would not like anyone coming to Dandi wearing foreign cloth. If it is our wish to turn Dandi into a place of pilgrimage or a bulwark of Swaraj, everyone coming here should be dressed exclusively in khadi. I know that the stocks of khadi in the khadi stores are about to be exhausted, and if, therefore, you fail to get a full-length sari or dhoti and come wearing only a khadi langoti, you will be welcome here as a civilized person. If, ignoring my suggestion, any of you comes to Dandi wearing foreign cloth, I shall have to place at the points of approach to Dandi, volunteers who will kneel before you and request you to wear khadi. If you feel offended by their doing so and slap them in the face, those satyagrahis will let themselves be slapped. Dandi was chosen not by a man but by God. How otherwise could we have chosen for the battle-field of satyagraha such an out-of-the-way place a place where no food grains are to be had, where there is scarcity of water, where thousands can assemble only with difficulty, walking ten miles from the railway station, and where if you are travelling on foot, you have to negotiate creeks full of slush and mud? The truth is that in this struggle we have to put up with suffering. You have made the road from Navsari to Dandi famous throughout the world by arranging for free drinking-water at frequent intervals all along it.</p>
<p>If this struggle did not have your approval, your blessings, why would you be doing this? Dandi should be a sacred ground for us, where we should utter no untruth, commits no sin. Everyone coming here should come with this devout feeling in his heart. If you brothers and sisters come forward as true volunteers and commit civil disobedience of the salt law, no matter what force the Government threatens to use against you, and if you do whatever else you may be required to do, we shall have in us the power to attain in a single day what we hold to be our birthright. Time was when I was infatuated with British rule, as British law taught that the person of every individual is sacred. According to that law, the police cannot kill or manhandle a man even though he might be guilty of murder. It is the duty of the police to produce the man alive before the court. Nor has the police any authority outside the jail to seize from person even goods alleged to have been stolen. But here the very opposite is true. How otherwise can the police have the authority to decide whether I hold a handful of salt or pebbles? Every man’s house is his castle. Our body also is a fort of a kind. And once salt has entered that fort, it should not be allowed to be forced out of it even if horses are made to trample on your heads. From today we should begin cultivating the strength of will to see that a fist holding salt does not open even if the wrist should be cut off.</p>
<p>Unauthorized entry into a house is a barbarous act. It is for a judge to decide whether I hold in my hand salt or dust. The English law holds the human person to be sacred. If every official assumes the authority of a judge and enters our homes, he would be acting as a robber. But the officers in India, when they feel impelled, throw the English laws to the winds or ignore them completely at their sweet will and, resorting to the Act of 1818, render them all ineffective. They have started arresting one leader after another. But according to the principle of this struggle, that the leader is one who endures the utmost suffering, one of those left outside should assume leadership and take the movement forward. This is a struggle not of one man but of millions of us. If three or four men can fight and win Swaraj, they will rule the country afterwards. Hence, in this struggle for Swaraj millions should offer themselves for sacrifice and win such Swaraj as will benefit the vast masses of the country. The Government is taking away from us all the eminent leaders one after another. If we get ready to follow in their footsteps and do the duty shown by them, we can smile at what the Government is doing, but if we fail to do our duty we should feel ashamed. The leaders are behind the bars, and now we in our turn should take their place. It is true that many of the leaders in and outside Gujarat have been jailed, that many volunteers have been wounded because they would not part with the salt in their hands, and that, at places; some were beaten so hard that they became unconscious.</p>
<p>But I remain unmoved. My heart now is as hard as stone. I am in this struggle for Swaraj ready to sacrifice thousands and hundreds of thousands of men if necessary. Since we have embarked upon a movement which will send thousands to jail, how can we weep over their imprisonment? In this game of dice we are playing, the throw has been as we wanted. Should we then weep or smile? This is God’s grace; let us remain unmoved and watch His miracles. If in spite of our breaking several salt laws the Government takes no notice of the camp here till the 13th, we shall disband it after that date and go somewhere else. But this plan depends entirely on the Government. For the present, we can but take what the Government gives. If you have not yet gone out to remove salt, let the whole village get together and go. Hold the salt in your fist and think that you are carrying in your hand salt worth Rs. 6 crores. Every year the Government has been taking away from us Rs. 6 cores through its monopoly of salt. You can today take the pledge not to eat salt supplied by the Government. You have a mine of salt right at your doorsteps. There is at Rohtak a humble, brave and selfless public worker named Lala Shyamlal.</p>
<p>At the time of the non-co-operation movement in 1921 he gave up his law practice but resumed it when the tide was low and earned thousands of rupees. However, his heart melted once more after the Lahore Congress and he pleaded to be taken into the Ashram. He also expressed his eagerness to join this march of satyagrahis to Dandi. But why should I exchange this gold mohur for a mere pice? So I sent him back to Rohtak. As he writes to me, he took leave of me after he had understood the value of non-violence better than before. He has now vowed never to give up non-violence and never to prove disloyal to the Ashram principles. This Lala Shyamlal has now been arrested on a charge of spreading disaffection against the Government. He must have made some speech on the lines of my writings in Young India in which I preach disaffection as our moral duty. In the first place, they should apply Section 124A to the person who has been every moment praying for the destruction of the Empire and has also been attempting to destroy it apply it, that is, to myself. But the true position is that Section 124A can be applied only to a person who wishes to overthrow the Government by rebellion or armed action. It can never apply to a person who wishes to destroy the Empire through self-suffering by following the path of non-violence and truth. But I am no judge. I have even been disbarred. 13</p>
<p>The attitude taken up by the Viceroy over the very mild proposal made by us regarding the salt tax affords a further painful insight into the Government’s mentality. It is as plain as daylight to us that, from the dizzy heights of Simla, the rulers of India are unable to understand or appreciate the difficulties of the starving millions living in the plains whose incessant toil makes Government from such a giddy height at all possible. 14 The people here in the slums round about live as well as the middle class in India. When I think of the poverty in which the peasants live, I feel ashamed that I have fruit to eat and fruit juice to drink. We can do nothing so long as we have this octopus bleeding us white, draining us and taxing us all the time. Why, they even tax our salt—a necessity of life, only less necessary than air and water. It ought to be free as they are. I know you pay a rate for water in England. But this salt tax is worse than a rate. It’s a monopoly. The idea of a thing so natural and necessary after air and water the one thing necessary, the idea of it being taxed! Nature bestows it on us and we may not use it. There’s the salt beside the sea and they forbid us to gather it. Salt is a small matter. What really matters is the excise on toddy and opium. That is really a big proportion of the revenue. There’s no way of filling that gap, unless we can cut down the cost of the army. That is the octopus that is strangling us. This terrible drain must come to an end. Indian Round Table Conference (Second Session): Proceedings of Federal Structure Committee and Minorities Committee, Vol. I, pp. 252- When I agreed roughly to the source of revenue to be common, I had in mind undoubtedly that I should be able to press for total repeal of the Salt Tax, merely by way of instance; but I should not in any way bind myself to the other taxes. I know that legally I do not do so; but if there is a recommendation on the part of the Committee, or if there are some calculations based upon the rigidity of the taxes that are enumerated there, I should again feel that I had not done justice to the cause that I represent. 15</p>
<p>The salt tax causes great hardship to the poor. Therefore, wherever salt can be made, poor people may certainly manufacture it for themselves and risk the penalty. 16 Its abolition would be a gesture the poorest peasant could understand. It would mean even more to him than independence itself. Salt in this climate is a necessity of life, like air and water. He needs it for himself, his cattle and his land. This monopoly will go, the instant we get independence. Then why not abolish it today? By such acts the Government could have created a feeling among the masses that the new era has already dawned. 17 The other affects the masses. I refer to the salt tax. As a means of raising revenue, it is insignificant. As a means of harassing the masses, it is a measure of which the mischief is indescribable. The masses will hardly appreciate independence, if the burden of the salt monopoly continues to affect them. I must not weary you with argument. I mention the two measures as a preparation of the Indian mind for independence. They will produce a psychological effect. I may mention that I discussed both the measures in a different setting with Mr. Casey, and I am now in correspondence with the present Governor of Bengal. I may add that I have today heard from Mr. Abell in regard to the salt tax that “the Government does not find them able to accept the suggestion.” 18</p>
<p>I am asked when the salt tax will be removed; and why it has not been removed already. The question implies impatience. The Cabinet has only been in office for eight days. The Finance Member has not yet taken charge of his office. We must wait. The Cabinet must do everything after full deliberation. It is I who should be impatient, for it was I who initiated the fight for the abolition of this tax. I also know how the loss of revenue can be made up for. Nevertheless I think we should not be impatient. We should not hustle the Cabinet. The Cabinet is of the people and works under their mandate. We must have faith that the salt tax will go and he who has faith can afford to be patient. There are many other things that the Cabinet has to do for the people as quickly as possible. If we continue to give it our support it will surely do all that should be done for the good of the masses. 19</p>
<p>Prof. Brij Narain has devoted two columns of the Lahore Tribune in support of the salt tax. I dare not combat his arguments though they make little appeal to my lay mind. He has come to the gratuitous conclusion that I ask for repeal on grounds of sentiment rather than reason. He reminds me of armchair politics and philosophy. Salt tax hits not only men, women and children, but also fish and cattle. Reason demands its immediate repeal. It is not the amount of the tax that kills, it is the monopoly and all it means that kills the poor villager and his cattle. Imagine what would happen if the poor were prohibited from breathing air or drinking water without permission of the Government. The condition as to salt is not radically different. The scientist has not taken the trouble to study what this prohibition to prepare salt even for one’s own consumption has cost India. 20 You have rightly said that the removal of the salt tax will drive home to the millions of villagers the truth that our Sarkar has now the reins of Government in its hands. Will they not also realize this truth, if the villages have cotton delivered at their homes on the easiest terms possible so that with a little corporate labour they can clothe themselves without difficulty? 21</p>
<p>If they can do this much Rajendra Babu’s helplessness in providing food for the people would be removed. I have received a letter which says that even though I had the salt tax repealed, salt is now costlier than before. How is that? I say after the repeal of the salt tax we should get salt almost free. For such a thing to happen the traders will have to do business for the sake of India instead of for their own sake. They should forget black-marketing altogether. When that happens, the ministers of the Interim Government would be able to carry out their respective tasks, and Rajaji, Rajendra Babu, Jawaharlal, Matthai, Bhabha and all the four League Ministers would be able to serve you in every way. Even after that, if India cannot have enough food and clothing and there is no progress in the country, you can remove them from office. 22 Today I wish to say something about salt. People say there was a time when I had marched to Dandi for salt but today there is no salt to be had or, if there is, an exorbitant price has to be paid for it. I can only bow down my head in shame. People say that although salt tax has been abolished it has not affected the price. Salt is not rationed but there is black-marketing in it. Traders are so mean that they derive huge profits even from salt. But we have become lazy. 23</p>
<p> </p>
<p>References:</p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>Instructions for Satyagrahis, June 30, 1919</li>
<li>Young India, 9-3-1922</li>
<li>Navajivan, 12-3-1922</li>
<li>Navajivan, 8-2-1925</li>
<li>Young India, 2-4-1925</li>
<li>Chapter XXXI : That Memorable Week !—I</li>
<li>Draft Declaration for January, January 10, 1930</li>
<li>Young India, 27-2-1930 </li>
<li>Young India, 20-3-1930</li>
<li>Hindi Navajivan, 20-3-1930 </li>
<li>Young India, 27-3-1930</li>
<li>Prajabandhu, 30-3-1930 </li>
<li>Navajivan, 13-4-1930 </li>
<li>The Hindu, 5-9-l930</li>
<li>The Manchester Guardian, 13-10-1931</li>
<li>Gandhiji’s Correspondence with the Government, 1942-44, pp. 286</li>
<li>Harijan, 14-4-1946</li>
<li>Letter to Lord Pethick-Lawrence, April 2, 1946</li>
<li>Hindustan, 10-9-1946</li>
<li>Harijan, 29-9-1946</li>
<li>Harijan, 17-11-1946 </li>
<li>Prarthana Pravachan-I, pp. 116</li>
<li>Prarthana Pravachan–I, pp. 273</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Salvation Army and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-26:2043530:BlogPost:747762013-10-26T15:47:41.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Salvation Army and Mahatma Gandhi </b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>If orphanages were reserved for orphans alone, they could be self-supporting in a very short time. We have much to learn from the Salvation Army in this respect. The orphanages which they run have a soul in them. Ours are by comparison soulless. They have given refuge to thousands of children, have made men of them, have found employment for them. The children in our orphanages have not been given this sense of security. Some have been found petty jobs. These may be left out of account. The general practice in our orphanages is to send away the children when they come of age. Not so with the Salvation Army. In its institutions the orphans, when they come of age, start working in its factories, in the same way that a son in the family who has grown up is regarded as an additional shield and support for the family. It is necessary that such a family feeling be injected in our institutions too. 1</p>
<p>During the self-denial week, the members of the Salvation Army take a vow to abstain from taking jam or other eatable for a fixed period. During Lent, the Roman Catholics undergo certain privations. That is also a vow. In each case, the result expected is the same, viz., purification and expression of the soul. By these resolutions, you bring the body under subjection. Body is matter, soul is spirit, and there is internal conflict between matter and spirit. Triumph of matter over the spirit means destruction of the latter. It is common knowledge that [this is] in the same proportion that we indulge the body or mortify the soul. Body or matter has undoubtedly its uses. 2 The Government too teaches us this. Since it punishes, it also enlists, to some extent, the help of institutions like the Salvation Army for reforming communities which are given to robbery and other evil ways. We are in a better position than the Government to undertake this task; for we have the whole class of sadhus and fakirs for the purpose. If its members cultivate the qualities of true sadhus and fakirs, they can be of the utmost help ill this work. Let no one think that organized efforts are necessary for this purpose. Inhabitants of every village or town in which national awakening has taken place should, without waiting for a lead from others, make arrangements for their protection and undertake the work of reforming [the thieves]. If this is satisfactorily done even at a few places, the practice will spread to other villages. 3 </p>
<p>You can picket liquor shops quietly and advise drunkards in their houses, in these seven days, to refrain from drink, just like the Salvation Army. You must subject yourselves to introspection and come out like Ramachandra. Take a vow to cleanse your hearts, keeping God, and not Satan, as your witness, and make your life simple and easy. If you do these, you will have truly observed the Youth Week. May God give you that intellect and strength. 4 Wean them from their rascality by going amongst them as fearlessly as some of those Salvation Army girls who go into the dens of thieves and gamblers and drunkards, fall on their necks and at their feet, and bring them round. The service will deck you more than the fineries that you are wearing. I will then be a trustee for the money that you will save and distribute it amongst the poor. I pray that the rambling message that I have given you may find a lodgment in your hearts. 5</p>
<p>I ask the ladies in particular to help in this. They should visit the homes of those who drink and plead with them. I have seen women of the Salvation Army do this. Why should not the women of India do the same? Are they the Hindu, Muslim and Parsi women less capable of doing good? Are not those who are caught in the vice their own brothers? If I go and reason with them, they will quarrel with me as they will with other men. They will not, however, be disrespectful or insulting to any woman. They are not such beasts that they will not understand you. As soon as they come in contact with you they will be awakened, they will step back and, seeing the love and affection pouring from your eyes, they will conclude that it is some sati or yogini confronting them and ashamed of themselves they will give up liquor. 6 I have a letter from Mr. John Collett which I enclose herewith. I send you also a copy of my letter to Mr. Collett. Will you please tell me whether you will care to receive the cards and the medals for the use mentioned in the letter? 7 </p>
<p>The Salvation Army wants to teach people about God. But they come with bread. For the poor bread is their God. Similarly we should bring food into the mouths of the people through khadi. If we succeed in breaking the idleness of the people through khadi, they will begin to listen to us. Whatever else the Government might do, it does leave some food for the villagers. Unless we can bring food to them, why should the people listen to us? When we have taught them what they can do through their own efforts, then they will want to listen to us. That trust can best be generated through khadi. While working out the khadi programme our aim should be purely humanitarian, that is, economic. We should leave out all political considerations whatsoever. But it is bound to produce important political consequences which nobody can prevent and nobody need deplore. 8 I remember years and years ago in the early nineties when the brave Salvation Army people, at the risk of their own lives, used to carry on picketing at the corners of notorious streets of Bombay which were filled with houses of ill fame. There is no reason why some such thing should not be organized on a large scale. As for gambling on the racecourse, it is, so far as I am aware, an importation, like many other importations, from the West, and if I had my way I would withdraw the protection of the law that gambling on the racecourse enjoys even to the extent it does. The Congress programme being one of self-purification, as is stated in so many words in the resolution of 1920, the Congress can have nothing to do with income derived from any vice. The Ministers will, therefore, use the authority that they have obtained for educating public opinion in the right direction and for stopping gambling in high quarters. It is useless to hope that the unwary public will not copy the bad manners of the so-called high-placed people. I have heard it argued that horse-racing is necessary for breeding good horses. There may be truth in this. Is it not possible to have horse-racing without gambling, or is gambling also an aid to the good breeding of horses? 9</p>
<p>Begging is an age-old institution in India. It was not always a nuisance. It was not always a profession. Now it has become a profession to which cheats have taken. No person who is capable of working for his bread should be allowed to beg. The way to deal with the problem will be to penalize those who give alms to professional beggars. Of course begging itself by the able-bodied should be penalized. But this reform is possible only when municipalities conduct factories where they will feed people against work. The Salvation Army people are or were experts in this class of work. They had opened a match factory in London in which any person who came found work and food. What I have, however, suggused is an immediate palliative. The real remedy lies in discovering the root cause and dealing with it. This means equalizing the economic condition of the people. The present extremes have to be dealt with as a serious social disease. In a healthy society concentration of riches in a few people and unemployment among millions is a great social crime or disease which needs to be remedied. 10</p>
<p>This evening I wish to devote to Sylhet. I have received frantic telegrams from Sylhet about the serious riots that have broken out there. The cause is not known. I am sorry that I am unable to go just now to Sylhet, nor am I vain enough to think that my presence would immediately abate the mob fury. I know, too, that one should not without peremptory cause abandon his present duty, however humble it may be, in favour of one which may appear to be higher. To adopt the Salvation Army language, we are all soldiers of God to fight the battle of right against wrong, by means which are strictly non-violent and truthful. As His soldiers ours is “not to reason why”, ours is “but to do and die”. Though, therefore, I am unable to respond to the urgent call of the sufferers of Sylhet, I can appeal, not in vain, to the authorities in East Bengal in general and Sylhet in particular to put forth their best effort on behalf of the sufferers and deal sternly with the recalcitrants. Now that there is peace between the Hindus and the Muslims, I am sure the authorities do not relish these ugly outbreaks. It would be wrong and misleading to underestimate the trouble by calling it the work of goondas. The minorities must be made to realize that they are as much valued citizens of the State they live in, as the majority. Let the Premiers of the two divisions of Bengal meet often enough and jointly devise means to preserve peace in the two States and to find enough healthy food and clothing for the inhabitants and enough work for the masses in East and West Bengal. When the masses, Hindu and Muslim, see their chiefs acting together and working together honestly, courageously and without intermission, the masses living in the two States will take the cue from the leaders and act accordingly. To the sufferers I would advise bravely to face the future and never to give way to panic. Such disturbances do happen in the lifetime of a people. Manliness demands there should be no weakness shown in facing them. Weakness aggravates the mischief, courage abates it. 11</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>References:</b></p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>Mahatma Gandhini Vicharsrishti</li>
<li>Letter to Esther Faering, January 25, 1919</li>
<li>Navajivan, 29-1-1922</li>
<li>The Hindu, 23-11-1925</li>
<li>With Gandhiji in Ceylon, pp. 16-21 </li>
<li>Navajivan, 13-4-1930</li>
<li>Letter to Salvation Army, June 14, 1931</li>
<li>The Hindustan Times, 17-10-1935</li>
<li>Harijan, 4-9-1937 </li>
<li>Harijan, 8-6-1940</li>
<li>Harijan, 7-9-1947</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Revenue system of British and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-25:2043530:BlogPost:747692013-10-25T14:30:32.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Revenue system of British and Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>When I entered on the Kaira struggle I had no notion that I was attacking the whole revenue system. I felt that I was attacking what in my opinion was a grave injustice to the people. At the same time I confess that I would not have hesitated to enter upon the struggle even if it had meant an attack on the whole revenue system. War had ever been present before me and I know that as a law-abiding citizen and still more as a lover of the British Constitution I should at least hesitate to embarrass the Government if I cannot actively co-operate in the prosecution of War. I have tried to do the latter so far as as I could. But should anybody allow the War to cover injustice? Should not the Government refrain from defying honest public opinion? I do not say the people’s verdict be accepted in the Kaira matter. But I do say that where there is a sharp difference of opinion, arbitration should be resorted to. It is no pleasure to me to use adjectives for Talatis or for that matter anybody, but I know that it would be prudery in private matters, and a shirking of a painful duty in public matters, to shun adjectives where they describe material facts. I wish you really knew them as I have come to know them. You will then probably use stronger language than I have done. Give me the committee I have asked for and I will show you what their estimates are worth and incidentally show you also what they are. But here the fault is not theirs; the system under which they are working makes them so. 1</p>
<p>They set about the work by sympathizing with Sir Sankaran over the difficulties of dealing with “so complex and specialized a subject” as the Land Revenue system. I respectfully submit that this is a highly misleading statement. There is nothing complex and specialized about the Land Revenue system except in so far as the administrators have made it so. Sir Sankaran has left ‘the complexity and specialization’ to the specialists and merely dealt with the main principles which even a layman can easily understand. I had to undergo the torture of going through the bewildering Revenue Rules and their amendments made from time to time, which, I would full grant, can only be remembered and recalled, as occasion may require, by specialists. But those rules are really devised not for the relief of distress but for ensuring a scientific, rigorous and regular collection of land-tax levied almost to the highest margin. And I would freely admit further that it will tax even the great ability of Sir Sankaran Nair if he had to find out how best to collect revenue from cultivators who can ill afford to pay. But not much ability was required to understand the simple problem whether there was failure of crops in Kaira in the year 1917, and whether the damage done by the excessive rains was such as to entitle the ryots to relief by way of suspension.</p>
<p>The Bombay Government’s note frightens the laymen . . . and in this category must be classed the Secretary of State and the Parliament by authoritatively saying that the resolution submitted to the Legislative Council and referred to by Sir Sankaran was “thoroughly impracticable”. The impracticability consisted in the Hon’ble Mr. Kamat proposing that “the expert agency of the agricultural department” should find the anna valuation. The Government ask the reader on their mere ipse dixit to consider this very practicable suggestion as thoroughly impracticable. The Hon’ble Mr. Kamat suggested a comparatively independent though still Government agency, to do the work instead of an interested Government agency, viz., the circle inspectors, and other officials in the lower ranks whose very promotion depends upon their ability to make full collection of the revenue even by “coercive” measures. In further proof of Sir Sankaran Nair’s “misconception of fact and policy”, the Government criticize his acceptance of my testimony “based on the mere statement of interested cultivators”. As the framers of the note claim to be specialists having an intimate knowledge of the Revenue Department, I find it difficult to characterize this passage. I can only say that they have been ill-served by their subordinates. If the cultivators, whose statements I accepted, were interested in one way, the circle inspectors, as I have already shown, were far more interested the opposite way.</p>
<p>The note omits, however, to mention that I did not rely upon the evidence of interested cultivators but checked their statements, in some cases, where it was possible, with my own eyes, in all cases with the evidence of disinterested and respectable men who were not concerned for their own sake in securing a suspension of the revenue collection. I thus applied a threefold test and I venture to say that, when the same evidence was given in thousands of cases by thousands of men and women, it was impossible to question that testimony, and the Government, in order to support the interested statements of their officials and in order also to be able to collect the revenue which they wanted, were obliged to discredit not only the testimony of the villagers concerned but that of practically the whole of the Kaira population. Any authority, in any shape or form responsible to the people, would have recoiled from any such imputation. Under our system, however, the word of the Government has come to be regarded with superstitious awe and it has to be accepted as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth even though large masses of people require to be damned for that purpose. The Government summarily reject Sir Sankaran Nair’s appreciation of the past economic situation of the tract. I challenge the framers of the note to go through the villages of the district, and find out for themselves from the dumb testimony of the dilapidated buildings in the villages and say, with hands on their hearts, what evidence those buildings bespeak.</p>
<p>The Government then take delight in being able to say that the agitation in Kaira did not have “any considerable effects on the measures of relief actually sanctioned”, and that the result was not to “leave the decision as regards payment of the Government demand to the raiyats themselves”. I can only say so much the worse for the Government and the broken word of their accredited officers, one of whom, in the presence of nearly two hundred people including myself, said that suspension would be granted in cases of poor cultivators and that the question of inability on the ground of poverty would be decided in consultation with the leading men of villages.1 This was confirmed by the Collector of the District. That suspension was confined to the fewest cultivators possible, that the orders of suspension were suppressed from the public for over a month and that they were only discovered when the departmant was at its wit’s end as to what to do, even after having sold the cattle of absentee cultivators, attached and removed their jewellery, imposed chothai fines, attached valuable crops wroth a few thousand rupees for a paltry balance and after the statement of the Commissioners that he did not need, like his ignorant audience, the binding effect of a vow to make good his threat, that he would sell their crops, confiscate their holdings and never restore the names of the contumacious holders, is a tale too thoroughly discreditable to require any further elaboration, and I feel sorry that the new Governor, who has given evidence of his anxiety to hear both sides and to be as impartial as he can, has been, no doubt unconsciously, made a vehicle for passing to the Imperial Parliament a note that is brimful of misleading statements, and innuendoes. I never took advantage of this so-called concession, meaning the orders discovered in June. I merely made use of the knowledge gained at Uttersanda, and, as befits a satyagrahi, stopped the struggle. Had I prolonged it, I would have been guilty of contumacy, incivility to the Government and indifference to the distress of those whom I had the privilege of guiding. 2 </p>
<p>The revenue system in the States is also not free from blame. I am confident that their imitation of the British system has done a great injury to their subjects. The British revenue system may have a shadows of justification if we grant that it is morally right for a handful of Englishmen to maintain their hold over our country in any and every circumstance. There can be no such plea of compelling necessity in the case of the Indian Princes. They have nothing to fear from their subjects as their existence is never in danger. They do not need a large military force; no Prince has got this and the British would never permit it. Still they levy a taxation far beyond the capacity of the subjects to pay. I am pained to observe that our ancient tradition that revenue is intended only for popular welfare has been receiving but scant respect. 3 The figures present a case for overhauling the land revenue system. They demand a scientific study of the relative value of cotton-growing and the growing of grains, and the scientific method of breeding, rearing and feeding cattle. The figures also demonstrate the absolute necessity of cottage industry auxiliary to cultivation. No agricultural country in the world can possibly support a population on less than one acre per head, if the population is to subsist merely or principally on agriculture. 4</p>
<p>It is only gradually that we shall come to know the importance of the victory gained at Bardoli.1 The final decision of the Government of Bombay which it has communicated in its correspondance with Shri Shroff2 is the necessary result of the triumph at Bardoli. It will have its effect on the revenue department in the entire country. And if there is real improvement in this department, if that department is freed from corruption, it would amount to securing three-fourths of swaraj. This is because a foreign government largely depends upon money for its very existence. No one would run the government of another country merely for the pleasure of doing so, certainly not the British. They have withdrawn their settlements from places where they have not earned any money. One will rarely find in another department the chaos that is found in the Indian revneue department. The peasants of Bardoli have shed light on this darkness. However, there is nothing to be cheerful about the letter addressed to Shri Shroff. No great hopes can be pinned on it. Those in authority are experts in giving verbal promises and then violating them in practice; under the pretext of dispensing justice and introducing reforms, theyhave been found to perpetuate their real position and even to strengthen it further. As a result of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, officers have increased their salaries, consolidated their own positions, added to the expenditure of the army and strengthened the roots of their own businessmen. Hence caution will be necessary to see to it that the hopes that the letter from the Government has raised in regard to reforms in the land revenue system are realized. Bardoli has shown the way and cleared it. Swaraj lies on that route alone and that alone is the cure for starvation. 5</p>
<p>The terrific pressure of land revenue, which furnishes a large part of the total, must undergo considerable modification in an independent India. Even the much vaunted permanent settlement benefits the few rich zamindars, not the ryots. The ryot has remained as helpless as ever. He is a mere tenant at will. Not only, then, has the land revenue to be considerably reduced, but the whole revenue system has to be so revised as to make the ryot’s good its primary concern. But the British system seems to be designed to crush the very life out of him. Even the salt he must use to live is so taxed as to make the burden fall heaviest on him, if only because of the heartless impartiality of it incidence. The tax shows itself still more burdensome on the poor man when it is remembered that salt is the one thing he must eat more than the rich man both individually and collectively. The drink and drug revenue, too, is derived from the poor. It saps the foundations both of their health and morals. It is defended under the false plea of individual freedom, but, in reality, is maintained for its own sake. The ingenuity of the authors of the reforms of 1919 transferred this revenue to the so-called responsible part of dyarchy, so as to throw the burden of prohibition on it, thus, from the very beginning, rendering it powerless for good. If the unhappy minister wipes out this revenue he must starve education, since in the existing circumstances he has no new source ofreplacing that revenue.If the weight of taxation has crushed the poor from above, the destruction of the central supplementary industry, i.e., hand-spinning, has undermined their capacity for producing wealth. The tale of India’s ruination is not complete without reference to the liabilities incurred in her name. Sufficient has been recently said about these in the public Press. It must be the duty of a free India to subject all the liabilities to the strictest investigation, and repudiate those that may be adjudged by an impartial tribunal to be unjust and unfair. 6</p>
<p>In another column will be found my manifesto to the U.P. Kisans.1 I know that H. E. the Governor does not quite like it inasmuch as it goes beyond the relief given by the U.P. Government. But the advice given to the kisans in the manifesto is an honest attempt to express their capacity for payment. I am hoping, therefore, that if the kisans pay according to the suggestion made in the manifesto, the zamindars and the local Government will accept the payments in full discharge of the kisans’ liability. But under the land revenue system prevalent in the U.P. the brunt will in the first instance fall upon the zamindars. I am hoping that the Government will grant proportionate relief to the zamindars who accept the tenants’ terms. 7 The writer belittles village work. It betrays gross ignorance. If the mutts and the revenue offices were extinguished and free schools were opened, the people would not be cured of their inertia. Mutts must be reformed, the revenue system must be overhauled, free primary schools must be established in every village. But starvation will not disappear because people pay no revenue and mutts are destroyed and schools spring up in every village. The greatest education in the villages consists in the villagers being taught or induced to work methodically and profitably all the year round whether it be on the land or at industries connected with the villages. Lastly, my correspondent seems to resent acceptance by us of humanitarian services by missionaries. Will he have an agitation led against these missionary institutions? Why should they have non- Christian aid? They are established with the view of weaning Indians from their ancestral faith even as expounded by Vivekanand and Radhakrishnan. Let them isolate the institutions from the double purpose. It will be time enough then to expect non-Christian aid. The critic must be aware of the fact that even as it is some of these institutions do get non-Christian aid. My point is that there should be no complaint if they do not receive such aid so long as they have an aim which is repugnant to the non-Christian sentiment. 8</p>
<p>I think the suggestion has something in it. Such stocks are necessary in the economic conditions of the country. Ever since the system of collecting revenue in cash was introduced, the stocks of grain in the villages have diminished. I shall not go into the merits or demerits of the cash revenue system; but I do believe the country could have been saved from the present difficult situation if we had continued to stock grain in the villages. Now that the controls are being removed no one will suffer any hardship if the grain is stocked as suggested by Vaikunthbhai and if the villagers and the traders become honest. If the farmers and the traders get a fair margin of profit there can be no high prices for the working class and other people in the cities. What really matters is that necessaries of life should be within the reach of every one. There can then be no question of high or low prices. 9</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>References:</b></p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>Letter to James Duboulay, April 9, 1918</li>
<li>Young India, 16-8-1919</li>
<li>Young India, 8-1-1925</li>
<li>Young India, 24-12-1925 </li>
<li>Navajivan, 21-7-1929 </li>
<li>Letter to Lord Irwin, March 2, 1930</li>
<li>Young India, 28-5-1931</li>
<li>Harijan, 6-3-1937 </li>
<li>Harijanbandhu, 28-12-1947 </li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Royal Commission and Mahatma Gandhitag:gandhiking.ning.com,2013-10-25:2043530:BlogPost:747732013-10-25T14:30:10.000ZProf. Dr. Yogendra Yadavhttp://gandhiking.ning.com/profile/DrYogendraYadav
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29,…</b></p>
<p><b>Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav</b></p>
<p>Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist</p>
<p>Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India</p>
<p>Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229</p>
<p>E-mail- <a href="mailto:dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net">dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net</a>;</p>
<p><a href="mailto:dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com">dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p><b>Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Royal Commission and Mahatma Gandhi</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is common knowledge that before the War the British Government used every effort possible that Law 3 of 1885 should be repealed. The condition today is changed, but we had hoped that it would change for the better, seeing that there is no foreign government to deal with, but our own Government. Unhappily, we are now in the position of strangers in what may be called our own land. We have always endeavoured to conciliate prejudice and with that view we have made suggestions which have been adopted in the selfgoverning Colonies. Failing, however, the adoption of these suggestions, we have asked that a commission of enquiry may be appointed. This is the time honoured British custom. Whenever a new step has been taken, a royal commission has preceded it. The latest instance, perhaps, is that of the Aliens Act in the United Kingdom. Before any steps were taken, a commission investigated the charges made against the aliens, and into the question of the adequacy of the existing laws, and into the question as to what new laws were necessary. We have asked for a similar commission regarding the British Indians in the Transvaal. We believe that we are entitled to this, in view of the very grave charges I have referred to. We have been asking all these years for bread, but we have received stones in the shape of this Ordinance. We have therefore every reason to hope that Your Lordship will not countenance the legislation above described. 1</p>
<p>With reference to the Royal Commission, what the Delegates have requested is a commission or rather a committee it may be of local, but independent and impartial men, such as the judges of the Supreme Court or the Chief Magistrate of Johannesburg to enquire into the charges made against the Indian community and which have been used as reasons for passing the Ordinance. In our humble opinion, such a committee can give its report within a month from its formation. The Delegates respectfully submit that either the veto should now be exercised, as in the case of the Native Land Tenure Ordinance, or the Royal sanction should be suspended, pending result of the investigations by the committee or the commission described above. 2</p>
<p>The first Indian to become a member of the British Parliament was Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji. Born on September 4th, 1825, in the city of Bombay, he was educated at the Elphinstone School and College, and was, at the age of 29, made Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy—being the first Indian to receive that honour. In 1855, Mr. Naoroji visited England as partner in the first Indian business to be established in that country. The University College, London, did him the honour of appointing him Professor of Gujarati; and one of the benefits gained for India by Mr. Naoroji was the admission of Indians to the Civil Service in 1870. He was made Prime Minister of Baroda in 1874, and a year later was elected a member of the Corporation and Municipal Council of Bombay, to which body he gave five years’ valuable service. Mr. Naoroji was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council from 1885 to 1887. The Indian National Congress honoured him by electing him President in 1886, 1893, and again in 1906. Mr. Naoroji sat in the House of Commons from 1893 to 1895 as Liberal member for Central Finsbury, London, and he did good work for his country as member of the Royal Commission on Indian Expenditure, etc., and, in 1897, gave evidence before the Welby Commission. From the very commencement of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress, he was a diligent member and hard worker. Among the publications from the pen of Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji are: England’s Duty to India, Admission of Educated Natives into the Indian Civil Service, Financial Administration of India, and what is, perhaps, the best known of his many writings, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. In 1906, the venerable Dadabhai journeyed to the Motherland to preside over the Indian National Congress, a task which was a tremendous strain upon even his iron constitution and indomitable spirit. Since the Calcutta Congress of 1906, Mr. Dadabhai has practically retired from public life, and in 1907 he went to reside at Varsova, a small fishing village in the Bombay Presidency where he still watches with a keen interest the progress of events in India which go to make or mar its future. Truly has he earned for himself the honoured title of the Grand Old Man of India. 3 </p>
<p>The most important part of the cablegram, however, is the fact that the commission promised by the Union Government is to be appointed as a “concession” to “the detractors” of Indians in the Union Parliament. Unless, therefore, the Government of India take care, there is every likelihood of the commission, like the committee of the South African Assembly, proving to the British Indians a curse instead of a blessing. It is, therefore, not unnatural that the British Indian Association urges that H. E. the Viceroy should propose a Royal Commission upon which both the Union and the Indian interests are represented. Nothing can be fairer than the proposal made by Mr. Aswat. I say so becasue, as a matter of right, no commission is really needed to decide that Indian settlers are entitled to trade in South Africa where they like and hold landed property on the same terms as the European settlers. This is the minimum they can claim. But under the complex constitution of this great Empire, justice is and has often to be done in a round-about manner. A wise captain, instead of sailing against a headwind, tacks and yet reaches his destination sooner than he otherwise would have. Even so, Mr. Aswat wisely accepts the principle of a commission on a matter that is selfevident, but equally wisely wants a commission that would not prove abortive and that will dare to tell the ruling race in South Africa that, as members in an Empire which has more Coloured people than white, they may not treat their Indian fellow-subjects as helots. Whether the above proposal is accepted or some other is adopted by the Imperial Government, it must be made clear to them that public opinion in India will not tolerate confiscation of the primary rights of the British Indian settlers in South Africa. 4</p>
<p>His Excellency the Viceroys speech at the time of the opening of the session of the Imperial Legislative Council is naturally a very important pronouncement, coming as it does after very troublous times through which we have just passed and from whose effects we have hardly emerged. The fact of the actual appointment of the Commission gives relief, though I observe that the Indian Press is not over-enthusiastic upon the personnel or upon the fact that it is not a Royal Commission, but it is one that is to report to Delhi. In my humble opinion, a commission appointed from Delhi can be just as effective as a Royal Commission. And Royal Commissions have been known in our own times to have been perfectly abortive. Lord Morley, when he was in active service, used to say that his experience of them was so unhappy that he did not believe in them at all. He became an unwilling party to them because it was an English weakness. In a case, however, like that of the Punjab, an inquiry is the necessary sequel. We need not, therefore, complain of the inquiry not being a Royal Commission, but we have every right to examine its personnel and, though Lord Hunter does not enjoy a world-wide reputation, it need not be doubted that he has a reputation to lose.</p>
<p>After all, he must be pre-eminently Mr. Montagu’s choice and I would hesitate to distrust his choice or his intentions even though he has quite unjustly and unwarrantedly put in an energetic defence of some of the measures adopted or approved by the Government of India. Nor may one cavil at the appointment of the other members. We in Bombay, however, can derive the greatest satisfaction from the appointment of Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, not because he is a Bombay man but because he is an able advocate and what is more, because he is a pupil and an ardent follower of the late Sir Pherozeshah Mehta. We may trust him to act as fearlessly and as impartially as the late Sir Pherozeshah Mehta and to hold his own against odds. His appointment, moreover, furnishes perhaps an indication of the desire of the Government of India to secure impartial men who have not formed, or rather expressed, opinions one way or other. We have a right to expect Sahebzada Sultan Mehomed Khan to do no less. And I would take leave to add, too, that where Englishmen have not formed preconceived notions or where they have not gone, as all of us sometimes do go, mad over some things, they dispense fearless justice and expose wrong even though the perpetrators may be their own people.</p>
<p>I would, therefore, respectfully suggest suspension of judgment over the personnel of the Commission. Trust it and respond to the Viceregal appeal for a calm atmosphere. I derive, however, much greater satisfaction from the knowledge that, after all, the securing of a proper finding by the Commission is in the largest measure dependent upon our countrymen in the Punjab. If those who know the facts will come forward fearlessly to tell the truth and if there are no degraded beings in the Punjab ready enough to sell themselves for the sake of personal gain, we need have no misgivings. Our case is so excellent, the injustices that have been already brought to light are so glaring that we need not fear an abortion if the people of the Punjab will but do their duty. Why was there justice done in the case of Champaran? It was primarily and principally because the poor, ground-down ryots of Champaran dared to tell the truth. Will the free people of the Punjab do less? There can be but one answer.</p>
<p>But we must help them and we shall best do so, not by spilling ink over showing the weakness of the personnel of the Committee or over its not being a Royal Commission, but by concentrating ourselves upon seeing that there is no espionage either on the one side or the other, that the people of the Punjab are permitted to have a free atomoshere to work in, and there is comfort in the thought that the ever-vigilant and ubiquitous Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviyaji is there, assisted by Sannyasi Swami Shri Shraddhanandji and the indomitable Pandit Motilal Nehru. We need not fear the consequences. It is noteworthy that the Committee is to investigate not only the affairs in the Punjab, but also in this Presidency. There should be no difficulty in our being able to show the real causes of the discontent as also the happy distinction, on the whole, between the aftermath here and the Punjab. There is one more thing about the Committee before it can be dismissed from consideration. What is the meaning of the reference to the Committee? It seems to me broad enough to cover an examination of the judgments of the Punjab Special Tribunals, whether the Special Commissions or the Martial Law Courts, and to include the power for the Committee to recommend total or partial remission of sentences. But we may not leave anything understood on a matter so vital as this. We must therefore have this point satisfactorily cleared up some way or other. As regards the Indemnity Bill, though I think that it would have been graceful, even tactful, on the part of the Viceroy not to have mentioned the Indemnity Bill in the same breath as [the] Commission, I submit it is well to suspend judgment till we have seen the full text of the Bill proposed to be introduced by the Government. 5</p>
<p>His Excellency the Viceroy has informed us in his speech that a Commission has been appointed for the purpose. I have seen criticism regretting that this is a Committee and not a Royal Commission, and that some injustice has been done by the refusal to appoint a Royal Commission. It seems to me that there is no great difference between a Royal Commission and a Committee appointed by the Viceroy. The appointment of a Royal Commission is notified in England and the Commission submits its report to the Imperial Government. In the present case the appointment of the Committee is notified by the Government of India and it will submit its report to the Viceroy. Even so, the members of the Commission appointed in India cannot be nominated without the consent of the Secretary of State of India. We have had experience of Royal Commissions having been appointed, which proved unavailing, and of local Committees having been appointed and of justice done by them. To me, therefore, there seems to be no great difference between a Royal Commission and a Committee appointed by the local Government. The outcome of the Committee’s labours depends in some measure on the members who constitute it. Examining these names, we see that, though we cannot be enthusiastic over all the names, we cannot say, on the whole, that the members are biased men or that they are not men of independent judgment. The Chairman is Lord Hunter.</p>
<p>He is not a man of Imperial standing, but he was Solicitor-General of Scotland and we have, therefore, no reason to fear that he will hesitate to express independent views. As for the other members, we have a standard of reference by which to judge them, and that is Sir Chimanlal Setalvad. We have no reason to criticize his appointment; on the contrary, we would enthusiastically welcome the Committee if all the other members were of the same calibre. Sir Chimanlal Setalvad is an advocate of established reputation and, what is more, takes part in public life. He was also a follower, a supporter and a friend of an able man and lover of freedom like Sir Pherozeshah Mehta. We may, therefore, trust to his acting impartially and fearlessly in doing justice and carrying others with him as well. If, thus, from Bombay they have selected an independent-minded and capable leader, we may assume that in selecting others too a like standard has been followed more or less. Sahibzada Sultan Ahmed is a brother of Sahibzada Aftab Ahmed Khan, a member of the India Council. However, what the Committee’s report is will depend on us, that is, on our brethren in the Punjab. If they come forward to tell the truth without fear and if no Indian comes to give us false evidence to further his own base interests, we need have no fear about the Committee’s report. Though the Committee can hold secret sessions for reasons which may appear sufficient to it, it will generally take evidence in public.</p>
<p>It will have, thus, to base its report only on this evidence. In some of the cases in the Punjab, the injustice has been so patent that even an illiterate person can see it. What other opinion can the Committee express about them? I should admit that I entertain no fear about what its report will be. The only fear is about our ability to lead evidence properly. Personally, I do not have this fear either, and want the reader, too, not to have it. The Hon’ble Madan Mohan Malaviya, Sannyasi Swami Shri Shraddhanand and the brave Pandit Motilal Nehru have taken upon themselves to collect evidence and there is no reason, therefore, to fear that evidence would not be presented properly. Thus, instead of concerning ourselves with what kind of a Committee it is, we should really direct our attention to how we can place all the facts before it. It is also for us to see that the question whether the Committee’s terms of reference include a review of the judgements already pronounced and the sentences already passed is clarified beyond doubt. Though the Viceroy’s words seem to imply as much, any doubt on an important issue like this must be removed. The reader will remember that the Committee is not only for the Punjab, but that Bombay province is also included in the scope of its inquiry. We shall, therefore, have to prepare for it. To me it seems that we need to give our main attention to obtaining an unambiguous statement of the Committee’s terms of reference and preparing ourselves for presenting our case to it. 6</p>
<p>I have not much to say, because I have not studied the scope of the Royal Commission, nor have I interested myself in it. Being a confirmed Non-co-operator, I naturally take little or no interest in the doings of the many Commissions and Committees appointed by the Government. In agriculture itself, I am certainly interested, so much so that I delight in calling myself a farmer without knowing much of farming; and, if His Excellency the Acting Governor invites me to an informal discussion on matters agricultural, I shall certainly place my views before him. 7 I went to the Acting Governor at his instance. He wrote to me not as Governor nor for any purpose connected with his office as Governor. He invited me to go to Mahabaleshwar to discuss with him agricultural matters. As I explained some time ago in the pages of Navajivan, I told him that I could not be identified with the Royal Commission in any way, that I was still confirmed in my views on non-co-operation and generally had no faith in Commisions. I added further that it would suit me to see him when he descened to the plains. His Excellency therefore wrote saying it would suit him to meet me in June. But subsequently he changed his mind and sent a message that it would suit him better if I could go to Mahabaleshwar. I had no hesitation in going there. We had two very pleasant and long talks. And you are entitled to guess (and that correctly) that our talk revolved round the charkha. That was the central theme. And I could not discuss agriculture without discussing the terrific cattle problem! 8</p>
<p>I have myself just finished a preliminary study of the report of the Royal Commission. I confess I do not understand it as I would understand say a work on the economics of the spinning-wheel. I am in search of a teacher who would make the language of currency almost as real to me as that of the spinning-wheel. Then but not till then shall I be able to express my own opinion on the problem. Meanwhile I promise to devote to its serious study all the odd moments I can spare. 9 How the Royal Commission should be constituted is as alien a subject to me as, say, the cure for tuberculosis which falls in the province of a medical expert. I have paid no thought to the subject of Royal Commission because it is distinctly outside the sphere of my knowledge, thoughts and activities. Q. Would you accept a seat on the Royal Commission, if one was offered to you? A. What is the use of asking me that question? I had once speculated what I would do if I were appointed Viceroy of India, but those days of speculation are gone. 10</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>References:</b></p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li>Memorial to Lord Elgin, November 8, 1906</li>
<li>Letter to Private Secretary To Morley, November 24, 1906</li>
<li>Indian Opinion, 3-9-1910 </li>
<li>Young India, 16-8-1919 </li>
<li>Young India, 10-9-1919</li>
<li>Navajivan, 14-9-1919</li>
<li>The Hindu, 23-4-1926 </li>
<li>Young India, 27-5-1926</li>
<li>Young India, 2-12-1926</li>
<li>Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3-11-1927</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>