Rajaji's Legacy for India

RAJAJI’S LEGACY FOR INDIA:
Democracy, Non-Alignment and Peace

[Under the auspices of the Rajaji Centenary Celebrations Committee, Lord Fenner Brockway delivered two lectures at Delhi on March 21 and 22, 1980. The first is on “Rajaji –The Man and his Message, and India’s Unique Struggle for Freedom.” Calling India his spiritual home, the speaker observed that while the religions of the West were concerned that an individual should be good for his reward in heaven, the Eastern religions identified the individual with universal life. The latter were community religions seeking the service of all and this spiritual inheritance from India he felt most deeply. He traced the life events of Rajaji from the time he joined public life in India and observed that even before Gandhiji’s entry into Indian politics, Rajaji worked for prohibition and removal of untouchability, etc. “Rajaji attained human fulfilment even in an unfulfilled world. I know no one, who in his qualities and in his achievements was such a complete human being as Rajaji.”

We reproduce below the text of the second lecture by kind courtesy of Sri S. Ramakrishnan, Secretary, Rajaji Centenary Celebrations Committee.
–EDITOR]

I would refer to the four principles Rajaji dearly held. His dedication to democracy; his dedication to morality in politics; his dedication to non-alignment and peace; his dedication to conviction and conscience.

Rajaji’s Dedication to Democracy

The essence of both Gandhiji’s and Rajaji’s teaching was spiritual democracy. They thought that if India was to become free in reality, the peoples of India must become free themselves – consciously free in mind end spirit, claiming their equality by their personal attitudes and recognising the equality of all others, particularly the Harijans, the untouchables. That teaching brought about what can only be described as a religious transformation in many in India and in many other cases a deepened dedication to the cause. Gandhiji established a core of his dedicated whole-hearted supporters, in the Satyagraha Ashram. Rajaji was from the first a member, sacrificing, as I told yesterday, his prestige as a leading barrister to become a humble follower of Gandhiji. He needed little conversion. Even before Gandhiji’s return to India in 1919, Rajaji had campaigned for human equality and particularly the rights of the Harijans, and had proved his own equality in intelligence and ability with any of the British occupiers.

Now, what are the implications of his conception of spiritual democracy and human equality? First, of course, the right of the Indian people to govern themselves. They had to choose, when independence was gained, between two methods of government–dictatorship or democracy.

Gandhiji’s belief in free men implied democracy. When the Second World War took place and Britain refused India any self-government, he put India’ s right to freedom before participation in the conflict against Hitler and Fascism.

On the other hand, Rajaj”s passion for democracy was so deep, and his fear of Nazi domination of the world so great, that he differed from Gandhiji. He felt that India should be ready to postpone even its own freedom to join in the overthrow of Hitler and all he represented. So deep was his belief in democracy.

In Britain I was one of the few, although we hated Fascism, who supported the stand of Gandhiji and Congress. We felt that if the war was for democracy, the democratic rights of India should be recognised. But the fact that Rajaji with great sorrow parted from Gandhiji showed how deep was his belief in democracy.

When India became independent, with Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister and Rajaji as Governor-General, it became by far the largest nation in the world to practise democracy and to subscribe to it in its constitution.

Was it right to do so? The Soviet Union, the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, and later China, chose the path of what they termed “proletarian dictatorship.” I think this fact must be admitted: that in countries which have had no experience of even limited democracy, the greatest advance in lifting the standard of life of the people can be made temporarily under dictatorship if the dictators have that object in view.

I say only in the short term. I will discuss what is best in the long term later.

There is little doubt that in the communist centralised authoritarian countries, the dictatorship countries, the living standards of the people, their educational standards, their health standards and their social life, advanced more than they would have done immediately in democratic multi-party States. Decisions could be taken without argument, without obstruction and delay. But at what cost?

Undemocratic power inevitably corrupts. The Soviet Union had its period of Stalinism, with barbarous cruelty to thousands and with the imprisonment, torture and execution of those who differed–even when they accepted the communist basis of society and still today, with more humane and enlightened leadership, the persecution of dissidents continues in the Soviet Union.

Rajaji pointed out these dangers. Characteristically he did so whilst in prison in talks to his fellow prisoners, afterwards published as book. He believed passionately in human rights. It is a happy coincidence that the day chosen as Human Rights Day by the United Nations happened to be his birthday, December the 10th.

Dictatorship inevitably involves a limitation of the freedom of individuals, the denial even of the freedom ofknowledge. I visited the Soviet Union and even in the more liberal Kruschev days, information and views unacceptable to the Supreme Soviet were banned. I was interviewed by the editors of a leading newspaper and I paid my tributes to the provision of health facilities to the people–the free sanatoria on the shores of the Black Sea. That was welcomed, but when I pleaded for freedom of thought, the editor said bluntly: “We cannot print that. It is not the view of the Government.”

No people can progress towards a better society without Truth–that was a foremost principle of Gandhiji–and Truth can only be reached by knowledge and free discussion. A dictatorship may achieve results for a time, but not permanently.

I make one qualification. In periods of war or of grave emergency, authoritarian government may be necessary, but never when the crisis has passed.

In the long run, democracy is the guarantee of social progress because it is founded on the will of the whole people. Authoritarian rule may at first be speedier, but it has no certainty of endurance because it is imposed. Given the participation of all the people and their authority, social progress has the basis of at-the-roots support of the people as well as initiative for further progress, which no distant dictatorship can possibly provide.

Democracy reflects the degree of freedom and equality which Gandhiji and Rajaji sought. No society can permanently be better than itself.

It would be difficult today to find a country where complete political democracy is practised. Governments often represent majority electoral support. That is always constantly the case in Britain. Central power often denies sufficient regional autonomy. I cannot dare to offer solutions to these problems and I would not dare to do so in the case of India, a subcontinent of different ethnic origins, languages, cultures and circumstances. How to achieve participating democracy in your vast community is your problem demanding the thought of your best minds. But there is one problem to which Rajaji drew attention which goes beyond India. It was the influence of wealth in contesting elections. Candidates require very large resources of money to conduct their campaigns. This is illustrated in America at the present time by the vast sums, many millions of dollars, expended by each candidate even in the run-up to the presidential election. It is true of India with its extensive constituencies. Under these conditions only rich men or women with riches behind them can become candidates. Poorer men and women, however able, are ruled out. That is not democracy.

Rajaji saw this evil. He wrote his book “Rescue Democracy from Money Power,” in which he urged that donations to particular candidates from vested interests, from profit-making companies, should be prohibited. I have been interested to see that beloved Jayaprakash Narayan termed Rajaji as “the democratic conscience of modern India,” and in his foreword to Rajaji’s book he points out how these donations from vested interests were “a
sure means of obligation and insidious corruption”, obligation to defend sectional interests, corruption by purchasing votes. Rajaji’s proposals do not meet the whole problem, but they indicate how alive he was to obstacles by vested interests to true political democracy.

The conception of spiritual democracy for which Gandhiji and Rajaji stood required much more than political democracy. Indeed, Gandhiji showed little interest in the machinery of Government, the political constitution. He was concerned with democracy at the grass roots, among the vast peasant population of the villages. He encouraged them to be self-reliant, to develop co-operatively their own crafts particularly the production of the home-spun cloth, Khadi, which indeed became a symbol of the Congress. Rajaji was a notable parliamentarian, but his heart too was in Satyagraha, equality within the caste system, the rights of the Harijans, co-operative communities. When he had been Governor-General of all- India and Chief Minister in the Madras Province, he retired to his Communal Ashram in Southern India a simple-living, egalitarian fellowship. His conflict with Jawaharlal Nehru was largely because he saw what he termed “authoritarian tendencies” creeping into the body politic of the Central Government.

In my view, total democracy–a social and economic system which reflects spiritual democracy–demands democratic socialism. It is many years since the Indian National Congress declared for Socialism. You have still far to go as we halve in Britain. I beg you not to follow Britain’s example of centralised bureaucratic nationalisation. That is not democracy. My colleague Lord Emmanual Shinwell was the Minister who nationalised the mines of Britain in the forties. He says he thought he was handing the mines to the people but he found instead he was handing them to the bureaucrats. Democratic Socialism does not mean passing over everything to a State of the elite. Can you see Gandhiji or Rajaji contending in a society of that kind? It means democratic participation from below. It may be necessary to have centralised ownership of a few keys to the economy, a very few, but they too, should be diffused by democracy, a co-operative partnership of workers and consumers for the benefit of all.

May I say a few words about the millions of peasants in your villages, the bone of your Indian society? Most of them are wretchedly poor. Historically there has been democracy in the villages, Panchayats, community councils, co-operatively owning, co-operatively sharing. I would like to see the functions of the Panchayats restored and extended. I have visited the kind of social organization I have in mind in Tanzania. There the peasant population has been grouped in co-operative villages, together owning the land sharing the returns their produce brings, themselves running the school for their children and dispensary for the sick and the infirm. Each peasant also has his little allotment round his hut to grow his family’s needs.

Tanzania, like India, is not rich enough to provide the structure each village requires. The message of President Nyerere is “Self-reliance.” “Create yourselves together, don’t depend upon State aid.” I went to one village, the headquarters, the co-operative store, the large warehouse, the school house, the dispensary–all were built of mud, by the peasants themselves. Airy buildings! I don’t know, but may that not be the pattern which Indian villages need? It would give form to spiritual democracy.

Yes. Gandhiji and Rajaji stood for democracy in spirit, embracing the people in their daily lives, in all their social activities. It was not enough to be free from the British subjugation. India must be free from all imposition by superiors. The last word on Rajaji’s contribution to an equal society was said by India’s Ambassador in the U. S. A., Shri N. A. Palkhiwala: “Rajaji has carried the story of Indian independence forward into a new chapter –Freedom from subjugation of Indians by Indians–the full significance of which will be realised only in the years to come.” My friends, we are beginning to realise it today.

Rajaji’s Dedication to Morality in Politics

It goes without saying that Rajaji believed that politics should express morality. I have been trying to find a passage which indicates his moral philosophy. Perhaps it can be found in a Mantra of the Isha Upanishad which he himself quotes in his essay on “National Character.” He insisted that it is the totality of the character of each individual that makes what we call National Character. “It depends on, and in fact is, individual rectitude.” Then he makes the quotation which I have referred:

“He who practises seeing all other beings as if they lived and felt within his own body –andhimself as if living and feeling in the bodies of other beings–he overcomes all ill-will and aversions.”

In other words, it is not enough to urge service to others, but we must urge identity with others. This is the application of the Eastern Pantheism about which I spoke yesterday, to human relations.

If politics reflected that it has really affected this that my identity with you and your identity with me and our identity with all the people, there would be no acceptance of an employer class and an employed class, of riches and poverty, of differences of race or colour, of rivalry in arms or fear of war. Have that psychology, and mankind would become one?

It would be difficult to find any Government not only practising democracy but to find any Government in the world today whose policies entirely reflect morality. In domestic affairs, governments are often dominated by sectional interests rather than by the interests of the community as a whole. In international affairs, morality is subordinated to the major conflict of our time between the Capitalist West and the Soviet Union and its allies.

I will illustrate this in two instances. The West rightly criticises the treatment of dissidents in the Soviet Union, but at the same time accepts and arms allies which persecute dissidents, imprisoning them without trial, sometimes even torturing them. There is no morality in having allies of that kind. It only denounces the Soviet Union.

Secondly, the West rightly condemns the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan, but the record of the West is certainly not free from such invasions by itself. Before a debate in the House of Lords, I jotted down 17 instances of one country invading another since the last world war and there have been more. I found that the West has been equally guilty as the Soviet Union. Take notorious cases. The Soviet Union: Invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan; the U.S.A. Vietnam; Britain: the Suez Canal, France: only last year the Central Africa. There is no morality in ignoring the beam in one’s eye when becoming hysterical about a mole in another’s eye.

Rajaji would have condemned both. He would have desired politics, domestic and international, which expressed the ethic of human unity and identity.

In international affairs he would have regarded every issue as a moral issue and judged it as such. That can be done only if a nation is unaligned, unaligned from the alliances of the two Super Powers which bedevil the world today and which take precedence over any consideration of a moral code.

I would love to see India becoming an example to all peoples in this sphere. It would do so if spiritual democracy which Gandhiji and Rajaji taught were achieved, a national character composed of individual characters living their ideals.

Rajaji’s Dedication to Peace

Rajaji was, as we have seen, one of the few, in every country of the world, who realised the danger to all mankind of nuclear weapons. I have told of his heroic mission at the age of 80 to the President of the U. S. A. Eighteen years later there is a new hope that his purpose will be achieved.

Mankind has in these next few years to make the choice between a war which could destroy the greater part of the human race or a peace which could use the marvels of modern technology to create a human race of creative fulfilment.

On one side we have greater antagonism between the two great Super Powers than we have had since the world war, with weapons of mass destruction poised on both sides which could destroy the very existence of life on earth. On the other side, we have all Heads of State at the last Special Assembly of the United Nations declaring for a phased progress in disarmament which would lead to the abolition of all arms except those needed for internal order and an international peace-keeping force.

A committee of representatives of 40 nations including all the Nuclear Powers, is in session at Geneva to implement the recommendations of the U. N. Special Assembly. Hope lives in the fact that the unaligned nations represented there are demanding that the recommendations of the Special Assembly be carried out. They have formed themselves into “Group 21”, a majority of the members of the committee.

The unaligned nations are meeting with some obstruction from other members of the committee. The committee has to report to the renewed Special Assembly of the UN in 1982. I appeal to India and the members of the unaligned “Group 21” of which India is a leading member, to present if necessary a majority report from the unaligned nations with proposals leading to complete disarmament. If they did so the hope of a disarmed world would enter the stage of realistic politics. I confess I have little hope that the present governments of the world despite the declarations of their Heads of State, would respond to such an appeal made by India and the unaligned nations. I come to the Spiritual Democracy of Gandhiji and Rajaji, to the conviction and dedication of the peoples of the world whose governments are called upon to represent.

General Eisenhower once said that a time will come when the millions of common people on the earth will so determinedly demand an end to the arms race that governments will be compelled to listen, I believe there is an opportunity that time can be reached within the next two years. In Britain Philip Noel Baker, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and I have initiated a World Disarmament Campaign receiving extraordinary support which with the co-operation of growing movements in most of the countries in the Continent, is planning pressure on the UN Special Assembly, a pressure which can be made overwhelming. I hope the Report from “Group 21” to the Geneva Assembly will be target for this campaign.

How Rajaji would have thrown himself into this movement if he were alive! It is for us, the followers of Rajaji, to do so, and ensure that it succeeds.

Rajaji’s Dedication to Conviction and Conscience

Deepest of all was Rajaji’s dedication to his convictions and conscience. I have told how his loyally to conscience even led him–how can we measure what it must have meant in misery and tears to him – to part from Gandhiji and Congress.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who claim to lead it are above everything else, men and women of conviction. Too often we see political leaders place their careers before convictions. They change from one party to another as opportunity of security or preferment occurs. One begins to wonder if they have any convictions at all. By their personal aggrandisement, representatives, elected by the people who act in this way, betray democracy itself. We have sometimes witnessed this in Britain. You see it happening in India. If democratic Government is to retain the confidence of people, elected representatives must be men and women of conviction and conscience.

I add something to my prepared lecture. I would rather have been an opponent of conviction than an opportunist supporter. For me, there is no politician with whom I don’t differ, than our present P. M. in Britain–Mrs. Margaret Thatcher. But I pay this tribute to her. She is a woman of conviction. She believes in the Capitalists. She is an iron lady in foreign affairs. She has an ideology and it is her religion. One may differ, but one must pay tribute to that sincerity of conviction which she has. I take your own Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. A socialist by conviction and if she can now use her position to end exploitation of corruption, lift the lives of millions of peasants in the villages, she will have proved that conviction and conscience are supreme.

So I end these lectures on Rajaji. I am conscious of their inadequacy. He was too fulfilled a man, too embracing in his qualities, too universal in his ideas, for those of us less of state to portray, in rich completion.

Perhaps we can draw inspiration from him to become consecrated ourselves to his aims and ideals. It is to the degree that peoples do so that there will be hope of realising the world which he served and of which be dreamed.