BUNCH OF THOUGHTS
M.S. Golwalkar
PART THREE - THE PATH TO GLORY
(A) ROUSING NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
XVII.  Meeting the Historic Need

THE founder of the organisation used to put forth the aim of the Sangh in a small pithy sentence: "We have to organise and make our Hindu Society so powerful that no power on earth will dare cast an evil eye upon it." To fulfil this is the foremost duty that has devolved upon all the children of this great society.

What makes us say that we are duty-bound to devote ourselves to this mission of organising our society? Firstly, we are all born and brought up in this society. The happiness and security of our individual and family life have been made possible by the fact of our birth in this society.

Another important consideration is also there. Ours is an ancient and immortal society, which has given birth to the greatest personalities in all walks of life and has evolved the highest philosophy and the noblest social standards. The stamp of that greatness can be seen even to this day when others refer to a son of this soil as ‘the descendant of a Rama, a Krishna and a Shankaracharya, in whose blood the glorious virtues of all those illustrious predecessors – those world masters in every field of knowledge and action – are inherited.’

What does all this indicate? It is, that our birth in the Hindu Society has conferred this unique honour upon us, in addition to a happy physical sustenance, and opened the path for us to scale the sublime heights of those great souls.

Thus, in how many ways and how immensely are we indebted to our society! Then, is it befitting on our part to go on merely enjoying all its fruits and merits without caring to do our duty towards it? It has been said in our scriptures that a man should live on what is left over after offering to society. Thus, it is our first duty to absolve ourselves from that debt of gratitude. Therein lies the fulfilment of our life.

Our Shastras declare that man is born with three kinds of debts-deva-rina, pitru-rina and rishi-rina. This life is given to us by the grace of gods. And hence we have to discharge that debt-deva-rina. We are born in the lineage of our ancestors to whom we have to express our gratitude, i.e., pitra-rina. And since we inherit the legacy of learning and culture bequeathed by our ancients, the duty of discharging rishi-rina devolves upon us.

Then, what is the way in which we can repay that debt? A true devotee says to the Almighty, "O Lord! How shall I worship Thee? Flower, sandal paste and water are all Thine. Thou art the Effulgence of the light arati that I wave. Everything is Thine. Then, what else is left to me but to offer all that Thou hast bestowed on me at Thy feet and remain as Thy humblest servant?" Right from the hoary times, our society has been described as our living form of God. Let us also adopt that form as our Chosen Deity and resolve to serve it all through our life as a token of our indebtedness.

What then is the type of service that we are to do? Many and varied are the possible ways of service. Giving food to the hungry, knowledge to the ignorant or medicine to the diseased – each is a type of service. That is, true service implies removing the deficiency in the object of our service. Now, what is the chief deficiency in our society? Doubtless, our society presents an agonising picture of ignorance, poverty, untouchability, immorality and so on. And we see so many efforts being put forth by well-meaning persons to remedy those defects. It is but natural that we should have kind feelings towards them. But the question is, can we call these efforts the real type of service that our society is in dire need of today? Will they lead to the ultimate, abiding welfare of our society? It would be futile to treat and bandage the superficial boils, coming up one after another, when the blood has become infected? It is only when the root cause is remedied that the malady is cured. What is that root cause?

Is it true that our society, in the past too, presented the same picture of poverty and misery as we witness today? History has a totally different story to narrate. Some of the foreign travellers who had come here in the past have left their eye-witness accounts of what they saw here. Those writings say. "The people here are happy and contented. There are no destitutes, no beggars. The people leave their houses unlocked for years when they go out on pilgrimage, without a trace of fear of theft. There are very few cases of moral aberration; they are all highly virtuous, generous and reliable in their dealings. They are a virile and powerful race, wealthy and wise…" Those foreign visitors could have had no ulterior motives in recording such glowing descriptions. There was no iron curtain in our country as there is in Russia or China today. They had moved about for several years as they liked throughout the length and breadth of our country. Then, those accounts must be relied upon as correct beyond a shadow of doubt.

It was not as if, as is often misunderstood, our people had achieved eminence only in the spiritual field to the neglect of other walks of the day-to-day practical life. Authentic ancient records conclusively show that we were many centuries ahead of the times in every branch of science and art. The absolutely rustless, shining, 200-year-old pillar, Ashoka Stambha, stands to this day as an unbeaten challenge in metallurgy.

There is an anecdote narrated in our old books and also in foreign records. One of the Roman kings suffered from a strange disease, which could not be cured by anyone in his kingdom. He sought the help of our country, then considered a master in the science of medicine. One of our royal physicians went there, opened his skull and carried out an operation on his brain. The king was cured of the disease. The physician stayed there for three more years to instruct those people in that science and then returned, laden with great honours. It must be remembered that even at this advanced stage of surgery, operation of the brain is taken to be a very serious risk.

The modern plastic surgery too was a gift to the outside world by our ancient masters in Ayurveda. The concept of ‘Zero’ which we gave to the world is based on our philosophy. We have considered the entire Creation as ‘Zero’ and the God as ‘One’. It is only when the ‘Zero’ i.e., the Creation, is placed after ‘One’ i.e., the Creator, that it gets the value, otherwise not. The decimal system was also a brain-child of the Hindus. Verily, it is these gifts which have laid the foundation for the phenomenal superstructure of mathematics that we see today.

We were never a homebound people either. With the resounding cry of Krinvanto vishwam aryam (Elevate the Mankind), our saints and sages walked to the four corners of the world. Our benign influence extended over vast regions of the earth and our flag flew over many lands. Pilgrims came form distant lands to have a glimpse of that glory here. Students came here from far and near to drink at the pure and perennial springs of human knowledge. Countless are the living and eloquent witness standing in the form of temples and images, paintings and carvings, languages and customs, epics and idylls, literature and art in all these countries, giving proof of that all-pervasive cultural potency of our race in those days. The ‘Crescent and Star’ of the Muslims is but a piece of our Omkar-O. It is not a fact that our ancestors moved out of our country only after the advent of Buddha. Our missionaries had reached the shores of America even before. The Bouddha Bhikshus only continued that tradition. At home and abroad, we excelled as a virile, and at the same time, a benevolent people.

Then, why this present-day despicable state of affairs in our nation? How has the spectre of misery and vice come to stalk this land of affluence and culture? Why has Bharat, once the mother of the world giving succour and shelter to many a refugee race, become a mere mendicant on the streets of the world? Today we go about begging at the doors of all foreigners not only for food and money but for ideals and values of life as well. We are thereby parading before the whole world utter bankruptcy of our intelligence and originality. What, then, is at the root of all this abject destitution and debasement?

Many of our thinkers of the last few decades concluded that our slavery for the past thousand years is the main cause for this degradation. They had read in history that the Muslim invaders who had settled down here as rulers had carried out a systematic destruction of all our points of national faith and honour. They had desecrated our womanhood, demolished temples and places of pilgrimage and converted large numbers to their faith at the point of sword or with the lure of material pleasures. The new converts too, having lost their national moorings, perpetuated the same fanatic rule and the same heinous deeds of the foreign invader.

The English who came next were more shrewd and polished. They did not openly resort to desecration and destruction. With their insidious propaganda they attempted to subvert the age-old faith and solidarity of the nation. They introduced a vicious system of education, so as to de-nationalise, de-culturalise and de-vitalise our people and thereby consolidate their empire. And our so-called educated fell an easy prey to their trap and began to ape the customs and thoughts of the white man and deride all that is our own. Having thus been uprooted from the mother soil of our heritage, our nation began to fade and wither away, leaving a bitter trail of vice and evil behind.

Thus, having before them this lurid picture of the last one thousand years of foreign domination, those thinkers came to the conclusion that it is the foreign rule, which was at the root of all the present-day ills. Accordingly, they started to put in efforts to throw off the foreign yoke. And it was quite natural too.

But the matter does not rest at that. The question, how the foreigners came to establish themselves here, remains. Is it a fact that those invaders subjugated and ruled over so vast a country as ours on the sheer strength of their own superiority? No. It is writ large on every page of our history, that our people were incomparably superior to invaders in all the factors like population, armed forces, statesmanship, valour, wealth, wisdom, etc., which normally lead a people to victory.

We had a free and flourishing national life of our own in our motherland. We had a unique social order and highly evolved political institutions. Our statesmen of those days had a thorough grasp of the principles of statecraft. The Artha Shastra of Kautilya is a volume, which has few equals in the entire world literature on politics. This small treatise is a veritable treasure-house of thoughts of such abiding and inherent worth as to cross all boundaries of clime and time. And it was not mere dry knowledge encased in a book but a living and practical guide in the actual statecraft of those days. The striking power of our armies was a terror to the invaders from outside. In fact, we had previously put to rout the barbaric hordes of Shakas and Hunas, and whoever remained over here were absorbed in our all-embracing culture.

A similar fate overtook the so-called ‘World Conqueror’, Alexander of Greece. We are taught in our history books, written by Westerners, that ‘Alexander the Great’ gave back the kingdom he had conquered in our country as a ‘gesture of generosity’. The same Alexander who gloated over his atrocities in Persia and in his intoxication of victory had committed all sorts of barbaric excesses wherever he had stepped, becomes a generous man immediately he steps on the soil of Bharat! And we are expected to believe in such a ‘history’! The world has yet to see a generous Western conqueror. Even after nearly two thousand years of the much boasted ‘Christian training’ the ‘generosity’ that is shown by them to their own brother-Christians in the conquered nations of the West makes hair-raising reading. The facts as revealed by history are that Alexander could not withstand the shattering blows of even our small hill-chieftains and had to run for his life. Even then, he could not escape the deadly arrow of one of our heroes. Mortally wounded, and not willing to risk a retreat by the same route, he resorted to another route. But he could proceed only up to Iran where he finally entered his grave. Another Greek invasion by Seleucus was also effectively smashed by Chandragupta, the great Emperor of Magadha.

However, by about that time, a set-back in our national solidarity was gradually creeping in. During the long peace which, succeeded the great battle of Mahabharata the whole nation was lulled by a sense of security into a sort of stupor. The cohesive impulse, which results from an awareness of impending common danger, having ceased to function for centuries, a gradual though imperceptible falling away from a living consciousness of one nation resulted in creating little independent principalities and weakened the nation. Kingship became the object of the people’s loyalty and supplanted the national concept. Mutual jealousy and rivalry between the various kingdoms poisoned their relations, thus making our nation a house divided against itself. Kings were drunk with their own personal glory and prestige and lost the power to discriminate between the friend and the foe. We forgot even the first lessons of national defence that the enemy who plundered a part of our land would one day plunder the whole of it and that national freedom is indivisible. We also forgot that the result would be disastrous to one and all, that things dear and sacred to us, all our pelf and prosperity would be razed to dust. Thus the enemies who trembled at our might before, came here as ‘honoured guests’ later, and became the conquerors and rulers.

The painful story of how our country fell before the Muslim invasion is before us. Within a century of the death of their Prophet, the Muslims had overrun almost the whole of Southern Europe, Spain, Portugal and portions of Asia, and established themselves securely right up to the Pacific Ocean. With a far-flung empire spread form the Atlantic to the Pacific at their back, they turned their greedy eyes towards our country. They tried to penetrate at two points, one through Sind and the other through Afghanistan across the Himalayas into Punjab. But, even with such a vast empire and huge armies at their command, waves after waves of their invasion were effectively repulsed for over two centuries by the small Hindu principalities defending our North-Western frontiers, thus proving that Hindu military skill and valour were incomparably superior to the aggressive power of the Muslim horders. The reason, however, for the ultimate collapse of the Hindu resistance was that internal dissensions and treachery had enfeebled their ranks and the rest of the country had failed to give them succour from time to time to carry on the battle for the defence of motherland.

Nor did our country wake up and stand united at least after the first shock of Muslim invasion. The suicidal story of dissensions and betrayal continued. To Ghazni Mohammed, who had set out to loot and desecrate sacred Somnath, our own chieftains acted as guides and aides. Again, it was Jayachand who invited Mohammed Ghori. Thus it was a Hindu king who helped the foe to establish a foreign reign for the first time in the scared capital of Indraprastha. The tribe of Jayachand fast multiplied. Raja Mansingh became the cornerstone of Akbar’s vast empire. It was he who came down upon Rana Pratap who alone had kept the torch of freedom bruning bright in those days. Mirja Raja Jayasingh, Jasavantsingh and others, all Hindu generals, became the powerful arms of Aurangzeb, the notorious anti-Hindu fanatic. It was they who came to destroy Shivaji on behalf of Aurangzb.

Our disintegration had gone to such an extent that Bakhtiyar Khilji who had set out eastward from Delhi, it is said with just eighteen men, carried his sword right up to Bengal, leaving behind a bitter trail of massacres, mass conversions, abduction of women, destruction of temples and breaking of kingdoms. Thousands of students and teachers of the world-famous Nalanda University were all mercilessly butchered by him. He put to sword the entire population of the city also. He made a bonfire of the library there, the treasure-house of knowledge accumulated over thousands of years. Finally he established his rule in Bengal.

Manucci, an Italian officer in the army of Aurangzeb, wrote in his diary after personally going round the country. "If any invader descends today with an army of thirty thousand through the Khyber pass, he can easily conquer and rule over the whole of Hindustan." Such records and instances are engraved on every page of our history of those times telling the heart-rending story of internecine struggles, betrayals and of joining hands with the enemy to enslave our country.

The suicidal story of betrayal continued unabated even after the English came. We had shut our eyes to lessons of Muslim invasion. Hindu captains and soldiers shed their blood and also the blood of freedom fighters to make the British empire safe and secure. our wealthy merchants helped the British with money. Our resources, in men, money and intellect were placed at their feet. They were harnessed to forge our own fetters. As an English historian has written, "Even if all the able-bodied persons in England had been armed and organised into an army, they could not have conquered or much less ruled in peace over India by themselves. It was in fact the local people who, out of internal strifes, carved out the kingdom for us. Even to this day they are content to remain as docile slaves of England."

The verdict of history is therefore too clear to be mistaken. It was the absence of national consciousness, of the feeling of being the organic limbs of a single national entity with the resultant mutual hatred, discord, jealousy and internecine quarrels to gain little selfish ends that has eaten into the vitals of our nation over the last thousand years.

It was not the Muslims or the English who were our enemies but we ourselves. The Gita says,

(We are our own friends; we are our own foes.) Alas, in our case, the truth of the latter half has been proved!

So we say that it is no use cursing the external aggressors as being responsible for our degeneration and destruction. After all it is in the nature of predatory nations to overrun, plunder and destroy other weaker countries. If a serpent bites a person, that is not its fault. That is in its very nature. The fault lies with the person who does not exercise caution and protect himself against the possible attack. Unfortunately, during the last one thousand years of our history, even after repeated experiences of disgraces and disasters, we failed to learn the basic lesson that we alone are responsible for our downfall and unless we eradicate that fatal weakness from ourselves we connot hope to survive as a nation.

Have we, at least now, learnt that lesson? We nowadays hear that we have won freedom, that there has been all–round awakening and therefore there is no need to worry about our past failings and so on. But is it true that we won freedom solely on the strength of our valour and sacrifice? If it is a fact, then, how is it that the British left Burma and Ceylon also where there was no freedom struggle at all? How did Pakistan – a new independent State – come into being without the least sacrifice on the part of the Muslims? And why did our leaders also acquiesce in it against all their declarations and pledges of securing the independence of undivided Bharat? The fact is, the British had little energy left in them after the blood-bath of the last world war to run a vast and far-flung empire. They were not sure of the loyalty of the Indian Army either. And the British, shrewd as they were, managed to quit all these countries preserving their goodwill and creating for themselves a permanent base in the from of Pakistan. In an old book of Sir John Strachey, the author had stated more than half a century ago that if the British had perchance to quit India, they would do so only after dividing in into ‘Hindu India’ and ‘Muslim India’. The only difference now is that not only did our leaders concur with the British in carrying out that plan but have gone fruther and cut up the country into ‘Muslim India’ and ‘non-Muslim India’!

The formation of Pakistan has only proved that we have not as yet learnt the lesson of history and remedied our fatal weakness.

At the time of the quitting of the British, the Hindus were too disorganised and the national leadership too demoralised to face even the small sporadic onslaught of the Muslims and the machinations of the British. And Partition was the result. History repeated itself. Alas, the only lesson that we learn from our history is that we do not learn anything from history! Big slices of our motherland – half of Punjab, half of Bengal, Sind and the Frontier Province – once again fell into enemy hands.

These parts were once the glory of our Hindu Nation. Punjab is the birth-place of Vedas – the holiest of our holy heritage. Our great rishis meditatd on the banks of the Sindhu. Bengal has been cradle-land of saints, poets and revolutionaries. NWFP was our life-line of defence for millennia. The writ of our free and powerful Hindu State ran all over there. But centuries ago those parts fell to Muslim invasion. Later on, they shook off the Muslim yoke, only to come under the rule of another enemy, the British. Now they have once again fallen under the Muslim heels.

Lakhs of Hindu brothers and sisters were butchered in cold blood in these provinces after they were handed over to the Muslim bondage in 1947. The honour of our womanhood was trampled upon. Conversion at the point of sword took place on a massive scale. The inhuman atrocities which the Muslim hordes had perpetrated on the Hindu people a thousand years ago were re-enacted. The horror is still continuing with the same barbarity, with the result that tens of thousands of our displaced brothers and sisters are continuously pouring into West Bengal day after day, the very images of human wrecks.

The root cause of our national tragedy then, a thousand years ago, and now, a thousand years later, is the same – the utter lack of organised and unified life among the Hindus, the children of this soil. The law of cause and effect knows no limits and place. Every page of our history of the past thousand years is a mute witness to this bitter truth operating on our national plane.

Let us now turn to the conditions in the areas, which came into our hands when the British left. Is our freedom and hounour secure at least here?

After the first partition, there has been again partition of Kashmir. At one time, our late Prime Minister Pandit Nehru had even expressed his willingness to offer the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir to Pakistan in a bid to ‘solve’ the so-called Kashmir problem. The offer of plebiscite in Kashmir was also mooted by our leaders. What does this indicate? If there is an injury to a limb of the body, then, should that particular limb be asked to decide its fate by itself? On the contrary, is it not the complete body, which has to decide? Similarly, if at all there is to be a plebiscite, it should be conducted in the whole of our country. Plebiscite in Kashmir alone would only mean that the consciousness of the unity of our motherland has all but disappeared from our mind.

There are, in addition, serious cleavages developing among our people on any and every issue, whether of language, caste, sect or party. Everyone stands up and says that he wants a state for his own language, a state for his own sect, and if at all he is prepared to stay in the Union, he wishes that it should be a loose federation with greater and greater powers for his state and the Central authority prevailing only in name.

The same curse of mutual hatred and jealously, which turned our national life into a shambles during the last thousands years, is continuing to pay its devil-dance under the new garbs of love of province, party, language, community, sect, etc. Once a prominent leader of Andhra had publicly declared that if a separate Andhra State was not formed he would take the aid of Russia to achieve it. A prominent Sikh leader once threatened that if Punjabi Suba was not carved out then all the Sikhs would turn Communists. With the Chinese armies poised on our frontiers, such a statement could convey only one meaning, and that is, an invitation and an assurance to the aggressor of help from inside, in exchange for his help in carving out a separate state. Some years ago that leader was hobnobbing with Pakistan in a bid to get help from that country. Can we say that the race of Jayachands and Mansinghs has disappeared from this land?

The same fatal disease of the absence of national consciousness, which made us lose the power to discriminate between the friend and the foe is continuing as before. Once in Nagpur there was a conference of some persons calling themselves non-Brahmins. I was surprised to find Muslim and Christian speakers also addressing the conference. When I inquired of this from one of the organisers of the conference, he said, "Well, they are also non-Brahmins"! How strange that they could not recognise the simple fact that the Hindus, whatever their denominations of caste or sect, formed a single society and the Muslims and Christians belonged to an alien and often hostile camp!

It may be inconceivable, but is nevertheless a hard fact, that during the 1957 elections, a Muslim was elected from Ambala constituency in Punjab, where he was the only Muslim voter and all others were Hindus who, hardly a decade ago, had suffered unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Muslims. Such is the suicidal, self-oblivious condition of our society.

No part of the country is free from these internecine quarrels. Everywhere the ground is being prepared by our own people for the enemies to step in and fortify their positions. The anit-Bengali riots in Assam in July 1960 resulting in the exodus of Bengali Hindu has only profited the Muslims by reducing the percentage of Hindus in that vulnerable State. The mutual hatred and discord between Assamis and Bengalis has only helped the Muslims to intensify their atrocities on the Hindus in general in that province.

In fact, we lost Srihat (Sylhet) district to Pakistn only because of the same Assami-Bengali discord. In 1947 there was a plebiscite in Srihat to decide whether that district was to remain in Bharat or go to Pakistan. The Hindus, torn with Assami-Bengali quarrels and jealousies, did not care to vote at all. But the Muslims being politically alert had immensely mobilised their numbers from far and near and solidly voted for Pakistan. Such is the sordid story of how we lost Srihat to Pakistan even through it had a Hindu majority.

The utter lack of consciousness among our people of belonging to one country and one culture has made them a fertile field for any scheming foreigner to sow seeds of disruption. Even the so-called intelligentsia are easily swept off their feet by such insidious propaganda. For example, the movement for a separate Dravidanad owes its origin to the scheming brain of a foreigner. It was a foreign Christian missionary, who first toured every town and village in Tamil Nadu about eighty years ago and carried on an incessant and vicious propaganda that Tamil culture. Tamil language and everything Tamil differed fundamentally from the rest of the Bharatiya culture, language, etc, and that the Tamilians formed an independent nation by themselves. He even gave a distorted interpretation to Tirukkural to make his poisonous theory palatable to the common people. But the wonder is that even the so-called intellectuals are not able to see the trap laid for them. In fact, some of them seem to take a pride in playing the enemy’s game. The arguments advanced by the so-called thought-givers of the present movement are only parrot-like repetitions of those of the foreign missionary.

A favourite argument in support of the Dravidanad Movement runs as follwos: "Even in the past, though Bharat was culturally one, there had always been several states. So what harm is there, if now too, we form ourselves into a separate state in the interest of our material welfare and at the same time continue to consider Bharat culturally and spiritually one, with our people going round Bharat for pilgrimage etc. as before?" It is true that in the past there were many small principalities, though we have remained culturally one throughout. But it is also equally true that there had always been an irresistible tendency among the prominent rulers of the land to bring the whole country under one administrative unit. The Rajasuya and the Ashwamedha Yajnas had but one chief motive and that was to bring the whole of Bharat under the supreme political authority of a single Chakrawarti. The performer of these Yajnas had no selfish motives such as exploitation or suppression of the people in other kingdoms. He would only demand the allegiance of the smaller principalities to one supreme central authority. For the rest, he would leave them in peace as before.

Moreover, just as history has recorded the existence of several states, it has also recorded the bitter truth that it was the existence of so many smaller principalities, which in course of time turned mutually exclusive and hostile, that paved the way for the foreign invaders to subjugate the entire country, including all such states, for the last one thousand years and more. History has amply proved that the fortunes of any one part of the country are inseparably linked with those of the rest of the country. And especially, when material welfare is the only incentive, as in the case of the demand for a separate Dravidanad, some foreign power is bound to make it a pawn in its hands by throwing material baits. That would result, as in the past, in the ruination of not only the rest of Bharat but of that so-called Dravidanad itself.

That the framers of our present Constitution also were not firmly rooted in the conviction of a single homogeneous nationhood is evident from the federal structure of our Constitution. Our country is now described as a Union of States. Those that were merely provinces in the former set-up are now given the status of States, with many exclusive powers. In fact, it was the fragmentation of our single national life in the past into so many exclusive political units that sowed the seeds of national disintegration and defeat. The present federal structure has in it the same seeds of disruption, which are already sprouting in the form of conflicts between States on boundary issues, allocation of river waters, etc. The quarrels have now assumed a high ‘status’ and are officially termed as ‘boundary disputes’, ‘river water disputes’, etc., as if they are disputes between two sovereign independent countries! One of the leaders of Maharashtra once stated that he had no time or desire to think of the Chinese aggression on our borders so long as the Karnataka-Maharashtra border dispute was not settled to his satisfaction?

Even during the present times of serious food crisis, the venomous fans of provincialism have, instead of withdrawing in the face of dire misery of the millions thrown into the jaws of starvation, only injected a further dose of poison into the body-politic. In 1963-64, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab had a surplus stock of wheat. But those State Governments were not prepared to give it to their neighbouring States. Newspapers had reported that in Punjab the surplus wheat had begun to rot and had to be used as fodder for the cattle. But Punjab Government was not prepared to spare a single grain to the neighbouring starving State U.P. It was only when the Centre brought pressure upon the Punjab Government that it agreed to give one-fifth of what UP. had asked for. That was also not as a help to the suffering neighbour but only in return for liquor and sugar which U.P. had in retaliation refused to supply to Punjab! Wheat can come to our doors from America some ten thousand miles away from our shores but it cannot reach from a surplus State to the neighbouring starving State in our own country! What a shame!

Recently, the Election Commission has evolved a new formula for recognising political parties. The system of recognising parties on a nationwide basis has been given up in favour of recognition on State basis. It only indicates that the mental working of the persons at the helm of affairs is dominated by the consciousness of separateness of ‘State’ units and not of the indivisible unity of the entire nation. On the one hand, they pass resolutions on ‘national integration’ and, on the other, in the actual conduct of national affairs, frame policies that strike at the very concept of national unity!

These are all ominous straws in the wind. And the greatest danger is yet to come. The poisonous theory of linguistic states has aggravated the claims for ‘right of self-determination’ and ‘right of secession’. It may be that in our present Constitution the right of secession is not conceded. But let us not forget that the ruling Congress party has committed itself long ago to that principle which in fact sowed the seed for the partition of our motherland. It is also a fact that Congress has not till today repudiated that previous resolution. With the same Congress leadership continuing and with the tempo of provincial and linguistic jealousies and hatred increasing, a day may come when the Constitution also will be suitably amended to incorporate the right of secession. Already in the case of Berubari* we have seen the Constitution being amended** to empower the parliament-which in fact means the ruling party-to give away parts of our motherland to foreign States.

With such amendments striking at the very heart of the Constitution coming up every now and then, people are exhorted to pledge themselves to uphold the sanctity of the Constitution and the integrity of the country! And who are those that administer the pledge? The determined disrupters of the constitution and the ‘partition experts’ of our country! Can mockery go further?

With such germs of disintegration eating into the vitals of our nation, will it be safe to assume that the root disease, which resulted in our misery and ignominious slavery in the past and which has today taken a more terrible form than ever before, will not nibble away at our present freedom in course of time?

Under these conditions, what is the best type of service that we can render to society? Obviously, it is to remove this basic disease of the loss of national consciousness and cohesion and build a strong, well-organised and self-sustaining national life. Then alone will our independence remain firm and secure. It would be futile to expect to only go on enjoying fruits while ignoring the roots. For some time, no doubt, the tree gives fruits even if it is infected with disease. But those fruits will be unhealthy, dry and tasteless. And so is the fruit of independence that we have got today, exhibiting various types of diseases. The reason is that the national roots have not gone deep into the minds and hearts of our people. If we continue to neglect the roots, after a time, even those fruits will disappear with only trunk of the tree standing dry and bare. If we take care of the roots, fruits will take care of themselves. There is no need to borrow fruits from outside and stick them on to the tree. We should, therefore, strive to deepen our national roots so that we can stand free and erect amidst all tempests in the world.

How is this to be done? Can it be done by merely establishing new industries or byeconomic planning? No. The patient, if his internal disease is to be cured, needs medicine and not things like dainty dishes and drinks. In that weak condition, he will be unable even to drive away a dog, which may happen to raid and eat away all that is served to him. The fate of our body-politic is not different. Unless our society is cured of its internal malady of disunity and self-forgetfulness and made nationally alert and organised, it will remain incapable of enjoying prosperity in the world. Without this prerequisite, any attempt to achieve mere material glory may ever turn out to be a cruse rather than a service to society. History tells us that it was boundless affluence that attracted the barbaric hordes of invaders to our land. We had not the organised strength to protect it and as a result we find ourselves in the present predicament of abject poverty and misery, having lost all that glory to those depredators.

We have to resolve to eradicate that basic malady by making our mother-society once again united, organised, vigilant and resurgent with an intense spirit of national consciousness and cohesion? To that end, let us approach every son of this soil with the message of one united nationhood and forge them all into a mighty, organised whole bound with ties of mutual love and discipline. Such an alert, organised and invincibly powerful national life alone can hope to stand with its head erect in the present turmoils of the war-torn world.