Swaraj and independence

Swaraj and independence

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Express Buzz

By Arun - arun@expressbuzz.com

A couple of days after joining as reporter in Shimoga I went to Heggodu to seek the blessings of K V Subbanna, who was revered by everyone for his simplicity, down-to-earth thinking and, above all, for his continuous experiments on equations between the individual and the community.

Asking me whether I had read Mahatma’s ‘Hind Swaraj’ Subbanna gave a copy of the Kannada version of the book.

The Mahatma wrote this handbook in Gujarati in 1908 while he was travelling from England back to South Africa after meeting people involved in a movement for free India. In 1909, it was published in book form and later its English version had also come.

For true Gandhians, Hind Swaraj has been the Mahatma’s gospel. He had written it in the form of a conversation between an imaginary editor and a reader.

In his word of explanation, in the beginning of the book, the Mahatma said, “in my opinion it is a book which can be put into the hands of a child. It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-sacrifice. It pits soul force against brute force. It has gone through several editions and I commend it to those who would care to read it.” By the word ‘Swaraj’ the Mahatma meant “Self-rule and selfrestraint and not freedom from all restraints”. For him independent country meant a nation where citizens were alienated from the State and yet enslaved to the State. He felt that the former was desirable and not the latter. Based on his experiences in South Africa and his study of the representative democracy of the British, he felt that the Parliamentary system was unable to meet the aspirations of the people and would not give justice to the millions of Indians. That is why he suggested a two-way strategy for the freedom struggle: resistance to the British and reconstruction of the society through voluntary and participatory system. Satyagraha was the symbol of resistance and the Charaka was the symbol of reconstruction of the society. To implement his concept of voluntary and participatory system he and his associates founded many organisations to work in different fields. He believed in sovereignty of the people and not that of the State.

For the Mahatma progress never meant earning profits. For him individual health and wellbeing were supreme than the health of corporate body. He wanted organisations built by individuals than the organisations having individuals as slaves. He wanted a society wherein all indigenous cultures and philosophies developed over generations should be protected and he opposed globalisation based on industrialization. So, by reconstruction of the society he meant deconstruction of the myths about modern civilization and its adverse impact on the individuals.

In the chapter titled ‘Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule’ the Mahatma wondered whether the country wanted English rule without the Englishman.

That is equal to having tiger’s nature, but not the tiger and making Hindustan an Englishtan.

“This is not the Swaraj I want,” he declared. But Jawaharlal Nehru, who never agreed to the Mahatma’s concept of Swaraj, in a letter told the Mahatma ‘‘a village, normally speaking, is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment”. The seeds he had sown then are yielding their crop now. Villagers are migrating because the politicians, who are slaves to the Nehruvian thought, strongly felt country could not progress by strengthening villages. Bhoodan movement founded by Acharya Vinoba, which intended to abandon the age old Zamindari system or Sampoorna Kranti founded by Jayaprakash Narayan, which intended to have a holistic revolution in the society, had failed.

We have corporate zamindars and the partners in Sampoorna Kranti have become replicas of Nehruvian thoughts.

But there are hopes amidst the dark situation. To name a few, Ninasam, founded by K V Subbanna’s father, which has been carrying forward, under the aegis of K V Akshara and others, the experiments started by the late KV Subbanna or Charaka founded by Prasanna, have been working on realising the Mahatma’s concept of Swaraj.