We must never forget in the present day that those people who have got
their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely
powerful. The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge
organizations of slavery in the disguise of freedom. Those who have made
the gain of money their highest end are unconsciously selling their life
and soul to rich persons or to the combinations that represent money.
Those who are enamoured of their political power and gloat over their
extension of dominion over foreign races gradually surrender their own
freedom and humanity to the organizations necessary for holding other
peoples in slavery. In the so-called free countries the majority of the
people are not free, they are driven by the minority to a goal which is
not even known to them. This becomes possible only because people do not
acknowledge moral and spiritual freedom as their object. They create
huge eddies with their passions, and they feel dizzily inebriated with
the mere velocity of their whirling movement, taking that to be freedom.
But the doom which is waiting to overtake them is as certain as
death--for man's truth is moral truth and his emancipation is in the
spiritual life.
The general opinion of the majority of the present-day nationalists in
India is that we have come to a final completeness in our social and
spiritual ideals, the task of the constructive work of society having
been done several thousand years before we were born, and that now we
are free to employ all our activities in the political direction. We
never dream of blaming our social inadequacy as the origin of our
present helplessness, for we have accepted as the creed of our
nationalism that this social system has been perfected for all time to
come by our ancestors, who had the superhuman vision of all eternity and
supernatural power for making infinite provision for future ages.
Therefore, for all our miseries and shortcomings, we hold responsible
the historical surprises that burst upon us from outside. This is the
reason why we think that our one task is to build a political miracle of
freedom upon the quicksand of social slavery. In fact we want to dam up
the true course of our own historical stream, and only borrow power from
the sources of other peoples' history.
Those of us in India who have come under the delusion that mere
political freedom will make us free have accepted their lessons from the
West as the gospel truth and lost their faith in humanity. We must
remember whatever weakness we cherish in our society will become the
source of danger in politics. The same inertia which leads us to our
idolatry of dead forms in social institutions will create in our
politics prison-houses with immovable walls. The narrowness of sympathy
which makes it possible for us to impose upon a considerable portion of
humanity the galling yoke of inferiority will assert itself in our
politics in creating the tyranny of injustice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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