George Joseph has been one of my dearest comrades. When I was having rest in Yeravda,
he was editor of Young India. Before that at my instance he was editor of
the now defunct Independent. He had sacrificed a lucrative practice for
the sake of the country. He went to gaol for the same cause. He is an earnest
and honest worker. He is therefore entitled to a respectful hearing, the more so
when such a man differs from you, and, rejecting the old, recommends with the
fervour of a convert the adoption of a new policy.
He condemns Khadi, he is "quite satisfied that the removal of untouchability is not
primarily a problem of statesmanship." His programme in one simple sentence is
‘Militarize India’. Here is an extract from the speech:
We cannot all become soldiers. There is enough room for us. But it should be possible for
us to set about the idea of training about 5,000 men every year in this
presidency in urban units. The men will go to drill two or three times a week,
go out to camp three weeks in the year. Such training should be made available
not only for the students who are at college, but also for men of sufficient
social and educational status, the educational standard being the membership of
the School Leaving class. If you see in every street such people going about in
khaki, there will be a new element in our life. This kind of training would make
people to stand straight, to think straight, and to speak straight. It will be a
great enrichment of our life."
My experience teaches me differently. I have known men in khaki rolling in gutters
instead of standing straight. I have seen a Dyer thinking crooked and speaking
not straight but nonsense. I have known a commander-in-chief being unable to
think at all, let alone thinking straight. Let those who are enamoured of
military training have it by all means; but to suggest it 'as a new constructive
programme' betrays impatience and hasty thinking. There is not much danger of
'the new programme' taking root in the Indian soil. Moreover, it is against the
new order of things that is coming into being even in the West which has grown
weary of the war-god. The military spirit in the West bids fair to kill the very
humanity in men and reduce him to the level of the beast. What is wanted and
what India has, thank God, learnt in a measure undreamt of before is the spirit
of unarmed resistance before which the bayonet runs to rust and gunpowder turns
to dust. The vision that Joseph puts before us of an armed government bending a
minority to its will by a clatter of arms is a negation of the democratic spirit
and progress. If that is the promise of the new programme, we have the armed
coercion even now, not indeed of a mere minority but of an overwhelming
majority. What we want, I hope, is a government not based on coercion even of a
minority, but on its conversion. If it is a change from white military rule to a
known one, we hardly need make any fuss. At any rate the masses then do not
count. They will be subject to the same spoliation as now if not even worse.
When George Joseph has lived down his impatience, I know him to be too honest
not to retrace his steps and become the fine democrat that, to my great joy, I
had discovered him to be on the Madras beach in 1919.
Let us then turn to what he has to say about Khadi: As long as I was within the fold of
the Congress, the only thing the constructive programme represented was khaddar,
removal of untouchability, and in later years prohibition. Now I must frankly
tell you that I have come deliberately to the conclusion that not one of these
goes to the root of the fundamental need of this nation. Khaddar does not. I
think it will not survive the creator of the movement, Gandhiji. I have come to
that conclusion because of the fundamental economic defect which is attached to
khaddar. It costs far too much to produce and to buy, and is, consequently,
unjust to the consumer. Khaddar which costs about a rupee a yard will not stand
against the cloth produced by the machine industries costing as. 6. My
experience of khaddar is that it results in injustice to the producer also. The
women, the spinners, who are at the root of khaddar, working for 10 hours a day,
have got to be content with a wage of as. 3. I suggest that an industry based on
the payment of as. 3 as wages to the fundamental producer thereof cannot
succeed, because it amounts to sweating of labour. The sweating of labour
consists essentially in paying to the labourer less than is sufficient for her
physical maintenance. It is no answer to say that the country is stricken with
famine, that there are millions of people without occupation, and to say that
for these as. 3 is better than no income whatever. I refuse to accept that
argument. That cannot be an argument which can appeal to any human employer of
labour, or any-statesman with a forward-looking view, in reference to the
affairs of his country. It is no consolation to be told that I shall be right in
offering as. 3 wages a day, when I know as a matter of economic necessity that
the wages would not be sufficient to maintain the worker, much less her family.
That is to my mind the hopeless, ineradicable and inexorable vice that attaches
to khaddar. That is why today, in spite of 7 or 8 years of labour by Gandhiji,
and 'n spite of lakhs of money poured like water into the organization of the
industry, the production of khaddar is infinitely small compared to the
magnitude of the problem that has got to be solved, that JS to produce clothing
for the whole of India, and to put an end to the importation of Rs. 60 crores
worth of cloth every year."
Here George Joseph's impatience for reform has betrayed him into lapse of memory. For
he brings no new argument in support of his summary rejection of Khadi, but
quotes as facts what he himself used to refute as fallacies. Arguments may be
revised on further consideration, but facts may not be unless they are proved to
have been false. Khadi as conceived for the use of millions does not cost more
than foreign cloth for the simple reason that the millions must, if Khadi is to
be used by them, be their own manufacturers and consumers. These pages have
shown that in Bardoli, Bijolia and several other places Khadi is being so
manufactured and consumed, even as in millions of homes people cook and eat
their own food. It is possible to demonstrate, in terms of metal, that rice or
bread cooked in a few factories would cost less than they cost today in the
millions of homes. But nobody on that account would dare suggest that the
millions should cease to cook and should send their raw rice and wheat to be
cooked in centralized factories.
Again it is not true to say that women spinners work ten hours per day. Whatever spinning
they do is done during their spare hours, and what they get is not a day's wage
but in the majority of cases a substantial addition to their daily earnings from
their daily avocation. The earning from spinning is waste turned into wealth and
not the price of 'sweated labour' as Joseph puts it. And let me correct Joseph
by saying that no spinner even working for 10 hours per day can earn 3 as per
day. Spinning has never been conceived as a full-day occupation. Lastly, it is
untrue to say that "lakhs of money have been poured like water into the
organization of the industry." No organization on a nationwide scale has been
known to cost less in organizing than this has. What is true is that a paltry 25
lakhs have been invested as capital for organizing this great and daily growing
cottage industry which brings water to thousands of parched lips. Joseph must
think cheap of his countrymen when he prophesies that an organization which
employs at least 1,500 willing workers in 1,500 villages, an organization which
brings daily relief to nearly 1,50,000 women, an organization which commands the
self-sacrificing labours of a Mithubai Petit, the Naoroji Sisters, of a Banker,
a Jamnalal, a Rajagopalachari, and Abbas Tyebji, a Venkatappayya, a Pattabhi, a
Gangadharrao, a Vallabhbhai, a Lakshmidas, a Rajendra prasad, a Jairamdas, a
Mahadev, a Kripalani, a Satish Chandra Dasgupta, a Suresh Banerji, aye a
Jawaharlal, and a host of others, doctors, merchants and laymen too numerous to
mention though known to fame, will die after the death of one man. It will be a
tragic miracle, if all these men and women find the morning after my death that
Khadi was a 'huge blunder'.
And the pity of it all is that Joseph does not suggest an alternative. Not even if every
educated Indian was dressed in khaki and knew how to shoot straight, would the
problem of growing poverty and the forced partial unemployment of millions of
the peasantry be solved without a special programme devised for the purpose.
For better or worse Khadi is that programme till a better is evolved.
Young India, 19-12-1929