The exclamation mark which I have added to the question raised by the editor is symptomatic of the maze we have woven around us in the 56 years of our freedom.

We sidelined the spirit of the man we accepted as our mentor and revered as the father of the nation. We sent his “Hind Swaraj“ to the library shelf and aped the 19th century ideals of democracy and 20th century ideals of planning .We failed in both except for the ‘vote‘ in democracy and in the mixture of planning and anarchic free competition in our economic ideals.

A friend of mine, a former MLA and of the Lohia school of thought, says that the political ideals of western democracy and the economic ideals of anarchic free competition or of centralised planning were totally alien to the dream of our freedom fighters especially of the 1942 Quit India struggle. They had dreamed vaguely of village republics in a decentralized federal constitution for India. But we strayed from this dream and have got ourselves into an impossible maze of greed and corruption.

What we need today is to revive the memories of the great man not ritualistically but to follow his ideal of “Hind Swaraj “. This is not any utopian idea or a mad dream We can bend the present structure to form a new set up with the help of the existing institutions like the Supreme Court, the Election Commission and the reports of the various commissions like the Human Rights Commission, the Sarkaria Commission etc.

The new ideal of the nation should be simple living and high thinking. It does not mean austere living but living without ugly luxury. The ideal of simple living and high thinking has been till today (except for the social life of the citizens of the Greek republics) an individualistic ideal which now needs to be practiced as a national ideal.

The late revered Rajagopalachari is reported to have washed his dhoti and jubba even when he was the first Indian Governor General of free India and later when he was Home Minister in the Central Cabinet. This should not be dismissed simply as an individualistic gesture but should be inspire the nation to adopt the ideal of simple living and high thinking. That is the only way which can help us get rid of the helplessness of accepting corruption and greed as a way of life.

We are today practicing the method of policing the evils of greed and corruption that are eating into the vitals of our nation. Instead we should adopt measures to prevent the rise of these evils as we did in the past. To wit a very small evil, the copying at examinations which today is a national evil. One government in Uttar Pradesh went to the extent of handcuffing the copying students! The need here is to prevent the spread of the malady.

Similarly an elective post should be seen as an obligation and a responsibility and not as a prize post of ‘votecracy’. This will lead to the miracle of making our public life purer and cleaner.

But all this needs a little needling by the top leadership of the country and by the various institutions, which are even today trying to rid us of the maladies in our national life.

A decentralized political and economic setup will automatically lead to the ideal of simple living and high thinking which in turn will prevent the rise of social evils like corruption and greed in their multifarious forms.

I may even make bold to say that this will be an answer to terrorism which is stalking the country today.

Mr. V. N. Torgal is a school teacher in Bijapur in Karnataka.