I believe in the Brotherhood of Man. There are many who think that the Brotherhood of Man is meaningless without the Fatherhood of God. To me there does not appear to be any such essential interdependence. The Brotherhood of Man involves human solidarity based on the fact that human nature is essentially the same everywhere, that people react fundamentally in the same way to the same incentives and the same pressures. Certain modifications, of course have to be made to allow for variations in social heritage, religion, climate, and such factors, but basically we are all brothers under the skin.

Because of this belief, which I find corroborated by concrete experience, I am not inclined to accept the plea that the economic and social policies that produce certain results, shall we say, in Japan or Germany or the United States would not produce similar results in India. Human nature being what it is, people everywhere respond to the same incentives and to the same stimuli. I find nothing unique about the people of our country or the situation in which it finds itself. I believe that, thanks to the conquest of space the crashing of the sound barrier and the development of telecommunications, the world is now one organism. Chauvinism and zenophobia are today, therefore, forces that are as reactionary as racism.

A Question of Balance

The belief in humanism leads to an acceptance of ethics. I believe there is such a thing as good and evil. Of course, the idea of what is good or evil, what is moral or immoral, is a subjective one. My own belief is that what makes for human happiness is moral, what makes for misery is immoral. One man’s food, of course, can be another man’s poison, and one man’s pursuit of happiness may easily cause unhappiness to another. The test of action, therefore, should be the overall balance of happiness and unhappiness it produces.

It is obvious that such an approach to the problems of morality has little to do with traditional or conventional codes of morality. Would such liberty as this approach of mine given to each individual be exercised with maturity and restraint? I don’t know. I only know that no other concept of morality appears to me to make any sense.

The philosophy that appeals to me is the Stoic philosophy. From my youth, I have responded to the logic of the Meditations of the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. For instance, it is only what we ourselves do that can hurt us, nothing that anyone else does, however beastly, can possibly diminish one’s dignity or make one shrink. I find that this philosophy helps in making it possible to tell the truth even when it is unpalatable and builds resistance to smears and lampooning as also a relative indifference to popularity, the pursuit of which is the bane of our national leadership.

From youth onwards, I have responded to Tagore’s invitation “Ekla chalo re” and the sentiment of James Russell Lowell in his Stanzas on Freedom:

They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

My mother tells me that, even as a little boy, I was always on the side of the underdog - the servant about to be dismissed or the woman selling fruit who was being beaten down by some member of the family inclined to bargain too hard. On such occasions I was always on the other side of the social barricade. I should like to think that this craving for justice and sympathy for the underdog is still a major element in my beliefs. It no doubt accounted for my early acceptance of socialism as a result of being an avid reader of H.G. Wells and George Bernand Shaw.

The Gandhian Path

To this instinct for social justice my contact with Gandhiji and my arguments with him over the years helped to add an awareness that ends and means are interlinked and that the end does not justify the means even if the end is, in Lenin’s words, “a society of the free and equal”. Hence my book, “Socialism Reconsidered” (1944) and my renunciation of State Socialism and the acceptance of the Gandhian path to a better world.

Since 1954, I have been, at the instance of my good friend, Jayaprakash Narayan, Sampattidani No. 29 on the roll of the All India Sarva Seva Sangh, giving a small part of my income every year to enable the landless to be given a plough or a pair of cattle or some seed to cultivate the land made available as a result of Bhoodan. This modest attempt at “Trusteeship” gives me considerable personal satisfaction, even though it also creates a certain amount of financial strain and embarrasment.

I believe in the essential goodness of people. Recently, in the course of a talk with Rajaji, I must have displayed a certain measure of faith in the bona fides and assurances of a certain group of hard-faced politicians. “You seem to believe in God,” observed Rajaji dryly. In answer to my puzzled and inquiring look, he added: “You behave as if you do. Perhaps you call it providence or righteousness.”

Of all the values, I put freedom first. I believe with Lord Acton that liberty is the highest good and that other values, like peace, for example, must yield when freedom is involved. Here again, I reject, as Gandhiji did, the “peace of the graveyard”. While war is bad, I believe that appeasement and submission to tyranny are even worse.

Heretics - Salt of the Earth

I have little love for the status quo. The world needs change. I believe the nonconformist conscience is one of our country’s saddest shortages and that heretics are the salt of the earth. To those timid spirits who are afraid of radical change, I commend the words of G.B. Shaw in his play Major Barbara: “What do we do when we spend years of work and thought and thousands of pounds of solid cash on a new gun or an aerial battleship that turns out just a hair’s breath wrong after all? Scrap it. Scrap it without wasting another hour or another pound on it. Well, you have made yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn’t fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that fits. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions.”

(First published in the Illustrated Weekly of lndia, November 16, 1969)