Importance of Hind Swaraj

The Importance of Hind Swaraj: The quintessence of Gandhi’s thinking was contained in his little booklet “Hind Swaraj”. Its import is so revolutionary, so different from what most of us are used to, that a real paradigm shift is a basic pre-requisite to grasping what he had in mind. As Gandhi himself explained, anyone who wants to understand Hind Swaraj has to view the world “with my eyes”. That is why even close followers and admirers of his, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, just could not stomach what he had said in Hind Swaraj.

The most important thing that Gandhi conveyed through this booklet is a meaning to Swaraj which is totally removed from the political context in which we normally understand this concept. He declared in his booklet.

We have plunged headlong into globalization and the market-oriented economy. Even more than in Nehru’s days, money and material growth and industrial production are being worshipped as the only way out of our problems. That our appreciation of Gandhi is confined to symbols is evident when, for instance, we name the biggest streets in our cities as M.G. Road, and then carry out the most ungandhian activities on it, or when we print his photos on our 500 rupee notes and then use those very notes for the most ungandhian transactions. While we may celebrate his birthday as a national holiday and praise him in our speeches and functions and newspapers, deep down we feel that in the present era of technology and modernization, rapid development and globalization, his ideas are outmoded and unsuitable for our needs. In other words, Gandhi may be a hero of our past, but has no place in our future.

And yet, simultaneously, there is also a slow awakening – at least amongst a limited circle of concerned citizens – to the wisdom contained in his ideas. This is the result of a growing realization that our present way of living is leading us headlong into disaster. Where ever development has made rapid strides, it has been accompanied by environmental problems, social stratification and stress, water scarcities, soil depletion, air pollution and traffic nightmares – Bangalore and China being two shining examples of how badly we foul our very nest which we are trying to convert into heaven through technological progress. 

Gandhi had predicted all this a full hundred years ago. Interestingly, his predictions included an environmental crisis. How did he manage to do that at a time when no one had heard of words and concepts like ecology, sustainability and bio-diversity conservation? The secret lies in his awakening of the soul-force, a faculty each one of us possesses, but has not developed. It is the method by which we can rise above the concept of the ‘other’ and experience the world as an undivided whole. This is the route to true spirituality or religion, and it is also the route to true ecology, for then we see the interconnectedness of all the species, nay, of all living beings, with one another. Gandhi could see with his own eyes how modern science and technology was violating this supreme Law that governs the entire universe, and the consequences that will follow. That is why he insisted that to grasp the message of Hind Swaraj one has to see the world “through my eyes”. 

He was not, as is commonly imagined, against science and technology. On the contrary, he favoured science in its true essence – the uninhibited pursuit of truth and reality, rather than just blindly following a ‘scientific method’ that had evolved through experiments at the physical level. He predicted that a new science of the future would take into account the realities of the spiritual dimensions and the resulting technologies would be very different from what we witness today – promoting rather destroying ecology, healing the earth and its wounds, and thus having a healing touch on the human psyche too. As he put it:

“Modern science is replete with illustrations of the seemingly impossible having become possible within living memory. But the victories of physical science would be nothing against the victory of the Science of Life, which is summed up in Love which is the Law of our Being.” 

But for the above vision to be translated into practice, we need to reverse the following five trends which have become necessary corollaries to our notions of what development is all about: 

Urbanization, Heavy industrialization, Commercialization, Monetization and Militarization. 

Unless and until we discard our attachment to the above five as necessary indicators of ‘progress’, we cannot implement Gandhi’s notion of Swaraj at a societal level. But we can still do so at the individual level. 

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