Know Where To Stop

The new Prime Minister may justly say to me, “You are a man of much experience: you wish me well: what is your stand, I wish to know?” I am answering this hypothetical question.

     Of course I am not a Statist - this everybody knows by now. I am not an individualist either. I recognize the fact that people must and do live together and obligations arise out of that fact. I am neither a Statist nor an individualist but, if I may put it that way, just a correctionist. I want no one to go to extremes. The individualist has little chance of going to extremes. The environment does not permit it. I am therefore applying myself principally to correcting the Statist’s excesses which are very harmful.

     The great and common error of people, when afforded opportunity, is to overdo something they find good. They fail to stop where they should stop. The man who takes to drinking does not know when to stop. The man who is given power over society soon becomes incapable of sensing where he should stop using that power. Civilization itself forgets at what point it should not proceed further. It esteems itself as an infinite blessing and may go to any length, whereas it is definitely finite in its capacity to be beneficial.

     Mr. Norman Cousins, the American savant, writes anxiously about the great evil of contamination of the human environment through the smoke and the gases that are belched out by the chimneys—what I would call, using the language of the atomic age, the unavoidable fall-out of civilization. Not content With what it does by itself and its endless, goal-less, blind ‘advance’, it is engaged in ~civilizing’ the rest of the world—the undeveloped nations—so that the contamination may get to be world-wide. The general rule issuing out of a consideration of all these things is that the biggest, most important lesson for every one to learn is where to stop, even when we handle an admittedly or proven good thing. This world is a finite world as far as we humans are concerned. Quality changes when quantity is taken beyond a certain limit, either by way of reduction or by way of expansion. All our actions should be governed by a rule of moderation. ‘So far and no further’ must be a warning sign kept before us, lest conceit and pride may take us to folly. And folly is dangerous when power is ended to it.

     ‘Do good to others’ is a good doctrine. On this, however, is based the folly of nineteenth century socialism, of Statism and totalitarianism. The ruling power can do much good, and so much good as to kill human personality and take civilized society back to collectivized life under cruel and all-powerful chiefs. Let us help others and make them happy; but there can be no happiness left if self-exertion is made unnecessary, and by presription the individual gets lost. “Do away with wasteful competition, plan for the whole community and build accordingly, do not leave it to the anarchy of individual decision”. This is good, but only up to a point. If you go beyond that point, you have to install an ever-expanding bureaucracy and Prof. Parkinson has told us that then, instead of progress, we shall have ceaselessly increasing waste, and all men and women will stand emancipated into bondage.

     Co-operation is good, not only good up to a point, but even necessary; but carried beyond and organized through compulsion of law, it becomes Statism—one or another form of what we know, Naziism or Fascism or Communism or some newer variation, wherein the individual is wholly suppressed in collectivized life and in course of time lost. Take another very tangible case of over-doing. The mother-tongue is a good thing, a sweet thing, a dear thing. But we can easily overdo our attachment to it in a multilingual continental nation. We had been often warned by our previous masters never to aspire to Freedom because of the multilingual character of our nation. We discarded that advice rightly and aspired, and attained Freedom, in spite of our multilingual and multi-religious character. But after Independence, if we do not keep our minds and eyes open and see the traps and pitfalls in our path, we can easily retrace our steps and get lost in the multilingual and multi-religious wilderness. If to get the mass votes of the Hindi area by trading on the Hindi people’s ill-informed attachments, the Congress crew pushes its ill-conceived and impossible official language programme (all the time swearing hypocritical compliance with the Jawaharlal Nehru formula), the natural consequence of this folly-cum-deceit, will be that the Congress, without intending it, will divorce the Hindi population from the non-Hindi population—just what the partitionist DMK had been wanting. The law of opposites will come into operation, and the non-Hindi people will blindly and ferociously go the other way; and India will get divided, instead of being strengthened in unity.

     When will the goddess Saraswati inspire our Congress masters to replace blind attachment to their mother-tongue by true enlightenment, over which that deity presides? Will not the present Congress President who hails from the South and whose wounds received repeatedly at the hands of the DMK have not yet healed and are still smarting, give sound advice to those in authority, telling them that it is their Hindi programme that is at the root of the DMK’s successes over the Congress in the State?

     But it is not only this issue I intended to bring up. In every one of our problems, the danger of overdoing lurks. The great commandment of the Gita is temperance in all things. Zeal and pride pull us the other way, the anti-Gita way. True Yoga is temperance in all things. And Yoga is a shaastram for all and in all matters, including politics and the science of good governance. And the Swatantra Party stands for this.