Swarajya, October 14, 1961
You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.
Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.
Be steadfast in the performance of your duty, O Arjuna, abandoning attachment to success and failure.
Such equanimity is called Yoga.
-- Bhagawad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47 & 48.
Have you ever in your own person experienced the joy of doing the right thing without caring about results, success or failure, which in the Gita is called Yoga? You will experience this delight if you do your own little best in the battle against a purse-proud power-intoxicated party. Vote for the Swatantra Party and thereby withdraw your vote from the Congress at the next elections if you disapprove of confiscation of honestly acquired property and hate injustice. Do not sit despairingly if you despise fraud such as is practised when Government confiscates property, pretending to give compensation for it. You should reduce the Congress by at least one vote-which is in your power. If you in your heart dislike the Congress Party helping persons of its choice to amass easy wealth in partnership with the party, by giving them a monopoly in some business which it pretends to 'regulate', condemn the practice by withdrawing your vote from that party. If you want this permit-licence-quota raj to disappear you should make up your mind not to keep that desire secret, but make your displeasure known by refusing to cast your vote for the Congress and giving it to the Swatantra Party.
Are you thinking it would be good for the people if prices go down and taxes are less? Then you should know for whom you should not vote. Your vote to the Congress would mean you want the prices to soar and the taxes to grind: The Congress will get votes by rousing class hatred and making false promises to a gullible people. But do not add your vote to it.
If you disapprove of India becoming it hopeless debtor ending in bankruptcy and desire that India should maintain her Gandhian self-respect and hold her head high, then you should be among those who cast their votes for the Swatantra Party. Your duty is to do what you can and not get frightened by thinking how successful the Congress is with people who can be deceived. It will not add to your glory or peace of mind to be among those who have allowed themselves to lose their will-power and surrendered themselves to the hypnotist. Do not become and unwilling party to take India one step further towards totalitarianism.
The appeal of the Congress is founded on its Plan-the Plan with 15 years behind it and 15 years or more in front of it. This totalist Plan is ambitious and at the same time fatally linked to a supply of foreign aid. It depends on others for capital equipment and for sustaining the whole economy. Foreign aid depends, whatever may be said to the contrary, on the continuing life of the cold war without bursting into actual war. Daily we hear Mr. Nehru's voice warning us against hot war, if not actually foretelling it. If war breaks out by accident or by provocation, what happens to the Plan? It would then, beyond doubt, be a sad wreckage. Let our non-alignment be a genuine, brave, though humble attitude. Let us not get hopelessly entangled in a net of assistance from the parties to the cold war. Let us arrange to survive any mess outside. From this point of view our ambitious plans are futilities and unwise adventures. The whole of the Congress appeal is linked to this Plan and its Achilles' heel.
Dharma should be restored to its traditional position in the minds of men and women in India. We should not look on impotently when it is being overwhelmed by money-hunger. Here is a non-Dharma party overwhelming the culture and the traditions of India. Whatever others may do, you should vote for Dharma and the freedom of the soul. Do not vote for a party that seeks to make Government the total master of every citizen's affairs, killing the spirit of compassion and extinguishing all private charity, in favour of a leviathan-State.
The Congress leadership aims at complete conformity of feelings and beliefs as well as external behaviour. It aims at an all-devouring totalism of which totalitarian secular authority is a chapter. Against this is ranged the Swatantra movement. The Swatantra Party's work and success or failure this year form but the preliminary of an emancipatm, determined movement that must go on without ceasing until freedom is established. The coming 1962 election is but the beginning of the battle against Congress's totalism. Be a pioneer in the battle and cast your vote for Swatantra.
It matters little if there are atheists, if some among the people do not believe in the soul but think the body is everything. But it matters a great deal if the government of a country is run by a leadership that ignores and denies the soul and acts on the footing that the body is the one and only thing that matters. It you want government to be in the hands of people who believe, like the Hindus, the Muslims, the Parsis, the Sikhs, the Christians and the Jews, in an eternal spiritual element to which the name of soul or atman is given, and of which the body is a tool, stand up against the Congress and support the Swatantra Party. Do not be deceived by the tall talk of a party that has only the cloak of Gandhism and has rejected its vital principles and gone over completely to Lenin and communism.
There can be no nation if the individual is robbed of his strength and his confidence by a ruling clique, a closed shop, which uses its position to build permanent domination for itself. We must re-make freedom by dislodging this clique.
