Swarajya, July 6, 1963
Between ourselves, honest voter, these private monopolies created by the pernicious system of permits, licences, quotas and controls (to be extended now even to foreign capital which voluntarily comes into the private sector) make the Congress Party's rich friends richer, and the poor poorer. It is a close conspiracy; we have a battle between money and liberty, between dharma and atheism, between freedom and communism clothed in Congress robes.
If you arrange for your sons to marry, you must be prepared to receive grandchildren. You cannot let your Government practise socialism, which is a marriage between the State (which is the bureaucracy) and the productive and distributive activity of the individuals (which is the national economy), and not be prepared for the outcome of that marriage, corruption, black-marketing and all the other evils we now so loudly deplore, without making any effort to do what would stop them.
Socialism is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Dogmatism begins by making it an end in itself. The objectives to be attained by socialism are objectives recognized and accepted by all political parties. The question raised by other parties is whether the objectives cannot be better attained by other means than making the State command and regulate all economic activity. They point out that the loss of freedom and the corruption that result from the marriage of the bureaucracy to business, constitute a greater moral, cultural and material loss than anything to be gained by way of social justice through State socialism. The uneducated public are bamboozled to confuse the means with the unfulfilled en
LEO of the Hindu, the Reserve Bank of India, the Committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, all agree that the results of the policies pursued by the Congress Government have been, to put it in mild phrase, harmful to the national economy. They all agree in asking us to be ready to face very serious damage to the national economy, besides crushing taxation and Soaring prices. The Federation’s resolution adopted at Hyderabad on June 21, indeed draws a gloomy picture and the Federation is not an ignorant crowd or an anti-Congress political organization. Generally, it errs on the side of over-supporting the Government.
“Dividend payments have been low, new floatations have been meagre and have received scant support from the public, share prices have slumped and foreign collaboration has been negligible. It is imperative that the Government should take immediate steps to revitalize the different markets—share, capital, security and the like. Otherwise all our developmental efforts will be jeopardized and the future of the economy seriously impaired.”
Mr. Bharat Ram, who presided, said that one of the serious impediments in the country was the prevalence of corruption at all levels and that the insidious vice was sapping the vitality of the nation. He did not overstate the case: on the other side, the Congress Party’s secretary has been briefed to tell the people to accept all the heavy taxes and the rising inflation as “burdens of freedom”. They are not burdens of freedom but burdens of the folly of putting in power a party which had openly stated that it would pursue the policy of State socialism and confiscate freedom.
Not terror and physical force or slavery as in communist countries, but culture which is self-restraint, education which ingrains culture and self-restraint, and conscience which is the great internal policeman of freedom—these should be the means to socal justice, as Gandhiji took trouble repeatedly to point out, not a futile policy that begins by taking away the precious freedom of the individual, the one supreme element constituting what we all seek, to which we give the name ‘happiness’. Without terror and the slave-driving lash, no State socialism can produce the wanted results. It can only produce fraud and corruption and the rest of that brood, and make the rich parasites richer, keeping the poor as poor as ever. The rupee is being hotly pursued but it hides its head in the sand, ostrich-style. We are abetting a mad Government in the worst form of dacoity practised on our children and grandchildren.
