Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/12



BOMBAY, Mar. 8, 1927. Dear Comrade Gandhi,

We are both erratic enough to permit each other to be rude in order to freely express oneself correctly, instead of getting lost in artificiality of phraseology.

Several of your enthusiastic supporters have assisted me greatly by criticising me openly in the public press. How ever these several critics have effectively replied to each other and one has contradicted the other and each one has tried to prove a different case on your behalf. You may not be responsible for creating this confusion. But I consider you are in duty bound now to clear it. Let us understand, openly, whether the Charka movement is or is not an attack upon machinery, upon physical sciences, upon material progress. If it is so, then it is a most damaging disservice to our coun try and must be stopped. If it is not so, then your ardent followers ought not to be allowed to believe that it is so.

As to the economic argument that khaddar adds to the earning power of the agricultural worker, I consider this to be a feeble case altogether. It is pointed out to me by a newspaper correspondent that if I had seen the great ocean of khaddar in India in 1921 and 1922 and the tremendous enthusiasm of people at that time, I would not have ventured upon the criticisms that I am now doing. That is perfectly true, but this conclusively proves that my criticism now is fully justified, and that all that ocean of khaddar and all that enthusiasm has dwindled if not disappeared on their merit or demerit, long before I came here and offered my criticism.