Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/17

 municipal wards where the factory workers live would be from 600 to even 800 per thousand. Such a damnable attack upon human life is unknown in those countries where the working classes are organised. To defend such a position is criminal, but for anybody to go even further and to throw dust in the eyes of the world that class war is not operating acutely in India is inhuman and monstrous, and I have always felt that through your misguided sentimentality, you have preferred to be one of them.

Then take the other important elements of life — the dignity, the consciousness and the self-respect of man, and look at our unfortunate clerks, teachers, postmen and rail way station staff, etc. The treatment which they are made to suffer, and are almost habituated to, is a disgrace to human society, and the only salvation out of it is efficient labour organisation. Class war is there, will continue to be there till any successful scheme of Communism abolishes it. But in the meantime not to organise the people and not to struggle against its evil effects from day to day is a doctrine which cannot appeal to any genuine humanitarian.

During my conversations with you at certain periods you did not seem to take a definite attitude with regard to the value of organisation of labour and peasants. You emphatically argued that the charka movement was making organisation. I emphatically deny it. There must be conscious and deliberate work of organisation, to be carried out for its own sake in a proper scientific manner and for the purpose of our national object, with a straightforward and unconcealed imparting of political consciousness. The same similarity of operation of the working of charka with some vague idea, religious zeal or economic welfare or a great Gandhi's command, does not and cannot do any effective organising work, and cannot create and has not created any political consciousness. For centuries together millions of men and women in India have been boiling rice, utilising similar quantities of rice and water and conducting cooking operations of a similar nature, doing some industrial work when cooking it and producing food of economic value without buying ready-made food. All these operations surely have not produced any organisation, and the work of spinning can never do so any more than the work of cooking.