Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/22

 go still further and you actually and deliberately fraternise and co-operate with the master class, so as to make the task of labour organisers not only difficult but almost unjustifiable in the eyes of poor workers. You may defend this process whichever way you like, but the experienced world can only see there the exploitation of the spirit of superstition and of ignorance amongst the poor workers at the cost of human lives and their families and for the benefit of the bank accounts of the happy minority that rules the roost.

I remember in London we all read the description of your royal reception at Jamshedpur and your acceptance of an address in a steel casket with a purse, as if in that Jamshedpur under-feeding, bad housing, under-clothing does not go on, as if deaths, which are preventable under modern scientific principles, are not daily taking place, as if men were never driven to resort to strike, through unreasonable obstinacy of their employers, and as if even military operations against workers had never taken place. I have con fessed above that I have looked at this picture of your performance with disappointment from a long distance. Comrade, you have to take the world as it is, and you have to believe that all the labour world have looked upon that picture with a similar disappointment. Even with all your personal power and success you will not be able to change the great law of worldly life that those who are not with us are against us, and in the name of the working classes I want to call upon you to remember it.

I have put down my candid thoughts in the above para graphs not with a view to disburden my soul of personal grievance ; I fully realise that I am courting great unpopularity in the eyes of my own fellow countrymen whose good wishes and good opinion are as dear to me as to you. What I am really attempting to do is to disburden your mind of a lot of confusion and contradiction and to demand from you in the name of all sufferers not merely that you stop adding to their sufferings but that you come forward and live with us as a brother with brothers, and work with us in a manner and form in which we all consider you to be most fitted and your service to be most valuable. I have already read to you my notes, in which I have mentioned what psychological, political and even revolutionary value can be attached to the khaddar movement. I have no prejudice against it, and I would even preserve and build upon whatever value it may have for a nation's liberty and life. I attach a full copy of