Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/33

 vastness of the area of our country, for both Russia and China have overcome their greater difficulties in this respect.

You complain that Indian labourers have no mind of their own on matters of general policy or even of labour policy. That is exactly where the value and need of propa ganda comes in. Had our workers their conscious policy I would not have been driven to urge you to help them and to preach to them in order to organise them.

For Khaddar and for non-co-operation you fearlessly carry out a whirlwind campaign all over the country amongst villagers and workers who had no conception of your ideal before your propaganda reached them. You, with your colleagues, confessed to carrying out a labour propaganda in Ahmedabad ; all that I ask is that Ahmedabad should be merely a part of a whole and that your services should be unreservedly given to the whole movement.

You say in your letter "Labourers in various parts of India have no social contact and no other mutual ties." That is where you ignore and overlook the most powerful common factor of life that has unfailingly united men and women in other countries despite their hundred and one, and sometimes very bitter, differences on religious, social or clan questions. No man has succeeded nor shall one now succeed in stopping modern industrialism, and the economic factor is the one common factor that applies to, and that unites, men and women of various social, national, religious and communal textures. Hours, wages, standards of life, political and legislative needs of the workers, are on the whole so uniform that when organised to battle around those wants they have invariably forgotten and drowned their internal dissensions. The absence of labour unity and trade union discipline is a more serious loss to the India of to-day than we have yet learned to observe.

On the one hand, you blame Indian labour for being sectarian and communal, and on the other hand, when the All-Indian Trade Union Congress is struggling to build up national and international labour unity, you feel tempted to induce Ahmedabad to stand separate and apart. You say : "It is not everywhere wisely guided." Does that not rather support my argument that you and other popular Congress and Swaraj leaders must take up the work ? Then you describe various factors making for dissension and disunity amongst