Page:Gandhi and Saklatvala - Is India different.pdf/7



NDIA is a very young country as far as capitalism is concerned. Although capitalist industry is now so much developed that India is officially reckoned, by the Labour Office of the League of Nations, as one of the eight chief industrial countries of the world, the development of capitalism in India has taken place so quickly that there is still a big controversy in India as to whether it and its characteristic effects really exist there at all.

Some of the Indian leaders say that India has a special spiritual civilisation, in which the capitalism of the West will never be able to obtain a foothold. Others admit that capitalist industry has come into being in India, but they hold that this is an excrescence and a mistake, and that it ought to be done away with. Especially important is the controversy about the class struggle. It is quite usual for Indian politicians to deny that any such struggle does or need exist. The class struggle between labour and capital, they say, is a lamentable feature of Western civilisation which must not be introduced into India. The occurrence of strikes indicates a tendency to copy Western methods which are unsuitable for India and must be prevented.

All these are signs of the youthful stage of Indian capitalism in which class consciousness, the conscious recognition of the class struggle, is only just beginning to emerge. Those who care to look, of course, cannot help seeing what a miserable, sweated, exploited, slum-ridden existence the Indian industrial worker has to endure. The question is, how is this to be remedied ? On the one side we find those, still few in numbers, but rapidly increasing, who advocate the organisation of a working class movement such as we know it in Western Europe ; on the other side are to be found those who wish to uplift the masses by classless, humanitarian welfare work. The most important representative of the latter viewpoint is to be found in the great Indian Nationalist leader Gandhi, and thus the exchange of letters between him and Saklatvala reflects and sums up the whole controversy still proceeding in India on the subject of the class struggle. Rh