To Lancashire Employers and Working Men

My nationalism is not so narrow that I should not feel for your distress or gloat over it. I do not want my country’s happiness at the sacrifice of any other country’s happiness. But whilst I see that you are hard hit, I am afraid, your distress is not largely due to India. Conditions have been bad for some years and the boycott came only as the last straw.

I am pained at the unemployment here, but here is no starvation or semi-starvation. In India, we have both. If you went to the villages of India, you would find utter despair in the eyes of the villagers, you would find half-starved skeletons, living corpses. If India could revive them by putting life and food into them in the shape of work, India would help the world. Today India is a curse. There is a party in my country which would sooner see an end to the lives of these half-starved millions in order that the rest may live. I thought of a humane method and that was to give them work with which they were familiar, which they could do in their cottages, which required no great investment in implements, and of which the product could be easily sold. This is a task which is worthy of the attention even of ‘Lancashire’.

A Debasing Thing

You have three millions unemployed, but we have nearly three hundred millions unemployed and under-employed for half the year. Your average unemployment dole is 70 shillings. Our average income is seven shillings and six pence a month. I do believe it is a debasing thing for a human being to remain idle and to live on doles. Whilst conducting a strike I could not brook the strikers remaining idle for a single day, and got them to break stones or carry sand and work in public streets, asking my own co-workers to join them in that work. Imagine, therefore, what a calamity it must be to have 300 millions unemployed, several millions becoming degraded everyday for want of employment, devoid of self-respect, devoid of faith in God. I dare not take before them the message of God. I may as well place before the dog over there the message of God as before those hungry millions who have no luster in their eyes and whose only God is their bread. I can take before them a message of God only by taking the sacred message of work before them. It is good enough to talk of God whilst we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon, but how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day? To them God can only appear as bread and butter. Well, the peasants of India were getting their bread from their soil. I offered them the spinning wheel in order that they may get the butter, and if I appear today before the British public in my loin-cloth, it is because I have come as the sole representative of those half-starved, half-naked, dumb millions.

No Hope of Reviving Lancashire Trade

We have prayed that we may bask in the presence of God’s sunshine. I tell you it is impossible to do so whilst millions are knocking at your door. Even in your misery, you are comparatively happy. I do not grudge that happiness. I wish well to you, but do not think of prospering on the tombs of the poor millions of India. I do not want for India an isolated life at all, but I do not want to depend on any country for my food and clothing. Whilst we may devise means for tiding over the present crisis, I must tell you that you should cherish no hope of reviving the old Lancashire trade. It is impossible. I cannot religiously help in the process. Supposing, I have suddenly stopped breathing, and am helped by artificial respiration for a while and begin to breathe again, must I, for ever, depend on artificial respiration and refuse to use my own lungs again? No, it would be suicidal. I must try to strengthen my own lungs and live on my own resources. You must pray to God that India may strengthen her lungs. Do not attribute your misery to India. Think of the world forces that are powerfully working against you. See things in the dry light of reason.

- Young India: Oct. 15, 1931