Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Indian National Movement

The national movement culminating in the independence of India in 1947 was one of the most important events in the world in the history of twentieth century; and one man identified as the main architect of this momentous event was Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian National Congress founded in 1885 provided the organisational base for expressing the aspirations and expectations of the people of India. As the movement progressed into the twentieth century, it was continuously evolving and changing its goals and objectives in response to the changing objective reality. In 1915 Mahatma Gandhi returned to India from South Africa where he had developed his ideological convictions and the political idiom which was deeply rooted in Indian ethos. This made him qualitatively different from other contemporary nationalist leaders. His emergence as the supreme leader of the national movement in 1919–20 was the most significant development in the history of the Congress and the struggle for freedom of India. The fundamentals of the Gandhian philosophy as outlined in one of his earliest publication Hind Swaraj is, therefore, vital to our understanding of the dynamic of the movements lead by Mahatma Gandhi from 1920 to 1947. ¹

The founding of Indian National Congress was believed to be a resonance of the ‘interplay between social structure and political activity’. ² Towards the close of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there prevailed growing dissatisfaction with the policies of the Raj and economic discontent caused restlessness in the society. Since the Indian National Congress was not able to reflect the full range of social aspirations or economic discontents, the influential leaders who advocated moderate politics and had faith in the British sense of justice, were increasingly becoming the targets of criticism. ³ The moderates had concentrated mainly to appeal to the logical reasoning of the liberal politicians of Britain and to convince them about the hardships of the people of India through petitions, speeches and articles. Dada Bhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, in which he gave exposure to the colonial economic policies and believed that the British would take remedial and ameliorative steps, was just one example of this reasoning. ⁴ According to Surendernath Bannerjee,

Indian opinion was weak, hardly vocal, the pulsations of national life were not felt. The great Indian continent, consisted of innumerable units, disintegrated without coherence or consistency, without any purpose or aim, speaking with different voices, wrangling, quarrelling, and contending with their energies dissipated amid a conflict of views and babble of tongues. ⁵

The critics identified as ‘extremists’ did not have hold over the organisation, neither they had adequate means and methods to mobilise masses into action. The revolutionaries too shared the same position.

Ravinder Kumar has made an important observation in this regard that ‘the tensions located in different sectors of Indian society, rural and urban, constituted the raw material of great populist upheaval. It is also true that prior to 1919, no institutional means had been devised to channelise these discontents into an organised movement reflecting popular aspirations against British government’. ⁶ It was Mahatma Gandhi’s genius that he ‘recognized the discontents in different sections [of] Indian society’ and gave them organised ‘expression in a revitalized Indian National Congress’. ⁷ His returning back to India in 1915 after a stay of twenty years in South Africa was the beginning of the transformation of the national movement.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had left for South Africa as a lawyer to represent his clients for a case in 1893 and when he landed back on the shores of India in January 1915 he was a well-known political campaigner who had the ingenuity to take along everyone, motivate people to abandon their homes and jobs, suffer starvation and physical violence, to defy laws, courting imprisonment without raising their fingers at their opponents. His sojourn in South Africa was full of challenges as well as opportunities which he had neither visualised nor anticipated. His personal exposure to racial discrimination and humiliations left a deep impact on his mind and thinking process. He in his autobiography has admitted, ‘Thus God laid the foundation of my life in South Africa and sowed the seeds of the fight for national self-respect’. ⁸ From 1894 till his final departure for India, for twenty years he organised campaigns and movements, particularly from 1906 to 1914—till about 1906 he followed the moderate techniques of prayers and petition—of the people of disparate regions, communities and classes: Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians, Gujaratis and South Indians, upper class merchants and lawyers, mine workers and indentured labourers to defend the dignity and integrity of Indian men and women with a unique weapon of passive resistance or Satyagraha based on truth and moral power. ⁹ In fact, at the Phoenix settlement established just outside Durban in 1904, ‘he conducted his first experiments in developing a sense of all-India consciousness, free from the harmful effects of modern civilisation, undue regionalism, and the worst manifestations of caste mentality’. ¹⁰ He wrote, ‘whatever energy is put forth in Phoenix is not so much taken away from India, but is so much given to India’. ¹¹ During his stay in South Africa Gandhi had kept himself updated about the conditions in India. During his visits back home in 1896 and 1901 and to England in 1906 and 1909 he had developed acquaintances in India as well. During his visit to India in 1896 he visited Bombay, Pune and Madras (Chennai) and met Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, Dinshaw Wacha, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishan Gokhale and a number of persons who mattered in the Congress politics and organisation. He attended the Calcutta session in 1901 and watched the functioning of the Indian National Congress from close quarters. ¹² In 1903, the weekly, Indian Opinion started its publication. The journal did well to serve the Indian community. In his autobiography, Gandhi says that ‘I poured out my soul in its columns and expounded the principles and practice of Satyagraha as I understood it, for ten years, that is, until 1914, excepting the intervals of my enforced rest in prison’. ¹³ He attaches great importance to it because ‘Satyagraha would probably have been impossible without Indian Opinion’, because it contained

a trustworthy account of the Satyagraha campaign as also of the real condition of Indians in South Africa. For me it became a means for the study of human nature in all its casts and shades, as I always aimed at establishing an intimate and clean bond between the editor and the readers. ¹⁴

In other words Mahatma Gandhi had proven the efficacy of the method of Satyagraha in South Africa and he aimed at implementing this in India as well.

During his visit to London in 1906 and 1909 he acquired the diplomatic skills necessary for dealing with the British political establishment, and in 1909 he came into contact with the Indian expatriates who had fully converted themselves to western civilisations. ¹⁵ During his stay at India House in 1909, he had a long conversation with Shyamji Krishanvarma. Association with Gopal Krishan Gokhale, his political Guru, and writings of Dadabhai Nauroji, who according to him was the ‘author of Indian Nationalism’, contributed significantly in his understanding of the conditions of India. ¹⁶ B. R. Nanda in his article in Encyclopedia Britannica has remarked, ‘What he did to South Africa was indeed less important than what South Africa did to him…by drawing him into the vortex of its racial problems, it had provided him the ideal setting in which his peculiar talents unfold themselves’. ¹⁷

Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa fully equipped with his philosophical foundations as articulated in his book the Indian Home Rule published in Johannesburg in 1910. ¹⁸ This extraordinary work possesses an authority of its own. It has been observed that in all of his writings, speeches and actions, the general statements or the thought process that flows comes out from this foundational work. ¹⁹ It can be said that it is the seed from which the Gandhian thought has grown. It was written in ten days—between 13 and 22 November 1909—on board the ship christened as Kildonan Castle on his return journey from England to South Africa. He writes that his ‘mind was flooded with ideas and he decided to write’. ²⁰ He was so enthusiastic to write to give expressions to his ideas that about 275 pages were written on the stationery borrowed from the management of the ship. It was published in Gujarati language in the journal Indian Opinion under the title ‘Hind Swarajaya’ in 1909; all its copies were seized by the police when it reached the shores of Bombay (Mumbai). In the meanwhile, Gandhi was translating it into English for his European friends. But, when the news of seizure reached him, he ‘hastened to publish the translation without a moment’s delay’. ²¹ This book has the unique distinction of being the only work translated by the Mahatma Gandhi himself. It is in the form of a dialogue between Gandhi and Gandhi. He himself is the reader and the editor. He raises questions as the reader and as the editor answers them. Gandhi writes in the preface that in Gujarati language ‘it is considered as the best method to deal with difficult subject’. ²² He has admitted also that this was the outcome of the dialogue that ‘actually took place between him and several friends’ who had been discussing and asking questions about Indian condition from time to time. ‘I felt, therefore, that it might not be improper for me to ventilate publicly the views expressed by me in private’. ²³ The inspiration to write this book came to him from the writings of ‘Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and other writers, besides the masters of Indian Philosophy’. ²⁴ He considered the views expressed in the Hind Swaraj as sacred as ‘almost part of his being’. He was attacking in his comments on the seizure of Hind Swaraj (original Gujarati version) in India. He asserted, ‘To me the seizure constitutes further condemnation of the civilisation represented by British Government’. ‘There was no trace of approval of violence in any shape’ in the book. Therefore, the action of the British government is ‘undoubtedly, severely condemned…. My notion of loyalty does not involve acceptance of that standard of morality in practice which it at present vaguely and hypocritically believes in theory’. Gandhi through these expressions spelt out his strategy for future action which was to be rooted in the belief of the pre-eminence of ancient Indian civilisation. He said that Indian civilisation, in contrast with the western, ‘represents the best that the world has ever seen’. In view of this, he was ‘not so much concerned about the stability of the Empire in India’ as about Indian civilisation. He in the same breath took on the revolutionaries who were active both in India and Britain and trying to launch violent movement to end the British rule in India. He cautioned them about the futility of their methods by saying that those who ‘believe that they should adopt modern civilisation and modern methods of violence to drive out the English…are following a suicidal policy’. He advised them to follow the righteousness of Indian culture by reverting ‘to their own glorious civilisation’. ²⁵ He was confident that it would impact the thinking of English rulers in such a manner that either they ‘would become Indianised or find their occupation in India gone’. ²⁶ These statements in the preface and the foreword are an expression of intent and purpose of writing Hind Swaraj (Gujarati) and are pointers to the course of action that Mahatma Gandhi subsequently followed. This writing is important from the point of view that it help us to read into the working of Gandhi’s mind at that stage of his career when he was nearly a decade away from becoming the face of the struggle for freedom in India.

Hind Swaraj is divided in to twenty short chapters in about one hundred and four pages of text, besides the appendices in about ten pages. Nine chapters deal with philosophical reflections while the rest of eleven deal with questions like the condition of India, how the Congress has kindled a desire for home rule, by partitioning Bengal British have sown seeds for the partition of the empire and that the real meaning of swaraj is to revive Indian civilisation to its pristine glory, unity and amity between Hindus and the Muslims. The high point of the book is the virtue of non-violence as against violent revolution and the need to use ethical means to attain independence by means of educational reforms and adoption of technology suitable to Indian conditions. ²⁷ He has dealt with each subject with pithy comments and direct references. He wrote this book because there was an ‘inner illumination’ and a ‘strong urge to communicate’. He later recalled the experience that ‘just as one cannot help speaking out when one’s heart is full, so also I had been unable to restrain myself from writing the book since my heart was full’. ²⁸

Gandhi begins with the straight question about how Indians are ‘pinning for National Independence’? He first of all extols the contribution of Indian National Congress and its founding fathers, like Dadabhai Naoroji, who prepared the soil, A. O. Hume who lashed us into action, Buddurudin Tyabji, Sir William Wedderburn who gave his ‘body, mind and money for the cause’, and his writings which are ‘worthy of perusal’. ²⁹ Since he was an admirer of Naoroji, Ramesh Dutt and Wedderburn, he mentions their names and works in the list of authorities in the appendices. He is candid in his admiration for Dadabhai Naoroji for ‘dedicating his life to the service of India’. The inventor of ‘Drain Theory’ and the treatment of the subject in his well circulated book, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India published in 1901 had inspired a good deal of debate on the economic policies of Britain in India. Naoroji had argued that under the British rule India was continuously sinking in poverty, because the British in India were pursuing those policies which were un-British in nature. ³⁰ In Gandhi’s assessment Naoroji, the Grand Old Man of India, was the ‘author of Nationalism in India’. ³¹ His admiration for Gopal Krishan Gokhale, his political guru was no less. He had met him in 1896 at Pune and instantly became his admirer. Writing about him he says,

I found him (Gokhale) on the Fergusson College grounds. He gave me an affectionate welcome, and his manner immediately won my heart. With him this was my first meeting, and yet it seemed as though we were renewing an old friendship…Gokhale was like the Ganges. One could have a refreshing bath in the holy river…the Ganges invited one to its bosom. It was a joy to be on it with a boat and an oar. ³²

He held him in high esteem notwithstanding differences in views but because ‘he gave himself to Indian education’. In order to prepare the nation to fight, he ‘embraced poverty and gave twenty years of his life. Even now he is living in poverty’. Gandhi believed that ‘whatever Gokhale does he does with pure motives and view to serving India. His devotion to the motherland is so great, that he would give his life for it…we are bound to entertain highest regard for him’. ³³

Gandhi was fully informed of the split in the Congress in 1907. His line of argument was more on the side of the moderates who stood for Swaraj or self-rule within the framework of empire and achieved through the constitutional means of gradual reforms. Gandhi was though not in complete agreement with them because his vision of the Swaraj was based on the reform of the soul and through the soul force or Satyagraha and not merely constitutional reforms. He believed that ‘petitions must be backed by force’ albeit moral force backed by passive resistance; the emphasis on the reform of the soul and self, distinguished him from the moderates. He maintains a distance from extremists who stood for Swaraj as complete political sovereignty achieved through constitutional means, if possible, but through other means if necessary. He does not mention any of the extremist leaders in the book.

In the context of differences of opinions and methods Mahatma Gandhi has commented upon the tendency to label people as ‘right and wrong’. His views in this regard are extremely important in our public life. Gandhi was uncompromising in this regard. He said,

it is a bad habit to say that another man’s thought are bad and only ours are good, and that those holding different views from ours are the enemies of the country’. ³⁴

Gandhi was of the conviction that contribution of Indian National Congress to bring about political consciousness in India was immense and his appreciation in this regard is unconditional. He writes:

The Congress brought together Indians from different parts of India, and enthused us with the idea of nationality. The government used to look upon it with disfavour. The Congress has always insisted that the nation should control revenue and expenditure. It has always desired self-government after the Canadian model. Whether we can get it or not, whether we desire it or not, and whether there is not something more desirable, are different questions. All I have to show is that the Congress gave us a foretaste of Home Rule. To deprive it of the honour is not proper, and for us to do so would not only be ungrateful but retard the fulfilment of our object. To treat the Congress as an institution inimical to our growth as a nation would disable us from using that body. ³⁵

The partition of Bengal in 1905 was a watershed moment in the history of the national movement of India. Viceroy Lord Curzon’s decision, to separate the Muslim dominated areas from Bengal and join them with some districts of Assam to form a new province as ‘East Bengal and Assam’, sparked off a spate of protests and the Swadeshi Movement in different parts of India, particularly, Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab. ³⁶ Gandhi’s reaction to the events of 1905 are in one sense a prognostication of the long term political consequence for the British empire and the national movement in India. Gandhi observed that Curzon in ‘the teeth of all opposition partitioned Bengal. That day may be considered to be the day of the partition of the British Empire’. He said, ‘the people were ready to resist the partition. At that time (1905) feeling ran high. Many leading Bengalis were ready to lose their all. They knew their power; hence the conflagration’. He could also foresee the future course of the national movement. He anticipated that the ‘Partition will go, Bengal will be reunited, but the rift in the English barque will remain; it must daily widen’. ³⁷ He was unequivocally positive that ‘India awakened is not likely to fall asleep. The demand for the abrogation of the partition is tantamount to a demand for Home Rule’. ³⁸ He further adds to these observations that as a result of the agitation against the partition people of India were stimulated to face the British more boldly. His remarks are comprehensive in this regard. He writes,

Hitherto we have considered that for redress of grievances we must approach the throne, and if we get no redress we must sit still, except that we may still petition. After the partition, people saw that petitions must be backed up by force, and that they must be capable of suffering. This new spirit must be considered to be the chief result of the Partition. ³⁹

Here in this situation he was visualising the possibility of Satyagraha in India. Referring to the deportation of Lala Lajpat Rai and Sardar Ajit Singh to Burma he says, ‘Some of the best sons of India are at present in banishment. ⁴⁰ This is something different from mere petitioning. Thus, are the people moved. The spirit generated in Bengal has spread in the north to the Punjab, and in the south to Cape Comorin’. ⁴¹ At this point of time, it is interesting to note, besides other ‘glaring injustices’ he writes, ‘Salt tax is not a small injustice’. ⁴² It is patent that salt tax had entered into the invective mind of Mahatma Gandhi long before the launching of salt satyagraha. In his meeting with the Mahatma in 1930 the Viceroy Irwin had to admit that Gandhi had planned a fine strategy around the salt. ⁴³

Mahatma Gandhi was categorical in his assertions that most of the ills of the modern world had emanated from the emergence of what he called the industrial civilisation in the west about which he was generously disdainful. The establishment of Sabarmati Ashram and adoption of spinning wheel as a symbol of the revival of indigenous industries were based on the philosophy which emphasised on the indigenisation of methods of production which according to Gandhi were friendly to Man and nature and were less exploitative. In view of the condition in which the industrial workers had to operate machinery, his comments in the Hind Swaraj make sense of this assertion. He writes:

Formerly, men worked in the open air only as much as they liked. Now thousands of workmen meet together and for the sake of maintenance work in factories or mines. Their condition is worse than that of beasts. They are obliged to work, at the risk of their lives, at most dangerous occupations, for the sake of millionaires. Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy. ⁴⁴

He said, ‘this civilisation takes note neither of morality nor of religion…after twenty years of experience I have come to the conclusion that immorality is often taught in the name of morality’. Since Gandhi was a religious man, he underlined that bane of modern civilisation was that pursuit of profit and greed has made ‘bodily welfare as the object of life’. ⁴⁵

The next question that Gandhi took upon himself to answer was if the modern civilisation was based on morality, how have the British been able to take India and how are they able to retain it? Gandhi’s position on this question was:

The English have not taken India, we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them. They had come to India for purpose of trade. English merchants were able to get a foot hold in India because we encouraged them. Our princes fought among themselves, they sought the assistance of Company Bahadur unhampered by the question of morality. ⁴⁶

He, in a terse statement says, ‘the Hindus and Mahomedans were at daggers drawn’. This too gave the company its opportunity, and thus we created circumstances that gave the company control over India’. ⁴⁷

South Africa had taught him to interact comfortably with the Muslims, Parsis, Christians and all those who mattered in public life. For him the amity between the Hindus and the Muslim, therefore, was the major concern for his politics after his return from South Africa till he breathed his last. He had in no uncertain terms made his position on the question of Hindu–Muslim unity clear in following words:

India cannot cease to be one nation because people belonging to different religions live in it. The introduction of foreigners does not necessarily destroy the nation; they merge in it. A country is one nation only when such a condition obtains in it. That country must have a faculty for assimilation. India has ever been such a country. In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals; but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another’s religion. If they do, they are not fit to be considered a nation. If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in dreamland. The Hindus, the Mahomedans, the Parsis and the Christians who have made India their country are fellow countrymen, and they will have to live in unity, if only for their own interest. In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms; nor has it ever been so in India. ⁴⁸

He believed that sectarian nationalism fostered by certain sections of both Muslims and the Hindus presented a major obstacle in the achievement of Swaraj in India. ⁴⁹ He reiterated the same with added emphasis in a letter to Asif Ali in which he asserted that ‘he is going to devote his life to demonstrate that cooperation between the two (Hindus and Muslims) is an indispensable condition for the salvation of India’. ⁵⁰ His stay in South Africa, in this regard, was most rewarding. In My Experiments With Truth, he has described the social scene in Pretoria.

Indian clerks were divided into many groups. There were Muslim merchants who would call themselves as ‘Arabs’. Another was that of Hindus and still another of Parsi. They called themselves as ‘Persians’. The largest class, however, was those of Tamil, Telugu and North Indians: indentured and freed labourers.

He, thus, came into contact with almost every category of Indians of all the communities. The experience he gained was critical for his later career in India. With the weapon of passive resistance or Satyagraha, he fought on issues which concerned larger sections of the Indian community, for instance, the poor, the uneducated the peasantry, and the mill workers’. He acknowledges with gratitude that

my stay in Pretoria enabled me to make a deep study of the social, economic and political condition of the Indians in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. I had no idea that this study was to be of invaluable service to me in the future. ⁵¹

The observation that ‘South Africa was the forge where he beat out his ideals and his techniques of leadership’ is too appropriate. ⁵² When he reached, India Gandhi had already earned the distinction of being more of an all India figure in comparison to any other politician of the time.

The core of the book, as conveyed through the title is Indian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj or self-rule, is an analysis of the nature of British rule in India and manifestation of its consequences in the political and moral decay of Indian society. Indian Home Rule or Swaraj is the prescription to pull India out of this quagmire. Gandhi is of firm conviction that India can pull herself out of it only with the help of moral and intellectual resources available to her in her own traditions as against the adoption of western civilisation. ⁵³ In this perspective he has emphasised on the futility of usefulness of violent means and the need to use ethically sound means which is satyagraha to attain independence.

He raises the question that though ‘all Indians are impatient to obtain Swaraj’, but are not certain as to what it is and why it should be so? ⁵⁴ He said that the answer to this question does not lie in the appointment of Indians on higher positions—it was one of the demands of the Presidency Associations and the Indian National Congress—end of the drain of wealth or the establishment of a government on the pattern of Canada and South Africa. This will not be good enough? In effect, it would mean that

we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan. This is not the Swaraj that I want. ⁵⁵

In other words just the exit of the English and the transfer of administration in Indian hands was not the solution to the problems of India. Solutions lied in the constitution of the state based on Indian ethos. His definition of Swaraj, therefore, was in the larger perspective of the ancient Indian civilisation.

He defines civilisation as that ‘mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions’. It was not the control over the self in physical sense of the term, it had the intrinsic meaning. He laid emphasis on the superiority of Indian civilisation because this was only civilisation in the world that had survived all the challenges of times. It was more inclusive than exclusive. He writes: ‘I believe that the civilisation India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors. His argument has a sound logic’. He writes:

Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become Westernised; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation. The people of Europe learn their lessons from the writings of the men of Greece or Rome, which exist no longer in their former glory. In trying to learn from them, the Europeans imagine that they will avoid the mistakes of Greece and Rome. Such is their pitiable condition. In the midst of all this India remains immovable and that is her glory. ⁵⁶

He, therefore, to revive the glory of civilisation that India was, insisted that, ‘The more we indulge in our passions, the more unbridled’ we become. ‘Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. Our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures’. Comparing the modern with premodern philosophy of life of Indians, Gandhi was a passionate about which, writes:

They saw that kings and their swords were inferior to the sword of ethics, and they, therefore, held the sovereigns of the earth to be inferior to the Rishis and the Fakirs. A nation with a constitution like this is fitter to teach others than to learn from others’.

His admiration goes further when he draws comparison between Indian and western civilisation, he writes:

The tendency of the Indian civilisation is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilisation is to propagate immorality and that the latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. it behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilisation even as a child clings to the mother’s breast. ⁵⁷

Having thus underscored the value of Indian traditions, he reverts to the question of self-rule which can be attained by passive resistance and which in turn is possible with the acquisition of a stable character and by the practice of certain virtues. ⁵⁸ For Gandhi, passive resistance, the soul force or the force of love is the most potent weapon to fight injustice. This is a method of securing rights by personal suffering, the reverse of which is resistance by arms. The reader in Gandhi puts up the preposition that if the laws that have been passed are bad, we must ask the state to remove them and if they do not do that, we must drive out the law-givers by force. Gandhi rejects the use of force and comes out with the alternative that Satyagraha or passive resistance, though not violent form of action, is more revolutionary than the use of force. In the Gujarati text, he has linked fasting with Satyagraha to get the unjust laws annulled. Later on, during the course of the Gandhian movements we see the efficacy of the weapon of fasting. Gandhi was emphatic that it is ‘unmanly to obey laws that are unjust’. And that one has to realise that he cannot be ‘enslaved’ by tyrannical methods and this is the ‘key to home rule or self-rule’. ⁵⁹ He elaborates it further that it is a superstition that man is bound to obey laws even if they are unjust. ‘So long as this superstition exists their slavery exists’, passive-resisters are duty bound to ‘remove such superstition’. ⁶⁰

Not everyone can be a passive-resister, one has to be a sound mind and bodily strong. ‘A man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive-resister’. ⁶¹ This is the most potent weapon which ‘produces far reaching results’. This concept is charged with the seeds of non-cooperation as he writes, ‘we cease to cooperate with our rulers when they displease us’. ⁶² ‘Real home rule is possible where passive resistance is the guiding force of the people, any other rule is foreign rule’. ⁶³

In retrospect, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule makes clear distinction between Swaraj as self-government or quest for home rule or good state and self-rule or the quest for self-improvement or one’s rule over one’s own mind. Gandhi was firm advocate for the latter. He considered passive resistance as the soul force or love force which is much higher and most potent moral weapon than the use of violent means to attain objectives. And to exert this force the use and manufacture of Swadeshi in every sense is a precondition. It would not be inappropriate to quote the concluding sentences form the Indian Home Rule where Gandhi made his purposes unequivocally clear:

What we want to do should be done, not because we object to the English or what we want to retaliate, but because it is our duty to do so. Thus, supposing that English remove the salt tax (emphasis is because of the significance Gandhi attached to this tax), restore our money, give the highest posts to Indians, withdraw the English troops, we shall certainly not use their machine-made goods, nor use English language, nor many of their industries. It is worth noting that these things are in their nature harmful. We do not need them. I bear no enmity towards the English, but I do towards their civilisation. ⁶⁴

‘My life, henceforward, is dedicated to the objective of the attainment of Swaraj’. ⁶⁵ Gandhi strove for the rest of his life for the attainment of his objectives by taking along peasants, workers, rural artisans, under-privileged, mill workers, students transcending religious, communal and cast identities and all those who till his return for South Africa had remained outside scope of institutional means to express their aspirations and expectations, seek redressal for grievances and be part of the evolving modern India based on the ethos of its own civilisation. The process continues.