What should the labourers be assured of according to the Mahatma Gandhiji?
Answers
Answer:
According to the Mahatma Gandhiji's thinking that the labourers should be assured that he will not be jobless. He should be sure of getting daily wages and the work which is not dull or hard.
Answer:
Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage, they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the Government established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, on jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town-dwellers of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history.
The Root Cause
The present distress is undoubtedly insufferable. Pauperism must go But industrialism is no remedy. The evil does not lie in the use of bullock-carts. It lies in our selfishness and want of consideration for our neighbours. If we have no love for our neighbours, no change, however revolutionary, can do us any good.
I would destroy that system today, if had the power. I would use the most deadly weapons, if I believed that they would destroy it. I refrain only because the use of such weapons would only perpetuate the system though it may destroy its present administrators. Those who seek to destroy men rather than manners, adopt the latter and become worse then those whom they destroy under the mistaken belief that the manners will die with the men. They do not know the root of the evil.
The question about railways and telegraphs is really too insignificant in relation to the great doctrine I have just discussed. I am not myself banishing the personal use of these conveniences myself. I certainly do not expect the nation to discard their use nor do I expect their disuse under Swaraj. But I do expect the nation under Swaraj not to believe, that these agencies necessarily advance our moral growth or are indispensable for our material progress.
Machinery in the Ideal Condition
‘Ideally would you not rule out all machinery?’ Ideally, however, I would rule out all machinery, even as I would reject this very body, which is not helpful to salvation, and seek the absolute liberation of the soul. From that point of view, I would reject all machinery, but machines will remain, because like the body, they are inevitable. The body itself, itself, as I told you, is the purest piece of mechanism; but if it is a hindrance to the highest flights of the soul, it has to be rejected.