The ground for optimism

Lahore, Wednesday, October 22, 1924

AT a time when the prevailing note in India is that of a certain soul-killing sadness and despair, when there seems to be no way out of the maze into which, in the working out of its destiny, the nation has been brought, it does one’s heart good to go back to the first principles and try, if one can, to find in them some ground for optimism. Is society in India, after half a century of earnest striving after unity, once again dissolving into atoms? To the man without the eye of faith, no other conclusion is possible. Politically, there seems to be no way out of the deadlock to which non-official non-cooperation, in response to official non-cooperation, has brought the country, not because a way cannot be found by reason and common sense, but because when passions run high, these are the things most at a discount. In the conflicts of self-interest, the last thing one cares for is the justice or even the expediency of a case, unless it is both obvious and immediate. Socially, the position is even worse. The Hindu-Mahomedan problem appears more insoluble today than it ever was in the past; and along with this problem, there is the Sikh problem in Punjab, the Brahmin-non-Brahmin problem in Madras and Maharashtra, the problems of untouchability and of the elevation of women and the still more gigantic problems of poverty and illiteracy all over the country. The worst of it is that the two sets of problems have the look of being interdependent, and in our effort to solve one or the other we seem forever to be moving in a vicious circle.