Reblogged from – http://athiyaman.blogspot.sg/2009/09/rajaji-on-sri-sri-prakasa-and-nehrus.html

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Rajaji on Sri Sri Prakasa and Nehru’s policies :

Rajaji writes about Sri Sri Prakasa and Nehru’s policies  :

Hear Sri Sri Prakasa, veteran patriot who can justly be called  a born congressman whose disinterested attachment to the Indian National Congress dates from the Home Rule movement up to date :

“For me, after fifty years in public life, the pain is intense when I see what the private citizen has come to, and what power has been vested in the hands of those who are in Government employ. 

I certainly did not work for a Swaraj like that, and am sorry that I am alive to see what is going on in my unhappy land. To the rulers I would say that it is no fun ruling a people who have lost all self-respect ; who regard the taking and giving of bribes  as a matter of course; abd who surrendered themselves to the position that either one must get into Government and exercise irresponsible authority, or be a slave to be exploited and maltreated as may please the powers-that-be.”

How much conviction and feeling there must be, one can imagine,before the above could be written by a veteran Congress-man whojoined in the fight for Indian freedom with Mrs.Beasant firstand then with Gandhiji and served in parliament for many yearsbefore he was appointed Governor of one state after another.Sri Sri Prakasa is not the only one who feels in this way;he is one of a great number of good people who feel the same.

Sri Jawaharlal Nehru, urged by patriotic impulse, and early indoctrination committed the blunder of taking India out ofthe path of humility and put it in the race for industrialization,and did all he could to transform our ideology into that of Soviet Russia. This was the fatal step that brought us to thepresent position out of which it requires not only wisdom but indomitable courage to save India. Social justice and removalof disparities of opportunity and equitably distributed welfareare great and worthy ends. But the fatal mistake was the planto achieve this by the shortcut of heavy borrowing and central planning and permit-license-regime which has brought in its wake all that makes Sri Sri Prakasa lament so bitterly.

December 18, 1965 Swarajya