Gujarat was once at the hub of the Swadeshi, economic freedom and civil disobedience movements. I wonder if Gujarat has forgotten those legacies, which made it a leader, not only in the field of business and industry but also nationalism, public morality and ethics. Since it is August, the month in which we commemorate and celebrate the freedom of India and the men and women who brought us this freedom, without gun and sword, through the great weapons of truth, non-violence and clean and pure private and public conduct, I cannot but help present an echo from August, 1919.

On the 20th of that August, Mahatma Gandhi, who was setting new heights in activist journalism of fighting for freedom, had written in the Harijan something that deserves our attention today. It was a report on a "Public Meeting on Swadeshi," later published as an article entitled "Khaddar—a Religious Duty." The Harijan report said that to Gandhi, the economic and religious aspects of Swadeshi were far more attractive than the political, and it was his dream that all, from the Viceroy down to the sweeper, should accept the Swadeshi concept. He was desirous of conducting the Swadeshi propaganda from the economic and religious standpoints. To Gandhi, the religious aspect was all-encompassing. That elementary religion which was common to all mankind taught us to be kind and caring of our neighbours. An individual’s service to his country and humanity consisted in serving his neighbours. If that was true, it was our religious duty to support our farmers, our artisans and weavers, carpenters, etc. And Gandhi, in August of 1919, had a different message for the citizens, farmers and rural artisans of Godhra and Gujarat than that of the political obscurantists and self-justifying political megalomaniacs of today. He had said: "And so long as the Godhra farmers and weavers could supply the wants of the Godhra citizen, the latter had no right to go outside Godhra and support even, say, the Bombay farmers and weavers. He could not starve his neighbour and claim to serve his distant cousin in the North Pole." Gandhi had stressed this as the basic principle of all religions and said it was also true of humane economics. India was suffering from a triple curse, the curse of disease—disease not of normal but of an abnormal kind—the curse of want of food and lastly that of want of clothing. If Gandhi were amidst us today he would have added two more dangerous diseases to his short and crisp list of national maladies, the disease of intolerance and violence, which had set Godhra on fire again and again and spread the blaze of hatred to other parts of Gandhi’s Gujarat also.

I am an optimist. I have faith in India. I have faith in Gandhi and I have faith in the people of Gujarat. I ardently hope that the Gujaratis remember some chapters from their great and glorious past. Gujaratis, who were in the vanguard of the political and economic freedom of the country, should launch a new Swadeshi era where India would truly be the land of all Indians belonging to all castes, creeds and colours, with economic freedom as a sacred religious duty. We all owe at least this much to that great son of India, who got us our freedom without going to the conventional battlefield strewn with dead bodies and flooded with human blood.