Parekh narrates how when G.D. Birla set up a mill in the princely state of Gwalior, the government obtained the land for him without paying adequate compensation to its poor owners. “Gandhi pursued the matter with Birla in a series of letters and told him to drop the project rather than harm the ‘just and legitimate interests of the poor’. When Gandhi received complaints about the working conditions in the mill, he asked Birla for an explanation. Birla blamed local ‘agitators’ for stirring up trouble.”

Gandhiji wrote back: “The dispossessed class is today full of rancour. There is no denying the fact that they have been sinned against and as a class we have a lot to expiate for, not necessarily our sins but of the system with which we are identified.”

Valuable collection.

Wars are always costly. Often they are waged with borrowed funds, as did the Great Britain, during World War II. Britain’s liabilities, at the end of 1944, totalled £3 billion (or $12 billion at the prevailing exchange rate), writes Peter Clarke in The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire ( www.penguin.com ). Of this amount, “much of the biggest item consisted of the ‘sterling balances’ that were owed to the Dominions and to India. Keynes projected that by the end of the Japanese war these balances themselves might total £3 billion — and no less than half of this sum was owed to India.”

Churchill would however argue in his war memoirs that the amount was to be set off as a counter-claim for the defence of India. “In 1939 it had been agreed that India would only be responsible for its own immediate defence costs and that the British Government would be charged for Indian troops used outside India…. Admittedly, the Indian Army came cheap at the price — obviously cheaper than equipping an equivalent number of British troops.”

Recommended read.

On trust, an insightful quote from Gandhiji compiled by Karishma Bajaj in Precious Gems of Wisdom: Mahatma Gandhi ( www.magnamags.com) is this: “Are we sure that the leaders trust one another? My fear is that neither at the top, nor at the bottom, are we cleansed of hypocrisy.” And on work, his advice was that useful manual labour, intelligently performed, “is t he means par excellence for developing the intellect.” Mere brave speech without action is letting off useless steam, is another of his bold sayings. “Rights accrue automatically to him who duly performs his duties. In fact the right to perform one’s duties is the only right that is worth living for and dying for. It covers all legitimate rights. All the rest is garb under one guise or another and contains in it the seed of himsa.”

Of timeless relevance.

Independence Day

Early in the morning on Independence Day, August 15, 1947, Sudhir Ghosh received a greetings telegram from Stafford Cripps. The next day, the two met at a dinner. “Stafford who was reputed to be a man of iron will, like Vallabhbhai Patel, was almost in tears; he said Jawaharlal had exchanged congratulatory messages with the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for India and a number of other people in London but had not acknowledged Stafford’s telegram of con gratulations,” reminisces Ghosh in Gandhi’s Emissary, from Routledge, a book originally published in 1967, in the US.

“Mr Nehru, who was the soul of courtesy and kindness, could often be cruel to those who broke their hearts over him. Stafford told me that evening at dinner that if Jawaharlal had trusted him India would never have been divided into two sovereign States. To this day I remain convinced that he was right…” Elsewhere in the book, Ghosh writes about his meeting Gandhiji on January 30, 1948, hours before the assassination… Poignant.

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