Gokhale and Gandhi - Their Second Meeting Birth Centenary Lectures Which Were Later Published Under Prabha Ravi Shankar 14 the Title Gokhale and Modern India
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NEW PUBLICATIONS For a brief description of these publications turn to page 34. For copies, get in touch with us at Freedom First, 3rd floor, Army and Navy Building, 148 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Mumbai 4000001. You can also email us at [email protected] or phone us at 022-22843416 or 022-66396366. 2 Freedom First February 2015 www.freedomfirst.in Freedom First The Liberal Magazine – 63rd Year of Publication Between Ourselves No.572 February 2015 GOPAL KRISHNA GOKHALE Contents 1866 - 1915 New Publications 2 Gopal Krishna Gokhale was the founder of the Servants Between Ourselves 3 of India Society, President of the Indian National Congress The Legacy of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and a member of the Imperial Legislative Council. His Death Centenary Year, February 19, 1915-2014, was commemorated Introduction by several organisations. Among them the Deccan A. B. Shah 4 Education Society, Servants of India Society, Gokhale Laying the Foundation for a Modern India Institute of Politics and Economics, Indian Committee for S. P. Aiyar 4 Cultural Freedom, Project for Economic, Indian Secular His Relevance Today Society and Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya. Aroon Tikekar 8 His Achievements On his birth centenary in May 1966, the Indian Committee Sunil Gokhale 11 for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) had organised a series of three Gokhale and Gandhi - Their Second Meeting Birth Centenary Lectures which were later published under Prabha Ravi Shankar 14 the title Gokhale and Modern India. Sir Pherozeshah Mehta’s Tribute Godrej N. Dotivala 16 Forty eight years on, on November 15, 2014, the ICCF, in Some Contemporaries of Gokhale in Poona association with the Project for Economic Education, the R. Srinivasan 17 Indian Secular Society and LiberalsIndia for Good The Symposium held on 15th November, 2014 Governance, organised a day-long symposium on – Report 19 “Gokhale’s Legacy” Budget 2015 – Will it Ensure Make in India M. R. Venkatesh 21 The Symposium was chaired by Dr.Usha Thakkar well known Gandhian, educationist and president of the Mani Point Counter Point Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya. The keynote address was Ashok Karnik 22 delivered by well known journalist and author Aroon Foreign Relations in the 21st Century Tikekar. Other speakers included Sunil Gokhale, advocate Global Power Structure in Transition and great grandson of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Dr.Vibhuti B. Ramesh Babu 25 Patel, Head of the Department of Economics SNDT Women’s University, eminent economists Sunil Bhandare Will the Real BJP Please Stand Up? Firoze Hirjikaka 27 and Dr. C. S. Deshpande, noted journalist and educationist R.N.Bhasker and social activist and author Godrej Dotivala. Right-Wing Zealots Are Derailing Modi’s Push 85 students, academicians, professionals and senior for a Development Agenda corporate executives participated. Bapu Satyanarayana 29 The Peshawar Attack on School Kids WE ARE PRIVILEGED TO DEDICATE THIS ISSUE Ashish Punthambekar 31 OF FREEDOM FIRST TO GOPAL KRISHNA GOKHALE Book Reviews 33 Photographs of the Symposium held on Editor 15th November 2014 35 FOUNDER: Minoo Masani EDITOR: S. V. Raju ASSOCIATE EDITOR: R. Srinivasan ADVISORY BOARD: Sharad Bailur, R. C. A. Godbole, A. V. Gopalakrishnan, Firoze Hirjikaka, Ashok Karnik, Hina Manerikar, Jyoti Marwah, Farrokh Mehta, Jehangir Patel, Nitin G.Raut, Suresh C. Sharma, Kunwar Sinha, Sameer Wagle SUBSCRIPTIONS: Kashmira Rao COVER: Vivek Raju. PUBLISHERS: Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) 3rd floor, Army & Navy Building, 148, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Mumbai 400001 Phone: +91 (22) 22843416 Email: freedom @vsnl.com / [email protected] PUBLISHED BY J. R. Patel for the ICCF and printed by him at Union Press, 13,Homji Street, Fort, Mumbai 400001. Phone: 91 (2) 22660357 / 22665526 TYPESET by Narendra Kotak, A-605/606, Mahavir Platinum, Govandi, Mumbai 400043. SINGLE COPY: Rs.20.00 ANNUAL: Rs.200 TWO YEARS: Rs.350 THREE YEARS: Rs.500 Overseas (IInd Class Air Mail) Annual: $20 or £10 Cheques to be drawn in favour of ICCF and mailed to the publishers at the above address. Freedom First February 2015 www.freedomfirst.in 3 The Legacy of Gopal Krishna Gokhale Introduction ost leaders of thought and action who laid the modern but not estranged from his people, atheistic – at foundations of contemporary India were born least, agnostic – and yet (or, therefore?) committed to truth Min the second half of the nineteenth century. It without any subterfuge; devoted to his country’s interests was therefore inevitable that the second but neither a chauvinist nor lacking in half of the present (20th) century should moral courage when the occasion be an age of centenaries of pioneers in demanded frankness or, even, a public different fields – social, political, confession of error – Gokhale stands out economic, religious, literary and cultural. in the fog of Indian politics as the most However, of all those whose centenaries important exponent of reason in public the nation has celebrated since life and liberalism as the basis of a modern, independence or is planning to celebrate democratic welfare state. in the coming years, none perhaps is more worthy of grateful remembrance A. B. Shah and emulation today than Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Excerpted from Professor A. B. Shah’s foreword in the ICCF publication, Teacher and educationist, Gokhale and Modern India, published in statesman and economist, social reformer May 1966, to commemorate Gokhale’s and a true Servant of India in the best Birth Centenary. Prof. Shah was then the sense of the word; without vanity of any Executive Secretary of the ICCF. kind and yet completely free from a pathological obsession with simplicity; Laying the Foundation for a Modern India S. P. Aiyar The celebration of the Gokhale centenary on 9 May 1966 had more than ordinary significance. The nation was not merely honouring one of the most extraordinary figures of modern India but one who more than anyone else was dedicated to the philosophy which now underlies the Constitution of India. His life and teachings have a message for our time and his writings, particularly the celebrated budget speeches will rank for all time as a great landmark in the ordered constitutional progress in this country. opal Krishna Gokhale’s life – a brief span of forty- Gokhale’s premature death in 1915 was the direct nine years - had all the elements of grandeur and result of the stress and strain under which he lived and Gtragedy. He offered his life as a living sacrifice worked. Sleepless anxiety for the country brought in its to his country. Only one great idea loomed large in his train diabetes and heart trouble. At the time of the Islington mind – the moral and material progress of the Indian people. Commission1, Gokhale was a physical wreck. The doctors It could indeed be said of him, as he said of his Master, had given him only three years to live. With stoic calmness Mahadev Govind Ranade, “It was as though the first he told Sarojini Naidu that he was carrying his death person singular did not exist in his vocabulary. warrant in his pocket, and yet he worked on the Commission like one possessed. Sleeping for barely four hours, Gokhale was up at two in the morning to read up 1 The Lord Islington Commission (1912) to examine and report all the evidence and be ready for the Commission’s work on the Indian Civil Service conditions of service, etc. which commenced at 10.30 a.m. and dragged on till 5.30 4 Freedom First February 2015 www.freedomfirst.in The Legacy of Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the evening. Almost his last words were: do it at a moment’s notice, if at all. On one occasion Lord Kitchener privately asked him the points on “My end is nearing. I have deceived my country. which he wished to touch so far as military It would have been better if I should have been expenditure was concerned; and out of spared for a couple of years more. I would have consideration for the great soldier, who was no gone to England and striven hard to bring about debater, Gokhale did not emphasize certain points a most satisfactory termination of the Royal as much as he would have liked to. His budget Commission and thus would have repaid, although speeches always bore their fruit in the succeeding in the smallest degree, the debt I owe to my years’ budgets. He was always on the side of country.” retrenchment, and did not want Government to take Gokhale’s patriotism and ideals were incarnated in more from the tax-payers than was absolutely the Servants of India Society, which he established in 1905 necessary.” with the object of drawing together young men with a It was a characteristic of this early period of Indian spirit of dedication and training them to serve the country nationalism that those who participated in politics often through careful study of its problems. Concerning this devoted themselves to the serious study of public aspect of Gokhale’s work, Srinivasa Sastri wrote, “Mr problems. It was all the more necessary in a period when Gokhale loved India and her welfare so intensely and so the press had not emerged as a guardian of public interests. deeply that he would not willingly see it injured by the Moreover, it was the age of an elitist national movement; labours of unprepared, immature, crude workers whose the age of mass nationalism had not quite emerged. In only equipment consisted in a genuine call of patriotism. 1939 Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, delivering the Kale Memorial Patriotism by itself is not enough. It is a noble, powerful, Lecture, contrasted the India of Ranade with that of Gandhi exalted emotion. It is only an emotion. It has got to be for which he did not have much sympathy.