JUNE 30, 2019 • THE WEEK 49speech at the Constituent Assembly stressed
the need for India to hold fast to constitution-
al methods to achieve its social and economic
objectives and went on to say, “... we must
abandon the method of civil disobedience,
non-cooperation and satyagraha.... Where
constitutional methods are open, there can
be no justifi cation for these unconstitutional
methods. Th ese methods are nothing but the
Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are
abandoned, the better for us.”
Gandhi had a deep-rooted aversion to the
civilisation he originally called western, but
came to see as a far more general phenom-
enon which he called modern civilisation.
It is well known that he criticised the new
amenities science and technology had made
available to him such as railways, telegraphs
and hospitals; urbanisation too. He once said,
“I wholeheartedly detest this mad desire to
destroy distance and time to increase animal
appetites and go to the ends of the earth in
search of their satisfaction.” Hospitals he once
described as “institutions of sin” because they
enabled people to live intemperate lives and
then be cured of the consequences. Gandhi
had a pastoral view of the way life should be
lived in India. It was tinged with nostalgia for
a golden age which never existed, an age of
village democracies. He believed there was a
time in India “when village economies were
organised on the basis of nonviolent occu-
pations, not on the rights of man but on the
duties of man.”
Gandhi’s yearning for the past, dislike of
the present, and fear for the future of what
passed for civilisation in his time make him
an unlikely person to be chosen as a guide to
increasing India’s GDP growth rate. But there
are ideas underlying his economic thinking
which India and indeed the world would do
well to keep in mind.
“Plain living and high thinking” was Gan-
dhi’s motto for life. He opposed the consum-
erism of his day saying, “Th e incessant search
for material comforts and their multiplication
is such an evil, and I make bold to say that the
Europeans themselves will have to remodel
their outlook if they are not to perish under
the weight of the comforts to which they are
becoming slaves.”
Gandhi realised that consumerism was
based on the encouragement of greed and that
greed created not only perpetual dissatisfaction
but also envy. Th e Europeans have not remod-
elled themselves and if Gandhi were to return he
would be horrifi ed to see how far Indians have
gone down the consumerist road. He might well
remind India and indeed the rest of the world of
words said by Krishna in the Gita, “Enveloped by
wisdom is this insatiable fi re of desire which is
the constant foe of the wise.”
We might dismiss Gandhi’s concerns about the
moral impact of the technological and scientifi c
advances in his time as excessive, but the under-
lying principle of them is still highly relevant. He
was in eff ect saying we shouldn’t be led by the
nose by science and technology. We should stop
to think about the disadvantages as well as the
advantages which come with new technologies,
the price we pay for adopting them, so that we
don’t misuse or overuse them. Take hospitals
as an example because Gandhi warned against
them. Th ey may not be institutions of sin but they
have become dangerous places. According to
the World Health Organization, “In high in-
come countries approximately 30 per cent of the
patients in intensive care units are aff ected by at
least one health care associated infection.” Th ese
infections are often caused by improper or over-
use of antibiotics. Antibiotics were discovered by
researchers in the 20th century.
We need sometimes to think whether we
should even develop a particular line in re-
search. But scientists rarely accept limits to
their research on the grounds that it might have
dangerous or immoral outcomes. In the 16th
century, Leonardo da Vinci suppressed research
into inventing the submarine because he thought
we humans were too devilish to be trusted with
such a dangerous invention. In the 20th century
Enrico Fermi, one of the scientists who set out
on the atomic bomb project, said, “Don’t bother
me with your conscientious scruples. After all the
thing is beautiful physics.”
Finally, going back to where I started, I believe
that if Gandhi were to come amongst us he
would ask two fundamental questions. Where
do moral questions and considerations of moral
consequences come in today’s politics and
economics, science and technology? Where
does consciousness of God within, awareness of
the sacred, and of the transcendental, come in
today’s Hinduism?