Hind Swaraj

“Railways, lawyers and doctors” are ruining India, asserts Gandhi. Railroads increase the British hold on the country, spread disease, and disrupt grain markets, leading to famine: “Bad men fulfil their evil designs with greater rapidity. The holy places of India have become unholy” (25).

Can good people make positive use of the railroads? To this, Gandhi answers that good people “are not in a hurry […] But evil has wings. To build a house takes time. Its destruction takes none” (25).

The English argue that India is not a nation and will not achieve nationhood for centuries. Gandhi retorts that “India was one undivided land so made by nature” (26) and that wise men of old “established holy places in various parts of India and fired the people with an idea of nationality in a manner unknown in other parts of the world” (26). India is thus by its nature more united than the English.

Do the differences between Hindus and Muslims divide the nation? Gandhi answers that all nations have some religious differences and the notion that major religions must fight is a British invention. The two main religious communities of India cease fighting long before the British arrive: “The Hindus flourished under Moslem sovereigns and Moslems under the Hindu […] With the English advent quarrels re-commenced” (28).

Cows are sacred to Hindus but not to Muslims. Gandhi would “approach my Mahomedan brother and urge him for the sake of the country to join me in protecting her” (29), but he would not kill a man over it. A person “can only plead—therein lies his sole duty” (29). Furthermore, the effort to save the cows has backfired: “When the Hindus became insistent, the killing of cows increased” (29).

As for scriptural differences, Gandhi asserts that “[i]f I do not want to quarrel with a Mahomedan, the latter will be powerless to foist a quarrel on me” (30). The truly confident adherent will have no need to argue with others over religion: “If everyone will try to understand the core of his own religion and adhere to it, and will not allow false teachers to dictate to him, there will be no room left for quarrelling” (30).

From time to time, there will be fighting, as between brothers, “[b]ut when we do quarrel, we certainly do not want to engage counsel and resort to English or any law-courts” (31).

Gandhi believes lawyers have exacerbated conflicts in India and increased English power. True, many lawyers have done good things in India, but “the good is due to them as men rather than as lawyers” (32). Lawyers “advance quarrels instead of repressing them,” and their work “is one of the avenues of becoming wealthy and their interest exists in multiplying disputes” (32). On top of that, they are lazy, arrogant, and overpaid.

“But the greatest injury they have done to the country is that they have tightened the English grip,” for Indians, in going to English courts for justice, have lost their ability to settle disputes on their own, thereby becoming “unmanly and cowardly” (33). Worse, “without lawyers courts could not have been established or conducted and without the latter the English could not rule” (33). Indians who become lawyers merely abet the English in tightening their grip on the nation: “If pleaders were to abandon their profession, and consider it just as degrading as prostitution, English rule would break up in a day” (33). 

Gandhi compares the “modern system” to the Upas tree, whose “branches are represented by parasitical professions, including those of law and medicine, and over the trunk has been raised the axe of true religion. Immorality is the root of the tree” (34).

Gandhi describes a typical scenario where a doctor can cause a physical problem to get worse: “I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again” (34). This causes the mind to weaken. Without the doctor, the patient suffers the pain of self-indulgence, learns to overcome it, and “would have been freed from vice and would have become happy” (35).

Hospitals are “institutions for propagating sin,” where people are treated for their indulgences and “immorality increases” (35). Researchers practice vivisection, annually killing thousands of animals, even though “[n]o religion sanctions this” (35). As for pharmaceuticals, Gandhi states that “[m]ost of their medical preparations contain either animal fat or spirituous liquors; both of these are tabooed by Hindus and Mahomedans” (35).