And as if to find an echo of that in a thinker of a very different school, I shall now cite a sentence or two from a recent Picture of Socialism drawn by the leader of the Indian Socialist Party, Jai Prakash Narain. I regret, Sir that he has not joined us in our labour here, but this is what he says and it sounds almost like an echo of Gandhiji’s thought:
“The State under socialism threatens, as in Russia, far from withering away, to become an all-powerful tyrant maintaining a strangle-hold over the entire life of the citizen. This leads to totalitarianism of the type we witness in Russia today. By dispersing the ownership and management of industry and by developing the village into a democratic village republic, we break this strangle-hold to a very large extent and attenuate the danger of totalitarianism….
Thus, my picture of a socialist India is the picture of an economic and political democracy. In this democracy, men will neither be slaves to capitalism nor to a party or the State. Man will be free.”