Now, what is a State for? The utility of a State has to be judged from its effect on the common man’s welfare. The ultimate conflict that has to be resolved is this: whether the individual is for the State or the State for the individual. Mahatma Gandhi tried in his lifetime to strike a happy balance, to reconcile this dwandwa and arrived at the conception of the Panchayat Raj. I hope that we in India will go forward and try to make the State exist for the individual rather than the individual for the State. This is what we must aim at and that is what we must bring about in our own country. Because we have a great spiritual and political heritage, we in India are best fitted to bring about this consummation in our own country; and let me say that unless in the whole world the spirit of empire gives place to the empire of the spirit, in the way that Mahatma Gandhi and all seers before him have conceived it, unless this consummation comes about in the world, there will be no peace on earth. At least let us try to bring about this empire of the spirit in our own political institutions. If we do not do this, our attempt today in this Assembly would not truly reflect the political genius of the Indian people. We have been so much taken in by Western glamour. This glamour has been too much with us. We have become the prisoners of our habit forms and thought forms. They have become almost like the old man in Sindbad the Sailor whom he could not shake off. We have become unable to shake off our old habits. But amid all the mist of confusion, there is still the certainty of a new twilight; not the twilight of the evening, but the twilight of the morning – the Yuga Sandhi India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and for the human family. And that which is now awake in India is not, I hope, an Anglicized or Europeanized Oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the Occident’s success and failure, but still the ancient invincible Shakti recovering Her deepest Self, lifting Her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength, and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of Her Dharma. In that faith and fortified by that conviction, let us march forward into the future, and by the grace of God, victory will crown our efforts.
