Dadabhai Naoroji: Gandhiji called him “Father of the Nation”

YOUTUBE

The other day I came across a book excerpt in The Scroll wherein it was mentioned that Mahatma Gandhi had described Dadabhai Naoroji as “Father of the Nation”. I was intrigued because right from my childhood I had been taught that Naoroji was the Grand Old Man of India and Mahatma Gandhi the Father of the Nation. But this book ‘Dadabhai Naoroji: Selected Private Papers’ by S.R. Mehrotra and Dinyar Patel states otherwise.

I decided to do some reading. And I came across some fascinating details about the man who has been gradually disappearing from our collective consciousness. No political outfit found it profitable to lionise him or adopt him as their principal icon; our mainstream media is too busy toadying up to the powers that be. After all, he belongs to the tiny Parsi community, whose votes cannot tip the balance at hustings for or against any political party. And given the level of enlightenment of today’s generation of rulers, he has been most probably clubbed with the Muslim community.

Dadabhai Naoroji was born to a Parsi family in Navsari in Gujarat on September 4, 1825. His academic brilliance at the Elphinstone College fetched him the prestigious Clare Scholarship.

Although he had business interests in London, he remained resolutely nationalist in his lifetime. He had realised much before the establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885 the importance of carrying out political activity in England to remove the layers of misunderstanding and ignorance from the minds of the British people about India and its people. He was a firm believer in parliamentary democracy. He founded several important organisations and belonged to many leading societies and institutions, both in India and the UK. Prominent among these were the Indian National Congress, the East India Association of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society of Bombay.

After a brief stint in 1874 as the Dewan of Baroda, he started a newspaper called the ‘Voice of India’. He took a leading part in the founding of the Indian National Congress and became its president on three occasions, in 1886, 1893 and 1906. During the third term, he prevented a split between the moderates and extremists in the party. For the first time, he publicly articulated the demand for Swaraj in his Presidential Address during the Congress Party’s 1906 session. Only self-government, he declared, could stop the drain of wealth.  He publicly established Swaraj as the Congress Party’s central and ultimate goal. “Self-government is the only and chief remedy”, he declared. “In self-government lies our hope, strength and greatness.”

Earlier, in 1892, when he became the first Asian elected to the British House of Commons, Dadabhai Naoroji got a resolution passed in the British Parliament for holding preliminary examinations for the ICS in India and England simultaneously. Further, he forcefully established how India was bearing the burden of British empire-building efforts, paying the salaries of the civil administration and footing the bill of the occupational army. He got the Royal Commission on India Expenditure to acknowledge the need for uniform distribution of administrative and military expenditure between India and England.

Dadabhai Naoroji was the first to understand the mechanics of India’s economic exploitation. He propounded the Drain Theory that focused on the drain of wealth from India into England. In his book, “Poverty and Un-British Rule in India,” he did pioneering work on estimating the Net National Profit of India and the effect colonisation had on the country’s economy. He sought to prove that Britain was draining money out of India and pouring it into its domestic economy. For example, the money being earned by the railways did not belong to India, which supported his assessment that India was giving too much to Britain. He established that India was losing between 200 million to 300 million pounds in revenues to Britain every year. He called this phenomenon vampirism as money is the bloodstream of any economy. He pointed out that the process of income formation in India was such that it left the masses of India at a static poverty level and its population periodically decimated by famines. Naoroji advocated stopping the economic drain by establishing industries in India.

Naoroji’s Drain Theory was later adopted by other nationalist leaders, such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who declared in 1907, “When the Mohammedan rulers came they settled in the country and there was no question of any foreign drain.” Gokhale added that the British rule established the “industrial domination” which worked “in a more insidious manner”.

Naoroji’s pioneering work in the field of the Indian Economy had a lasting and powerful influence on the development of the nationalist movement in India. It fuelled the Independence Movement under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership later on. Naoroji’s words turned prophetic when he remarked that once India rallied behind self-government and realised the drain was the ultimate cause of its miseries, “the British will have either to leave precipitately or be destroyed in India or if they see the danger of the disaster in good time and apply the remedy, to save the empire by putting an end to the drain”.

The Calcutta Congress was Naoroji’s last major political undertaking. On June 30, 1917, he passed away at the age of 92 years, appropriately enough, a short distance from the Tejpal Hall in Gowalia Tank Maidan, the venue where, in 1885, he helped inaugurate the first meeting of the Congress. Now it is known as the August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai as a tribute to Gandhiji’s Quit India call in 1942, exhorting Indians to do or die. During the last three decades of his life, Naoroji had been at the forefront of the Indian National Congress. He presided over its institutional growth and, in 1906, established Swaraj as the ultimate objective of the INC.

A true patriot that he was, Dadabhai Naoroji said in his Presidential Address to the Indian National Congress’s 1893 Lahore session, “Let us always remember that we are all children of our mother country. Indeed, I have never worked in any other spirit than that I am an Indian, and owe a duty to my country and all my countrymen. Whether I am a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Parsi, a Christian, or any other creed, I am above all an Indian.”  He was a prominent nationalist with progressive views. Although he was a champion of Swadeshi, he was not against the use of machines for organising key industries in the country. He urged Jamshedji Tata to raise Indian capital for his iron and steel plants.

Writing in Hind Swaraj, Gandhiji declared Naoroji to be both “the author of nationalism” and “the Father of the Nation”. “Had not the Grand Old Man of India prepared the soil,” concluded Gandhiji, “our young men could not have even spoken about Home Rule.”

How true!