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From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Subject: speech by Narayan Desai on Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1992 Message-ID: <1993Jan22.153419.5478@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Summary: talk given by the son of the man who was Gandhi's scribe and secretary Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Keywords: liberation from everything nuclear, truth is "classified" Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 15:34:19 GMT Lines: 486

talk given by the son of the man who was Gandhi's chief scribe and secretary for 25 years--who grew up in Gandhi's ashram--about nuclear power and weapons and about how their existence is founded on the truth about their effects on all life and on Mother Earth herself being hidden and classified and kept from the people so that death dealing material and death producing industry is able to continue and continue killing and weakening our spiritual as well as our physical selves.

about the speaker, Narayan Desai: If you let your imagination run--I let mine run--it's hard to run far enough to imagine growing up in Gandhi's ashram. And Narayan's father for 25 years was Gandhi's chief scribe and secretary. And Narayan grew up on an ashram with Gandhi, he knew him as a young boy growing up, and I think it's fair to say, has tried to live the rest of his life in the principles and ways that made sense to that early upbringing.

excerpts from (complete speech below) Narayan Desai: So what I was trying to tell you is, truth is something which the producers of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons--and I think they are two sides of the same coin; they are hands in gloves working together--truth is something they fear and covet. The money that is spent on the research for nuclear energy--and it is almost equivalent to 80% of the total money spent on research spent by the central government --is classified as spent on defense, and so it is not counted when the price of the electricity would be fixed later on, it is not counted in that. And when people say we do not want nuclear weapons, it's easy to say in parliament, "No, we are doing it only for peace." So both these two different things help each other . . . And they fear truth.

. . . We asked for a very simple thing. In fact we were invited by these people in order to prove that "atoms for peace" were actually peaceful. And we just asked them to show us the health records of their workers. And their answer was a typical answer: "Sir, we can't give you these records because it is classified information." That's the word that they have borrowed from the defense department.

Classified information . . . something to be hidden from your enemies. Not from your own people--not from the parents of those workers who were working there or their relatives . . . but classified information. Truth is classified. . . .

So I think truth is the weapon with which Hiroshima can be fought, with which nuclear power plants or nuclear "testing" can be banned. The president can still ban the resolution [unclear] that has been passed. He can do it. But if the people come out with the truth, it may not be so easy for him to veto it especially having in view the elections coming in November. . . .

So we have to fight that nonviolent struggle by some kind of . . . creative activity. It is an activity where you try to put, instead of the two incentives which are always being used by us, those incentives which can change, or which can move things. Instead of two old incentives, Gandhi tried to put two new incentives. The old incentives are very well known. Very often we practice it at home. [unclear] Those are very much practiced in the society at large.

The first incentive, the old incentive, is that of fear; and the other is that of greed. It is on these two incentives that people think the world can move. The whole of the capitalist society is built on the incentive of greed. The whole of the dictatorial structures were built on fear. And Gandhi tried to give two new incentives instead of these two incentives. Instead of the mother saying to the child, if you do such and such thing which she pleases, I will give you an ice cream or chocolate or something, that's greed; and if the child does not agree with that, oh let papa come, he will give you a big thrashing, that is fear. So it's there very much in the family. It can be there in the large human family of nations. We have seen enough of that.

Instead of that, Gandhi gave those two incentives which sound to be very simple, but can be quite difficult. . . . The two incentives of sharing and caring. Instead of greed, share; instead of fear, or instead of threaten, [unclear] care. Sharing and caring. So these two incentives come as two alternatives suggested by Gandhi.

from m.a.p.:

Article: 6521 of misc.activism.progressive From: Don Fong <dfong@cse.ucsc.edu> Subject: speech by Narayan Desai Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 20:14:29 GMT Lines: 386

A couple of weeks ago a Mr. Narayan Desai gave a very impressive and inspiring talk about Gandhi, nonviolence, and the anti-nuclear movement in India.

________________________________________________________________________

SPEECH BY NARAYAN DESAI AUGUST 6 (HIROSHIMA DAY) 1992 GRACE METHODIST CHURCH, SANTA CRUZ, CA

Transcribed by Don Fong from a tape provided by the Resource Center for Nonviolence.

NOTES: <sounds on tape> [editorial notes] ________________________________________________________________________

SCOTT KENNEDY: We're really privileged to have Narayan Desai speak with us this evening. Our relationship with Narayan and the Resource Center goes back, I think it's fair to say, several decades, through his work with Peace Brigades International, which is an attempt to apply Gandhian principles to the international situations, and national situations of conflict. And also through the War Resisters, the War Resisters League and War Resisters International.

Probably most of you heard today, the Senate passed a resolution to abolish nuclear testing, to at least suspend it for 9 months starting in October. An unprecedented act by the United States Senate. This came on Hiroshima Day. Maybe it's some small sign that our culture is finally able to look at some of the conflicts in which we live and work.

When I stopped at the Resource Center this afternoon there was a message, in the message book that said, "Please tell Narayan that he's not able to be here tonight because of an urgent meeting, but that Cesar Chavez had planned to come this evening to hear Narayan speak, and he regrets that he's not able to be with us tonight." So of course, we regret that too. It's quite a testimony to Narayan that Chavez had planned to join us this evening.

If you let your imagination run--I let mine run--it's hard to run far enough to imagine growing up in Gandhi's ashram. And Narayan's father for 25 years was Gandhi's chief scribe and secretary. And Narayan grew up on an ashram with Gandhi, he knew him as a young boy growing up, and I think it's fair to say, has tried to live the rest of his life in the principles and ways that made sense to that early upbringing.

And if you look at Narayan's biography, it has this kind of full scope of Gandhian nonviolence: he's been working on issues of basic education; how to educate young people, in the culture that involves work, right livelihood, proper leisure and so on, to "shantisena" (SHAN-TI-SENA) the Gandhi peace army, how can nonviolent activists really deal with internal communal strife, and international situations and conflicts, monitoring the Indian government, as it drifted towards fascism, even, how to build people's communities, and people's committees that would be some kind of antidote to the centralization of power in the states, to the experiments with Peace Brigades International, opposing India's nuclear power program. I mean, he's seen it all. And it's a real privilege for him to be able to speak with us tonight, and for us to benefit from him.

Currently Narayan is the founder and director of the Institute for Total Revolution, which supports the fundamental Gandhian core principles. And Narayan will speak [unclear] and there will be an opportunity for questions and answers and feedback. [unclear]

________________________________________________________________________

NARAYAN DESAI: Good friends: When Scott Kennedy was introducing me, I was thinking all the while, what person he was talking about? <laughter> . . .

To me this day is the day for turning the searchlight within. Not to feel guilty . . . not to feel any hatred . . . but to pledge or commit ourselves not to make same kinds of blunders that we did 47 years ago. And I say "we" because partly all of us are responsible for Hiroshima.

I lived with a man who made many mistakes in his life. But he had the courage to announce them to the world, and he had the perseverance to try to not to make those mistakes again. That was perhaps the only difference between him and us. We also commit mistakes, but we try to hide them, and if our mistakes are known, we hardly try to . . . to improve.

I'm going to share with you some of my reflections, beginning with a mistake that we made early in the 50s and beginning of 60s. We in India were thinking about "atoms for peace". This is a slogan which is still very current in many parts of the world. And we thought that India will never have a bomb, but India can use the nuclear technology for peaceful purposes like making electricity and using it for industrialization. We have now come to realize that it was a mistake, perhaps a blunder greater than Hiroshima. Hiroshima was a blunder which was obvious. People could see that.

But 6 years ago, when we bicycled from my place--which is a small village on the western coast of India--to Ravapata, a place about a thousand kilometers north of us in Rajasthan where there are nuclear power plants constructed with the help of Canadian technology.

When we were going there, just before we could reach that place, every day we used to meet people in the villages. And that day it was a turn of my daughter--who is a medical doctor--to explain to the villagers about the hazards of radiation. After the meeting was over, she was asked to address a separate, private meeting of women of that village and we were taken to a well which was some distance away from the village, and a completely illiterate person was showing me the way to the well. And this man said to me, very seriously--he did not know that the person who spoke at the meeting was my daughter; he had never heard anything about the power plant before, which was about 4 or 5 miles away from his place; he had not heard about the hazards til then; but in a very straightforward way he said--"Sir, what the lady was saying is right." It was almost like giving a certificate: "What the lady was saying is right." So I was a bit surprised. I said, "What did she say, and what was right in what she said?" He said that she was saying that the radiation is going to affect the small animals first. "And I am a witness to the fact that before this nuclear power plant was built we had 5000 goats in our village and we do not have even a hundred goats living in our village anymore. And there has not been any butchering. It's just because of reasons we did not understand. But she is right." He was convinced of it. So when I met my daughter, I said, please keep your eyes open and you might find things which we did not expect. We were just speaking from what we had read in the books.

And it was between 115 to 120 degrees of heat. We were going on a bicycle, and we stopped at one place to drink some fresh water. These students of our institute, which is a training institute for nonviolent workers--I sometimes find Americans are scared by the word "revolution", they were not scared 300 years ago . . . <laughter> [unclear]--but it's an institution for nonviolent volunteers. And they were also in the cycle march, and they had their packs which had a symbol which says "liberation from everything nuclear", and they had fancy dresses which had slogans. Anti-nuclear slogans [unclear] all about on their clothes. And so that attracted many people from that village where we were drinking the water.

About 50 people just surrounded us only to have a look at these queer sort of fellows with these dresses which they had never seen before. And they were watching while my daughter was trying to see them closely. And the first thing that she noticed was that in this crowd of about 50, about 12 or 13 men, women, and children had big tumors over the body. Some had very clearly on the head, some had on the feet, and then she started asking questions. They gave different replies, but one reply was common among them all: that every one had this tumor at least 7 years after the nuclear power plant was established. Very critical, only after that. None of them had any such disease before that. So we thought, this is something serious.

So we talked about that when we went to the actual place where the nuclear power plant is situated. And there one of them said, "You must visit another village, and visit a family, that's the family of the washer man who washes the clothes of the workers who are engaged in the nuclear power plant." So she went there and these clothes are only low-level nuclear radiation if at all. She went there, and there the wife of this washer man had given birth to a child who was crippled. So my daughter examined her, and she said, "Well, I'm very sorry about you, but this sometimes happens. This is not absolutely new, sometimes it happens." So this woman who had just delivered a child 3 or 4 days ago, she said, "Yes, that is true, my neighbor also had had similar [unclear] delivery. and that was a neighbor just 3 houses away from her. And when she visited that house, that woman said, "No, there is one more in this same street." And the streets of villages are not very long. Three cases of abnormal childbirth in a space of some 12 or 15 houses. And this . . . shocked us.

And the only thing we said to the public through news media was,--it was an appeal from my daughter, as a doctor--that this place should be surveyed, just for the health purposes. But the successors of the bomb-burst of Hiroshima, are afraid of one thing, and that one thing is truth. They would never like truth to come out.

We went to another power plant in the south, which is the oldest power plant, which was prepared with the help of U.S. aid, at Tarapur. And they need about 250 workers to work on that. And on the whole through all these years they have employed ten thousand laborers, because after a certain period, those who were working inside the plant were just dismissed. And people did not know what happened to them. We asked for a very simple thing. In fact we were invited by these people in order to prove that "atoms for peace" were actually peaceful. And we just asked them to show us the health records of their workers. And their answer was a typical answer: "Sir, we can't give you these records because it is classified information." That's the word that they have borrowed from the defense department.

Classified information . . . something to be hidden from your enemies. Not from your own people--not from the parents of those workers who were working there or their relatives . . . but classified information. Truth is classified.

The nuclear energy commission in India is not responsible to the parliament. The budget of the nuclear commission is not passed by the parliament. It is only the prime minister who is responsible for that. It's easy either to convince or to deceive one person rather than 525 persons. So that is how the law has been made. We do not have the law which gives information to every citizen of India, to find facts about it.

So what I was trying to tell you is, truth is something which the producers of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons--and I think they are two sides of the same coin; they are hands in gloves working together--truth is something they fear and covet. The money that is spent on the research for nuclear energy--and it is almost equivalent to 80% of the total money spent on research spent by the central government--is classified as spent on defense, and so it is not counted when the price of the electricity would be fixed later on, it is not counted in that. And when people say we do not want nuclear weapons, it's easy to say in parliament, "No, we are doing it only for peace." So both these two different things help each other. And that's why I say--well, I can talk about this for long periods but that's not my subject--but they are parts of the same coin. And they fear truth.

So I think truth is the weapon with which Hiroshima can be fought, with which nuclear power plants or nuclear "testing" can be banned. The president can still ban the resolution [unclear] that has been passed. He can do it. But if the people come out with the truth, it may not be so easy for him to veto it especially having in view the elections coming in November.

I have to some extent tasted that strength of the people's truth. If you go to the eastern coast of India--and I am going to tell you stories only from India. I am a stranger to your situation, first of all, and I don't feel myself competent to talk about your problems, at least not in details. And I would also like to share some of my experiences as a citizen who sometimes feels he's entrapped in this system which thrives on untruth and violence, and that this system is not restricted to one country alone. But still I'm going to restrict myself to experiences in India.

If you go to the eastern coast of India, there's a state called Orissa which is one of the smaller states of India. Well, it is about 350 million people, but it's still one of the smaller states of India. . . . And there the government of India--I don't know who had this original idea, but he must be something more than a poet to have that original idea--to construct a ballistic missiles base on land which is very fertile and to have a ballistic missile base on the eastern coast of India. It would need some time to find out which is the enemy which they are facing, unless of course they are thinking of Bangladesh as the potential enemy, which is both smaller in size and smaller in weapons . . . much smaller, no comparison with India. But the base which goes on for miles together, on very fertile land, that is what was envisaged. And the people of Orissa--men, women, and children--like one man decided that we are not going to allow them to construct this missile base at Balyapal. We'll just say no to them.

And I think the only lesson that Gandhi taught us was to say no: no to injustice; no to exploitation; no to colonization. These people said: no to missile base.

Fortunately for them, there is only one road leading to this place, and they blocked it. Blocked it just with one . . . bar. But then there were living bars behind her. Thousands of people just stood there for the first few days. And then they later on said, we will keep a day and night vigilance, and they organized their own method of communication, and that was using what we call shankh or conch, the shell. When they saw a government jeep coming from a distance, they would just blow a shell. And people in the surrounding parts and then surrounding villages and then from distance villages would reciprocate by blowing more conchs and all of them would come back together.

For 7 and a half hears not one representative of the government has been able to put his or her step on that land. And it is this year, early this year, that the government of India declared that they had finally abandoned the idea of creating a missile base there, after 7 and a half years. <applause>

This happened because of the power of the people. And we were witnesses to the fact that the power of the people can only be nonviolent power. Because we know for certain with our own experience that those who hold the power of the state, or the power of money, are far better equipped about violence than the people. They have more weapons, far superior than perhaps the stones that the people can use, or sometimes the sticks that they can use, but they have much superior weapons. They have much better training. Although I happen to be a nonviolent trainer, I know their training is much better in their own line. And they have far more experience of violence than we people have. So I am convinced that the power of the people can be only that of nonviolence. Violence can not be the power of the people. If it is the power of the people, then perhaps they would kill each other.

So what I was trying to say, was that thinking about how to overcome--if I can say, the forces of Hiroshima, or forces of death, or forces of violence--it is the forces of life which have to come together and which have to try to say no to violence, no to injustice, and not stop with that.

I really often say, when there is sometimes discussions--and I find that there is much more of that kind of discussion in the west, than in the east--whether nonviolence is a way of life, or nonviolence is a technique of life. And I think it's both. Because if we have nonviolence only as a philosophy, without the technique, nonviolence will be diminished. And if we have nonviolence only as a technique, without the philosophy, the nonviolence will be misguided. One is like the steering wheel in a car, and the other is like the gas in it. One gives it strength, the other gives it direction. We need both. So nonviolence has to be comprehensive. It has to be the technique as well as the philosophy of life that goes behind nonviolence. I cannot think of both these two things separated. But there are sometimes these debates.

But when he [previous speaker?] was talking to you about death, I was going to get back to one small statement of mine. [unclear] At the conference of the War Resisters' League that they had last week in [unclear . . . Eugene ?], I said, "Nonviolence or nonviolent revolution begins at home." But then immediately I followed that by saying, "But it does not stop at home." It has to reach wider horizons until it can reach the horizons of the planet. Because I see that the violence which has been committed between men in Hiroshima, was not violence only on human beings, but it was also violence on the planet. And to me, the very definition of nonviolence is harmony. Harmony within oneself; harmony with fellow human beings; and harmony with mother nature.

I'm saying "mother nature" because that's the Hindi term. When in Hindi we use the word, we do not say Prakriti(PRA-KREE-TEE) but we say Prakriti-Mata (PRA-KREE-TEE MAA-TAA) which means "mother nature". When we say "earth" we do not say "earth", we say "mother earth". This applies even to rivers. Well, but the rivers have one more adjective. They say loka-mata which means mother of the people. So in that sense, the rivers are even more venerated.

But what I was trying to say, that the violence is much more extensive than we usually think when we are thinking about wars. The violence begins with ourselves, when we suppress or sometimes oppress ourselves. So we have to get over that, and that can be achieved only through some kind of creative--and I think even there Gandhi had something to give as a message.

In his idea about of education, I think the three focal points were: first of all, freedom in schools, many were talking about praying in schools; freedom to love; and self-expression. These were the three focal points of Gandhi's way of education. And I think self-expression not only is good for the children--and it is definitely good for the children--but also for us adults who sometimes have to fight a struggle within ourselves, an ongoing fight very often.

So we have to fight that nonviolent struggle by some kind of . . . creative activity. It is an activity where you try to put, instead of the two incentives which are always being used by us, those incentives which can change, or which can move things. Instead of two old incentives, Gandhi tried to put two new incentives. The old incentives are very well known. Very often we practice it at home. [unclear] Those are very much practiced in the society at large.

The first incentive, the old incentive, is that of fear; and the other is that of greed. It is on these two incentives that people think the world can move. The whole of the capitalist society is built on the incentive of greed. The whole of the dictatorial structures were built on fear. And Gandhi tried to give two new incentives instead of these two incentives. Instead of the mother saying to the child, if you do such and such thing which she pleases, I will give you an ice cream or chocolate or something, that's greed; and if the child does not agree with that, oh let papa come, he will give you a big thrashing, that is fear. So it's there very much in the family. It can be there in the large human family of nations. We have seen enough of that.

Instead of that, Gandhi gave those two incentives which sound to be very simple, but can be quite difficult. . . . The two incentives of sharing and caring. Instead of greed, share; instead of fear, or instead of threaten, [unclear] care. Sharing and caring. So these two incentives come as two alternatives suggested by Gandhi.

And when we think about this present situation, and when I was reflecting on what was being read [earlier in service], I thought I should share with you some of the thoughts that came to my mind, instead of going through this note that I had prepared, I thought I should think aloud with you and with his [one of the organizers?] permission, I want to end with a song.

You said, no music, don't consider it to be a music, just part of my prayers. But I'm going to sing to you a song which was written the day after Hiroshima day, on hearing the news of Hiroshima, by a friend of mine. The song is in Gujarati (GOO-JA-RA-TEE) my language, Gandhi's language. But I think it's quite expressive. And . . . I think I will be permitted if I don't translate. I'll just sing it. And that's how I would like to close my talk.

One word I should translate for you, That's the crucial word: shanti. shanti is peace. Many of you know the word. But here in this song the refrain is shanti karu: let there be peace, let there be peace, let there be peace. That's the refrain. And the prayer is to the lord of life, Jivana (JEE-VA-NA).

[several mins of singing]

[end of tape]

-- daveus rattus

yer friendly neighborhood ratman

KOYAANISQATSI

ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.