They Have Ruined The Country

Nehru The AristoRAT!

Have you read Sri Aurobindo's last letters on China?[[See Addendum. ]]
Oh, yes - he read them to me himself! (Mother laughs.)
But everything Sri Aurobindo said has always come true. You know he also said (but it was in jest, he didn't write it) ... concerning reuniting with Pakistan he told me: "Ten years. It will take ten years." The ten years passed and nothing happened - OFFICIALLY nothing happened. But the truth is (I learned it through certain government officials), Pakistan did make some overtures in that direction, asking for a union to be reestablished (they would have kept some sort of autonomy, but the two countries would have UNITED, it would have been a UNION), and Nehru refused.
How foolish!
So Sri Aurobindo had seen it.
He had seen it happen. After ten years, when that man who headed Pakistan died,[[This may refer to the death of Liaquat Ali, and the grave economic and political difficulties resulting in the dissolution of the Pakistani Parliament in October 1958, and General Ayub Khan's seizure of power. ]] they found themselves in grave difficulty and were unable to get organized; so they sent somebody (unofficially, of course) to ask India to reestablish union on certain bases - but they refused, the Indians refused. It was a repetition of the same stupidity as when Cripps came to make his proposal, when Sri Aurobindo sent a message saying, "Accept, whatever the conditions, otherwise it will be worse later on." That's what Sri Aurobindo told them. Gandhi was there and he retorted, "Why is that man meddling? He should be concerned only with spiritual life."[[In April 1942, when England was struggling against the Nazis and Japan, which was threatening to invade Burma and India, Churchill sent an emissary, Sir Stafford Cripps, to New Delhi with a very generous proposal which he hoped would rally India's goodwill and cooperation in the fight against the worldwide threat. In this proposal, Great Britain offered India Dominion status, as a first step towards an independent government. Sri Aurobindo at once came out of retirement to wire his adhesion to Cripps; he wired all of India's leaders, and even sent a personal messenger to Gandhi and the Indian Congress to convince them to accept this unhoped for proposal without delay. One of Sri Aurobindo's telegrams to Rajagopalachari (the future President of India) spoke of the grave danger, which no one seemed to see, of rejecting Cripps' proposal: "... Some immediate solution urgent face grave peril. Appeal to you to save India formidable danger new foreign domination when old on way to self-elimination." No one understood: "Why is he meddling?" Had it accepted Dominion status, India would have avoided the partition of the country in two, the artificial creation of Pakistan, as well as the three wars that were to follow (and which we haven't heard the last of), and the blood bath that ravaged Bengal and the Punjab in 1947 at the time of the partition. (See in Addendum an extract from Sri Aurobindo's message on the occasion of India's Independence.) ]]
They have conscientiously ruined the country.

The Indo Pakistan War Part5

November 10, 1965
(Mother hands Satprem a brochure, "Spiritual Unity of India," in which quotations from Sri Aurobindo and Mother on the partition of India have been gathered, in particular Mother's declaration: "India must fight until India and Pakistan have once more become ONE.")
It has gone around India.
Thousands of copies have been distributed in India. There are even lots of newspapers that have written about it. It has made a lot of noise in the country.
But they don't seem - the leaders at least - to have understood at all.
The Prime Minister has fully approved. But he is a weak man. They are afraid of the United Nations.
Oh, they're afraid of everything.
But to the United Nations I have sent a lot of messages: lots of people there have talked about it. They are quarreling. There at the United Nations, it has kicked up a din. Only, the Americans are quite unrivaled in their stupidity! All the more so as they are puffed up with conceit - they are convinced that they are the leading nation of the world, so that puts the final touch to stupidity. But anyway, they are not alone at the United Nations and it has made a lot of noise, it has shaken people up a bit.
But unless outward circumstances COMPEL India to reunite with Pakistan, they won't budge.
But it's being prepared. It's being prepared. It's going to break out all at once.
The impression is that if India isn't pushed from the outside, isn't forced to re-create this unity, they won't budge.
The army is completely with us. Besides, it seems (I have been receiving a great many letters, I've again received some these last few days), it seems they had truly miraculous instances of forces intervening, of people suddenly turning into extraordinary heroes.... There were marvelous things.
If, at that point,[[Before India accepted the cease-fire of September 22. ]] they hadn't stopped, it would have been easy.
Oh, absolutely! It's really sad.
That's just what those fools were fearing!
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, mon petit, because we always see just one side of things; even being in contact up above, one doesn't have the vision of the whole every minute. So, as for me, whatever happens I say, "It's all right - He knows better than I do."
He knows better than I do.
No, it's necessarily the best ... in the given conditions - the earth isn't in a marvelous condition, far from it - but in the given conditions, it's the best. It prepares something far more complete, far deeper, far more integral than all that we can imagine. This is indisputable, there's no discussing it.
Later, about the health of Sujata, who is eating next to nothing:
... When I was six or eight, I used to eat with my brother, and to get ourselves to eat we were obliged to tell each other a story I We were given meat, you see, pieces of beefsteak, it was a nightmare! So my trick was to tell my brother, "I am an ogre ... and before me is half an ox," and with each slash of my knife I would carve my ox! - I would tell a story to myself and end up swallowing my beefsteak!
(Sujata:) But he doesn't tell any stories. How many times I have asked him!
He doesn't tell any stories?
(Satprem:) She would like me to write tales - fairy tales.
Do you know any fairy tales?
(Satprem:) I'll make some up.
Of course! I used to make up lots and lots of them!... Real fairy tales in which everything is so lovely, everything works out so nicely - not a single misery. Nothing but lovely things....

The Indo Pakistan War In 1965

The Mother
Agenda
Volume 6
September 18, 1965
(Regarding the Indo-Pakistani conflict:)
I have all kinds of things to show you ... because I have been made to say some things - I am always made to say things!
(Mother gives Satprem a hibiscus flower called "Grace")
It's the season for graces.

Do you know this text from Sri Aurobindo? (Mother holds out a note)
"... The fight in which we are engaged is not like the wars of old in which when the King or leader fell, the army fled. The King whom we follow to the war today is our own Motherland, the sacred and imperishable; the leader of our onward march is the Almighty Himself...."
May 11, 1907
Then I wrote this:
"It is for the sake and the triumph of Truth that India is fighting and must fight[[Interestingly, Mother had at first written shall fight, then, in the afternoon, she changed shall into must.]] until India and Pakistan have once more become ONE because that is the truth of their being."

Sri Aurobindo And Bangladesh

Child leads street procession duringmass revolt of 1969 (Rashid Talukder/Autograph ABP)

Sri Aurobindo and Bangladesh

Behind the jostle of temporary points of view and instant interests there are the Eternal Landmarks. To lose sight of them is to lose one's very way and steer onto the reefs of expediency and comfortable compromise upon which we shall founder a moment later. Behind the little frontal events is the greater tide of history and to lose sight of it is to lose one's direction and the golden thread that leads to our perfect fulfillment, be it individual or national. Those who have left their unique mark upon the labyrinth of history are the very ones who have seized the golden thread and affirmed the Greater History and the Greater Meaning against all the instant arguments and fleeting expediencies.
The Greater History tells us that the whole earth is a single body with a single destiny, but that within that single destiny each part of the greater body, each nation, has its special role to play and its rare moments of choice when it must make the decisive gesture, its true gesture in the total movement of the great Eternal History. Each nation is a symbol. Each gesture of each nation potentially represents a little victory in the total victory or a little defeat in the total defeat. And sometimes the whole of our history is at stake at a symbolic point of the earth; and, a little gesture, a tiny turn to the right or left, has repercussions, either good or bad, down the ages and over the entire earth body.
India is precisely such a symbol and Bangladesh is another, a little turning point in the great course of events of the earth. The time has come to consider the eternal Landmarks and read the greater tide in the small eddies. Now, the greater tide tells us that India's role is to be the spiritual heart of the terrestrial body just as, for example, the role of France is to express clarity of intellect, or that of Germany to express skill, Russia the brotherhood of man and the United States enthusiasm for adventure and practical organization, etc. But only if India is ONE can she fulfill this role, for how can one who is herself divided lead others? Thus the division of India is the first Falsehood that must disappear, for it is the symbol of the earth's division. As long as India is not one, the world cannot be one. India's striving for unity is the symbolic drama of the world's striving for unity.

THE AGENDA,MAY15TH,1971

The Birth Of Bangladesh Par1

Yes, "the urgent recognition...." That's the second note, the one of the fourth. "The urgent recognition of Bangla-Desh is imperative."[[The first version, the one of the third, read: India must recognize Bangla-Desh. This is urgent. ]]-THE MOTHER

THE AGENDA APRIL17TH,1971

The Mother's remark On Gandhi's Non Violence(Ahimsa)

(After listening to a passage in Satprem's manuscript on nonviolence and Gandhi, Mother makes another brief remark:)
They're really smacking their lips over their ahimsa[[Ahimsa: nonviolence. ]] - it's disgusting!....Today we are finding that the old gods know how to transmigrate. Gandhi himself, seeing all those years of nonviolence culminate in the terrible violence that marked India's partition in 1947, ruefully observed shortly before his death: "The attitude of violence which we have secretly harboured now recoils on us, and makes us fly at each other's throats when the question of distribution of power arises.... Now that the burden of subjection is lifted, all the forces of evil have come to the surface." For neither nonviolence nor violence touch upon the root of Evil.... (THE AGENDA ,SEPTEMBAR22,1962)