VISIT BY THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA
MRS INDIRA GANDHI
LUNCHEON AT PARLIAMENT HOUSE,
CANBERRA 22 MAY 1968
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. J. G. Gorton
Prime Minister, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is my very pleasant task to propose the toast of our
distinguished guest. I think it is impossible for me edequately to express
on behalf of myself or of those Australian people who are here, or Prime
Minister, who are in their thousands watching you now and waiting to hear
you speak the intense admiration which we have of you as a person, and
the great pride and excitement that we feel in this nation because on this
occasion we have been visited for the first time by the Prime Minister of the
great Republic of India. I think that when August comes this year, it will be just:
twenty-one years since the flag of India flew from the old Red Fort at Dell~ i,
as a symbol of the political independence which had been gained as a result
of a struggle of some quarter of a century, a struggle, Prime Minister, in
which you and your distinguished family, together with countless other of
your countrymen were engaged in, a struggle which occupied all the thoughts
of your early life. I have heard, and you have confirmed to me that the story is
not apocryphal, that at the age of three or five or some very early age of that
kind, you began to make political speeches standing on a table at the home of
your distinguished father, with a captive audience, and I have not only envied
you this early start, but I have also had borne in upon me the fact that fromn
that time until the time the flag of free India flew from the old Red Fort
Delhi, you were entirely engaged upon this struggle. In it you lived and
breathed and had your being, and in his heady excitement of striving against
sone thing, which appeared stronger at the time, for an ideal which you believed,
and those with you believed to be more important than the hardships which
struggling against it entailed, because you believed that, eventually you
achieved that political freedom which for so long you had sought.
It was a struggle, I like to think, Prime Minister you
may not agree with me not against a harsh, oppressive, overbearing,
corrupt power, but against an alien power and one which was in your coun try,
and one which you respected but wished to leave your country so that politically
you could run your own lives.
I can only, as from a distance, feel in myself the excitement
there must have been, the heady wine there must have been during those
years, and congratulate you on having with your countrymen finally achieved
that for which you had so long fought. But this was just the beginning, this
attainment of political freedom.
That freedom having been attained, then those who had b~ een
successful were at once faced with the immensely significant requirements of
economic freedom, ( for political freedom of itself is not enough) and faced with
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immense problems problems which to a country like ours almost stagger
the imagination of seeking to take and raise the standards of what is now
530 million people in a nation which each year adds to its population, the
same number as is the total population of our nation of Australia. Having
to build up almost from nothing an industrial base and industrial muscles,
having to face in such a vast country the terrific incursions of drs~ ughts in
particular areas1 having to provide for those whcq having followed your
banners toward political freedom now required some material advancement
as a result of having achieved that, having at the same time to provide for
the defence of that political freedom and those boundaries of India against
incursions which were first feared and then in fact occurred, having all
these problems to cope with, you had to show that a democratic country
because through all these times you remained a democractic country could
cope with these kinds cf problems and could provide for the citizens of
their nation an improving standard of material things.
So from that first struggle, that first excitement of seeking
political freedom, these problems came upon your country and in time you
became the leader who must decide how best they could be met. During
that time, you have managed, Prime Minister in your country to increase
the average expectancy of life from 32 years to, I think, 49, you have
mai~ eI to build up an industrial capacity much greater than that with which
you started, you have managred to resist and to repel incursions upon your
frontiers. It looks as if you will, in this present plan, overcome the
agricultural disadvantages which have dogged you for so long and will manage
to be able to provide from within the borders of India the food which India
requires. These are no mean achievements, Prime Minister, and
these if they are maintained, as 1 am sure they will be, will stand as an
example to other nations in Asia that great problems can be met by
democratic processes, that great problems can be overcome by democratic
processes, that there is more than one way to improve and increase the
economic well-being of a nation, and that it is not necessary to surrender
political liberty in order to do this, If this indeed turns out to be the fact,
Prime Minister, then I can think of very little that would be of more
significance for the future of the world and the peoples who will live in
the various countries of the world.
I" is not for me to speak long, Prime Minis ter, in this,
but may I take your mind back to a time when you were left alone because
your family were all in gaol, and when you had written to you by your
distinguished father a poem which I know must lose much in translation
but which yet I would like to express to you who have not forgotten it and
to others who have not yet heard it:
Wlhere the mind is without fear
And the head is held high.
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into
fragments
By narrow domestic walls
WVhere words come out from the depths of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards
perfection
VWhe re the clear stream of reason
Has not lost its way into the dreary desert sands of
dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Mther,
Let my country awalke. / 3
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Prime Minister, the man who wrote that poem did much to
see that it was translated into fact. Prime Minister, you are doing much
to see it is translated into fact. it is something which your country and
mine can both ta., e as something of a guidance for the future, and i wish,
Prime Minister and hope, Prime Minister, that for many years to come you
will be aole to continue to try to see that the se. itiments expressed in your
father's verse are expressed in actual fact in the country that you lead and
that you lead it with the same high courage, political perspicacity, elegance,
modesty and grace with which you have led it so far.