It will be better if India shifted to a presidential form of government which would be something between democracy and dictatorship. Democracy is needed so that no dictatorship becomes an absolute imprisonment for the country. So after each five or ten years you can change the government. But as far as the functioning of the government is concerned, for whatsoever the period the government is in power, it needs absolute control of the country.

India can be in a better situation only if the government starts working on a war footing – less than that won’t do. If the country understands only one language then you have to speak that language.

My own name for this cross between democracy and dictatorship is “benevolent dictatorship” – not absolutely dictatorial, so there can be a possibility to change the government. After at least ten years the government can be changed, but for those ten years the government has to be totalitarian, with absolute power, and all lawlessness will disappear immediately.

In these thirty-three years, India functioned in a disciplined way only when Indira made the Emergency. In those few months India functioned without any lawlessness. The smugglers disappeared, the bribery disappeared, the dacoits disappeared. Crime suddenly fell to a minimum and the whole country was functioning without strikes, without protest marches, without any chaos anywhere.

Indians understand that language immediately. And they are not at fault; for centuries they have been fed on poison. They have not been prepared to function as free human beings and they cannot immediately start functioning that way.

If a person has functioned with crutches for thousands of years and you withdraw the crutches, he will fall over. Maybe he is not crippled, maybe he is basically healthy, but now he has become dependent on the crutches. You cannot withdraw crutches so suddenly.

A rabbi was telling his wife on her birthday, “I would like you to live one hundred years and three months.”

The wife was a little puzzled about those three months. She said, “Why the three months? I have never heard of such a thing. One hundred years is enough! Why the three months?”

The rabbi smiled and said, “I would not like you to die suddenly.”

Yes, those three months are needed. Nothing can be taken away suddenly.

Freedom came to India very suddenly, without any preparation. The so-called “Father of the Nation,” Mahatma Gandhi, had not prepared the country at all. The so-called leaders were only efficient in creating a little bit of chaos here and there, and when freedom came they were absolutely at a loss as to what to do, because all their efficiency was in creating chaos.