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Dr. Abdul Kalam, President of India, has interacted with Mahapragyaji several times in the course of last five years. The last occasion was in Surat when he flew down from: Delhi to be with him. Together they interacted with fifteen leading spiritual leaders of different faiths and issued a unanimously adopted Surat Spiritual Declaration. The declaration is aimed at promoting interfaith harmony on the one hand and inter-faith cooperative effort to accelerate the tempo of development and to maximize welfare of the needy sections of the society.
It is the yawning gap between the affluent and the impoverished that provides the breeding ground for violence. Affluence fosters wasteful consumption and exploitation of the weaker sections. Poverty is the worst pollutant and promotes violence provoked by the injustice of being deprived even the basic necessities. Significantly, the declaration links progress and development with spiritual rejuvenation, inter-religious harmony and collective inter-faith creative engagement.
In India and elsewhere, the society is confronted often with ethnic and communal passions, which if not tackled at the roots. could explode leading to violent incidents. This is so because religion and communalism have been bracketed together, Communal harmony is established only in a non-violent environment, which provides no room for fanaticism and fundamentalism.
It is important to realize that violence will continue to foster disorder and disturbance in the society, if the country does not take to the path of all-round development and if economic backwardness persists. The progress may be in the field of science and technology, agriculture or industry, education or health, politics or social upliftment. However, it would effectively contribute to social welfare and mass happiness only if its benefits reach the deprived sections of our society. If religious and spiritual leaders rise above their narrow religious perceptions and work together to promote equitable development, it
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