“Today India does not need Geeta but needs a football ground.” This thought…

Colonial-era social and religious reformers who called for national regeneration often paired scriptural revival with an equal, sometimes greater, emphasis on physical strength — holding that a nation of physically weak individuals could achieve neither spiritual depth nor real independence.

Swami Vivekananda pressed exactly this point in his lectures and letters on practical Vedanta: he urged young Indians toward sport and physical culture as the base on which spiritual and national strength must rest, famously telling them they would be nearer to God through football than through reciting the Gita on an unexercised body.

• Rousseau is the 18th-century French Enlightenment thinker of the social contract and natural education, with no connection to Indian reform movements or this remark.

• Radhakrishnan's legacy rests on serious philosophical translation and commentary on the Gita and the Upanishads — a scholarly register very different from this remark's provocative, activist framing, and no such statement is recorded from him.

• Plato is the ancient Greek philosopher of the Forms and the ideal state, unconnected to modern Indian nationalist thought.

So the remark belongs to Swami Vivekananda.