The New India Lord Linlithgow. should make an admirable . chairman
Of the Select Committee on India, the more so since his knowledge of the. country itself is not merely a politician's.
India is four-fifths agricultural, and a man who has presided over a Royal Commission on Indian Agriculture sees a good deal more of the real India than most people who discharge some brief mission there. The Select Committee lost no time in holding its initial meeting, and it should soon be settling solidly to work. Meanwhile the attitude of Mr. Sastri and other Indian Liberals, as disclosed at the Liberal Federation's annual meetings this week, is encouraging, though it would be unfair to emphasize the very qualified approval the Liberals give to the White Paper and minimize their searching criticism of the proposals it contains. Those proposals, it was pointed out naturally enough, fall far short of Dominion Status, and there was not -unreasonable complaint of the prominence which the India Office and the Secretary of State arc still to assume in the new scheme of things. The Indian Liberals by their attitude in the past three years have abundantly established their claim to a sympathetic hearing by the Select Committee. •
* * * *
Previous page
