India and the Seven
The Commonwealth Conference opens amid universal goodwill and general perplexity. On the dominating problem, how India as a republic can remain a member of a society whose fundamental basis is loyalty to the Crown, no new light has been thrown in the un- official speculations and discussions in which the Press has been fertile in the past fortnight. One weighty consideration is the fact that India is today technically a member of the Commonwealth. If the decision has to be taken that the structure of the Commonwealth cannot be altered—and there are grounds at least as weighty for that conclusion—then a definitely separatist step will be taken, and the fact that it would be taken by India herself would not make it less regrettable. There is the further consideration that India is evolving. Her feeling towards the Commonwealth, and this country in par- ticular, is warmer than it has been for generations. Any step calcu- lated to check that growth of cordiality could only be deplored. At the same time, just because the bonds that unite the Commonwealth are so intangible and so delicate it is a serious matter for one of the eight members to ask the other seven, who are well content with them as they are, to relax them in the light of her own political ideas. There the problem remains. If a solution has shaped itself in any of the Prime Ministers' minds, except Mr. Nehru's, it has not been disclosed. Acceptance of Mr. Nehru's solution would be undisguisedly unwelcome to some of the Prime Ministers, possibly to most, and room for a compromise between things as they are and things as Mr. Nehru would have them is singularly scanty. In deciding, as they must, between a modified Commonwealth with India and the present Commonwealth without her they must be fully—and it is hoped unanimously—convinced of the superior advantage of the former before they assent to the change.
