THE SITUATION IN INDIA LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR
Stn,—Is it not time that we cleared our minds of circumlocution and our language of euphemisms? We are all aware of the saintliness of Mr. Gandhi—a saintliness that far exceeds that of the Pharisee who fasted twice in the week ana gave tithes of all he possessed—and of his influence with a population which is impressed by asceticism as by nothing else. And in a country like ours, and at a time like this, we cannot but be moved by his reiterated cry, echoed by the Congress in their passionate devotion to their fuehrer, "Give us freedom, and then— get out! " But it is surely clear that the one thing that Mr. Gandhi does not want is freedom, in the sense of freedom for India. What he means by freedom is power to " boss " the Moslems and, incidentally, the depressed classes and the other sections of the heterogeneous popula- tion of India. And what the other sections mean by freedom is power to boss, or to avoid being bossed, by the Congress. For the past twenty-four years we have been presenting India with one measure of freedoi._ after another. Everyone of them Mr. Gandhi has bluntly rejected ; but he has never done this on the score that it does not give enough freedom to India ; his one complaint has been that it has not given enough power to Congress. He knows quite well that the British people will never present him with such a caricature of freedom ; he also _knows the enormous dangers which, as Dr. Bevan pointed out last week, await any Government of India on the day when the British evacuate it ; and he also knows how much easier and pleasanter it is to pull someone else's plan to pieces than to make one's own.
Hence his demand, echoed by his docile friends in England, that the Government should "reopen negotiations" and produce yet another plan which he and his faithful Pandit Nehru will tear to bits as another "insult to It.dia," in the name of a freedom which they do not under- stand, and which they certainly would never accept. Mr. Carl Heath urges that the Government should take yet a "further step in policy to meet the present impasse," and he quotes a Chinese paper to the effect that the dispute is not "beyond the possibility of compromise." No, it is not, if there were any real statesmanship on the Congress side or if compromise was 'what would satisfy any responsible party_ But Mr. Gandhi's statesmanship consists in saying, "If I cannot get what I want, I will fast to death ; or I will roux-. all India against you " ; or else, when all that he has asked for is being offered him, he will make some fresh demand—a well-known Hitlerian device—as he did at the end of the Cripps' negotiations (see Coupland, The Cripps Mission, pp. 47 ff.). It must be regretfully admitted that when Mr. Gandhi says freedom for India, he means -independence for the Congress and for its fuehrer.
Unhappily, no great Indian party has yet learnt to think of India as a
whole. Great Britain has in vain tried to teach that lesson. The only thing Mr. Gandhi ever did tb raise the depressed classes was to demand
for them the right of temple-entry, as if that would ever fill their empty stomachs! And when he found it was not popular with his wealthy and influential friends, he dropped it ; since then he has said as little about it as about access to village wells. And what has the apostle of non- violence ever said in protest against the persecution of the Christians in every mission field in Inilia? In' the impressive recoti of advances in
Modern India, edited by the late Mr. O'Malley, there ic not an
example of a reform in which Mr. Gandhi has conspicuously interested himself. Can it be that the champion of freedom would rather that the
British should remain in India to be the butt of hi, Philippics, to being himself the legatee of their problems ; and that in his heart he sets above the duty of preserving order among Moslems, Sikhs, native States, and the sixty millions of the depressed classes, the martyrdom of the palace
Old Bank House, Woodstock.
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