ARMY EDUCATION Sm,—A good deal of lip service is paid
to Army Education in the National Press, and the undersigned feel that the public should hay'• some of the facts of what often happens at "educational meetings. The meeting from which the following details are taken is fairly typi of those we have attended.
The lecture, purported to be on India, took place in the evening, an' attendance was supposed to be voluntary. Nevertheless, men bad be detailed to attend in order to ensure that the military officer had " full house." The address which followed was noticeable both for its inaccuracies and for its bias.
No attempt was made to put forward the views of any of the Indian Groups, Hindu or Moslem, or such liberal views as those of Sir Tej
Sapru or Mr. Rajagopalachari. The only view presented was that of the British Army and British Imperialism.
We leave you to judge as to the accuracy of the following statements: a. Gandhi is the self-appointed dictator of Congress.
2. The only demand for Indian Home Rule comes from a small Group of Indian professional men and would-be intellectuals.
3. Gandhi comes from the money-lending classes in. India.
4. Only 65 per cent. of Indians are now illiterate (and this even though Empire, a monthly record, May, 1940, gives 86 per cent. males and 98 per cent. females as illiterate).
In addition to the patently misleading statements given above, the whole address was accompanied by cheap sneers at Gandhi and his fast, while no attempt was made to place the present struggle in India in its historic setting.
Many of those who came into the meeting with empty minds on India left with a very one-sided view of the difficulties there.
When soldiers in this country are dragooned into a political meeting and there conditioned at the authority's whim, we are left in no doubt as to their future sympathies, should they ever be called on to suppress national or independent feeling in Indik or elsewhere.
We append our names, but for obvious reasons ask you to respect the address as secret, and to allow us to sign ourselves FIVE MEMBERS OF H.M. FORCES.
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