THE ISSUE IN INDIA
[To the Editor of the Seearsaoa.) Snt,—The behaviour of the panic-stricken Government has startled the nation and has compelled me to come out with the following message to my own people who have been provoked to intense indignation suppressed by force.
Mahatmaji has been arrested without having been given a chance of coming to a mutual understanding with the Govern- ment. It only shows that of the two—partners in the building of the history of India—the people of India can be super- ciliously ignored according to our rulers. However, the fact has to be accepted as a fact, and we must prove to the world that we are important, more important than the other factor, which is merely an accident. But if we lose our head and give vent to a sudden fit of political insanity, blindly suicidal, a great opportunity will be missed. The despair itself should give us the profound calmness of strength, the grim determina- tion which silently works its own fulfilment without wasting its resources in puerile emotionalism and self-thwarting de- structiveness. This is the moment when it should be easy for us to forget all our accumulated prejudices against our kin- dreds, when we must do our best to combine our hands in brotherly love, even with those who have roughly rejected our call of comradeship, when we must claim of ourselves an intense urge of co-operation with all different parts of our nation. This is the kind of catastrophe which rarely comes to a people, with a shock that brings to a focus our scattered forces and shortens the difficulties of our creative endeavour in the building of its freedom.
"The primitive lawlessness of the law-makers should forcibly awaken us to our own ultimate salvation in a love undaunted by the menace of a power which barricades itself with an indiscriminate suspicion that its blind panic cannot define. This is the time when we must never forget our responsibility to prove ourselves morally superior to those who are physically powerful in a measure that can defy their own humanity."—
[Sir Rabindranath entirely misunderstands understands the duty of the Government of India to keep order for the sake of the whole people. It is doing so without any panic. Mr. Gandhi's arrest was plainly welcome to the prisoner.—En. Spectator.]
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