Commonwealth and Foreign
INDIA UNDER CONGRESS
ALREADY serious difficulties have begun to close in on the new Congress Ministries in the provinces where they are in office ; but they have been met with a courage and con- fidence that speaks well for the future. Above all, the bulk of the people is with the Congress and they are ready to carry out the programme put forward.
Out here in India, as I have watched events, the following have seemed to be the main points at issue. In the first place, the release of political prisoners has been carried out with far less difficulty than was at first imagined possible. Under any other form of government it could not have been undertaken with safety ; but in every single case so far the assurance has been given that violent revolutionary methods would be abandoned and the Congress platform adopted. This assurance will be loyally kept. Terrorism, as such, is dead.
The greatest triumph of all fell to Mahatma Gandhi. For when everything else had been tried and had failed, a telegraphic correspondence between him and the Andaman prisoners not only brought to an end a very critical and dangerous hunger strike, but also obtained a full assurance that violent methods would be eschewed in future. The relief of this was enormous.
May I add in a parenthesis, that the entire abandonment of the Andamans as a convict station is now long overdue ? There is a golden opportunity offered, without any threat or moral compulsion, which the Government of India may utilise, with public opinion solidly behind them. No measure would be at the same time so opportune and so humane. The argument is unanswerable, that what is not tolerated in British penal administration should not be tolerated in India.
The second issue has been that of prohibition both of opium and alcohol. Ever since the non-co-operation move- ment began in 1920-2T, this has been put forward in the very front of the national programme. Mr. Gandhi at one time went so far as to state in writing that he would co-operate with Government, if the revenue from opium and liquor were abandoned and khaddar (home spinning) were actively encouraged. But revenue was so completely bound up with Government excise policy that his offer was not accepted. Prohibition was then regarded as impossible : and the United States experiment did not offer any hope to the contrary.
But Mr. Gandhi and others have pointed out that Indian conditions are different. On the one hand, the ban on intoxicants has in India the strongest of all religious sanctions. Any form of intoxicating drug or liquor is forbidden by Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism. Christianity also, under Indian conditions, is against these things, which are so palpably harmful. On the other hand, India is a land of villages, and the poverty of the Indian village is proverbial. There- fore, intoxicants always tend to make the poverty more acute : they drag down the level of subsistence still lower. In every way therefore they do mischief.
The question still remains whether the revenue can stand it. The Congress Ministries have shown their sincerity by abandoning three-fourths of their incomes as Cabinet Ministers and the greater part of their personal allowances. They also travel in the very uncomfortable third-class carriages. In this way they have put themselves, as far as they can, on a level with the common people. Enthusiasm has been created ; for the villager understands sacrifice and hardship : that is why Mahatma Gandhi is so popular. On the wave of this popularity the villagers are responding to prohibition in a remarkable manner. There is even a generous rivalry over which district shall first offer itself for local option.
If it is feared that illicit liquor will be distilled and illicit opium smuggled, so that 66 boot-legging" will have to be met, I doubt again there the analogy. When the majority of a village is against liquor and opium, there will be very little chance of secret smuggling and distillation.
The gravest of all further issues, which the Congress Ministries will have to face, is the passive opposition of the land-owners in the provinces, such as Bihar and the United Provinces, where the landlord system still is strong. Already at the slightest sign of taxing the landlords there has been excited opposition. Some amusement has been caused by some of the wealthiest of them passing a resolution that they would offer Satyagrana (passive resistance) if their incomes were touched ! Such threats can hardly be taken seriously ; for everyone knows the acts of tyranny that have been committed by some landlords in the past, and such people do not make good passive resisters. Probably in the end the landlord system, which is unsuited to India, will have to be given up with a certain amount of compen- sation, and the peasant proprietor system introduced more widely than at present. No issue that can be raised in India will be of more importance than this ; for in India everything finally comes back to the village and the land.
The education policy will now come more directly under the control of the new provincial councils. The Minister of Education will have the most responsible office in the Cabinet, next to the Prime Minister : for the future will depend upon his wisdom. The present top-heavy system of education, whereby the few are benefited and the many suffer, will undoubtedly be reversed. There is likely also to be brought into primary education an immense expansion of handicraft work, especially spinning and weaving : for on this Mahatma Gandhi has set his heart, and his counsel is likely to prevail.
On one side—foreign affairs—the Congress Presidentship of Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru has made an immense difference. Here is the field in which his own influence is being felt most of all, and he is determined that India shall be in leading strings no longer. The interest he has already roused has made the whole political horizon of Congress different. He has appealed to the League of Nations by telegram on behalf of Congress as truly representing India, condemning any further betrayal of Abyssinia and any partition of Palestine. His voice was raised against Indian troops being sent out to the Far East, without the consent of the Indian people. Every phase of world politics is beinF followed closely, and any attempt on the part of Great Britain to compromise with Fascism, and to make terms with Mussolini over the dead body of Abyssinia, will be met with by such strong moral reprobation from Indian nationalism that in the end it may have very far-reaching effects.
The most striking feature of all has yet to be mentioned, and I have kept it to the last. Woman has now come right to the front in Congress affairs. One woman has become a Congress Minister, and has already exercised her minis- terial functions with remarkable success. The whole educa- tional programme of the new womanhood of India will depend upon women who will be in office in different pro- vincial Cabinets. While they are ardently progressive on the side of social reform, they represent a steadying force in modern Indian politics. For they recognise how back- ward things still are among the masses of the common people, and their hearts are set on changing injurious social customs, without which Indian womanhood as a whole cannot make progress.
Altogether, then, the situation out here is remarkably hopeful.
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