INDIA TODAY : III. THE ULTIMATE AIM
By VISCOUNT SAMUEL
[This is the last of three articles in which Lord Samuel records some of the impressions gained during his recent visit to India.] FOR the last thirty years and more there has been continual tension between politically-minded India and Great Britain ; the Civil Disobedience movement is fresh in our memories, with its hundred thousand prisoners in gaols and detention camps. Meanwhile an effort to secure better conditions has been growing among Indian workers in town and country, the mill-hands and the cultivators. And always in the background there have been the differences, usually latent, sometimes acute, between Hindus and Muslims, and Muslims and Sikhs. Those three tensions—the national, the social and the communal—are still the chief factors in the Indian situation. Sometimes one predominates, some- times another. Forces will combine for a common purpose and then separate again. The clue to the complexities of the Indian scene is to be found in the existence of those three tensions and their interaction.
Congress is the only political party that is effectively organised, and that extends throughout the Provinces of India. It claims a membership of three millions ; of these only 3 per cent. are Muslims. It includes on the one hand financiers and industrialists, landlords and lawyers ; on the other hand socialist intellectuals, trade unionists and the leaders of agrarian movements among the peasants. There are Right and Left Wings, and a question constantly discussed is whether a split will come between them. The lines of fissure are already apparent; they are so clear that many observers confidently foretell an open division in Congress- at an early date, with a complete change in the political scene as the consequence. There is that possibility, no doubt. But after talking to many of the leaders of the Congress Party, I doubt whether there is any certainty, or even probability. The leaders are as fully aware of the tendencies within their movement as the observers outside, and they realise the risks. Although Mr. Nehru, the recent President of Congress, and Mr. Subhas Bose, his successor, are both convinced Socialists, they show no signs of wishing to force the pace. The agrarian legislation that is being promoted by several of the provincial Ministries—and not only by those belonging to the Congress Party—is of a pattern already adopted in many European countries, and is more often an effort to remedy obvious grievances of the peasantry, that ought to have been dealt with long ago, than an attempt to apply wholesale the theory of nationalisation.
Previous page
