Mr. Gandhi's Plans Whether Mr. Gandhi has or has not
actually retired from the Indian National Congress is still a little obscure. His views, particularly on the subject of khaddar—home- spun cloth—and the fostering of village industries, are being fully accepted by Congress, and his demand that non-violence shall be formally and prominently inserted in its programme has been immediately conceded. The spinning-wheel crusade must be regarded, today at any rate, as an end in itself, not an oblique form of boycott of British textiles. Mr. Gandhi, impressed like everyone else with the necessity of raising the miserable standard of life in the villages of India, is endeavouring to find some ancillary industry for the peasant in the months when little or no work on the land is possible. Hence his proposal that instead of paying the trifling fee (four annas) for Congress membership every member should deliver 8,000 feet of home-spun yarn monthly. It looks as though Mr. Gandhi, withdrawing like Mr. Gladstone into nominal retirement, will still dominate his party from the background and may return to dominate it openly at any moment. Certainly no obvious successor suggests himself.
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