INDIA'S OPPORTUNITY
q't HE task of the British Government in the matter of an J. Indian settlement has been to discover not the solution that would be the best and the most practical in its own eves, or even in the eyes of the world, but the solution that would command the best prospect of general acceptance in India itself. The plan that emerged from the prolonged de- liberations of the Simon Commission, the three Round Table Conferences and the Joint Parliamentary Committee, and finally took shape in the 1935 Act, on which provincial government in India is at present based, gave India a constitu- tion under which she might well have lived and prospered. But it is not a constitution drafted by Indians for themselves— though from first to last Indians figured largely in the formal and informal discussions on the plan—and for reasons which are familiar but which it would serve no good purpose to dwell on here, the proposed central government, with federation as its basis, has never come into being at all, and of the eleven provincial governments which began their career as autonomous bodies with such promise only four are functioning normally. today. Any new plan, it is plain, must depend for its accept- ance on the support of moderate men of all parties in India. It must disappoint all schools, for the simple reason that if it conceded the full demands of any one school it was bound to be denounced and rejected by the others. So long, in par- ticular, as the official programme of Congress and the official programme of the Moslem League were both insisted on without abatement there was no possibility of devising any instrument that would bridge the communal gulf. The supreme merit of the proposals Sir Stafford Cripps announced on Monday is that they provide common ground on which both Congressmen and Moslems can take their stand, not indeed without some compromise—that was inevitable—but without the sacrifice of any essential articles in their political creeds.
The danger which threatens India is a factor making power- fully for unity, but it would be unjust to suggest that it needed the stress of war to persuade the British Government to make concessions which it ought to have offered voluntarily long ago. It did offer them voluntarily. What is conspicuous about the present proposals is not their difference from those of August, 1940, but the skill and wisdom with which British Policy in regard to India has been restated. What are the essential features of the War Cabinet's plan? India, as in 1940, is to be constituted at the earliest moment possible a Dominion equal in status in every respect with the other Dominions and with the United Kingdom itself. (That aim Was indeed defined as long ago as 1917.) The new consti- tution is to be drafted by Indians themselves, as in the 1940 Proposals, and though the War Cabinet goes further than before in proposing a method by which the constituent assembly should be elected (by an electoral college consisting Of the elected members of the lower houses of the provincial legislatures), it is left perfectly open to the leaders of Indian Opinion in the principal communities to substitute some other method. What is new, and it is a notable innovation, is the Concession that any province in British India, and, of course, any of the Indian States, shall be free to remain outside the Indian Union which it will be the purpose of the constituent assembly to bring into being. The recognition of the demand of the Moslems to create out of the predominantly Moslem Provinces a new and independent sovereign State of Pakistan iS courageous and wise. Moslems would be bound to insist on secession so long as the right to secede was denied them; if it is fully recognised they are far more likely to appreciate the advantages of remaining part of a united and powerful India. There is, moreover, a clear inducement to the Hindu majority to do everything reasonable to conciliate the Moslems.
The superiority of the present proposals over their prede- cessors lies less in their content than in the time and manner of their presentation. Hitherto the spokesmen of the British Government have been the Secretary of State and the Viceroy, both of them holders of offices which tended inevitably to emphasise tacitly India's dependence. Today it is the voice of the War Cabinet that addresses India—of the Prime Minister, who had always been credited with grave hesitations about Indian emancipation, of the leader of the Labour Party, of Mr. Eden, a Conservative fundamentally Liberal in his outlook, and above all, in view of the personal part he is called on to play, of Sir Stafford Cripps, whom Congress at any rate regards with reason as its most sympathetic and under- standing friend in Downing Street. Our full debt, and India's, to Sir Stafford cannot be appraised till the verdict which will determine the success or failure of his mission has been pro- nounced by the Indian communities. But already he has done more than any other man could. His insistence on his complete identity of view with the Prime Minister, and the plain intimation that he himself believes that the present proposals embody everything that India could reasonably ask or desire and everything essential to her role as a fully self- governing Dominion, endowed even with the right to sever association with the British Commonwealth altogether, is calcu- lated to commend the new plan in India as nothing else could.
It is now for the leaders of Indian opinion, with the eyes of the world on them, to prove whether they are of a stature to grasp the opportunity laid before them at so grave an hour in their country's fortunes. While their aspirations cannot be fully realised till after victory, for constitution-making and war go ill together, some outward badges of India's new status can be affixed at once. What is meant by the statement that "His Majesty's Government desire and invite the immediate and effective participation of the leaders of the principal sections of the Indian people to the counsels of their country, of the Commonwealth and of the United Nations" is in part explained by Sir Stafford Cripps' announcement that India has been invited to appoint representatives to sit on the War Cabinet and on the Pacific Council in Washington or London. But more than that would appear to be implied. It is evidently hoped that in the atmosphere of new cordiality and new responsibility which Sir Stafford Cripps' presence and the proposals he has unfolded have created the titular leaders of the chief Indian parties will now take the places which it had always been hoped they would fill on the Viceroy's Executive Council and the National Defence Council. Both these bodies are ably staffed as it is, but by patriotic and able individuals rather than by representatives of bodies like Congress and the Moslem League, which have hitherto withheld their co- operation even at this time of crisis. If, as there is reason to hope, they, and all Indians, are prepared now to forget the past and fix their minds on the new destiny opening before India the first evidence of that must be the acceptance by men like Mr. Nehru and Mr. Rajagopalachari, Mr. Jinnah and Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, of immediate responsibility for the mobili- sation, stimulation and direction of India's war effort.
The power to choose has been given to India, and it may be used well or ill. The new plan may be rejected altogether by one or more of the great Indian communities whose acceptance is essential to its success. In that event there will be delight in Berlin and Tokyo and Rome, and dismay in Moscow and Washington and Chungking. Even if the plan is accepted—it seems incredible that the impossible demand that General Wave11 be replaced on the Viceroy's Executive Council by an Indian defence member be pressed to breaking-point—it will still be open, after the constitution has been drafted, for any province or any or all of the States to break the unity which has been so patiently forged through generations of British association with India, and for schism to take the place of consolidation. That is possible, and it is right that it should be possible, for the freedom that is offered to India must include the right to disintegrate. That would not necessarily be a dis- aster. In a population of nearly 400,000,000 there is material for two or three or more powerful States. But this is the day of wide autonomy for diverse units within one large frame- work, and India, it would seem, will best fulfil her destiny in the form of a single great union like Russia or China. Her path at the best will not be easy. There are immense diversities to weld into unity in that great country. But a right choice today will engender a common confidence and faith equal to any need.
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