Foreign News: Viceroy’s Plan

Everyone at the Round Table Conference (see p. 21) knew last week that for a long time to come India will enjoy exactly the measure of freedom Great Britain may choose to grant. Interest centered not on any Indian demand or request but wholly on three British tomes:

1) The Simon Report in two tomes totaling 753 pages which were three years in the making (TIME, May 26 et ante).

2) The Irwin Plan in one tome of 256 pages, hastily extemporized by Viceroy Baron Irwin in four months, released last week.

In all seriousness a prominent Indian delegate estimated that to deal with, without skimping, the questions which occupied Sir John Simon and Lord Irwin for 36 months, the conference must sit for at least 34 months. But the British cry last week was “Speed!” The MacDonald government tentatively set three months as the conference time limit.

Supreme at Delhi. Both Sir John and the viceroy agree that Burma should be separated from the rest of India, constituted a Crown Colony under a governor appointed from London.

Sir John and Lord Irwin disagree upon the subject of “Dyarchy,” the system by which in the Indian provincial governments the less important departments are entrusted to Indians, the more important (such as “police”) to Britons. Through fistfuls of pages the Report and the Plan weave back and forth among the intricacies of modifying “Dyarchy,” but both emerge with the recommendation that final decision in every case must be reserved to the Viceregal Government which, it is recommended, shall retain supreme power to override the acts of Indian provincial legislatures and the Assembly at Delhi.

Of recommendations to enlarge the freedom of British India most notable is the suggestion of Sir John Simon that the provincial franchise be extended from 3% to 10% of the population.

Simon Lemon, Irwin Apple. The real difference between the Simon Report and the Irwin Plan, the only factor which suggested that progress toward India’s aspirations may be made at the conference, was a matter of tone. Great and broad-visioned lawyer though he is, Sir John Simon infuriated Indians by three sour bits of priggery:

1) Appointed under the late Earl of Birkenhead when Secretary of State for India, Sir John Simon shared the Birkenhead view that no Indian should sit on the Simon commission, and none did.

2) The commissioners rigidly excluded from their Report any consideration of the Nationalist movement for Independence led by St. Gandhi, boasted in their conclusion, “We have not altered a line of our Report on that account.”

3) Nowhere in the Report’s 753 pages is there discussion of “Dominion status” for India: the paramount issue.

Exactly opposite is the tone of the Irwin Plan. The viceroy, a kindly Englishman, gives reign to his emotions, urges that “we spare no efforts and even take some risks,” admits that “it would be a grave mistake to underestimate [the] force or depreciate [the] value” of St. Gandhi’s movement, concludes, “[I] have endeavored to point the way to … place upon the constitution the first definite impress of Dominion status.”

Carefully examined and legalistically weighed, the Irwin Plan is as trustworthy a bulwark of British rule in India as the Simon Report, but it is much more palatable. India, which yearns to taste the apple of Dominion Status, is almost promised that she may presently feel “the first impress” of this apple.

Apropos the Princes and Maharajas, both Sir John and Lord Irwin recommend that the two Indias which exist today, namely the princely “Native States” and plebeian “British India” (see map p. 21) should eventually merge into “The Indian Federation,” but both Report and Plan are pessimistic on this point, seem to fear that the haughty Indian rulers will refuse indefinitely to merge. During last week the conference did no more than formally assemble, will reach the first stages of discussing Report and Plan this week.