Foreign News: Salt in the Sores of India

One month after the British decision to suppress Mohandas K. Gandhi’s Indian National Congress party, Winston Churchill informed the House of Commons that the situation in India “gives no occasion for undue despondency or alarm.” But from the facts he gave, and others he ignored or distorted, it was clear that the British will neither admit to themselves how serious unrest is in India, nor will they yield to Gandhi.

Commemorating Gandhi’s month-old arrest, hundreds of his followers, choking under a tear-gas barrage, lay prone or squatted in Bombay streets. But although Gandhi’s movement was spreading, the Raj persisted in pretending that it had suppressed the demonstrations and averted greater uproar. The danger, increasing week by week, was that the full fury of India’s disorder would burst when dry war weather in late September and October* adds its welcome to Japanese invaders.

Churchill on India. Churchill rose from the House of Commons’ front bench, placed his sheaf of quadruple-spaced notes before him. He was the same Winston Churchill who had lived a “gay and lordly” life as a subaltern in the 4th Hussars at Bangalore, India, in 1896. Age had broadened his beam and stolen his hair. It had not changed his view on the “patience and knowledge” of the Government of India. “It is patient,” Churchill the Subaltern wrote nearly 50 years ago, “because, among other things, it knows that if the worst comes to the worst, it can shoot anybody down.” Still a scrapper, Churchill the Prime Minister turned on the rich flow of rhetoric which stiffened British spines in the darkest hours of World War II. This time his finely chiseled words, falling flat and harsh, rubbed salt into the sores of India. “Mischievous half-truths,” screamed the Indian press.

Said Churchill: The rejected Cripps proposal of post-war dominion status and a possible Hindu-Moslem partition “is the settled policy of the British Crown and Parliament.” (While he spoke, responsible Hindu, Sikh and Moslem minority leaders demanded a wartime national government.)

Said Churchill: The Congress party “does not represent all of India. . . . It does not even represent the Indian masses.” Outside the Congress, “and fundamentally opposed to it, are 90,000,000 Moslems in British India [cries of “Nonsense!” and “Order, Order”] . . . 50,000,000 Untouchables . . . and 95,000,000 subjects of the Princes of India.” (The facts: The British have previously recognized the Congress as spokesman for the Hindus; Moslems, represented only in part by the Moslem League, also want independence; in the larger princely states the Congress has some of its strongest support.)

Said Churchill: Without compulsory service, India has raised an army of 1,000,000 volunteers. (The facts: in poverty-stricken India “volunteers” are easy to get with Army pay at $5 a month and plenty to eat assured; new volunteers have been nicknamed “rice soldiers.”)

Churchill gave one fact that had not been acknowledged by the Raj in India, or admitted to the outside world through India’s tight censorship: Japanese fifth-column work in the northeastern (invasion) provinces of Bengal and Assam has been on a “widely extended scale and with special direction to strategic points.” In spite of the obvious reminder of Hong Kong, Singapore and Burma, Churchill summed up the Indian situation as “improving and, on the whole, reassuring.”

China on India. Alarmed last week were the Chinese, who reported new Japanese troop concentrations near the Burma-India border. Lauchlin Currie, President Roosevelt’s envoy to China, told Washington that the Chungking Government is pressing for Indian mediation by the President. Repeatedly since the arrest of Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s right-hand man and China’s great & good friend, the Chungking press has “hoped” for mediation. Dr. T. F. Tsiang, director of political affairs, stated the Chinese position when he said that the conflict is not a British domestic question, but a moral issue concerning “Not only all the United Nations, but the future prospect of the future world order.”

U.S. on India. The reasons for Chinese anxiety and that of all United Nations, including Russia and the U.S., are at least fivefold: 1) only through India can fighting China be supplied; 2) only from India can the United Nations launch a campaign to recover Burma; 3) control of India means control of shipping in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean; 4) India’s position enables United Nations’ air power to strike east or west; 5) Indian supply routes to Iran and Russia will be increasingly important if Russia’s southern armies are defeated.

Returning from India, U.S. Industrialist Henry Francis Grady revealed last week that U.S. experts had thoroughly canvassed India’s possibilities as a strategic military bastion and a source of materiel. Wherever he went Grady heard the old complaint that war production was hampered by Britain’s protection of her own interests and by the apathy of labor and industry. The full Grady report was not released, but its recommendation that U.S. engineers and technicians be sent to speed up Indian war production was evidence of the U.S. stake in India and the need for internal stability.

Snow on India. Digging deep into India’s troubled politics, Correspondent Edgar Snow of Satevepost wrote that long-sought agreement between the Hindu-dominated Congress and the Moslem League of shrewd-bargaining Ali Mohamed Jinnah would lead to almost immediate independence.* He said that war-plant production and expansion would be greatly accelerated by the motive of patriotism; that military training and conscription might be introduced; men of ability brought to defense service; villagers trained, as in China, to make war goods. “India,” said Snow, “would lift up her head, shake off her inferiority complex, and get in tune with the rest of the world.”

Without Moslem-Hindu accord and a dynamic program allowing Indians to fight for themselves against the Japanese, Correspondent Snow saw only gloom ahead. Fifth-column work would increase, abetted by bitter tales from returning Indian soldiers of white discrimination in the flight from Burma. “I have seen enough to convince me,” said Snow, “that we cannot hold India against both the Indians and the Japanese.”

* Gandhi’s 73rd birthday is Oct. 2.

*In a pea-green paneled room at 10 Aurangzeb Road, Delhi, Jinnah this week criticized Churchill’s speech as misleading, urged an immediate “provisional composite government.”