GREAT BRITAIN: Indian Conference: Act II

Scene: The drawing room of the late Queen Anne (“Brandy Nan”) in St. James’s Palace, into which the London Naval Conference moved last winter after being opened by His Majesty in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords and into which the Indian Round Table Conference moved last week, having also been opened by George V fortnight ago in the Royal Gallery (TIME, Nov. 24).

Properties: Chairs for 86 Indian & British delegates; The Chair of Chairman James Ramsay MacDonald; a double elliptical table, a great improvement on the double U-shaped table at which the Round Table Conference first met.

Time: Enough to put through at record speed last week more than 50 speeches in which Indians of every class, from Princes to untouchables, and of every creed from Hindu to Mohammedan stood together publicly for the first time in history against the British.

(As the scene opened each day, all press correspondents were rigorously excluded, the British Government strategically obliging even the Indian press to apply for information and handouts of speeches to Capt. Wedgwood Benn, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for India.)

The Maharaja of Bikaner, Maj-General His Highness Sir Ganga Singhji Bahadur (Signer for India of the Treaty of Versailles, member of His Majesty’s Imperial War Cabinet, veteran of the World War, repeatedly decorated by Edward VII and George V, Hon. LL.D. Cambridge and Edinburgh, D.C.L. Oxford, Freeman of the Cities of London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol):

There are not two Indias.* We, the Princes, are Indians first and Princes afterward! . . .

The period of England’s “dominion over palm and pine” [Poet Rudyard Kipling] is now forever over. . . . I have seen . . . in British India . . . how the masses are being affected. . . . No half-hearted measures will meet the situation. . . .

We . . . must . . . make . . . for India . . . a federal system of government composed of the Native States and of British India . . . a co-equal partner in the great British Commonwealth . . . [in] the words of Abraham Lincoln “with malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right!”

The Earl Peel (twice Secretary of State for India [1922-24; 28-29] representing the British Conservative Party):

I want to pay the compliment of frankness to this assembly . . . if we agree here upon some form of constitution and you Indian delegates go back to work it, there is a strong organized party [Gandhi’s] in that country who will wrest it from you and use its newly granted powers for furthering their own separatist and independent ends.

(In a word Lord Peel opposed granting Dominion Status to India either now or at any specified future time, drew exclamations of fury by his cool sneer and pun that parliamentary institutions in India “are not growth but graft.”)

The Maharaja of Alwar, Colonel His Highness Sir Jey Singhji: I propose not a Federation of India but the United States of India. . . . To me “The United States of India” sounds more grand.

Brahman Dr. B. S. Moonje (Infuriated by Lord Peel, he had sat up all night revising his mild speech into an address of burning emotion):

I too shall speak frankly and sincerely! The time will never come again when any show of physical force is going to cow the Indian people. I have seen with my own eyes. . . .

(Here Brahman Moonje described minutely atrocious methods employed by the police of British India when dispersing crowds of non-violent Gandhite demonstrators for independence. News editors throughout the U. S. unanimously suppressed these details as unprintable. The gist: after tearing off Gandhite loin cloths, the police perpetrated upon the exposed parts painful indignities.

Well knowing that white men would doubt his charge, Brahman Moonje read into the record the explicit testimony of a white woman eyewitness, Miss Madeline Slade, daughter of a British Admiral, disciple of St. Gandhi. What Dr. Moonje read has just been published in the U. S. by Simon & Schuster on pages 158-160 of Philosopher Will Durant’s The Case for India [$2]).

The Marquess of Reading, Rufus Daniel Isaacs (former Viceroy of India, representing the British Liberal Party) :

We must speak with sincerity and frankness. You will forgive me if I use a strong expression. . . . I say that it is idle to say that at this moment there could be anything like equality of status—constitutional status that is—in India with the Dominions. . . . Impossible. . . . This conference has done one great thing . . . estalished the principle of “federalism” . . . only the principle.

The Maharaja of Navangar (famed as “Ranji” the onetime cricket champion):

The Nationalist [Gandhite] movement is universal throughout India . . . vital need of satisfying the aspirations of India as a whole.

Mohammed All (one of the famed “Ali Brothers,” Mohammedan champions of Indian liberty):

I have in me [bowing to Lord Reading] the same blood that runs in the veins of Lord Reading, who once sent me to prison. I am a Semite. . . . Oh you English! If you had listened to Burke you would not have lost America and you would not be talking of naval parity today. You would not have all these War debts to pay. You would not have to go to Geneva for preparatory disarmament negotiations which are going to succeed Heaven only knows when. . . .

God! have you got one real man in England—I care not what you call him: autocrat, democrat, aristocrat—who can rule and dare not lie? I hope my old friend Ramsay MacDonald will at least prove the man to rule and that he will not dare to lie to his own conscience, to his own dead wife, to his living country, to his own party, and that you British delegates of all parties will help him to make history.

But even more than I trust my friend. Mr. MacDonald. I trust the man whose name is George, whom you call His Majesty. He knows India better than any of his Ministers, and we are looking to him to do justice to 320,000,000 of my fellow-countrymen. George III lost America. Let history record that George V won India.

The Aga Khan, His Highness the Aga Sultan, Sir Mohammed Shah (Chairman of the British Indian Delegations, famed as the British-subsidized descendant of Fatima [daughter of Prophet Mohammed] who has kept millions of his faith quiet for years:

You, Mr. Prime Minister, have heard practically every school of Indian thought. . . . We all ask for a full measure of self-government! . . . There is no reason why we should not at this moment start on a basis of full self-government and responsibility!”

(His Highness later refused to deny a sensational story by Correspondent Raymond Gram Swing that the Aga Khan, bursting the bonds of his bought allegiance, privately declared to fellow Indians last week that either St. Gandhi ought to be let out of jail and brought to London or the Conference ought to move to India.)

James Ramsay MacDonald: The declaration of the Princes has revolutionized the situation . . . opening up the way to a really united and federated India. . . .

This then is a recognition of status. This recognition made here never can be departed from. . . . You have all got, in so far as it is worthy to be carried into the future, a federation. . . . Leaving this chair, as I shall now proceed to do . . . so that this plenary conference may resolve into committees . . . I . . . hope . . . we shall be able in our final meetings to register an agreement which will send you back to India happy men, powerful men.

Significance. The Prime Minister, having promised nothing in fact, promised so much by implication—and this at a time when the Labor Cabinet has only an unsteady majority in the House of Commons—that observers saw Scot MacDonald plunging neck-deep last week into a morass of good intentions from which he can extricate himself and party only by a display of the highest statesmanship.

Before the Conference divided to work in committees, Hindu Brahman Moonje with the Mohammedan Aga Khan and princes of both persuasions signed an epochal private pact of alliance with Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar representing India’s 45,000,000 lowly Untouchables (lowest class).

“Do not be surprised,” smiled Brahman Moonje at flabbergasted correspondents who know that Brahmans have been for centuries to Untouchables as white men to black, only more so. “The caste system is now rapidly breaking down. In the last three months there have been in Bombay more than 1,000 intermarryings between high castes and low castes, between Hindus and Mohammedans.”

*A reference to the distinction between the “Native States,” each ruled by a feudatory prince like the speaker, and “British India,” ruled directly by the Viceroy. The latter is a political sea in which the former are feudal islands.