Tea Amid Terror

Riots and demonstrations throughout India last week showed that the spreading ripple of St. Gandhi's movement for independence (TIME, March 24, et seq.) has widened to reach Peshawar near the remote Afghan frontier.

In protest against British firing on a mob at Peshawar, a funeral procession of 60 coffins was staged last week, but when British police poked the corpses about half of them leaped from their coffins, ran. Magnificent was the restraint of police at Bombay, where thousands of St. Gandhi's sympathizers were allowed to parade past the great stone arch called "The Gateway of India," past the Royal Yacht Club, past the Taj Mahal Hotel.

"The salt law is broken!" screamed the marchers. "The Government is dead!" But on the verandah of the Royal Yacht Club, Englishmen and Englishwomen imperturbably continued to take tea.

In places less public the police were less cool. St. Gandhi was exaggerating, not lying, when he said last week: "Instead of arresting [violators of the salt laws] the authorities have violated the persons of people who have refused to part with salt, held generally in their fists. To open their fists their knuckles have been broken, their necks have been pressed, they have been even indecently assaulted until they have been rendered senseless.

Ominous developments: 1) the St. Gandhi boycott against British goods reached such proportions that the Japanese Government railways cut freight and railway rates to speed goods from Japanese factories to boats destined for India, so that Japan may get all possible business while the getting is good; 2) His Majesty's Viceroy, Baron Irwin, accepted the "protest resignation" of the Speaker of the Indian assembly; 3) the Bombay stock exchange and other business houses closed for a day "in protest" when St. Gandhi's secretary was arrested; 4) Baron Irwin proclaimed that "civil disobedience . . . is rapidly developing . . . into violent resistance to the constituted authority"; 5) the Government clapped an official censorship on all the northwestern provinces, ordered evacuation of European women and children from Peshawar and other cities on the Afghan frontier.

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