Soldiers & Simon

Grimly last week H. E. Maj.-General Sir Frederick Sykes, Governor of Bombay Presidency, moved to smash by military rather than police methods St. Gandhi's independence movement at its focus, Bombay.

The viceroy's decree making "picketing" a crime punishable by six-month imprisonment (TIME, June 9) was being flagrantly disobeyed. Weeks ago the Bombay police, engulfed by hundreds of thousands of Gandhites and under orders not to fire, became virtually helpless. Soldiers would now be tried. Marching out of their barracks at Poona--near which St. Gandhi remained imprisoned--a battalion 1,000 strong, half British, half native, entrained last week for Bombay with all the paraphernalia of war: rifles, machine guns, armored cars.

Two armored trucks drove through Hornby Street, Bombay's Fifth Avenue. Police accompanied them, carrying a new weapon, canes three feet long with leather thongs at the end. With these they flogged satyagrahists (civil disobedience volunteers). They arrested 26 pickets of British stores, who within one hour were sentenced to four months hard labor. At once 26 replacements appeared before the stores.

Simon Report. As Bombay was flogged. London settled down cozily to read the ''Simon Report." Last week this state paper of more than 400 pages, selling for three shillings (75-c-), became such a best-seller that within three days of its publication His Majesty's stationery office announced that the last copy of the first printing (17,000 copies) had been "distributed." Telegrams ordering more poured in from booksellers all over the British Isles, from clubs, even from "circulating libraries" which usually rent only fiction. England was excited. England knew that Sir John Simon and his commission had labored more than two years, including 21,000 miles of travel back and forth across India and "taking testimony" in every important city--all for the purpose of finding out and recommending whethera larger or a lesser degree of freedom should be given by Britain to the Indian Empire (TIME, Jan. 30, 1928).

With his big job done Sir John Simon returned last week to his rich legal practice; and to their jobs also returned his six commissioners (four Conservatives, two Laborites). Sir John was the Liberal on his so-called "nonpartisan" commission which actually had a Conservative majority.

By what Sir John beamingly called a "novel plan," the report was split into two sections: 1) "History" and 2) "Recommendations" of which only the former was issued last week. Although a "best seller" and Conservative to the core, it drew from the arch-Conservative Morning. Post a comment which rather let the cat out of the bag: "This survey is so carefully balanced and so judicially vague that it is difficult to see to what it leads."

"Insult to India." Vague though it is, the No. 1 section of the Simon Report slams the door on St. Gandhi's demand for independence now. It declares that the goal of British policy must be: "Progressive realization of responsible government in British India as an integral part of the Empire."

Result: In Bombay, Calcutta and Madras last week Gandhites paraded with such placards as "Simon's Folly!" "Insult to India!" and at Surat, near Bombay, a mob burned Sir John in effigy.

"It [the report] can be dismissed" said the Bombay Indian Daily Mail, organ of the Independent party, "as being nothing more or less than a rather badly cooked rice pudding, strongly flavoured with the cinnamon of die-hardism."

Meanwhile in cozy English homes the Simon Report yielded such fascinating information as that the average Indian earns but $40 per year, millions of natives live "more than four to a room in the slum areas" of India's great cities, there are 562 native states whose interests must be considered, only 2,500,000 Indians out of 320 million are "literate in English," there are 4,500,000 Indian Christians, and that the commission has been "much impressed by arguments for the separation of Burma" (which is Buddhist, "highly literate" and has no caste system), from the rest of India.

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