1933 & 1776

In ornate and gleaming New Delhi, the $50,000,000 Viceregal Capital, swarthy politicos of India's Legislative Assembly jabberingly debated last week the Gargantuan British bill--longest ever submitted to the House of Commons--which is to give India a new Status (TIME, Dec. 3).

New Delhi's Legislators could neither pass nor reject this bill, which lay last week some 5,000 miles away on Parliament's great oak table, but they could endorse or denounce officially an epochal measure already roundly cursed by Mahatma Gandhi's unofficial Indian National Congress. The New Delhi Legislators are supposed to be Viceroy Lord Willingdon's trained seals, if an Englishman can tram Indians. Last week they decided to vote on the major premise of the proposed new status.

This major premise, established at a cost exceeding $3,000,000 by London Round Table Conferences at which Mr. Gandhi showed the world his dollar watch (TIME, Nov. 20, 1930, et seq.), is that British India and the Native States should unite in one vast All-India Federation of 350,000,000 souls. At the First India Round Table Conference the Native States' turbaned and bejeweled Rajas and Maharajas plumped for Federation, chiefly in order to be early on a bandwagon which they thought was sure to start. Today, five years later, India's potentates are getting restless on their motionless bandwagon seats. Significantly last week it became known that His Exalted Highness, the Nizam of Hyderabad, ''Richest Man In The World," now thinks he was "coerced" into approving Federation. Last week at New Delhi the trained seals of the Legislative Assembly pained Viceregal Seal-master Willingdon by voting 74 to 58 that the basic principle of All-India Federation is "fundamentally bad and totally unacceptable to the people of British India."

In London it looked as if the costly, tedious and high-minded efforts of His Majesty's Government to do something for India may not get much further. In the House of Commons worried Secretary of State for India Sir Samuel Hoare could only burble ''Our policy is to do all we can by sympathetic help. . . ." Worst of all, National Government were being successfully attacked on their moderate India policy from their reactionary English rear. The situation appeared so desperate that British Majority Leader Stanley Baldwin needed all his bumbling genius for executing the maneuver known as muddling through. Stepping to a microphone last week honest Stanley Baldwin, Lord President of the Council, magnificently announced:

"When it [India's new status] is in operation we shall have one more reason for holding that the best days of the British Empire are not over! . . . By extending to India a greater measure of self-government we shall show that we have learned the lesson taught us by the American colonies in 1776. . . . We are proceeding by carefully regulated transfers of power. Owing to the peculiar conditions of the country India may take longer than the Dominions to reach the final goal, but the principle of evolution is the same. . . . We have learned from experience that we shall preserve our Empire if we succeed in giving its units the right amount of liberty in the right way at the right time!" Scrutiny of this analysis revealed no flaw, except that neither Britons nor Indians agree, even among themselves, as to which is the right way or what is the right time. Should Britain's Labor Party win the next election they will, so they announce, give India 'immediate self-government for India" plus prompt Dominion Status which includes the right of secession. Should Britain's moderate Baldwins give way to her reactionary Churchills, they stand pledged to tell Indians plainly that they must submit to being ruled. This, Laborites assume, would goad India to Revolution. What most Britons and some Indians felt they could perhaps cling to is the certainty of Stanley Baldwin's good intentions, his proverbial luck, his well-earned reputation for Masterly Inaction.

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