How Much Longer?

(See Cover)

The whole Far East was atremble. From Burma, waves of refugees were already breaking over India's borders. Calcutta, Madras and other seaboard cities were being partly evacuated. If the Japanese struck at India and the Indian Ocean, 200 years of British-Indian argument might go up like tissue paper in a bonfire.

Yet in London the British Government was still mulling over the old argument. The incredibly complicated India problem threatened to become purely academic, a mass of mere words. Sir Stafford Cripps politely told Parliament that the Government had postponed comment on India's demands for self-government. While the British public cried for action, London rumor held that Government proposals had struck snags both in London and New Delhi.

In India the heat was creeping north from Cape Comorin, the heat which would grow to a relentless blaze scorching the country until the June monsoon. Much-traveled General Sir Archibald Wavell, back in New Delhi to resume his Indian command (see p. 19), waited in the heat for London to make up its mind. A U.S. air mission had arrived, the first tangible sign that U.S. fighters might join in India's defense. They too waited for London's words. And in New Delhi the Viceroy, who rules India for Britain, also waited.

Big, dignified, Roosevelt-jawed Victor Alexander John Hope, 54, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, strolled among the splashing fountains of his colossal, copper-domed viceregal palace. A mighty and beglamored figure, Britain's deputy over 352,000,000 Indians, he reviewed Indian troops of the New Delhi area, conferred with his Executive Council, talked with his private secretary Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, fed worms to his pet turtle, Jonah, whom Mohandas Gandhi once asked especially to see. Like the rest of India's millions, the Viceroy was waiting in the heat, waiting while the Japanese won Java and Rangoon, waiting to see whether, among other things, he would keep his post-waiting for London to make up its mind.

To much of the outside world, the British Government seemed like the Heifetz of all fiddlers while the Rome of all Romes burned. History might soon make the description fit. But after centuries of British-Indian relations, and even with the loss of India much more than a possibility, few British statesmen could be expected to do anything decisive about India. There were many reasons for this indecision.

Two Faces East. Britain has long shown India two different faces. One face has been ruthlessly imperialist. The harshness of this face can scarcely be exaggerated. During the Mutiny of 1857, the last widespread, violent revolt against the British Raj, Britons slaughtered harmless elderly Hindus of both sexes by the score (and were sometimes slaughtered themselves by the sepoys-see cut, p. 28). They seized Moslems, whose religion forbids contact with pork, and sewed them into pig skins before killing them. They tied some rebellious sepoys to the muzzles of cannon, and then fired the cannon. As late as 1919, at Amritsar, British General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer ordered his troops to disperse a prohibited meeting of unarmed Indians by firing into the crowd; the volley killed 379.

The other British face toward India has been liberal, reformist, seeking to redress imperialism's economic and personal ravages. Steadily through the years India has been championed by such Englishmen as Edmund Burke, who in 1788, speaking of the great Indian empire builder, Warren Hastings, said: "Was there ever heard, or could it be conceived, that a man would dare to mention the practices of all the villains, all the mad usurpers, all the thieves and robbers in Asia, that he should gather them all up, and form the whole mass of abuses into one code and call it the duty of a British Governor?"

In 1833 Lord Macaulay was intoning: "It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government. . . . Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history." It was such men who nurtured India's own liberal ideals and ambitions by inviting Indians into Britain's universities.

A British Case. Today many British liberals favor immediate Dominion status for India. Some favor immediate independence. But today, also, many liberals make perhaps the strongest possible case for extreme caution in Britain's India policy. The fact that the same case is adopted hypocritically by some archimperialists obviously does not impair its merits as a case. It rests on the undeniable major premise that the wrongs of the imperialist past cannot be undone, that present and future are what matter. The text is taken from the inscription on the $10,000,000 palace in which the Viceroy waited last week : "Liberty will not descend to a people ; a people must raise themselves to Liberty." The case goes on to claim that Indian self-government must be extended gradually, that sudden granting of it would result in civil war, ruinous to India and all its relations.

India is not a nation ; it is a subcontinent with many races and languages. It is only under British rule that India has known general unity. The bulk of India's population is made up of 250,000,000 Hindus and 80,000,000 Moslems; their religious and ethical ideals are widely divergent. Moreover, a third of India's space, a fourth of its population are in the 562 Indian States, of many sizes and conditions of government, which have their own rulers under an elastic "paramountcy" of the British Raj. These potentates generally incline toward British rule as safeguarding their own powers.

Since the Amritsar massacre of 1919, the British Government has been moving slowly but steadily toward Indian self-government. By the Act of 1935, provincial self-government became a fact. Eight of the eleven British provinces came under majority Governments of Mohand as Gandhi's and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's Indian National Congress, a great nationalist catchall of rich & poor, Hindu & Moslem, left & right. The Congress is the most powerful political group in India, though it has never had more than 4,500,000 paying members. The other three provinces had coalition governments.

But in 1939, when the Viceroy, following the Constitution, declared India in the war, the Congress forsook provincial self-government, withdrew its ministries, began demanding Indian independence as the price of war cooperation. Meanwhile India's second largest political party, Mohamed Ali Jinnah's Moslem League, loudly claimed that it could never submit to united Indian self-government unless it had 50% representation, since otherwise India's Moslems would be a permanent minority under the Congress-dominated Hindu majority. The Moslem League claimed heavy discrimination against Moslems, even atrocities, by Congress bureaucracies under the Act of 1935. The League began violent agitation for a separate Moslem state, Pakistan, taking over Moslem-majority provinces.

Still another great yeast cake of dissension were India's 60,000,000 Untouchables (peoples of the lowest caste), whose chief political spokesman was Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. He distrusted Congress ambitions, since they would lead to Hindu majority Governments which might sustain caste discrimination.

The British hold that rifts such as these would be fatal to self-government, that no such government can be established until the Indian National Congress and the Moslem League get together in a constitutional program. The British Government has repeatedly urged them to do so. If anything, they seem to grow farther apart. The British also emphasize the dangers of self-government in a country where only 95 out of 1,000 can read and write, where caste differences still hold firm among the vast Hindu majority, strongly inhibiting any idea of political equality.

Finally, the British case holds that immediate moves toward Indian demands would not galvanize India's war effort. It points out that India's war production has made astronomical increases-for India-in the past two years, that a great Indian Army, recruited as fast as equipment can be provided, has jumped from 170,000 to 1,000,000 since 1939. And despite the Congress' political views, many party leaders have plunged into civil defense, supply and morale activities. In short, the British case holds that India would rise to meet a Japanese attack, far more unitedly under British rule than it could during the internal struggle for political control that would arise between its own factions if independence were suddenly granted.

Indian Cases. Replying to this case for caution, India makes several cases. But they all agree that high-minded British liberalism is still much less evident than imperial British greed. Anti-British India cannot forget the long exploitation of India through British business and finance. It accuses British lust for profit and fear of Indian industrial competition of keeping India's population 75% supported by agriculture, only 2% by modern industry.

For decades India's chief exports have remained the same (cotton, jute, oilseeds, tea, tobacco). Yet India has iron-ore reserves three-fourths the size of U.S. deposits, huge reserves of coal, manganese, bauxite and many other minerals. Despite this raw wealth, Indian steel production, even under the spur of war, is under 1% of world production. India has a hydroelectric potential second only to that of the U.S., but only 3% is used.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, British-Indian tariffs have shaped India as a raw-material producer for British industry, a market for British finished goods, and persistently cracked down on Indian industry. Machine-made British goods drove India's ancient handicrafts out of business, forced millions back to the overpopulated soil.

During World War I, for purposes of supply, strategy and defeating foreign competition for the Indian market, Britain began -- encouraging Indian industry. But after British capital had enjoyed a brief post-war Indian industrial boom, the crash came and tariffs were readjusted to protect Britain. World War II has once again brought British encouragement of Indian industry. Even so, Indians have charged Britain with discrimination against Indian firms wishing to build air craft, ships and automobiles.

The chief Indian parties and groups all believe that politically educated Indians can govern India -for India's sake -better than the British. But their programs greatly differ:

> The Congress wants complete independence, rather than Dominion status. It declares that Britain has deliberately set Moslems against Hindus for Britain's political advantage. It wants a national central government, claims that the Moslem League would cooperate, if Britain granted independence.

> The Moslem League still demands a separate Moslem state.

> Dr. Ambedkar, spokesman of the Untouchables, wants Dominion status with representative government, has recently urged Britain to impose such a government by fiat, if the Congress-Moslem parties will not unite.

> From somewhere in Axis territory, debonair Subhas Chandra Bose, veteran Indian National Congress leader who fled India in 1941, preaches Axis propaganda by radio. The effect of Bose and other scattered Axis partisans in India is impossible to gauge.

>The chief Indian exponent of compromise with Britain, Liberal Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, has recently been gaining ground fast. Speaking for a group of nonparty leaders, he urges that Britain give a definite assurance of Dominion status after the war, make certain immediate changes:

1) The Viceroy's Executive Council of twelve (now eight Indians, four Britons) should be entirely Indianized, thus giving Indians the important portfolios of Finance and Defense. This would also force the Congress and Moslem parties to agree on councilmen or let Britain pick them.

2) Britain should give assurances that the Secretary of State for India will not use his powers to oppose the new Indianized Council.

Viceroy. The Indian apologists, at their best, reveal a passionate conviction; the British, a rational caution. There could be few better examples of this typical British temper than Scottish Viceroy Linlithgow. He is a model of sober British effort, often suspected of misunderstanding, frequently attended by friction. Son of Australia's first Governor-General, he was born to great wealth, went to Eton, served throughout World War I, thereafter specialized in agriculture. In 1926-28 he traveled exhaustively in India as Chairman of the Royal Commission on Indian Agriculture. Later he served on the Parliamentary committee which formulated the Government of India Act of 1935 (he accomplished a minor revolution by having Parliament open its windows in the summertime). He became Viceroy in 1936.

Lord Linlithgow's own estates had prepared him to occupy the Viceroy's staggering marble "lodge"-which has six miles of corridors-with casual ease. His innate conservatism was softened by sociability and humor-his London town house once bore the deeply felt legend in brass "This Is Not the Russian Embassy" (which was next door). The Viceroy was at first greatly admired in New Delhi for his hard work, conciliatory attitude, patient fact finding, agricultural knowledge. When the Congress party's provincial ministers balked at taking office under the 1935 Act, because of the extraordinary powers still reserved for the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow was able to persuade them that he could imagine few emergencies great enough to call for those powers.

Since the war crisis it has been said that Lord Linlithgow's conservatism has played into British industrial hands, which have held down India's industrial development and hence her war effort. A recent Indian cartoon showed the Viceroy hunting, with the legend: "This week the Viceroy shot down 247 enemy partridges." His persistence in official dignities has come in for criticism. He still uses a ten-car viceregal train, steps from it to scarlet carpets. Last month, when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek paid his momentous visit to India, the Viceroy sent an aide to welcome him instead of going himself.

But many feel that the Viceroy has done as well as any rational, cautious Briton might be expected to do in terrible, irrational times. Beyond doubt, he reflects the attitude of most of his colleagues and superiors in London. The great question is whether, in Indian policy, the times call for less rationality and more risk.

The most that was expected from the British Government last week was a compromise along the lines suggested by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. The Labor Party was urging it. Sir Stafford Cripps was probably urging it even more. The still-potent Tory imperialists were working hard against it.

But a new pressure was fast rising that might well force the British Government to do its bidding. This was the pressure of British public opinion. The British people in general were not experts on India. They could not judge the Indian issues either from first-hand experience or deep scholarship. They did not judge the issues from the standpoint of vested interests in India. But the British Government could ill afford to ignore their massed judgment, inexpert and instinctive as it might be. And, whatever the experts and officials and vested interests were saying last week, the British people were calling for Indian self-government, calling for it in such words as these: "We treat them like dirt and then expect them to fight."

Only time could fairly judge the complex Indian cases. But neither Japan nor the British people had time to waste. Unless every possible iota of Indian strength and spirit were called on, a day might soon come when Britain's Captains and Kings would depart from India, and the fire of Britain's power and glory would sink, perhaps forever, from India's dunes and headlands.

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