Cripps Trip

High-domed, socialistic Sir Stafford Cripps was off to India last week with British Government offers, arguments and possible compromises in his brief case.

Giving this job to Sir Stafford was a popular move on Prime Minister Winston Churchill's part, both at home and in India. Skeptics suggested that his passage to India might have been arranged by the Tory bloc, to rid the British scene of this ardent advocate of aid to Russia and Indian self-government (see p. 44). But there were signs that pointed against such a conclusion.

First, although few men could have been more aware of Tory pressure at home, Sir Stafford had volunteered to go. And Winston Churchill had never sounded more sincere. Foregoing all rhetoric, he gave Parliament straight, sensible reasons for the Cripps trip: "We should ill serve the common cause if we made a declaration which would be rejected by essential elements in the Indian world and which would provoke fierce communal disputes at the moment when the enemy is at the gates of India. . . . [Sir Stafford] carries with him the full confidence of the Government, and he has to procure the necessary measure of assent, not only from the Hindu majority but also from those great minorities amongst which the Moslems are the most numerous and on many grounds pre-eminent."

India was waiting, with working-committee meetings of both the National Congress Party and the Moslem League scheduled for the next fortnight. Said the Congress' Mohandas Gandhi: "In spite of my love for the British, I think their imperialism has been the greatest crime against India. The immediate thing, therefore, that the British Government should do is confess the wrong and undo it. Of the undoing there is as yet no sign visible in the Indian sky." The Moslem League's Mohamed Ali Jinnah still clung to the League's demands for a separate Moslem state.

In India, sympathetic Sir Stafford Cripps could sound out all factions privately, work toward compromises all around. He would do so with a veteran lawyer's tact as well as high minded ambition. Conceivably he might engineer an Indian agreement, headed toward representative self-government and all-out war effort, that would make his name ring in Indian and British history.

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