INDIA: Declaration of Independence

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Since that defy, despite the would-be liberal policy of James Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister's hands have been tied by opposition in the House of Commons, and the British Government has in fact done nothing to meet Indian aspirations. There have been commissions of investigation, soothing statements by the Viceroy, and several bombings, but nothing definite. For example: Nobody was killed last week when "persons unknown" dynamited the empty dining car of the viceregal train. (In 1872 a knife was stuck into Lord Mayo, only Viceroy of India ever successfully assassinated. Moral: A bomb—even the one which successfully exploded in the very howdah of Viceroy Lord Hardinge of Penshurst in 1912—is a poor weapon.)

With their ultimatum in effect rejected, the Indian National Congress was at zero hour last week when Mr. Gandhi, attended by ascetic gentlemen in white loin cloths and lean ladies in pink girdles, squatted down cross-legged on the rostrum and announced that the executive committee of the Congress had adopted unanimously his draft Declaration of Independence and would put it to vote after suitable debate. As the debate began, the weather turned bitter cold. Mr. Gandhi drew a piece of cloth over his shoulders and sat quiet, knitting something woolen.

All that was contemplated by Saint Gandhi last week was that the Congress should follow up his Declaration of Independence by exhorting 250 million Indians to stop paying taxes, stop buying British goods, indulge in a passive orgy of "nonviolent non-coöperation."

The serious aspects of this threat are that, if Indians stopped buying, Great Britain would lose more than one-eighth of her export sales, and that, if Indians stopped paying taxes, the people of Great Britain could not by any possibility make up the deficiency necessary to maintain themselves as a great power and still pay what they owe the U. S. in War debts. Because previous Indian boycotts have always broken down, British statesmen were anxious rather than frightened last week, calmly faced the probability that before "nonviolent non-coöperation" has gotten very far there will be enough casual rioting and bloodshed to justify the reimprisonment of Mr. Gandhi (let out of jail in 1924), and the mowing down of a goodly number of gentlemen in white, ladies in pink.