INDIA: Shames

The method of St. Gandhi is always to put a clawlike finger as publicly as possible upon whatever he thinks Britons are most ashamed of.

Last week he wrote to Viceroy Baron Irwin asking an investigation of the wholesale British-Indian police beatings of men, women and children who have taken part in non-violent Gandhite parades.

Lord Irwin's reply, not made public last week, was said by St. Gandhi to be a refusal, "curt and official."

Other things which the abstemious little brown man thinks Britons are ashamed of are the laws forbidding Indians to make salt and the British opium traffic in India. At his headquarters he made known that his followers will continue to protest such ''shames" while he ponders Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald's offer of limited Dominion Status for India, an offer which St. Gandhi strongly intimated, last week, he will reject.