INDIA: Reprieve from Disaster

Down a jungle walk on Bengal's marshy coast last week, two Indian political leaders stalked solemnly away from Mohandas K. Gandhi's in-roofed hut, burned out in recent communal rioting. They were Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and President Acharya Kripalani of the All-India Congress Party. Hindu women blew conch shells, and thousands of devotees showered the two leaders with flowers.

Well might Nehru and Kripalani look solemn. As India seemed to teeter on the brink of bloodshed, they were returning to New Delhi, to face the Congress organization's toughest problem: to accept or reject the British version of how the Constituent Assembly should be run (TIME, Dec. 16). With Nehru and Kripalani went Gandhi's blessing and ad vice. They would not say whether the Mahatma had recommended concessions that might win Mohamed Ali Jinnah's Moslem League to Assembly participation.

Next day, Gandhi renewed his spiritual campaign against India's bitter communal feuding. At 7:35 on the morning of Jan. 2, clasping a long bamboo pole in his right hand and flanked by four companions, Gandhi set out on a walking tour of Bengal's Noakhali district. On his "last and greatest" experiment, the Mahatma said he would visit 26 Moslem villages, would seek to rekindle the lamp of "neigh-borliness" quenched in that area (and in much of India) by blood.

Few dared hope that Gandhi's saintly pilgrimage would influence more than a handful of Moslems. But few, doubted this week that it was his New Year's advice which Nehru and Kripalani ex pressed in a Congress resolution that gave a well-hedged "yes" to the British pro posal, and opened the door to Jinnah for a face-saving entry into the Assembly.

Third Alternative. The British Cabinet Mission had divided India's eleven provinces into three groups for drafting provincial constitutions, and had made it clear last month that each group must vote as a whole on each draft. Group A was incontestably Hindu; Group B lumped Moslem-dominated Punjab and Sind together with the Congress-dominated North-West Frontier; Group C paired Bengal and Assam, where 36 million Moslems live with 34 million non-Moslems. Congress held out for a prov-ince-by-province vote within each group, which would assure it of a dominant voice in eight drafts instead of six. Mohamed Ali Jinnah sat tight with the British; under the group-voting plan, he had a slight edge over Congress in Groups B and C. The apparent Hindu choices: acceptance, or an immediate showdown with the British and the Moslem League.

The ameliorating resolution was in part political doubletalk. It accepted the group voting plan, but asserted: "In the event of any attempt at . . . compulsion, a province or a part of a province has the right to take such action necessary as to give effect to the wishes of the people concerned." Since the British plan was only for constitution-drafting, this represented little change except to give the Congress Party a future out if some Congress provinces or districts later proved recalcitrant.