INDIA: Will Be Hell?

An avalanche of close to 500,000 words buried in London last week the Second Indian Round Table Conference which has cost nearly $1,000,000.

In rambling, soot-stained St. James's Palace the final plenary session began at 10 a. m. Small grate fires accented the palace chill. Shivering and snuffling, the delegates climbed the crimson-carpeted grand stair. They were grimly resolved to utter 33 prepared orations if it took all day and all night, which it very nearly did.

Orator James Ramsay MacDonald admitted in 3,000 sonorous words that the $1,000,000 Conference had virtually failed. It broke down on the specific job of trying to draft a new constitution that would make the Government of India responsible chiefly to an Indian Parliament instead of to Great Britain's autocratic Viceroy of India. The larger issue, namely whether India should receive "dominion status" with its implicit right of secession from the British Commonwealth, was not even considered by the Conference—despite the fact that it was the Second Indian Round Table Conference and should have been the last.

In the circumstances Mr. MacDonald could only announce a Third Conference, to be held next year in India, and repeat the assurances with which he closed the First Conference last January, namely, that His Majesty's Government view with favor the setting up of an Indian Federation with an Indian Parliament as the supreme authority in all matters except: 1) defense; 2) foreign affairs; 3) finance.

Since control of these three most vital departments of government would continue "reserved" to Great Britain, the Prime Minister offered to the First Conference last January and to the Second Conference last week only the merest shadow of independence for India. Plausibly enough he argued that since the Hindu and Moslem delegates to the Second Conference have been unable to agree, even with each other, upon the proportion of Hindu and Moslem representation in the future Indian Parliament, they must all go back to India and keep on trying to thrash out these and other details among themselves.

"We have met with obstacles," cried Scot MacDonald, "but one of those optimists to whom humanity owes the most of its progress said : 'Obstacles were made to be overcome.' In that buoyancy of spirit and good will which comes from it, let us go on with our common task ! " Facing a third and nobody knows how many more $1,000,000 conferences, St. Gandhi, who had a heavy cold, received the Prime Minister's oration with no buoyancy of spirit whatever.

"I will study your declaration," he said thickly to Scot MacDonald, "once or twice or thrice, or as often as may be necessary, scanning every word of it, reading its hidden meaning if there is a hidden meaning in it—and if I then come to the conclusion, as just now seems likely, that as far as I am concerned we have come to the parting of the ways, it does not matter to us. ... The dignity of human nature requires that we must face the storms of life, and sometimes even blood brothers have got to go each on his own way. . . . Call it by whatever name you will, but I want complete independence for India."