Foreign News: Man of the Year, 1930

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¶ Strikes and mass demonstrations have decreased in frequency throughout India, but in the punjab (north) and Calcutta (east), the districts furthest from Gandhi-land proper (the Bombay Presidency), the Government faces much spontaneous violence: assaults, attempted assassinations, assassinations of British officials, particularly the military. The British Inspector General of Prisons in Bengal (east) was recently assassinated.

¶ In Burma Province a force of 1,000 well-armed native rebels swept through the villages of southeast Tharrawaddy, murdered British Forest Ranger H. V. W. Fields Clarke. British and Indian troops including the famed East Kent Buffs, scourge of many an Indian uprising, moved against them. In London Mr. U BaPe, Burmese representative at the Round Table Conference, sought to exonerate his countrymen on the ground that despatches said the rioters wore "only blue pajama bottoms."

"That dress is not Burmese," said he severely.

"It approaches more nearly the Shan dress."

¶ Correspondents nearly all believe that if the British Parliament (on a recommendation from the Round Table) grants India full "dominion status," the Gandhite Independence Movement can be diverted into that channel. If, however, the name only of "do-minion status" is granted (with its implicit "right of secession" temporarily reserved), there is about an even chance that the Indian National Congress can be horn-into quiescence.

If. finally, the Round Table breaks down, enough spontaneous violence is expected to give His Majesty's Government enough provocation to use at strategic points the weapon of massacre, so effective when Brigadier-General Dyer sprayed with machine gun bullets and killed some 400 Indians at Amritsar in 1919. General Dyer received the censure of the House of Commons by a vote of 230 to 129, was endorsed by the House of Lords 129 to 86, and finally accepted from the Morning Post a large sum of money spontaneously made up by individual Britons.