Mahatma, Pandit & Khan

The myriad eyes of teeming, docile Indians turned in mild approval and amaze, last week, upon Mother India's three greatest and most potent sons:

Mahatma Gandhi

The Aga Khan

Pandit Motilal Nehru

The famed, ascetic Mahatma is the Saint of India's Hindus; and the Pandit is now their Sword. The great Aga Khan is neither Saint nor Sword, but a very rich, fat and astute descendant of Prophet Mohammed, and therefore the most influential of Indian Mohammedans. Last week the Aga Khan traveled from his sumptuous home in Bombay (western India) to Delhi (northern India), and there prepared to sit as chairman of the all-India Mohammedan Congress. Meanwhile at Calcutta (eastern India) the predominantly Hindu so-called Indian National Congress, met under the chairmanship of Pandit Motilal Nehru, and under the aegis of sainted Mahatma Gandhi. These two gatherings--neither of them Parliamentary or authoritative--speak for Mother India, insofar as she is articulate. The pity is that too often her Moslems and Hindus speak at absolute cross purposes. Last week, however, each assemblage met with fervent protestations that at last Hindu-Moslem unity against the British Raj was about to be attained. Dubious, sympathetic observers watched.

Smart British sahibs of Calcutta affected unconcern, when the Hindu Congress met, 6,000 strong, within strolling distance of the leafy Meidan, where sahibs and mem-sahibs take their aristocratic air of an evening. Actually anxious talk buzzed all up and down the English clubs and offices in Calcutta's busy Chawringhee. It was surely no good sign when the 6,000 delegates and their more than 11,000 sympathizers proceeded to burn huge piles of Made-in-England goods before sitting to business. Presiding hysterically over the bonfire, Pandit Nehru cried: "Hail, soldiers of Swaraj [Self-Determination]! Let your shouts ring out when I unfurl our banner (hoisting it). Soon strikes the hour of supreme sacrifice for our Motherland!"

What the haranguing Pandit meant was coldly and succinctly put to the Subjects Committee of the Congress by skinny, self-starved Mahatma Gandhi, squatting as usual on his little dais, naked except for a loin cloth--fanatically revered.

In unusually keen-cut terms the Mahatma proposed that the Congress deliver to the British Government an ultimatum in the following sense:

Either grant to India full and free Dominion Status before Dec. 31, 1929; or from that day forward the Congress will declare a non-violent but absolute boycott of British goods, British officials, British schools, and British taxes.

If the Indian National Congress really possessed the prestige to induce all Indians to declare a boycott at Gandhi's order, even the Empire Prime Minister, big and beefy Stanley Baldwin, might well tremble at the ultimatum of India's skinny little saint. As matters stand, it can only be said that the Gandhi boycott of several years ago was a serious but not fatal blow to Great Britain's vital trade with India. Whether a more effective boycott could be staged next year is a question for Hindu Gods--and Mohammed's Allah--to answer. Last week the Subjects Committee of the Indian National Congress put Saint Gandhi's ultimatum on the agenda by a decisive vote of 118 to 45.

As steersman of All-Indian Congress, potent Pandit Motilal Nehru dwarfed, from a practical standpoint, even the Big-Little Mahatma. As leader of the Swarajist Party in the Legislative Assembly at Delhi, the Pandit is an intensely active and practicing politician. His official status with the British Raj is second only to his unofficial might as President of the Hindu Congress. Grave and deeply read in law, the Pandit is also a mob-kindling orator, and moreover a zealot who gave up his lucrative legal practice in 1920, when Pied-Piper Gandhi piped "Non-Co-operation!"

If anyone can lead India's lazy enervated Hindus to strike a virile blow at Britain, that someone is the Pandit.

The soul and purpose of the man stood well revealed when he utterly refused to deal or cooperate with the Indian Statutory Commission, chairmanned by Great Britain's leading Liberal barrister Sir John Simon, and now in India, charged with investigating how large a measure of self-determination can be wisely extended by Great Britain's Parliament. Thoroughly suspicious of Sir John and all his works--Pandit Nehru has said: "In this Commission there is nothing but a machine to forge chains upon India. . . . Personally I should prefer forced slavery to being a party to forging the chains to bind me."