Best Brain Worsted

Jabbering excitedly, delegates to the Third Indian Round Table Conference (TIME, Nov. 28) told His Majesty's Government last week that the "Lothian Plan" simply will not do.

Aged 50, the 11th Marquess of Lothian is supposed to be "the best brain at the India Office since Lord Birkenhead." Using this brain, Lord Lothian produced what seemed to many Britons a brilliant, simple and eminently workable plan for enfranchising more Indian women. At present 21 times more males than females vote in India. Under the Lothian Plan, persuasively expounded to the Conference by Lord Lothian last week, the wife or widow of every voting Indian male would be automatically enfranchised. What could be simpler or fairer than that?

Out of the Indian babel which greeted Lord Lothian came this Gibraltarlike objection :

"Such Indian husbands as have more than one wife could tolerate no arrangement which did not give all their wives the right to vote."

Lord Lothian's best brain had assumed that each polygamous husband would be able to pick one of his wives for enfranchisement. Indians at the Conference held that such an assumption could only be made by a man who knows nothing about managing a harem. The 11th Marquess of Lothian, they observed, is a bachelor.

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