The Time is Now

So serious were disturbances in India last week that General Sir Alan Hartley announced that it had been necessary "on five occasions to use airplanes to deal with mobs by machine-gun fire from the air."

In Delhi a tall Indian dressed in pajamas and supposedly representing the Viceroy paraded through the streets leading a string of donkeys, each of which bore a placard with the name of an Indian member of the Viceroy's Council. Man & asses were arrested, and the court debated whether animals as well as man had violated rules banning parades.

Ever since the Indian Mutiny in 1857 the British Raj had managed to deal with such disturbances. A long line of viceroys, some bad, some as imbued with noble sentiments as Viscount Halifax, professed that British rule was guiding India through evolution to eventual dominionhood in the British Empire. But last week it appeared that evolution had turned into revolution. India held not only jailed prophets but also homemade bombs, pistols and bottles of acid in the hands of terrorists. From the western world the Indians were learning the technique of violence, not the technique of self-government.

Contradiction. The supposedly transitional machinery of self-government which the British set up as the Indian Legislature Assembly met in Delhi (now swept by malaria). The members, weighted in favor of Government appointees and Europeans (39 Congress party members were in jail), argued turgidly. Gaunt, scholarly, widely hated Home Member Sir Reginald Maxwell inadvertently contradicted Winston Churchill's claim of "reassuring" conditions (TIME, Sept. 21) by an account of railways damaged and of Bengal Province having been for a while "almost completely cut off from northern India." Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Columbia University-educated Untouchable leader, claimed strikes at the great Tata Iron & Steel Works had the connivance of the management, which paid workers three months in advance.

Conciliation? More likely to bring about a settlement within India--if one is possible--were meetings between political groups outside the Congress party. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Moslem League's opportunistic president, barking for Pakistan (a separate Moslem state), came close to agreement on national government with his old political enemy, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu (Orthodox) Mahasabha. A Government refusal to allow Dr. Mookerjee to interview Gandhi helped to balk a possible agreement. The Moslem premiers of Sind and Punjab and Bengal urged conciliation. A millionaire industrialist and longtime intimate friend of Gandhi, Ghan-shyamdas Birla, said that he believed Gandhi would agree to allow Jinnah to form his own government.

Optimism. General Sir Archibald Wavell reported on his recent inspection trip to Assam and Bengal, the northeastern provinces where a Japanese invasion is threatened when the monsoon rains end in mid-October. Optimist Wavell compared Japan to a boa constrictor which has swallowed a goat and has to have time to digest it. He spoke of retaking Burma. Wavell's optimism may have been regarded by some as a military boost to the United Nations. But there was no cause for optimism in a political situation that, unless remedied, will endanger the United Nations' dealing with Asia for years. Intervention? Not so befogged as the British Raj was Frances Gunther of the onetime writing team of John and Frances Gunther. In Common Sense last week she wrote: "The major event of World War I was the Russian Revolution. . . . The major event of World War II is the Indian Revolution. . . . What are we, the United Nations, doing about the Indian Revolution? We are doing everything possible to hamstring, to frustrate, to spike, to cripple, to undermine and ultimately to destroy [it] What earthly good will that do?"

But not altogether forgotten was the plight of the Indian people, nor the necessity of keeping them on the side of the United Nations in Asia. This week 57 U.S. educators, writers, scholars and civic leaders petitioned President Roosevelt and China's Chiang Kai-shek to intervene. Their contention: "The time for mediation in India is NOW."

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