"The Gravest Danger"

The Tory gentlemen of the House of Lords were angry. Peer after peer rose to condemn Britain's decision to quit India next year (TIME, March 3). The Conservative leader, Viscount Cranborne, said the Government was "throwing up the sponge . . . abandoning our friends, washing their hands of the whole business." A motion of condemnation came from an old India hand, Viscount Templewood (as Sir Samuel Hoare he had been Secretary of State for India four years, then Foreign Secretary in 1935). He and others argued that the Government's decision was a betrayal of India's minorities and "a gambler's throw," with civil war at stake.

Laborites pleaded strongly against taking a vote on the motion. The Tories and Liberals were in a mean mood and, with a predominant majority, were certain to pass it. An adverse vote would not alter the Government's policy (only a defeat by the House of Commons could do that), but this was no time to show disunited India that Britain itself was disunited on India policy.

No Better 'Ole. In this tense situation up rose another old India hand: the Earl of Halifax, Viceroy of India from 1926 to 1931, Britain's great wartime Ambassador to the U.S. He sadly admitted that Britain's position in India was "rapidly becoming intolerable," and he thought that the Government's decision to pull out next year was "at least as likely to encourage disunity as to encourage unity." But, said Halifax: "The truth is that for India today there is no solution that is not fraught with the gravest objection, the gravest danger. . . . With all that can be said against it ... I am not prepared to condemn what His Majesty's Government are doing unless I can honestly and confidently recommend a better solution." That he could not do.

Tory Halifax powerfully pleaded that an anti-Government vote would have serious repercussions in India: "I should be sorry if the only message from this House to India . . . was one of condemnation based on what I must fully recognize are very natural feelings of failure, frustration and foreboding." Halifax's appeal carried the day. Laborites cheered him. The Loyal Opposition backed down from a vote.

No Better Yet. In India last week progress toward unity seemed to be in reverse. The Moslem League rejected overtures from the Hindu-dominated Congress Party to dicker over their differences. In the Punjab a Sikh army was being organized, just in case the Moslems tried to lay the cornerstone of a separate Pakistan in that province. In Sind, the League-dominated provincial government talked about arming a Moslem militia, just in case a Hindu army invaded Pakistan after the British withdrawal.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

As the British withdrawal became more certain, the Indian factions rushed in with increased determination to inherit the Raj. If civil chaos ensued, who would bring order? The U.N.? The U.S.? The U.S.S.R.?

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