"Puran Swaraj!"

Indian stocks and even bonds broke sharply on the Bombay Exchange and did not recover last week, as the Indian National Congress (TIME, Jan. 6) voted by a virtually unanimous majority the following Declaration of Puran Swaraj (Complete Independence):

"It has become a solemn obligation and a (revolutionary right for the people of India to assert their inherent power and dissolve the immoral ties which bind them to the British imperial system. . . .

"We solemnly declare that India . . . is a free and independent nation, and that Independent India now undertakes the responsibility of conducting war, concluding peace, contracting alliances, and establishing political and commercial relations with other nations.

"For the support of this Declaration we pledge our lives, our honor, and all that we possess to the cause of our country and humanity. . . ."

Additional specific clauses of the Declaration in effect created the Executive Committee of the Congress a Government of Independent India and authorized this Government to: 1) Proclaim "civil disobedience" to the British Raj; 2) Order nonpayment of taxes; 3) Command the desertion of the 200,000 native troops in the British Indian Army; 4) Exact the resignation of native members of the nine Provincial Legislative Councils, which flourish as puppet congresses under British tutelage; 5) And finally to do any or all of these things at such time as members of the Government may deem best.

As the Congress adjourned the Executive Committee in its character of Government immediately called upon the 145 members of the Central Indian Legislative Assembly to resign. At once 23 did resign. The Government then fixed Jan. 26 as the date for a "nationwide demonstration." Great was the triumph of India's ascetic little Saint, famed Mahatma Gandhi, boss-politician and demigod of the Congress. Usually he wears only a loin cloth, but at the final session at which his Declaration of Independence was adopted he appeared exclusively clad in a large white sheet which flapped dramatically as he gestured.

In London the fact that the House of Commons was in recess, with the Prime Minister and every statesman of consequence away on vacation, caused the grave and startling news from India to be received with curious apathy. Evidently carnivorous Church of Englanders still view the menaces of vegetarian Hindus with the customary contempt. The Daily Herald, party organ of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, recalled that during 1929 the Indian Nationalists demanded "dominion status," and complacently alluded to the 1930 demand for Pur an Swaraj (Complete Independence) as "an academic change involving no immediate consequences." In Manhattan, Chairman Sailendranath Ghose of the Indian Nationalist Association of America talked boldly of arming a million Indians for revolution but had no theory as to how a million rifles could be smuggled into India past alert British frontier guards.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.