Moderates Fail

Crestfallen out of Yerovda Gaol last week came the two "Indian Moderates" whom Viceroy Baron Irwin commissioned last July to seek a compromise with Mahatma Gandhi. These emissaries--Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and Mr. Jayakar--have visited all the principal Gandhite leaders in gaol, especially the potent Pandits Motilal Nehru and Jawarhalal Nehru (father & son) sometimes called "the brains of the Gandhi movement." After a final conference last week in Yerovda Gaol, disgruntled Sir Tej and Mr. Jayakar were forced to admit that they had failed. By six weeks of zealous effort they had brought Viceroy and Mahatma not into harmony but into the following specific deadlock, details of which were first revealed last week:

Lord Irwin demanded as a preliminary to any British concession that the Gandhite campaign of "NonViolent Mass Civil Disobedience" be called off. He would then:

1) Revoke his "restrictive ordinances" which have gagged the Gandhi press and sent thousands to jail for such crimes as picketing (TIME, Aug. 25).

2) Give to Gandhi's party (Nationalist) "an adequate but not majority representation" at the Indian Round Table Conference scheduled for October in London.

To this Viceregal offer the Mahatma replied last week by demanding, as a preliminary to any concession, that India be granted a National Government, responsible to Indians alone, and enjoying the right to secede at any time from the British Commonwealth. This right, Mr. Gandhi holds, is inherent in "dominion status" and is possessed by all the British dominions--a view with which not a few Canadians and South Africans agree, but flat heresy to Englishmen.

In addition Mr. Gandhi and the Pandits Nehru demanded that India's defense forces be turned over to Indians, that all political prisoners be released, and that all fines collected from Indians for political offenses be paid back to them by the British Raj. After these "preliminary demands" had been met, the Gandhites declared, they would be willing to discuss the question whether they should send representatives to the Round Table.

"Dizzy Heights." With the deadlock thus total, both parties made irate statements. Sir Tej and Mr. Jayakar reported that the Gandhite leaders said to them in substance: "The Viceroy's words afford a further painful insight into government mentality. It is as plain as daylight that from the dizzy heights of Simla [Viceregal Summer Capital in the mountains] India's rulers are unable to understand and appreciate the difficulties of the starving millions living in the plains, whose incessant toil makes government from such a dizzy height at all possible."

Blood. News that two months of parleying had been fruitless brought fresh blood spilling in Bombay Presidency, Gandhi bailiwick. Excited mobs again publicly manufactured illegal salt. In a scrimmage between natives and police at Bilashi two citizens were shot dead, six police badly wounded by clubs, brickbats.

"Jail Diplomacy." In London the Rothermere (yellow Conservative) press screeched that "Lord Irwin's jail diplomacy has failed!" and decorous Conservative papers said the same thing less neatly. The Laborite Daily Herald, worried, took refuge in a Palmerstonian phrase, observed that the Viceroy "reluctantly but perforce will now be unable to contract the latitudes of executive discretion"--i. e., "jail diplomacy" is to continue.

Sadly the London Times summed up last week's events in a really brilliant platitude, remarked "It is plain" that at the London Round Table Conference the party of Mahatma Gandhi will be "under-represented."

Viceroy's Plan. From the "dizzy heights" of Simla a brief cable pictured Viceroy Lord Irwin as "laboring night and day" to whip together "a proposal alternative to the report of the Simon Commission [TIME, June 30 et ante] and much more liberal." This means that the Viceroy himself is a rebel against the Simon Report, which nearly all Indians consider too reactionary and which a probable plurality of Englishmen (including all the Conservatives) hold to be too liberal.

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