Bengal Pains

Murder of several Britishers in Bengal was certain from the moment that Viceroy the Earl of Willingdon issued his ordinance suppressing the right of free speech and many another right (TIME, Dec. 14).* Last week fate made that innocent and worthy bureaucrat Charles Geoffrey Buckland Stevens, District Magistrate of Comilla, the first victim of fierce Bengalese reprisal.

Mr. Stevens was 42. Two years ago he took a comely wife. Recently she bore him a daughter. Last week Magistrate Stevens sat fiddling idly with a penwiper when two young native girls shyly entered his office.

One was Miss Santi Ghose, daughter of the late Professor Debendra Ghose of Comilla College, and the other was Miss Sunity Chowdhuri, also an undergraduate. They presented a petition, asking that Mr. Stevens arrange a swimming competition among their classmates. "But my dear young ladies," smiled the Magistrate, "surely your headmistress is the proper person to consult in this matter. However, I will read your petition."

While he did so, Miss Ghose and Miss Chowdhuri drew automatic pistols from their schoolgirl saris (shawls) and foully murdered Magistrate Stevens by pumping his chest full of lead at point blank range. A British orderly who dashed in was wounded in the hand by one of the schoolgirls last shots. Perfectly composed, they were locked up in the local British jail.

His Majesty's Government in the United Provinces issued a memorandum declaring that "with the equivocal assistance of Mr. Gandhi and the undisguised encouragement of Vallabhai Patel, President of the Indian National Congress," a campaign of essentially Communist propaganda has been waged ever since five days after the signature last spring of the truce between Mr. Gandhi and the Viceroy, then Baron Irwin (TIME, March 16). Objects of this Red campaign appeared to the Government to be "total expropriation of landlords' property and the setting up of a peasants and workers republic."

Thus on Dec. 30, when Mr. Gandhi and Congress leaders are scheduled to meet in Allahabad to determine the Congress' future policy (possibly resumption of the Gandhite "passive resistance" boycott of British goods), they will find themselves branded in a large section of the British Press as arrant Reds.

Protests against the British Raj have indeed taken the form of a "no rent" campaign which is spreading throughout the United Provinces and into the realm of H. H. the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. In Allahabad, correspondents summarized their fears by guessing that "one hundred thousand peasants in hundreds of villages" met and swore collective oaths to pay their landlords no rent.

This is communism, but with a small c. The Government issued a blanket decree that no leader of the Indian National Congress party should leave his native village.

*Year ago Freeman Freeman-Thomas, Lord Willingdon was Governor General of Canada. It is an open secret in London that he was personally picked for the viceroyalty by George V. No one objected. During the War Lord Willingdon served in India as Governor of Bombay, is typically British where Indians are concerned. Today he keeps a far tighter reign as Viceroy than did his immediate predecessor Lord Irwin, who became known as "friendly to Gandhi."

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