Offensive Objectionable

There are as many Indians (200,000) in the South African province of Natal as in the Indian city of Benares. Some 35 years ago Mohandas K. Gandhi, then a fully clothed Natal attorney (see cut), first used passive resistance in defending the Natal Indians against repressive race legislation.

South Africa's Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts has also tried for years to temper the country's harsh anti-Indian color laws. The latest of them, which has caused South Africa's voteless Indians to hum like a swarming hive, is a Natal ordinance dividing the whole province into Jim Crow residential zones. Smuts was in

England when this ordinance was passed.

The loudest reverberations came from India. Cried Sir Syed Raza Ali, who spent a term in South Africa as India's Agent-General : "Repressive, offensive, objectionable." Said Dr. Narayan Bhaskar Khare, member of the Viceroy's Council in New Delhi: "I wish India was in a position to declare war on South Africa here and now. If I had been able to do so, I would have lost no time in taking an army there."

Last week the Government of India imposed residential restrictions on white South Africans living in India (about 120 people). The Indian Central Legislative Assembly resolved to apply economic sanctions, thus threatening South Africa with a jute-bag famine.

At week's end, Prime Minister Smuts was taking long walks on the veld around his farm near Pretoria. For him the question was whether to veto Natal's ordinance by an Act of Parliament and rock his Government, or let the ordinance stand and perhaps rock the Empire.

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