"If I Were Dictator"

What should have been a week of triumph and hope for India was a week of confusion, riots, petty bickerings and incredible irrelevancies.

Things were so bad that Mohandas Gandhi devoted his weekly day of silence, when he usually gets a rest from the questions*that pour in from all over India, to fuming and fretting over the big question of Congress cooperation in an interim government.

Next day he successfully talked the Working Committee of the Congress Party (of which he is the boss, though not a member) into paying more attention to the crumbs than to the cake of freedom, which the Raj was holding out.

At Gandhi's insistence, the Working Committee refused to participate in the interim government of India unless the British agreed to name at least one Moslem to the Congress Party group in the interim government. Such a provision would further infuriate the Moslem League's Mohamed Ali Jinnah. Gandhi was very tough in handling the opposition to his policy. Objecting to newspaper stories about the negotiations, he dropped his air of outward benevolence, cried: "If I were appointed dictator for a day in place of the Viceroy, I would stop all newspapers--except, of course, Harijan" (Gandhi's mouthpiece).

Perhaps the only man who could have stopped Gandhi was brilliant, unstable Jawaharlal Nehru, but he went off on a small and dizzy tangent to his native Kashmir, where the local maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, had arrested a popular leader, the sheik Mohamed Abdullah. Sir Hari had Nehru arrested. In protest, thousands of Bombay mill workers and Calcutta transport workers went on strike. Markets closed in many cities, and in Madura five Indians were killed in riots.

The crowning irrelevancy came from the Government of India itself, which presented charges to the United Nations against South Africa's racial-discrimination laws covering Indian nationals. The Indian evidence against South Africa was strong enough, but the plight of 250,000 Indians in South Africa was scarcely as important last week as the plight of 389,000,000 Indians in India, who, instead of standing happily on the threshold of independence, were faced with famine and a growing chance of political chaos.

*Typical questions: "Of what advantage is decimal coinage?" "What should a sweeper do about the atom bomb?" "How can a girl avoid being raped?"

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