High Melting Point

In Johannesburg, a pudgy, sad-faced little Hindu unlimbered the weapon with which his father tumbled an empire. Manilal Gandhi, 60-year-old son of India's revered Mahatma, was under sentence of $150 fine or 50 days in jail for his part in a deliberate protest violation of South Africa's rigid race-segregation laws. Last week Manilal withdrew his appeal and surrendered to Transvaal police. Said he: "My rightful place as a self-respecting person is in prison ... By my voluntary sufferings, I seek to melt the hearts of the government."

While Gandhi suffered. Prime Minister Daniel Malan, whose heart has a high melting point, pushed on with plans to abridge still further the liberties of South Africa's nonwhites. Malan's next great objective was to exclude Cape Province's 49,000 voters of mixed blood from participation in "white"' elections and to limit their political representation to four white M.P.s. Two of Malan's schemes to achieve this had already been declared unconstitutional by South Africa's appeal court, so last week the old (79) preacher-politician called a joint session of the two houses of Parliament and tried to do the job constitutionally. But Parliament, for all its overwhelming sympathy with Malan's racial policies, gave him 16 votes less than the two-thirds majority legally required for a constitutional change.

Though his Nationalist supporters howled with rage, Malan blandly turned to another tack. Next day Parliament was confronted with a bill which would make a Malan-packed subdivision of the appeal court the final authority on constitutional matters. If the new bill passes, single-minded Daniel Malan will be free to proceed against "colored" voters, secure in the knowledge that the reorganized appeal court will approve whatever action he cares to take.

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