"Saintly Humbug"

One fact seemed planted firmly in the minds of the British: Mohandas K. Gandhi, long the darling of leftists and liberals, was either pro-Japanese or a plain traitor. When Sir Stafford Cripps set out five months ago to offer India a new deal, possibly self-government, but at least postwar dominion status, the public was aroused to the tremendous issues involved. Pros & cons were hotly discussed, with the pros in the majority. Last week the British were in no such liberal mood.

The publication of seized documents purporting to show that last April Gandhi planned to negotiate for peace with the Japanese was a bitter pill for the British. The reports of his later contradictory statements only confused the issue. The Government's position that Gandhi's call for civil disobedience was a "stab in the back" was widely accepted. Forgotten apparently was the famed Zinovieff letter of 1924, which swung an election through public misunderstanding. The British were hard pressed on many fronts, had suffered too many defeats and disappointments to have sympathy for illogical "blackmail."

The Glasgow Herald, only provincial paper blaming the British, found the Indian situation "a grim and sorry reflection" of past iniquities. The Laborite London Daily Herald, long committed editorially to Indian independence, criticized the "precipitate imprisonment" of Gandhi as an invitation for "unknowns" to run wild. The Manchester Guardian urged: "Our Allies--the U.S., Russia and China--should help us to compose a quarrel which injures every one of them. . . . We should refuse fatalistically to accept a new hostile front in India, whose people are our friends."

But more than counteracting these opinions were scores of other papers editorializing, like the Birmingham Post, that "it was imperative to scotch the disobedience movement at the start." The most bitter crackdown of all came from London's Daily Mail. "We are paying for past weaknesses," said the Mail. "Gandhi, Azad and Nehru . . . are now in jail. . . . They should have been there years ago. . . . From now on we should rule." The Mail urged that Congress leaders should be deported "as the Quislings they are." Gandhi, roared the Mail, is "a dangerous and unscrupulous politician whose sole desire is that he and his party shall profit from the war, whichever side wins . . . the nauseating hypocrisy of the saintly humbug. . . ."

Lost for a while in a land where freedom has long flourished, where the rattle of a tea service in any Bloomsbury drawing room will bring out a stouthearted supporter of a lost cause, was the fact that riots and bloodshed in India could not be dismissed solely as the work of a crank in a loincloth.

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