INDIAN PROBLEM.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 228, 26 September 1928, Page 7

INDIAN PROBLEM.

BRITISH COMMISSION.

Immense Responsibility On Parliament.

WEAVING EAST AND WEST.

(British Official Wireless.) (Received 2 p.m.) RUGBY, September 25. The Statutory Commission on Indian Reform is due to leave London on Thursday for a tour of India during which evidence will be taken by the Commission at various centres.

The visit will last seven months and Sir John Simon, head of the Commission, was to-day entertained at a farewell luncheon in London under the chairmanship of the Marquis of Reading, late Viceroy of India.

Sir John Simon said that the British! Parliament had an immense responsibility to the peoples of India and it seemed to the Commission that they would best act as interpreters to the British Parliament, of Indian needs and aspirations if there were, associated with them in their inquiry in every province, an Indian committee elected by the provincial Legislature which would act as their colleagues and assist in their investigations.

It was a deep satisfaction to know that this plan had been generally approved. Eight out of the nine provinces had resolved to adopt it and the ninth had not yet fully decided. In more than one case a provincial council, which at first resolved not to co-operate, had reversed the decision and had appointed its committee.

Sir John added: "Our duty is not to enact or decide but to bring home to the British people the realities of the Indian problem and to act as interpreters to the British Parliament of the wishes and aspirations of the peoples of India. This Indian question in the years now coining is likely to become the greatest of all the cases in which you have to reconcile authority with freedom.

"Let us never forget that while Britain has conferred on India the blessings of order and settled Government, the sense of unity and the experience of disinterested administration, it has also roused in the leaders of Indian opinion the desire for constitutional development and a belief in the virtues of self-government which are inevitable consequences of western education and of Parliamentary experience.

"No Briton should complain if the Indians should be eager to apply the lesson which our imperial history has taught. The British people have to lend their aid as sympathisers and as friends in what is perhaps the greatest external question laid upon the statesmanship of to-day—the tremendous weaving together of East and West."