GANDHI TALKS

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 94, 15 January 1935, Page 6

GANDHI TALKS

Statement of an “Eternal Position” HIS POLITICAL OUTLOOK Mr. Gandhi very kindly put aside all other work for an hour to talk over with me his plans for the future (writes an Indian correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian”). Signing letters of invitation io people whose assistance he wants on the executive of the ?Ul-Imjja Village Industries’ Association took some time; and then, with his hand busy on the spiuningwheel, he said: “I am ready for your questions.” “Does your retirement from the Congress mean that you take no more interest in politics?” I asked him. -No,” he said; he had no intention of immediately returning to active polities, but it certainly did not mean- retirement from politics.’ He will be “im-' mersed,” for the'-present, he explained, in guiding the new Village Industries Organisation, in solving the HinduMoslem problem, and continuing the campaign against untoucha.bility.- All these movements, he said, “will be nonpolitical in the narrow sense of the term.” But the keenness with which he had been following the results of | the Assembly elections did not suggest either retirement from or even indifference to politics. Irish Parallel. “Supposing,” I said to him, “that the Joint Committee’s report gives even less than the White Pajier, what will be vopr reaction to it?” He was quite prepared to believe that the forecast was correct, but did not seem willing to commit himself. He contrasted the procedure actually followed by the British Government in regard to the reforms with that outlined by Mr. MacDonald in the House of Commons soon after the termination of the second ■ session of the round-table conference. The Prime Minister had spoken of a settlement with India’s representatives (though, Mr. Gandhi .pointed out to me with emphasis, the round-table delegates were only nominees of the British Government) to be initialled, by both parties, and that settlement would then be the basis of Parliamentary legislation. The same thing had happened in Ireland, I said. "Yes,” added Mr. Gandhi, “the Irish parallel does hold good—but not just yet.” At this point I drew his attention to a recent statement by General Smuts in Britain. General Smuts had,said that it was an act of faith on the part of the British to have conferred selfgovernment on South Africa, and a similar act of faith in regard to India would, in his ■ view, be justified by subsequent results. Mr. Gandhi was almost abruptly prompt in his reply. “I was in South Africa at the time,” he said, “and can see no similarity between the two cases.” In the case of the Boers it was not an act of faith, he asserted, “but making a virtue of necessity.” “How?” I asked him. “The Boer ’War,” he replied., “was a virtual defeat for the British. They were sick and- weary, of the fight, amt their resources were getting exhausted. Of course, as an Imperial Power, they could’have carried it on; but the tide was rising fast in favour of CampbellBannerman. King Edward’s instructions to Lord Milner were to conciliate the Boers. “Handsomely.” “I will grant,” added Mr. Gandhi, “that.whatever was done was done not grudgingly, but handsomely.” _ “And so?” I said. “And so,” he replied, “I go back to the statement I made some weeks ago to the Congress in Bombay—that is, no constitutional agitation will ever achieve freedom for a country.” Nothing was ever gained that way, according to his reading of French and British history, and he had put that point, he reminder! me, to Lord Lothian and a few others with whom he discussed the Indian, problem at Oxford three years ago. ■Mr. Gandhi made it clear beyond doubt that his conviction was that Britain would never grant to India selfgovernment of the kind South Africa enjoys to-day so long as she has nothing to act upon.” She does not feel, he said, that civil resistance has been successful; there is a sense of exultation that the movement has been paralysed. Pursuing the point further, I asked him whether, apart from the circumstances under which self-government was granted to South Africa (and which do not, according to him, exist in India), the contents of that measure , would satisfy him—in other words, what is the independence be aims at? % He did not seem disposed to discuss the question in detail. But he said the goal, for him, was defined in the concluding portion of his statement at the second Round-table Conference: If membership of the British Commonwealth was forced upon India he would resist it; but if it was voluntary partnership, terminable at will, he would have no objection to such an association. So far as lie was concerned, it was the statement of an “eternal position.”