INDIA’S PART

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 September 1940, Page 2

INDIA’S PART

IN WAR AGAINST NAZIS ADDRESS BY MR AMERY. ATTITUDE OF MR GANDHI. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, September 25. The Secretary for India, Mr L. S. Amery, in a speech to the Overseas League in London, referred to the meeting which Mahatma Gandhi will have with the Viceroy of India in the next few days. “One can only hope,” he said, “that the outcome of the discussions may be an agreement consistent both with Mr Gandhi’s conscientious objections to war in general and with the Viceroy’s po less conscientious conviction and duty to allow nothing to stand in the way of India’s wholehearted effort to play a part in the struggle which concerns her present welfare and security and all the ideals her peoples hold dear. Dealing with the constitutional position, Mr Amery said: “The Act of 1935 was still, in essentials, the work of the British Government 'and Parliament and based on the existing structure of the Indian Government and inspired by British ideas. The main permanent framework of the future constitution of India as a Dominion is now a matter for the Indians to settle for themselves. “The whole constitutional field, the relations of the various parts and elements of India to the whole, the methods of election and' the representation of all these matters are open to reexamination. Only, as in the case of every Dominion or for that matter of any federation in the past, there must be that measure of agreement and of consent and necessarily therefore of compromise between the main constituent elements that have in future to live and work together which is a preliminary condition to free self-govern-ment. “In this matter Britain has now made clear one of the essential implications in India’s future status while imposing upon the Indians one of the first responsibilities of that status. It is obvious that a change so far-reach-ing both in structure and in the very z basis of the authority of India’s government cannot take place at a moment when the whole commonwealth is in the throes of a struggle for its existence.” Mr Amery added that the Nazi doctrine was a direct attack upon the spiritual basis of all religion. “It is as profoundly opposed to Islam with its insistence on equality of all men before God and on the supreme virtues cf justice and mercy or to Hinduism with its deep-seated hatred of violence and cruelty as it is to Christianity. The , Nazi’s onslaught threatens the soul of . India as it threatens ours, and there . is no Indian who does not realise that j menace.”