INDIAN FREEDOM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 October 1942, Page 3

INDIAN FREEDOM

MR AMERY REPEATS BRITISH PLEDGE

POLICY OF WILLING ADVANCE. BUT NO YIELDING TO CONGRESS VIOLENCE. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, October 8. “We are not quitting India under anyone's orders. It is we who wish India to go fori ward, not fly apart,” declared the Secretary } of State for India, Mr L. S Amery, in the r House of Commons, when moving the second reading of the India and Burma Temporary and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill. He . said that the main clause raised directly the whole issue of the present political outlook in India. The Bill was intelligible only in the light of the fundamental difference between the Congress Party on the one hand and the rest of India and the British Government on the other as to the method by which India’s freedom should be attained. In the name of the British Government, Mr Amery repeated the pledge already made before India and the world of the desire to see India’s destiny directed by Indian hands and free from all external .control, “The policy to which we are committed is not one of reluctant retreat, but of willing advance to free and proper partnership in freedom,” he said. It was not Sir Stafford Cripps’s rejection of the Congress demands for unlimited and unqualified power that wrecked a settlement. It was the demand, not the rejection. Stating that responsibility for the whole tragic business lay with Mr Gandhi and his associates. Mr Amery said that to the present it was known that 846 persons had been killed and 2024 wounded in the recent disturbances. The killed included 60 Government servants. There could be no question of the Government of India entering into negotiations with the Congress leaders or allowing others to do so as long as there was any danger of a recrudescence of the troubles for which they had been responsible or till they made it clear that they had abandoned illegal, revolutionary methods and were prepared to come to an agreed settlement with the rest of their fellow countrymen. Mr Amery added. There was no prospect of appeasement with Congress in its present outlook. The question was whether any immediate interim solution could be found apart from Congress.

BOMBAY ROUND=UP THREE THOUSAND SUSPECTED RIOTERS. FOUR CONGRESSMEN ARRESTED IN NEW DELHI. (Received This Day, 12.40 p.m.) NEW DELHI, October 9. The police at Ahmadabad thrice fired on crowds throwing stones, but there were no casualties. More than 3,000 persons suspected of participation in recent disturbances in Bombay were rounded up last night. Thirteen persons were arrested for possession of pistols and carridges. Four Congressmen were arrested in New Delhi for picketing the Town Hall and shouting slogans during a meeting of the Municipal Council.