WHY CRIPPS FAILED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 164, 14 August 1942, Page 3

WHY CRIPPS FAILED

Sir-Thank you for printing Professor Coupland’s talk on the Cripps Indian Mission. I know I am far from being the only person who, when listening to those so clear, so fair, so balanced, so reasonable, so ingenuously honest BBC talks, has come to detect his subconscious quoting Shakespeare: ‘"Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Now having seen this talk in black and white, I can’ study ‘it carefully to find Why. _ I note for example that Coupland says that the Indian provinces have just as much self-government as the Canadian ones. And my mind, not carried on willy-nilly and immediately into the next sentence as when I listened, comments, "Quite true. But if our New Zealand Parliament had had no more authority than Alberta’s, would we be in the Empire still? Ask Mr. Aberhart." Or again after Coupland’s reference to Moslem opposition to Congress policy, my eye marks time long enough to hear my mind recalling that there are more Moslems in the Congress Party than in the Moslem League, that the Rev. Dr. Azad, Congress President, stands higher among Moslems than does the lawyer Mr. Jinnah, and that all four of the Moslem’ provincial governments have so far "stood in" with the independence proposals of Congress. And so on. . . How-_ ever, the most ° confidence-shattering thing about Coupland’s talk was that it passed over in complete silence the most important and striking — indeed astounding-aspect of the present situation: namely, that Gandhi and the Pacifist third of Congress have reversed their tenaciously maintained policy of easing up the campaign for independence so long as the British people and government were struggling for life else-where-and have done so as the result of Cripps’s visit or of something that happened in connection with it. What was it that happened so fundamentally to alter the attitude of one who acts . always on moral principle, never on political exigencies? We whom it vitally concerns ought to know. Yet the BBC does not even admit that anything has happened. Cannot the NBC pass the word home to them that after the French debacle, Singapore, Libya and the long-preparing,

long-hidden shipping crisis, the time has passed for propaganda by ingenuous silence? Or is it the job of the Campaign for Christian Order as a matter of national morality?

A.M.

R.

(Wellington).