India Goes Free

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 416, 13 June 1947, Page 5

India Goes Free

T would be reckless, writing a ] few hours after the Viceroy’s broadcast, to discuss the events of the last few days in India, But it is permissible to look back a few months and forward a few years, and in both directions the view is fairly clear. India is this week taking the high road to national independence — in , one group or in two. It may or may not remain in the British Commonwealth, but whether it does or does not it will do so by its own decision. Apparently, too, the transfer Of power will take. place this year and not next. Instead of delaying the change, the British Government has hurried it on, partly for prudential reasons, but partly-let the sneerers sneer-in the spirit of liberty and generosity and good faith. That in fact is the chief meaning and lesson of the whole long story. The day will come when the events of the last few months in India will be a light in a power-drunk world; when Britain’s present conduct will be the ammunition of every nation fighting for freedom and the hope of all the victims of the new oppression; when the horrible things in India’s last two centuries will be forgotten and mankind will remember only the greatness of these last few weeks. It is not easy to keep the light properly focussed on 300 millions of people divided by religion, language, and age-long tradition, but it is possible now and again to see the picture in something like a general light, and no Briton will blush this week when he gets that longdistance view. The Australian professor who said the other day that "the governance of India has been the most glorious thing in British history" was perhaps being deliberately provocative. But it was not provocation to add this: that when the history of Britain’s dealings with India comes to be written, and men can judge as calmly as we judge the history of Ninevah or Babylon, it will be seen that nothing so became Britain as her manner of leaving India. That is an understatement of a fact that should make- every lover of Britain to-day walk a little more erect. ’