WHAT HOPE FOR INDIA NOW?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 453, 27 February 1948, Page 7

WHAT HOPE FOR INDIA NOW?

ss OW big an undertaking it is on a world scale you can gather from the fact that its little New Zealand member organisation represents an export from your country of over £150,000 every year." The slightlybuilt, friendly-voiced speaker with the penetrating phrases, out of whose three days in New Zealand I was snatching an hour’s interview, was referring to the International Missionary Council of which he is Secretary, and to its New Zealand constituent, the New Zealand Missionary Council. He himself was an Englishman, the Rev. Norman Goodall, a Congregational minister. To New Zealand he had come hacia India and Burma after consultations with their new Governments on educational and social service matters, and with the Indian Christian Council-

body that includes practically all Christians except the Catholics and the Jacobite section of the fourth-Century Syrians." After New Zealand he would attend a Pacific Missionary Conference in Australia where would be planned concerted action between missions in the islands and Government-Missionary cooperation in education and health. Obviously a man with a very keen ear kept unusually close to a practically worldwide stretch of ground. I asked his impression of post-inde-pendence turmoil in India. "Well, remember to begin with that it has been almost wholly confined to one Province. But theré the. mutual butchery was appalling, and led to a spontaneous transfer of populationsfour million Moslems into Pakistan, six million Hindus and Sikhs into Indiathat is one of the astonishments of history. I saw only a fraction of it myself (missions made available about 200 doc-

tors and nurses to care for the refugees), but even that was stupendous. "Imagine, for example, a caravan of oxcarts, loaded donkeys, or just people tramping with little bundles in their hands-a caravan 20 miles long, endlessly coming up from under the eastern horizon and endlessly disappearing into the sunset. That was just one I saw. And imagine transit camps of up to 300,000 people each-more than you have in any New Zealand city and its environs-camps you could smell for miles, camps that not all the government and religious relief work could save from being loathsome epidemic centres. I was in many such. And imagine quite apart from the human misery involved, the gigantic economic problem that these shifts gave to brand new governments." But the "exchange of populations" had finished by now, I suggested.

"Yes," said Mr. Goodall, "but not the miseries and problems they have caused. For example, 100,000 Moslems who went first to Lahore have since had to uproot again and trek off to Sindh. Or again: 3,000 Hindu doctors fled from Pakistén to Delhi. The Indian Government, seeing a chance to turn temporary disaster into permanent improvement, allotted them posts in doctorless country areas. "For familiar reasons most of them have objected to go. But Delhi doesn’t need 3,000 extra doctors. Or again: with the same idea of snatching social profit out of individual loss the Pakistan Government divided up among refugees the large estates of the wealthy Sikhs who fled over the border. An excellent thing. Only it left without jobs about 60,000 farm labourers-mostly Christiaris-who used to work for the Sikhs. So they, too, had to take to the road-to nowhere."

Effect of Gandhi's Death "And will the removal of Mr. Gandhi’s pacifying presence lead to further disturbances-and perhaps even war between India and Pakistan?" "So far the manner of his death has assisted the efforts of his life," replied Mr. Goodall. "For it has made the fanatically Hindu Hindus, the Mahasaba, lose face to such an extent that Nehru has even been able to declare the whole organisation illegal. They are what the Indian Government has to fear most of all-particularly if some’ of the Indian industrialists, who are enormously wealthy and don’t of course approve of Nehru’s socialism one bit, should take to financing them. A major part of Gandhi’s greatness was his influence over both industrialists and masses so that they worked togetheron the whole-tin the independence movement." ; "Have the present leaders such power?" "They are not Gandhis. But on their records and from my personal contacts with them I rate them men of first-class ability and first-class integrity — particularly perhaps Nehru, Rajagopalachiari, John’ Matthai~ (you'll notice by his name he’s a Christian), and the Health and Education Minister. Their administrative Services, however, are much closer to the abyss of graft and bribery that.underlies. Indian life, But I have hopes for them too. Two red lights are showing: that irresponsible fanaticism whose flare-up caused the

Punjab massacres on one front and Gandhi’s assassination on another; and sheer organised lawlessness, "In Burma Dacoits even pillage by ‘indirect rule’-so a police officer there told. me-forcing peaceful villages to raid factories and plantations for them, or take the consequences. But having felt on the spot India’s (and Burma’s) thrill of independence, chastened by troubles, I have confidence in their future-although, I must add, a very sober confidence." British Still Welcome "Do you feel the same about Pakistan?" "No: but only because I have not met enough Moslem leaders to enable me to form any opinion. For I found Pakistan still very largely administered by Indian Civil Service men. Denuded of experts by the withdrawal of both British and Hindus the Pakistan Government begged these people to stay on. In fact, although commercial jobs for Europeans are just about finishedfor the time being anyhow-in Pakistan, ‘India, Burma and Ceylon, there is still a great welcome for British people in administrative and social service spheres -including, most certainly, missionaries -provided, of course, that they really have expert help to offer and that they can stand being guests and employees instead of, as once, a ruling race. However, in Pakistan as in India, I don’t fear the top men. It is the lower levels where daily life is really lived, the attitudes, customs, dispositions, of the masses, that are the danger zones, Mr. Jinnah, for example, may hit headlines with liberal statements about making Pakistan a modern state. But they probably haven’t much relation to what hig village policemen are doing." "Then is Westernisation in South-east Asia only skin-deep?" "Technically, no; modern industrial« isation has come to stay-and to extend, Spiritually, no; if only because Christian communities that now exist everywhere are no longer regarded as foreign-the leaven is established in the lump, however slowly its. inner revolution may spread. But culturally-well, I remember travelling a great busy modern highway and noting hundreds of villages within sight of the road. In them our world was only a passing noise in the night and smell of burnt petrol in the day. Domestically their lives were lived in another world altogether, one three thousand years more firmly established than ours. Peasant India is still the real India. But we have yet to see what radio, turned to mass education, may

do about that."

A.M.

R.