The Press FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1945. Offer to India

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24677, 21 September 1945, Page 4

The Press FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1945. Offer to India

What is most important ”, declared the Calcutta “ Statesman ” after the set-back at Simla two months ago, “is that everybody should go on *• trying ”. On one side at least, as Lord Wavell and Mr Attlee have now revealed, the effort to break India's political deadlock is being pressed, and pressed even more urgently and more comprehensively. “ Despite all its preoccupation ”, says Lord Wavell, the British Government “ has taken time, almost in “ the first days of office, to give

‘ attention to the Indian problem as “ one of the first and most import- “ ant ”. It has, too, broadened the approach to the widest possible limit—much wider than the Simla talks compassed. The first step has been taken, tvith the decision announced a month ago to hold elections for the central and provincial legislatures. But there is a warning of the hazards ahead in the fact that the British Government does not even assume that the next step will necessarily be made; for “His “ Majesty’s Government earnestly "hopes that after the elections . . . “ Ministerial responsibility will be “ accepted by the political leaders “ in all provinces Though nothing has suggested that any party will abstain from participating in the legislatures or forming a Government if called upon, Lord Wavell does not exclude the possibility. If it can be excluded, the real task will be approached—to frame the constitution for an India “ governed “by Indians for Indians”, an India fully independent either within the British Commonwealth or beyond it. The Cripps offer proposed that the constitution-making body should be elected, on the system of proportional representation, by an electoral college composed of the entire membership of the lower houses of the provincial legislatures. This new body was to be in number about one-tenth of the number of the electoral college; and the Indian States —the Princes’ India—were to be invited to appoint representatives in the same proportion to their total population as the representatives of British India as a whole and with the same powers as the British Indian members. Lord Waveil proposes, immediately after the provincial elections, to meet representatives both of the provincial legislatures and of the Indian States to determine whether the Cripps plan is acceptable or whether some alternative is preferable. In addition, he is authorised to move to create an Executive Council supported by the main Indian parties. These are, of course, still the preliminary moves. They will not be straightforward: and agreement on their course —on the form, power, and procedure of the constitution-making body and on the personnel of the Executive Council—will by itself be a tremendous advance. Yet, if it is secured, the most complex and the most baffling obstacle of all will lie ahead. The machinery for framing a constitution will haye been created. The Indians themselves must then frame it. The field to be covered there is wideband bitterly controversial, with abundant possibilities for negation and deadlock. It gives some measure of them,’yet an optimistic one, to recall that it took Westminster two years to devise the 1935 constitution. The task of framing the constitution to supersede it can scarcely be less complex. It can only be hoped it is true to say that failure after failure among the Indians themselves to find common ground has brought them closer to realising that concessions must be made if the common aim of independence is ever to be achieved.