CONFERENCE PREPARATIONS

Evening Star, Issue 20635, 7 November 1930, Page 8

CONFERENCE PREPARATIONS

STATEMENT BY LORD PEEL DIFFICULTIES EXPLAINED. (British Official Wireless.) Press Association—By X'*Jegraph—Copyright. RUGBY, November 6. (Received November 7, at 11 a.m.) The King will open the Indian Round Table Conference in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords next Wednesday. The subsequent meetings will be held in St. James’s Palace, where preparations for the conference have now been completed. The secretariat of the conference has been housed at the palace for some time past, and in the last few days the palace has been used for the preliminary informal meetings of the Indian States and British Indian delegations, as well as for the smaller groups. The table around which the eighty-six delegates will sit has been specially constructed for the purpose, and is now in position in Queen Anne’s drawing room at the palace, in which the plenary sessions of the recent Naval Conference were held. Lord Peel (a former Secretair of State for India and a member of the forthcoming Round Table Conference), ip a speech, dealt with the difficulties that the conference would have to face. One of the difficulties of the existing situation, he said, was that there had been some confusion in the Indian polltical mind between the questions of status and the constitution. Indian thought was anxious that there should be no question of inferiority and that India should be placed on, complete equality with the great dominions. , Unfortunately, some of: the constitutional problems had been considered to some extent not merely from the point of view of what under the present conditions would he the best constitution for India, biit whether the new constitution did or did not place India on an equality with the dominions. The relations of the Hindu and -Moslem communities, the protection of minorities, and the relation of the Princes and their States to a more self-gpvern-i!l(r India all presented great problems for the conference. He did not think that it would he the duty of the conference to frame a constitution, but to indicate clearly to the Government what were the general lines upon which it wished the const ; tution to be framed; nor did he think that it would make decisions by vote. The conference was not representative in the sense that it had been elected by constituencies. Another groat difficulty was that the extremist Congress section was irreconcilable and would not be represented at all. Great responsibility would therefore bo thrown upon the parties which were represented.’