INDIA AND DEMOCRACY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18192, 11 September 1922, Page 3

INDIA AND DEMOCRACY.

Sir, —Permit mo to call attention to the parallelism between your news about Russia in column 1 of page 7 of Thursday's issue and your news about India in column 3 of the same page. From Russia we learn that one Radovsky, who at Genoa preached tho beauties of Bolshevik rule, is now engaged in passing death sentences by the hundred. From India we learn that the Viceroy is congratulating Mr. Sriuivasa Sastri on the success of his mission to the Dominions, and is expressing his hopes that ifc may lead to' fuller recognition of India's equal status as a self-governing Dominion, while at the same time religious riots are taking place both in the Punjab and in Bengal, accompanied by murders and lootings. The British authority, acting through the police, has indeed minimised the death-roll, but one may well ask whether with true selfgovernment it would be any less than the death-roll arising out of collisions in Russia. Not that Mr. Srinivasa Sastri is a Bolshevik any more than M. Kerensky was; but he is paving the way for a Lenin and a Radovsky just as assuredly as that visionary did. For whatever may be said of the boasted civilisation of India, it is the universal belief of all Englishmen who have spent their manhood in the country that sho is not in advance of Russia in the capacity to establish a democratic Government that will escape a rapid decline into anarchy, autocracv. tyranny, and eveu famine. Pandion.