MR CHURCHILL ON INDIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21994, 1 July 1933, Page 20

MR CHURCHILL ON INDIA

A NEW LANDSLIDE.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON. May 2G.

Mr Churchill continues his protests against the Government’s policy in regard to India. Speaking to the Putney branch of the Primrose League, he said that Mr Baldwin had very strongly denied on several occasions that the proposals in the White Paper were a legacy from the Socialist Government. The first BoundTable Conference was the authority which started the plan, and they had had a very revealing explanation from Mr Malcolm MacDonald, the Prime Minister’s son. who was attached to that conference as Cabinet Secretary. Mr Malcolm MacDonald had made a perfectly clear statement showing that the policy was toreseen, elaborated, and planned at Chequers in December, 1930, before the Conservative delegates had expressed their views at all. That was the policy subsequently adopted and embodied in the White Paper to-day. There was a class of people who said, “We have pledged our word, and even if if means the ruin of India and distress in Lancashire and Britain, never mind, the Englishman’s word is his bond.” He did not admit for a moment that there was any pledge which prevented Parliament from now doing justice to the actual merits of the situation and giving the best solution to India and to Britain in the problems in which they were both involved. The real liberty which India enjoyed was British justice, impartial administration, and security for peace and order. That liberty would be fatally destroyed if in any devolution of government they now made either the Hindus or the Mohammedans become in the ascendant and use class ratio and religious prejudice against the other. CIVIL SERVANTS’ ATTITUDE. The Simon Report and the Statutory Commission went very far —he thought too far —but they were left far behind by this new landslide. They had sailed otT into this vague idea of creating a united State of India when in Europe they had never been able to reach an organism of that kind. •, He was told that all the civil servants who were serving in India were in favour of this policy, but be did not believe that they were. He would give two reasons. First, the Government had to issue a| statement that all civil servants under the new system would be able to retire at any time on the proportionate pension they had earned. That emergency exit offered them did not show that they were all

frightfully enthusiastic about the new policy.— (Laughter.) Then again, only a few days ago, it was announced that this pension fund had been moved over to this country to meet the wishes of the contributors. to that fund. That hardly argued the complete confidence in the, new regime which one would imagine. Never could Britain remain in India if she disinterested herself in the welfare of the Indian masses. He would rather see the British end their story in India, he would rather see her last battalion sail away home with clean consciences, her last official with clean hands, than that she should remain there to see the old Asiatic tyrannies resumed upon the helpless masses of those people while she remained nominally responsible without the power to save them.