GANDHI’S CAMPAIGN

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1935, Page 8

GANDHI’S CAMPAIGN

POLITICAL OUTLOOK POLICY BEHIND HIS ACTION. REVIVING THE RURAL LIFE.

Mr. Gandhi very kindly put aside all other work, for an hour recently to talk over with me his plans for the future, writes a correspondent in the Manchester Guardian. Signing letters of invitation to people whose assistance he wants on the Executive of the AllIndia Village Industries’ Association took some time; and then, with his hand busy on the spinning-wheel, he said: “I am ready for your questions.” “Does your retirement from the Congress mean that you take no more interest in politics?” I asked him. “No,’ he said; he had no intention of immediately returning to active politics, but it certainly did not mean retirement from politics. He will be “immersed,” for the present, he explained, in guiding the new Village Industries Organisation, in solving the Hindu-Moslem problem, and continuing the campaign against untouchability. AU these movements he said, “will be non-poUtical in the narrow sense of the term.” But the keenness with which he had been following the results of the Assembly elections did not suggest either retirement from or even indifference to politics.

IRISH PARALLEL. “Supposing,” I said to him, “that the Joint Committee’s report gives even less than the White Paper, what will be your reaction to it?” He was quite prepared to believe that the forecast was correct, but did not seem willing to commit himself. He contrasted the procedure actuaUy followed by the British Government in regard to the reforms with that outlined by Mr. MacDonald in the House of Commons soon after the termination of the second session of the Round-table Conference. The Prime Minister had spoken of a settlement with India’s representatives (though, Mr. Ganrihi pointed out to me with emphasis, the Round-table delegates were only nominees of the British Government) to be initialled by both parties, and that settlement would then be the basis of Parliamentary legislation. The same thing had happened in Ireland, I said. “Yes,” added Mr. Gandhi, “the Irish parallel does hold, good—but not just yet.” -At this point I drew his attention to a recent statement by General Smuts in Britain. General Smuts had said that it was an act of faith on the part of the British to have conferred self-gov-ernment on South Africa, and a similar act of faith in regard to India, would, in his view, be justified by subsequent Results. Mr. Gandhi was almost abruptly prompt in his reply. “I was in South Africa at the time,” he said, “and can see no similarity between the two cases. In the case of the Boers it was not an act of faith, he asserted, “but making a virtue of necessity.” “How?” I asked him. “The Boer War,” he replied, “was a virtual defeat for the British. They were sick and weary of the fight, and resources were getting exhausted. Of course, as an Imperial Power, they could have carried it on; but the tide was rising fast in favour of Campbell-Banner-man. King Edward’s instructions to Lord Milner were to conciliate the Boers.” “HANDSOMELY.” .

“I will grant,” added Mr. Gandhi, “that whatever was done was done not grudgingly but handsomely.” “And so?” I said. “And so;” he replied, “I go back to the statement I made some weeks ago to the Congress in Bombay—that is; no constitutional agitation will ever achieve freedom for a country.” Nothing was, ever gained that way, according to his reading of French or British history, and he had put that point, he reminded me, to Lord Lothian and a few others with whom he discussed the Indian problem at Oxford three years ago j Mr. Gandhi made it clear beyond doubt that his conviction was that Britain would never grant to India selfgovernment of the kind South Africa enjoys to-day so long as she has “nothing to act upon.” She does not feel, he said, that civil resistance has been successful; there is a sense of exultation that the movement has been paralysed. Pursuing the point further, I _ asked him whether, apart from the circumstances under which self-government was granted to South Africa (and which do not, according to him, exist in India), the contents of that measure would satisfy him—in other words, what is the independence he aims at? He did not seem disposed to discuss the question in detail. But .he said the goal, for him, was defined in the concluding portion of his statement at the second Round-table Conference: If membership of the British Commonwealth was forced upon India he would resist it; but if it was voluntary partnership, terminable at will, he would have no objection to such an association. So far as he was concerned, it was the statement of an “eternal position.

VILLAGE POVERTY. But at present he is “immersed” in the building up of the Village Industries Organisation. His recent walking tour through the villages in connection with the anti-untouchabiEty campaign was a revelation to him. The village people seemed to him “inert and despondent.” Their poverty-stricken conditions have been making “a more and more forcible appeal.” The revival of village industries would infuse life into occupations that are now dying out. “Uninteresting” it may be for. some people, he remarked, but “it will be most solid work.” He is visualising to himself the 700,000 villages of India, and his ambition is to spread out his workers in as many as possible. Spinning, on which he has set his heart for many years, he confessed, is the lowest paid of rural occupations. But that will not come under the new organisation, since it is being directed by the All-India Spinners’ Association. More food for the villagers—and food of the right kind—is his principal aim. He makes no secret of his intention to start a campaign against mill-polished rice and mill-ground wheat. In this, he said, some distinguished research .workers in diet problems agree with him. He will also encourage the use of coarse sugar (gur) as against the factory-re-fined article. He will also give rural sanitation and hygiene a prominent place in ■ his programme. Again, there, must be, he emphasised, “no exploitation of the movement,” either by politicians or by anyone else —“not even in a distant fashion.”

MADRAS SURVEY. Mr. Gandhi has abundant material to confirm his analysis of the rural problem of India. There is before me, as I write, the report of a complete socioeconomic survey of a typical agricultural area in South India within 30 miles of Madras. The inquiry was directed by three officials of the Madras Government, the Directors of Public Health, of Agriculture, and of Industries, and the report was published only a few weeks ago. The average annual income of a family of five members ranges between Rs. 30 and Rs. 100 (a rupee us roughly

Is 6d), 50 per cent, of the population being nearer the lower margin. “Chronic poverty and insufficiency of income,” says the report, “form the strongest barriers to rural development, for the removal of which all-round improvement in public health, education, sanitation, and industries becomes indispensable.” Agricultural wages average, for a worker’s entire family, Rs: 25 to Rs. 60 (37s 6d to 90s) per year. For about 100 days in a year agricultural labour is absolutely idle and for six months, according to the report, “it is a hand-to-mouth existence or a life of semi-starvation.” The zest with which Mr. Gandhi and all his lieutenants threw themselves into the recent election campaign encourages me to think that Congressmen will enter the new Legislatures twelve months hence (or, whenever ' the elections may come). The desire to support Mr. Gandhi’s activities—rural development and the campaign against rmtouchability—may be a strong enough incentive to compel them even to accept office. The late Mr. Tilak and Mrs. Besant would have called this “responsive co-operation.’* Mr. Gandhi’s vocabulary is different; but do phrases matter?