The Daily News TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1935. INDIA: FROM WITHIN.

Taranaki Daily News, 19 February 1935, Page 6

The Daily News

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1935. INDIA: FROM WITHIN.

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The address given by the Rev. R. L. Gray to the New Plymouth Rotary Club yesterday, and reported in this issue of the Daily News, was provocative of much thought. Mr. Gray had the advantage of 14 years of close association with what he termed the real life of India, namely, the lives of the people in the thousands of villages where the common people ask but for justice and the opportunity for a peaceful existence. The villagers’ demands are not high. The standard of living is one that would seem deplorable in New Zealand, yet in all the history of British supremacy in India it is the .village life that has kept the Dependency steady. Conservative and even timid in outlook the agricultural community of India is slow to move, suspicious of any innovations, bound, as Mr. Gray pointed out, by religious and caste inhibitions, yet comprising withal the elements from which the new democratic government must be evolved if India is to fill its proper place in the British Commonwealth of Nations. The history of the movement towards self-government in India is now a century old. Before that time the villagers were content to hope, and almost afraid to believe, that the rule of the British was not to prove but another of the tyrannies from which they had suffered for many centuries. There is something for Britons to feel proud about in the fact that it was the action of a British administrative official that quickened nationalism in India. Paradoxically it was Lord Macaulay’s insistence that the English language should be the medium through which higher education could be obtained by the people of India that opened to them the democratic influences of Western civilisation. There have been other administrative acts that are less comforting to read about and which have cost Britain dearly in more senses than one. The effect of the defeat 30 years ago of a Western Power by Japan awakened the East to its latent possibilities, and India felt the invigoration as much as any country. The Great War proved the Dependency’s loyalty and brought with it the suggestion that selfgovernment might be obtained within a few years. Unfortunately those hopes could not be fulfilled, and the result has been the aggregation of nationalise in opposition to rather than, in co-operation with the. British Government. The opposition has taken many forms from passive resistance to very active murder plots, and the appeal to force had perforce to be met with repression. At the moment the Imperial Parliament is wrestling with what Mr. Gray called the greatest constitutional proposition Britain has ever had to bring forward. The new plan has been condemned in India because it gives too little selfgovernment, and in England because it gives too much. The issue is still uncertain, but that there must be a change in Indian administration is generally conceded. Mr. Gray pleaded for a sympathetic consideration of India’s desire for self-govern-ment. In a way the demand for Home Rule is a tribute to British rule. It has made the peoples of India realise that Western methods of government are not to be despised and that the rule, of the people can keep a nation strong. There is need for sympathy with a people anxious to take in one march the journey towards self-government that has taken centuries to accomplish even in Britain, the most democratic of communities. But if sympathy is necessary it must be with those responsible for the good government of India as well as for the spirit of nationalism. They know the problems, how deep-rooted they are, and how easily a superficial healing of a breach between caste, and caste, religion and religion, illiteracy and culture, the autocrat and his subjects, may be but a frail bridge over an abyss into which the accomplishments of a century might easily disappear. The Imperial Government has decided to hasten slowly, and reading between the lines of Mr. Gray’s address there seems every justification for caution.