GANDHI’S MARCH PAST

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3271, 12 March 1931, Page 5

GANDHI’S MARCH PAST

TRENCHANT CRITICISM. Mention was made by Mr R. W. Hanson, a retired Indian civil servant, in the course of his address to local business men at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon on Tuesday afternoon, to the Indian “ reformer,” Gandhi, and in concluding what proved to be an interesting chat the speaked quoted from a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, a criticism of Gandhi by Katherine Mayo, authoress of the book “Mother India.” For general information we have secured the criticism, and publish it below: — Gandhi criticises his people for their “ total disregard of the elementary laws of health.” At the same time he denounces vaccination as “ dangerous and filthy.” The natural consequence is'an outbreak of smallpox in his Ashram. Then, instead of “ imposing isolation ” on himself and followers as he insisted the anti-vaccin-ationists ought to do, he starts off on a march through India with a band of infected followers, and naturally leaves behind a trail of smallpox. The “ Great Soul ” has denounced child marriage in unsparing terms in the past. The Sarda Act nrohibiting such marriages below a certain age went into effect on Ist April, 1930. It was preceded by a “cyclone of marriages ” of little girls to middleaged and elderly men. Thousands and tens of thousands of little girls, were hurriedly sacrificed in this disgusting way. Did v the “ Great Soul ” intervene ? He did not. Not a word of rebuke was-' spoken, not a finger lifted in behalf of these helpless girls. He was too busy denouncing the British Government. “ Sedition has become my religion,” he says. The untouchable outcasts have been insisting on equality, and as a first step have been attempting to break into the Hindu temples—a pool", misguided effort whose only result is to show the determination of the Brahman to hold his privileged position in society. Thousands of outcasts have ringed about the Kalarama temple in Nasik (Bombay Presidency). They have been stoned, their women and children in adjacent villages flogged, and their waterholes fouled. Again, has Gandhi intervened on the side of the oppressed ? No ! He says the British Government is stirring up these outcasts in order to divide India and to govern it the more easily. “ Hindu reformers will attend to temple entry.” The untouchables think differently. They say that to commit themselves to Gandhi and the Brahmans iwould be like putting the frog in the care of the cobra.