MEMBERS OF THE CANADIAN TOURING TEAM THE INDIAN ARMY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19845, 20 May 1927, Page 10

MEMBERS OF THE CANADIAN TOURING TEAM

THE INDIAN ARMY

PROPOSED INDIANISATION POINTS OF VIEW* CALCUTTA, April 20. No report from the plethora of commissions of inquiry on India in recent years has aroused a tithe of the interest manifested in Lieut.-General Sir Andrew Skeen's proposals for the ludianisation of the army. The opinions of Europeans are at present being cautiously expressed in public, but in the leading Service clubs the report is the sole subject of conversation, ami of, perhaps prematurely, excited comment. Privately, the view of this majority is that the proposals are startlingly revolutionary. The newspapers Statesman and Englishman, while agreeing with the necessity for inviting Indians to take the fullest share in th® defence of the country, and sympathising with the proposal to open all branches of the Army to Indians when tho necessary material is available, emphasise that there is far more in this problem to> bo satisfied than the Indian politicians’ demand for Indianisation.

The European Press as a whole prefers to wait for tho consideration of the proposals- by the Committee on Impel ial Defence, which, in coming to a decision, will weigh the wider aspects of the problem as affecting not only India, but also the whole- Empire. In the meantime the political Indian Press is in full cry, devoting columns io reproducing the report sad commenting thereon. Shortly, the line tak in is that, while the picpcsals that half the cadro of commissioned officers in the Army should bo Indians twenty-five years hence is “a grotesque and wholly disappointing proposition from the Indian point of view, even this humble proposal, for all practical purposes, has been turned down in advance.”

The Forward concludes from the Earl of Birkenhead’s speech in the Home of Lords that the rulers of India in Whitehall have decided to wriggle out of a difficult position by obvious subterfuges, while the Government of India is depended upon to echo its master’.3. voice.

The Amrita Bazar Patrika has decided that the report is destined to be consigned to the Government’s archives. It scarcely considers the proposals worthy of consideration. Other “Nationalist” papers gleefully announce

as l. ... ci. . i-.uof-th.at the Bril’ professions of sympathy with legitin: Indian aspirations arc a sham, the ■ tainty that Sir Andrew Skeen’s p posals “will never get beyond tl> mocking, sophisticated comments of the Earl of Birkenhead.”