LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Cripps in India SIR,—In his penetrating analysis of Sir Stafford Cripps Mr. Francis Williams confuses the occasions of his visits to India. In fact he went there three times. First, he went in the late autumn of 1939 unofficially to explore the views of statesmen in India and the Far East generally. It was after that that he became British Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., and later leader of the House of Commons under Winston Churchill. He went next in the spring of 1942, bearing an official offer to India from the Coalition Government. This offer was rejected by Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress, who regarded is at a "post-dated cheque on a bankrupt empire." It was on his return from that visit that he became Minister of Aircraft Production.
In 1946 he went under the auspices of the Labour Government with Albert Alexander (now Lord Alexander of Hillsborough) and myself as Secretary of State for India (the three of us forming "the Cabinet Mission -) to try to unravel the Indian tangle. We succeeded in con- vincing Indians of British sincerity, but failed to bridge Congress- Muslim distrust. Throughout this period Sir Stafford was President of the Board of Trade. But in October, 1947, he became Minister of Economic Affairs and shortly afterwards *Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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