THE INDIAN ISSUE
SIR,—The Spectator of May 22nd, 1942, publishes a letter in which Sir Hari Singh Gour states, with regretful concurrence, that Mr. Gandhi ,
has declared the British Government's latest offer to India to be a " mere post-dated cheque " because he remembers how India made her " supreme effort in the last war " on the strength of " the declaration of India as a self-governing Dominion along with Canada and the other white colonies by the 9th resolution of the Imperial Conference, dated April 16th, 1917," and the consignment of that promise to oblivion after the war.
Memory plays strange tricks. I, at least, have refreshed mine by looking up the 9th resolution and the relevant discussion on pages 49 and 61 of Parliamentary Paper Cd. 8566 of 1917. Those pages show that no such promise was made to India, nor even contemplated. The Conference, by its 7th resolution, had rightly decided to welcome India henceforward as a member of the Conference. Then, in the 9th, it resolved to postpone until after the war the " readjustment of the con- stitutional relations of the component parts of the Empire," but noted that such readjustments " should be based upon full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth, and of India as an Important portion of the same, should recognise the right of the Dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign policy and foreign relations, and should provide effective arrangements for continuous consultation . . ."
The carefully worded passage I have underlined was inserted at the request of the Indian delegate, Sir Satyendra Sinha, who noted that the original regulation had been drafted solely with an eye on the Dominions, and desired that India also should be given an adequate voice in foreign policy and affairs. If words mean anything, even after the lapse of twenty-five years, that passage merely promised to give India a more dignified position in the Commonwealth, but differentiated clearly between that position and those of the recognised Dominions.
The sequel, of course, was the Montagu pronouncement of August loth, 1917, which promised the Indianisation of the Services and " the gradual development.9f self-governing institutions, with a view to th. ,rogressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire." Those were the promises of 1917 ; both fit in with the resolution of the Imperial Conference and neither have been consigned to oblidion. The Indianisation of the Services has been pro- ceeding steadily for twenty years past, and India has travelled far towards self-government since the Reforms of 1919. Sir Stafford Cripps took to India, not a mere post-dated cheque, but the latest and, in many ways, the largest instalment of payment that had from the start been proffered upon the instalment plan.—Yours faithfully,
St. John's College, Cambridge. ERIC A. WALKER.
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