A word to Sarojini Naidu

ONE good turn deserves another, and Sarojini Naidu’s eloquent speech at the Gujranwala Conference, reported in these columns yesterday, calls for a word in reply. So far as the speech was a stirring appeal for Hindu-Muslim unity, there is not a true-hearted man or woman in the rest of India who will not warmly sympathise with it, and in whom it will not find a responsive echo. Our only complaint in regard to it is that it was couched in too general terms and bore no evidence of the speaker’s readiness to face the real, concrete issue. So far as that issue was concerned, she brushed it aside almost as unceremoniously as the President had done in his address. Replying to those who said that if they could settle the question of communal representation, there would be peace in the land, she said that was not so, that they should not treat the leaves or the branches of the diseased tree, but should remove the canker from the root itself, that they should lay the axe at the root of mutual distrust, suspicion, jealousy and fanaticism. But what is the root? Where is the axe to be laid? Just as it is no use crying peace when there is no peace, so you do not eradicate an evil merely by mentioning it. It is perfectly true that if we could remove mutual distrust, suspicion, jealousy and fanaticism, we should be rid of the whole trouble. But the root of the distrust is not the distrust itself, but something else. What is this something else? Is it not that spirit of communalism, as distinguished from the spirit of nationality, of which the demand for communal representation is the one tangible expression so far as the educated sections of the affected communities are concerned?