Agenda for Congress session

IT is inevitable that the agenda for this year’s Congress session at Belgaum should be a particularly heavy and comprehensive one. The crisis through which the Congress and the country have been passing is one of the extraordinary gravity as well as complexity. To two of the most important elements making up this crisis, the question of restoring the unity of the Congress and the Hindu-Muslim question, we have referred already. It is obvious that it is by its success in dealing with these all-important questions, more than in any other respect, that the place of the 1924 Congress session in the history of that movement will be principally determined. Both subjects are mentioned in the forecast that we published yesterday, one under the name of “revision of the Lucknow Pact”, the other titled “attempts to alter the Constitution of the Congress”. What is necessary for securing the object in view in these cases is not so much a revision either of the pact or the Constitution as, to use a hackneyed phrase, a “change of heart”. The pact, with all its admitted drawbacks, may still remain, subject to an essential modification, as to which nationalist opinion has been keen and the importance of which even those who did not originally see it are beginning to realise, the substitution of joint for separate electorates. In the Congress Constitution, there is nothing to which any reasonable person need or would object, subject only to a proper interpretation of the word “Swaraj” in the statement of the goal of the Congress, and of the words “peaceful and legitimate” in the statement of the methods by which that goal is to be attained.