AICC meeting

THE meeting of the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) at Patna is an event of unusual interest. Two questions, each pregnant with great possibilities of good and evil for the country, will engage the attention of the meeting. On one of these, the revision of the Congress franchise, the country has spoken out with practically one voice. Either the present franchise must go absolutely, or it must remain, with or without modification, only as an alternative to a money franchise. There is some difference of opinion as to whether the franchise should be four annas, as in the past, or a little more. It cannot obviously be made much more, because the object is to draw the whole of political India, including the poorest classes, into the vortex of the national movement. In a poor country like India, a large number of whose people live perpetually on the verge of starvation or semi-starvation, a truly democratic franchise must be a low franchise. A more difficult question is how to make the richer classes contribute to the maintenance of the Congress in a manner more proportionate to their means. Obviously, the payment of a subscription of four annas per annum has no meaning and no reality for them. Both for the purpose of equalising sacrifices and because in many cases the interest that a man takes in a movement is proportionate to the sacrifice he makes for it, it is essential that some means should be devised to make the more well-to-do classes pay more for the maintenance of the Congress and the furthering of its ends than the minimum annual subscription that is to qualify a man for the membership of the Congress.