Jinnah’s new party

WE now know what MA Jinnah meant when he said in the course of a recent interview that he was making every endeavour to form a new political party to carry on constitutional agitation in the country and hoped to secure the support of Bombay. The new party, it appears, is not to be a new party at all, but the old Independent party in the Assembly, with a larger membership, an extended scope end increased functions. “The party,” he says, “should be on the lines of the Independent party in the Legislative Assembly. The time has come when an organisation should be started which will stand midway between the Swarajists and the Liberals. As the large bulk of opinion in the country does not approve of the policy and programme of either of these parties, the new organisation should be such as will be able to level up the Liberals and level down the Swarajists both in their profession and policy.” This is a much safer proposition, and some of our readers doubtless remember that this was the precise function which, in a leading article published many months ago when the Independent party in the Assembly had just been formed, we described as the only proper and legitimate function of that party, a description which Jinnah himself told the present writer was the truest description of the purpose, the policy and the function of the Independent party that he had seen in any newspaper. But if Jinnah only wants a new party in this sense, he will do well to remember that a party which stands midway between two other parties and whose professed purpose is to level up one of them and level down the other cannot, in the nature of things, be a party in the ordinary sense.