Swarajists and Independents

THE tendency on the part of the Swarajists and the Independents in the Legislative Assembly, both to drift apart in certain essential matters and to indulge in mutual recrimination, which has been noticeable all through the present session, reached its culminating point on Wednesday. The Finance Bill was passed by a substantial majority, and the foremost leaders of the two parties treated the House and the country to a supremely undignified exhibition of what one of them justly and truthfully described as the process of “washing one’s dirty linen in public.” In itself, the passing of the Finance Bill was a matter of no serious concern; and for our part, we should not have attached any great importance to it if it had not been for the fact that a similar Bill was actually thrown out last year. What one ordinarily expects in such matters, where the relations between the Government and the Opposition remain substantially unaltered, is not a gradual relaxation but a gradual stiffening of the attitude of the latter towards the former. From this point of view, the natural thing would have been for the House to have accepted the Finance Bill last year and rejected it this year. Again, so far as the rejection of the Bill last year was the outcome of the solidarity between the two wings of the Nationalist Party, one would have expected that solidarity to grow and not diminish with time. But this reversal of the natural process is, from the public point of view, less regrettable than the delectation which the two parties have now for some time been affording to their common opponents by mutual fault-finding, amounting at times almost to vilification.