The hunger strike

THE hunger strike among political prisoners in Mandalay jail continues to be a subject of anxious and animated talk all over India. Here are men, most of them educated and some of them of the highest respectability, who refuse to take any food in jail unless and until their grievances are removed. What precisely these grievances are, the public does not so far know. The Home Member, even in his latest statement in the Assembly, made so recently as on Monday, denied having received any representation from the prisoners except on the subject of their allowances. That these allowances are in some cases at least far from adequate is practically admitted by the authority on the spot, the Burma Government itself. In a communique just issued by it, that government states that in consideration of the high cost of living in Burma, it has recommended that a special grant should be made to the prisoners to allow renewing of their clothes. Why this recommendation, which is said to be still under consideration, could not be made long ago, seeing that the prisoners have been in Mandalay jail for long months, is not at all clear. It is all very well for the Home Member to say that the prisoners must be greatly mistaken if they imagine that they will succeed in having their allowances increased by this means. The extent to which the government can remain callous in spite and in the face of a hunger strike of the nature and proportion of the present one is a question of the comparative claims, in the eyes of the government, of discipline and red tape on the one hand and of humanity on the other.