The Indian debate

MORE than one Anglo-Indian journal has described the recent debate in the House of Commons on the Indian estimates as one of the most remarkable debates on India held in that House in recent times. That there were features in the debate which were worthy of this high praise, anyone who goes through the official report of it will at once admit. But as usually happens in such cases, it is not these features of the debate, not the head of fine gold, nor the arms and breasts of silver in the image, which are its chief attraction for our friends, but its feet of clay. Two of the finest speeches undoubtedly were those of Colonel Wedgwood and Ramsay MacDonald, but the only parts of those speeches that have met with commendations in the Anglo-Indian Press are those which were utterly irrelevant to the occasion. Such were the attacks which the two distinguished speakers made on the non-cooperation movement. Undoubtedly, there was much in that movement which admitted of an honest difference of opinion and in regard to which honest differences did exist both in India and England. But when MacDonald, for instance, said the action of the non-cooperators, when the Labour Party was on the threshold of office, "put innumerable obstacles in our way, gave us difficulties that made it impossible for us, for the time being, to do what we should like to have done, that so far from assisting India in its progress towards self-government, it was a most serious and, to my colleagues and myself, a most tragic disaster," he brought a charge against the non-cooperators which is absolutely unsustainable.