Unity of parties

Lahore, Friday, September 5, 1924

IT is a matter for sincere congratulations that two of the most forceful personalities (Mahatma Gandhi and Annie Besant) in India are now agreed as to what we for our part have always regarded as the fundamental condition of effective political advance in India, namely, the unity of all political parties, not in the sense of the elimination of all differences among them, but of their readiness to subordinate such differences to the paramount need for united action with a view to the attainment of the common goal. Of one of the two, it cannot, indeed, be said that he has ever been under a delusion in this matter. The success of non-cooperation with the bureaucracy, he has said again and again, depends upon the fullest cooperation among the people themselves. Unhappily, in actual practice, he as well as his immediate lieutenants, not to speak of the rank and file of the great party of which he has now for four years been the recognised head, have laid the bulk of their emphasis upon cooperation among several political parties. So far as the last is concerned, they, like other political parties, have occasionally talked of the need for unity, but it has always or generally been unity on their own terms, that is to say, on a basis on which no unity is possible among men of conviction and of self-respect. In fairness to Gandhi himself, it must be added that unlike most others of all parties, he has also publicly enjoined it upon his party to put its opponents at ease, an injuction, it must be sorrowfully admitted, which some of his followers have honoured more in the breach than in the observance.