"From Kipling to Tojo"

"I hope we can cooperate against aggression. The Japs also gave us sweet words, but brought hell, rape, looting, death-chill death, barbaric death." These were the desperate words of warning with which Chiang Kai-shek hoped to cash in on India's potential fighting population of 352 million natives, on his visit to New Delhi last week. But Chiang did not suspect that the spirit of Kipling would frustrate all his appeals. He did not know that Pandit Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi's successor as Chairman of the Indian National Congress and symbol of India's nationalist movement, had spent two-thirds of his life in prison, cufflinked by the British Foreign Secretary.

Now that Singapore has fallen, the loss of Rangoon would mean China cut off, and the ring for a return bout blasted into splinters. This man Nehru could, with the 425,000,000 Chinese that Chiang represents, hold sway over one-third of the population of the world. The natives of India, given their freedom, could defend themselves with the same phenomenal resistance which has been exhibited by the inspired populations of China and Russia-that same determination which was notably lacking in the peoples of, lulled Malaya.

But Pandit Nehru, treating Chiang like a spokesman of John Bull, replied that, "India will never grovel before the Japanese, but will utilize passive resistance." He added, however, that"... the moral factor is the dominating influence in this war, and it would make an immense difference if India and like countries were free." When he said this, he knew well that all India had ever gotten from the British was a series of double-crosses. During the last World War, India was promised "a greater degree of freedom." Then, at the Treaty of Westminster in 1931, the British conveniently forgot this promise, although they gave the virtual independence of dominion status to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other lands hitherto burdened by the white man of Albino.

This second World War is a war of politics as well as military strategy. The related stories of the Fall of Singapore and Life in the Raffles Hotel have knocked the props out of the white man's prestige in the whole of Asia. Chiang Kai-shek tried to make up for that loss of prestige by instilling fear of Jap invasion in the heart of India, and he was answered by an argument for passive resistance.

Only positive action on the part of the British can bring India over to the side of the fighting Allied Nations. Only fulfilled promises can make the sky-blue-pink Atlantic Charter mean something to the wily "untouchables." The sooner the British Parliament votes to give India all the freedom she wants, the sooner she can count on action from one of the largest populations in the world... and it had better be very soon.