Lean Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, rode to the Council House at New Delhi beneath a gold umbrella last week, opened India's Legislative Assembly with these words:
"I and my government are determined to use to the full the resources of the State in fighting and defeating a movement which would otherwise remain a perpetual menace to orderly government and individual liberty."
As Lord Willingdon well knew, Indian Nationalists were celebrating the third anniversary of St. Gandhi's declaration of independence. The Mahatma himself, rewarded for his good behavior in jail by permission to receive one visitor each week, squatted in his cell and talked to Disciple Madeline Slade about the two pounds he has gained. But outside Gandhites were far from peaceful.
In Bombay a mob set fire to the police .station, put out the city lights, built huge bonfires of British cloth. Police fired into the crowd, charged with flailing lathis (sticks). Many heads were cracked, hundreds of rioters arrested. The Bombay-Benares express was derailed. Hundreds were arrested in Calcutta and New Delhi for reciting the declaration of independence in public and singing patriotic songs. At the end of three days eight persons had been killed, 1,000 jailed, many sentenced to three years' hard labor.
As committees of the Round Table Conference prepared to resume sessions 24 native commercial organizations voted to suspend business for a week as a protest against the exclusion of St. Gandhi. The Bombay government retaliated by ordering the arrest of any merchant closing his place of business. At Ahmedabad an Indian surgeon was fined 1,000 rupees for refusing for the third time to remove the Gandhi tricolor from his dispensary. Unimpressed by the much publicized martyrdom of Krishna Kant (TIME, Jan. 25). a British magistrate ordered a 14-year-old boy flogged for picketing a British bank.
In Calcutta Miss Santi Ghose and Miss Sunity Chowdhuri, convicted of fatally filling District Magistrate Charles Geoffrey Buckland Stevens full of bullets (TIME, Dec. 28), appeared in court for their sentences. In bright colored saris, with flowers in their hair, they listened unmoved as they were sentenced to transportation for life from Bengal Presidency. Said they lightly: "It is better to die than live in a horse's stable."