Next in importance after the British Constitutional Question, now safely answered in the United Kingdom, is the Indian Constitutional Question—the question whether the Indian people accept and enter into the spirit of the new Constitution enacted in 1935 by the Mother of Parliaments and sent to them from London, together with a most able new Viceroy, the banker Marquess of Linlithgow (TIME, Oct. 12 et ante). Last week George VI, new King & Emperor, labored chiefly over reports from his Indian Empire.
Indians, apart from their groveling submission to princely rajas and maharajas in the Native States, and apart from their tepid interest in the rubber-stamp legislative bodies in British India, have a nationwide political organization which they call the "Indian National Congress," and Mahatma Gandhi is its Prophet. In case it should ever be argued that this native Congress does not represent any considerable number of the Indian people, Mr. Gandhi has secured the attendance of some 60,000 Congressmen at each normal meeting. They met last week in a swiftly-constructed bamboo and tent city near the village of Faizpur, 200 mi. outside Bombay, and the Mahatma laid aside for this occasion his recent preoccupation with the special problems of India's Untouchables and village industries. Mr. Gandhi now concerned himself and the Congress concerned itself with deciding whether to: 1) support or struggle against the New Indian Constitution; 2) support or boycott the Coronation Durbar in India next winter of Their Majesties; 3) support or withhold support from His Majesty's Government in case they find themselves at war.
A series of three decisions on these three points last week, all diametrically adverse to His Majesty's Government and to His Majesty, was the story which the Indian National Congress wrote by unanimous acts at Faizpur. This Voice of India said with its 60,000 throats, "No, no and NO!" A problem was therefore presented to British correspondents in Bombay, but not a problem beyond their powers to solve. Not only over British wires but over the U. S. circuits of United Press, the story of the Conference's three-times-No verdict went out with this lead sentence: BOMBAY (UP)—ENTHUSIASM RAN HIGH THROUGHOUT INDIA TODAY OVER THE ANTICIPATED VISIT OF KING GEORGE VI, EMPEROR OF INDIA, DESPITE A DECISION OF THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS TO BOYCOTT HIS CORONATION.
This was a British journalistic feat probably never before equaled and perhaps never to be surpassed in reversing at the start the biggest news story of the Empire last week. The dispatch contained no particulars of the alleged "enthusiasm" of Indians for the Coronation and this was presumably confined to pukka sahibs in the privacy of their homes. At the Congress sessions last week the Mahatma spoke with his usual mystic benevolence.
Not so the Congress' fighting President, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, now its active leader. Britons accuse him of being semi-Marxian and he last week called them semi-Fascist in return. Roared Mr. Nehru: