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Historic Irony. In 1750 this God-obsessed nation suffered one of history's supreme ironies: its conquest was begun by the world's No. 1 modern industrial power — Britain. For a century India supplied a large part of the capital wherewith Britain financed its industrial expansion and presently formed a big part of the market to which Britain sold its manufactures.
For two centuries tiny, remote Britain ruled India by the policy of divide and conquer. The differences between India's Hindus (256 million) and India's Moslems (92 million) were more than religious; they were almost organic. Says Moslem Dr. Aziz of the Hindus in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India'. "I wish they did not remind me of cow dung." Britain was suspected of setting the Moslem League against the Hindus, slowly acquiring political maturity as the majority in the All-India National Congress. Against the caste Hindus she played the 40 million Untouchables, whose very shadow, to a high-caste Hindu, is defilement. Against both she played the panoplied, privileged world of the Indian princes and the martial nations of the Sikhs and Gurkhas.
Inspired Discernment. Then in Natal, South Africa, (circa 1905), a lean, struggling, expatriate Hindu lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had a political discernment of genius: in God-obsessed India the politics of liberation must take the form of a religious struggle. Doffing his European store clothes and donning a dhoti, the little man moved against the British Empire in the name of four principles: satyagraha (acceptance of Truth), ahimsa (non-violence), swadeshi (home industry), swaraj (independence). From then on, the history of Indian-British relations has been a long, painful procession of thousands of nonresisting Indian nationalists passing in & out of British jails, or under the lathis (staffs) of Britain's police.
Many of the Congress leaders who sat around the conference table with Lord Wavell at Simla last week had spent more time in the last few years inside than outside of his jails. Among them were the Congress Party's Moslem President Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (both newly released from jail), and the Congress Party's moderate, resourceful lawyer Chakravarti Rajagopalachariar. In the background hovered the little man in the dhoti, Mohandas K. Gandhi, freed over a year ago. He was not participating in the conference, but his influence permeated it. Also present were the Moslem League's dapper, fractious President Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the Sikh leader Tara Singh, the Punjab's nonLeague Moslem Premier Malik Khizar Hayat Khan Tiwana. But the man on whom, more than on any other, the future of 400 million Indians depended at this climax of 200 years of British rule, was the short, thickset, smiling, one-eyed, taciturn Englishman at the head of the conference table.