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but when and what kind wil depend on the Indian people themselves and on their solution of the present di unity."
" Independence is coming to India
.
.
.
Cripps Returned to 6owni
Street
disappointed and puzzled INDIA'S
PROBLEM
COMPLEX SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS
-carried his bag back to Downing Street, empty.
Why had he failed?
A\ID SEETHI\G WITH DISCORD
dia is a country with an area of 1,808,680 square miles and a population estimated between 375 and 390 million people.
Background for the understanding of the immensely important moves being made to find a solution of the Indian problem, is given in "America' by John S. O'Connor, S.J., who has served eight years on Indian missions,
When Sir Stafford Cripps set out from No. 10 Downing Street, on his now famous flight to India, peoples held their breath and hoped with a great hope that his little black bag contained sufficient magic power to win over India's fuller co-operation
against the Axis Powers. Disappointment and puzzled wonder accompanied Sir Stafford as he carried back his bag to Downing Street, empty. Why had he failed? Why had the Indians refused to accept the offers of Dominion status-even with the compromise rider of having their own Defence Minister? There was no puzzled wonderment on the part of those who know India. For, even though they shared the same great hope, they realised more fully what a task had been assigned to this "trouble shooter extraordinary" of the British Empire. His was a task comparable to that of smoothing out the difficulties and bringing into unity all the nations of Europe. Sir Stafford Cripps would have encountered no greater mass of complications religious, racial and political, in such an assignment than he did in his mission to India. India was too commonly regarded in American headlines as a little nation bordering the Indian Ocean somewhere in southern Asia. The geopraphical education brought about by the profusion of detailed newspaper maps and
IS
Since 1920, Ghandi has been in the strange position of being leader of the Congress Party but not an official member of it.
descriptive radio broadcasts of this World War II. has been a revelation to many that India is more than a little country "way out East," People have discovered that India is really a sub -continent. Cut off from the rest of Asia by the lofty snow-
capped Himalayas, India forms a triangular peninsula jutting into the Indian Ocean. Its area, over half that of the continental United States, holds a population three times greater than that of our forty-eight States. To make this assertion more concrete, In-
But the size and population of this teeming sub-continent of India was not the reason for failure in the negotiations between Britain and India. Rather, it was the complexity of racial, religious and political elements that could not be simplified by any short and magical formula. India has never been a nation, True,. a superficial sort of unity was effected during the course of the centuries by the various conquering Aryan and Mohammedan invaders, who carved out greater or lesser empires in the But these never resulted peninsula. in a "melting pot" such as we know so well in these United States. Since the days of the East India Company, and more especially since the King of Great Britain became the Emperor of India, this surface unity has spread throughout India, but it was only the means of lightly linking together the diverse elements of the country and not really fusing them. India to -day remains a country composed of at least fifteen different races, speaking twenty-five different languages-and these become 225 different tongues if all the various dialects are included. English and Hindustani serve as linguae francae, but the number who speak these, in addition to their own vernacular is extremely small in proportion to the total population. More than four-fifths of the people India are engaged in agriculture, living on small farms and in small villages, away from the urban centres, of
Illiteracy is high. Eighty-five per cent, of the population are unable to read
or write, For these people, the hori(Continued on Back Cover.)
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