Evening star., 1942-03-29

| greater and greater Msistence here on
the other side Of the world.
1t is q chorus that can no longer be
ignored in the West, where India, with
one-fifth Of the population Of the earth,
has meant no more than romantic tags.
The sleek Rolls-Royces Of the fabulously
rich maharajahs in line before the vice.
roy's house in New Delhi. The bushels
of pearls and rubies, the stacks of gold
rupees, the caparisoned elephants. the
treasure of Mysore and Hyderabad.
Kipling and his Mowgli, his stoical,
heroic handful of British on the far
frontiers. That is the romantic gloss
that has been India.
Now, at last, the reality has made itself
felt and at time when history has come
to an about face in the Far East. At this
moment, stepping onto the stage that Is
Indian, the hot, dry, dusty, acrid, i'm
mensely lonely stage, is solitary Eng
lishman. If any actor ever had an
entrance built up for him, with long
roll of ominous drums, 1t Is Sir Stafford
Cripps, who arrived In New Delhi last
week on his mission to India.
Mind Free Of Prejudices.
He is a spare, tallish Britisher without
any side, with nothing Of what is tradi-
tionally connoted by the phrase "the
British In India" There were two rea-
sons why he went out to New Delhi. One
was that his friend, Harold Lash, has
called his almost neurological reputa-
ton" which came out Of his stay In
Moscow. The other, and far more i'm
portant, reason is his belief in the
brotherhood Of man. Cripps approaches
the problem of India with no conde-
scension whatsoever. His mind Is free OF
the prejudices of the ordinary English
man, yes, of the ordinary Westerner. In
the light of Grips Christianity, whether
a mans skin is white or brown is of no
| matter.
Success in his present mission will take
all his faith and good deal OF political
skill and shrewdness to boot. No Britisher
in our time has been put to any greater
test. 1t is not merely a matter Of
granting India independence, offering 1t
all neatly tied up in ribbons and tissue
paper. The Hindus want one kind of
| independence, the Moslems another, the
untouchables another. Their conflicting
demands are clamorous at a moment
when the peril from Japanese attack is
gravest p
Il Sir Staffords task Is to unity these
forces in the face of common danger
To do that he must convince each group
that it will achieve something approx
mating its desires. Churchill has given
Cripps set Of bargaining conditions, of
sufficient elasticity, it is presumed. to
enable him to meet from hour to hour
the contingencies that arise Sir Stafford
has said that his stay in India would be
short-not more than . fortnight-so
that these critical days will tell the tale.
Visit Laid Groundwork.
This Is only the second time in his
life that Cripps has ever been in India.
1t must have been an intuitive sense of
what lay before him that took him there
in the winter OF 1889. the winter of the
"phony" war. Looking about him in
London and finding no useful service he
could perform he started out on tour
of the world. In the course of the tour,
covering 10000 miles, he laid the ground
work for all that he has done since.
Cripps visited China, India, Russia,
Burma, Japan and the United States.
His was no ordinary tour. Everywhere
he went he talked to the leaders of the
people. 1t may be that he foresaw the
tremendous importance Of bringing to-
gether the peoples of India, China and
Russia as a bulwark against the Axis
Many things have grown out of that pro-
phetic tour-Cripps' mission to Moscow,
the coming together Of China and India,
which was symbolized by Chang Kali
shek's visit to Gandhi and Nehru, and
now Sir Stafford's return to India
Grips private secretary, Geoffrey
Wilson, in recent broadcast described
the first trip. From day to day Cripps
saw one after the other the spokesmen
for Indias inarticulate millions. The
striking contrasts of land of fantastic
contradictions unrolled before this sober,
serious Englishman.
Went to India to Learn.
At Wardha he had lunch with Gandhi
in q mud hut. The great leader who has
preached q return to simpler ways Of
the past and non-resistance sat cross
legged on the floor. Cripps sat cross
legged on q low stool. They ate meal
Of vegetables and bread served by
Gandhi's disciples. Such a repast was
perfectly to the liking of Sir Stafford,
who eats nothing but uncooked food
raw vegetables, cheese, fruit and milk
The day before seeing Gandhi, Cripps
had spent with the Nizam of Hyderabad,
ruler of one of the largest and wealthiest
of the native states of India. The day
after his meeting with Gandhi he stayed
with the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, in
Calcutta.
'Tt came easily to him." said Mr. Wilson
in his broadcast, ito talk with all manner
Of people and understand their point of
view. That was typical of his short stay
in India. He had gone there to learn and
the way to learn was to see the people
and listen to what they had to say. So
he saw Mohammed Ali Jinnah of the
Moslem League in Bombay and Dr. B. R.
Ambedkar, leader of the 10000 900 un-
touchables. At Allahabad he saw Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru of the Congress party.
He talked with the prime ministers of
the p11nioh ond popoo1 c;{ al