SIDELIGHTS : : A newspaper has two sides to it. On the one hand, it is a business like any other business, carried on for profit and depending on profit for prosperity or existence. On the other hand,, it may be described as a public utility service, a service which may be performed well or ill, but to the interests of the public. These two elements in the life and purpose of a newspaper are not always in accord; they may even violently conflict. Yet on their harmony the character and usefulness of a newspaper must depend.—C . P. SCOTT.

SWATANTRA—SEPTEMBER 27, 1947

A WRITER in a recently started weekly journal called upon one of the Ministers the other day to go and drown himself in the Cooum. I cite this as an example of advice that is never likely to be acted upon by those to whom it is addressed, however vigorously or captivatingly the advice may be phrased. Good journalism should restrict itself to purposes capable of being realized. In the expounding of opinion there is no charm in getting the plaudits of those who are already on your side. Achievement consists in forcing readers who belong to the “other” side to change over to your own under the irresistible compulsion of argument. In British journalism J. A. Spender excelled all others in this sort of achievement.

*               *          *

Lord Northcliffe said of Spender that he was the only man who could edit The Times, but it is with the Westminster Gazette that Spender’s name is primarily associated. In a note on spender’s completion of twenty-one years of editorship, the Manchester Guardian wrote, “The Westminster is the one journal in London which sells on its leader. It is unlike all other London leaders in that it is addressed to and read by the thoughtful section of the opposite party.” Spender was a devotee of the Liberal Party and the Westminster while he edited it was regarded as the most authoritative exponent of Liberalism in the British Press. But party loyalty never led to decline of intellectual independence in his case. In a laudatory letter to Spender, Sir Edward Grey said, “You manage to combine independent thought with unswerving support of the party in a way which is rare. It makes your articles like the opinion of a valued colleague. I know nothing else in journalism like it.”

*               *          *

Spender made a mark for reasonableness “not unsalted with wit”, and his peculiar combination of sanity, sincerity and scrupulous fairness which always made for moderation of expression was a source of constant exasperation to unreasonable opponents who found themselves powerless to deal with him in the customary styles of invective and denunciation. Spender used reason as the supreme journalistic weapon in a rather coldblooded way, but he had a passion for taking himself seriously and facing most respectfully the arguments of those who differed from him. He was a warmhearted apostle of journalistic integrity who felt sorely distressed professionally whenever he saw the power of the Press used for purposes that did not conduce to the public good. On such occasions he went out of his way to remonstrate with newspaper proprietors and persuade them to return to the paths of social duty.

*               *          *

Once when Lord Northcliffe conducted in the Daily Mail a campaign which Spender felt was doing a great deal of harm to the public, he went to Lord Northcliffe and objected to the campaign and begged him to put a stop to it. The story of how Lord Northcliffe dealt with his appeal is given by Robert Hichens in his just published autobiography, Yesterday:

“Northcliffe touched a bell and gave an order. The order was that the circulation sheets of the Daily Mail, from before the beginning of the campaign to that moment, should be brought to him. They were brought, and Lord Northcliffe showed them to Spender. The sheets proved that even since the beginning of the campaign which Spender considered so harmful to public opinion the circulation of the paper had been steadily rising.

“You see!” Lord Northcliff said.

Spender said, “Yes ! Well?”

Lord Northcliffe simply moved his broad shoulders, as much as tosay, “How can you possibly expect me to stop a campaign that is doing so much good to the paper?”

And the interview came to an end.

*               *          *

The Northcliffian tradition has spread from Britain to the rest of the world. It has not spread the Press of this poor country. We have journals run to create bad blood because the creation of bad blood is popular with excited groups primed for mutual recrimination and belligerency and happens for the time to be commercially profitable. It was the distinction of Spender’s Westminster that though it lost money and had, compared with the millions of readers of the Northcliffian Press, an inconsiderable circulation, it commanded a greater weight of influence per reader, having regard to the character of its readers, than any other London paper existing then or since. A revealing reminiscence indicating the superiority of the Westminster in the matter of continual gripping of intelligent readers’ interest is given by Sir Robert Edgcumbe:

“I was travelling to London on a Thursday afternoon, and was alone in my compartment. At Hatfield Lord Salisbury got into the same carriage, and as the train moved off he was handed three evening papers. Shortly after we started he took them up, opened first the Globe and immediately threw it upon the floor of the carriage; then he opened the Evening Standard and treated it in a similar manner; lastly he opened the Westminster diligently until we arrived at King’s Cross station.”

*               *          *

Some papers are just glanced at by their readers and thrown away. Some are bought for racing tips. Some for the appeal to avarice they contain in the form of lavish crossword puzzles. Some for the pictures of captivating pin-up girls which they print. And quite a lot (of late) for the predictions they venture as a regular feature to lure the anxious and the despondent tossed about in the sea of life’s troubles, with imaginary paradises of impending good fortune. These inroads on journalism by skilled exploiters of crowd hungers serve to confound professional eminence and success with the mere knack of putting through techniques of remunerative sensationalism. They have been tending to vulgarise the Press and to deprive it more and more of its social purpose. A great pity!

*               *          *

The date of publication of this issue of Swatantra synchronises with the silver jubilee of K. Iswara Dutt’s entry into journalism. His friends and admirers are celebrating the happy occasion in a fitting manner. Dutt is now Public Relations Officer in Hyderabad. It is a singularly difficult and delicate post to hold at the present juncture. It is remarkable that not even a tiny smear of the wild passion roused in all and sundry by the state of affairs now prevailing in that gravely disturbed State should have clung to him in the process of his official duties so closely connected with its Government. This gift of coming unscathed through storms that would have broken to pieces and wrecked the career of any less indomitably pleasant spirit, is Dutt’s unique asset. He has conquered all difficulties with a social charm that has taken most of India’s great, captive. Of Arthur Mee, a man of wonder in Britain’s Fleet Street, whose expertness in fitting every conceivable topic on earth with relevant tit-bits of historical interest, accounted to genius, admirers used to ask, Wherefrom did he gather all this knowledge? Early in his career Arthur Mee began a collection of cuttings from every available source which in course of time grew to such dimensions that a huge cabinet of many drawers was required to accommodate them all. It was insured for a thousand pounds. The result of his analysis and assortment of every scrap of general information collected through years of daily examination of the Press was to build up Arthur Mee into a prodigy of encyclopaedic knowledge with stupendous mastery over a vast variety of miscellaneous subjects. Dutt has a stock of cuttings that can be worthily compared with Mee’s. It is a rich treasure house from which invaluable results can be expected. Acquaintance with it has fashioned Dutt into a literary craftsman of exceptional polish.—(September 27, 1947) S A K A.

SIDELIGHTS : : Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.—GEORGE ELIOT.

SWATANTRA—SEPTEMBER 20, 1947

WHEN Dr. T. S. S. Rajan moved in the Assembly on Monday that the food situation be taken into consideration, Mr. B. S. Murthi said “I request that the Prime Minister be present.” The speaker said “The leader of the House (Dr. Subbaroyan) is here.” Mr. Murthi repeated “I want the Prime Minister to be here.” Dr. Subbaroyan said that the Minister in charge of Food would be able to cope with the situation.

*               *          *

Nobody ever said or could have thought that in situations which the Food Minister could not cope with, the Prime Minister is the one to be looked up to. Was it because the Constituent Assembly could not cope with its work that a regular contingent of Madras Ministers rushed to Delhi abandoning the province to its fate in the midst of a daily worsening famine crisis? No other province has contributed so many Ministers to the benches of the Constituent Assembly as ours, and no provincial Ministry made such little mark there as the Omandurians did. The story is told of one of the members of the Assembly, of how when a committee discussion was going on as to whether the Centre or the Provinces should have the residuary powers, he coped with the situation by suggestion “By why not divide them on some equitable basis?” Guess who.

*               *          *

It is scarcely likely that any demand for the presence of a Prime Minister like Churchill would have emanated from any member of Parliament in the war period. It would have been assumed that he was unavoidably detained by urgent indispensable work elsewhere, and due respect would have been paid to the multifariousness of function of a strenuous office making simultaneous demands on the holder’s time and energy. At less momentous times Parliament did insist on the presence of absentee Ministers. And speakers have been known to uphold the view that it was the right of legislators to be listened to directly instead of by proxy by the Ministers and it was the duty of the Ministers to give personal attention to the criticisms made on the floor of the House about the administration of their respective departments.

*               *          *

The Russian delegate at the UNO is reported never to have been absent from any of its sessions even for a single minute. Sri Prakasam while Premier set up a very high standard in the matter of attendance in the legislature. He attended each day of each session punctual to the minute and stayed to the end of business every day, allowing himself no respite whatsoever. Only on very rare occasions was C.R. in legislature. Legislators including Ministers are paid for with public funds to attend sessions of the legislature and bestow their judgments on the topics coming up there, and evasion of attendance is a lapse from the strict code of rectitude. It is like being paid for a work and shirking it.

*               *          *

When Dr. Subbaroyan said that the Food Minister “could cope with the situation even in the absence of the Prime Minister,” the implication conveyed is, apparently, that the Prime Minister is a tremendous parliamentary force held in reserve, to be called in only when other ministerial resources are taxed to the utmost and found inadequate to meet the situation. Why should anybody insult public intelligence by indulging in fictitious make-believes of this sort that can deceive nobody? The plain truth of the matter is that in the Prime Minister we have one whom it is hopeless to bolster up as an able parliamentarian.—(September 20, 1947) S A K A.

SIDELIGHTS : : We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibres connect us with our fellow-men; and along those fibres, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.—MELVILLE.

SWATANTRA—SEPTEMBER 13, 1947

WHEN two persons live together for long, each takes on a little of the characteristics of the other. The morose man is made jolly by contiguity with the cheerful—and the cheerful one is made dolorous by the company of the dismal. We all act and react on each other to such an extent that to live together is barely possible without a substantial exchanging of one’s qualities with another’s Imitation is an unconscious human trait. It takes place through all antagonisms, unknown even to those passing through the process. It has been so between the Andhras sand Tamils and Malayalees inhabiting Madras City. Amalgams in rich variety of the separate collective virtues and vices of the three categories can be seen therein in consequence of their being thrown against each other in schools and colleges, offices, workshops, buses, trams, streets and cinemas.

*               *          *

There is charm in the fraternization of dissimilar units. For all purposes except war, the attractionsof heterogeneity are superior to the advantages of homogeneity. Variety is the spice of life in capital cities which have grown out of visitors from far and near taking roots in them often without loss of contact with their original homes. As there is going to be no war between province and province, no dire necessity is involved calling for a change in the present multi-lingual pattern of cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Delhi. Like great leaders who outgrow provincial stature with their greatness and attain national status, they belong to the whole country and to no province. Their life will be impoverished if they are forced administratively into the narrower dimensions of linguistic uniformity. The wide diversity among persons and groups in art, philosophy, religion, language and the like constitutes the very essence of culture—a thing to be not only cherished but to be protected in every possible way. It will be profitable to all concerned if the principle of linguistic unity in administration should bypass the three or four big multi-lingual cities situation on the border between different language areas. So they can serve as microcosms of the vast variety of the nation’s life and cultures, hospitable homes for all present residents, with no section appropriating rights of exclusive sovereignty over the rest.

*               *          *

Andhras in their pristine condition in their town or village homes are very different from Andhras abroad. They are given to outspokenness sand emotionalism. Fervour comes to them more easily than to Tamils with their genius for caution. There is a dash of defiance to established things in every Andhra heart. They are incorrigible nonconformists. They love to march in the vanguard of revolution. Their collective heroism is of a high order. While they lack tenacity they are endowed with an abundance of the pioneering spirit. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. The reserves and restraints dictated by considerations of conventional propriety are comparatively less effective in their behaviour as also the strains that belong to social sophistication. The generality of them have a happy go-lucky temperament. Their susceptibility to kindness and grateful expressions of demonstrative affection is as marked as their capacity for organising black flag processions and boycott campaigns against disliked individuals at short notice. Personal indentification with public affairs is habitual with them—so that their attitude to leaders eminent in public life is one of personal obligation. Conversely they react resentfully with a sense of personal injury towards those who in their opinion have let down the public and not acted worthily in public matters. Their sensitiveness to affronts is acute and is apt to lead them into manifestations of reckless vehemence. Unpopular leaders are only too well aware of the advisability of keeping at a safe distance from them and the danger of getting too near. Premier Omandur, for example, recently ran to Tanjore in order to hurl a threat of prospective coercion against defaulting Andhra producers.

*               *          *

The Tamils are the world’s inveterate rationalists. They are hard to bluff. They excel in organization and executive capacity. A silent contemptuous disregard of frothiness in any form moves them to shift substance from shadow and concentrate on pursuits of effective benefit ignoring the lures of mere vainglory. They will endure much in the present for the sake of a benefit in the offing. Their practical sagacity, added to their flair for the consolidation of small gains to ulterior ends, has marked them for success in business and administration, but the inroads of infectious communalism of a virulent sort in their midst, have latterly been making havoc with their powers of combination for social and public purposes. They need a little of the lovable imperfections of the Andhras, just as the Andhras need something of the admirable practicality of the Tamils, for evolving into a higher order of citizen, and the intermingling of the two classes in a common capital would seem to have rendered this inestimable service to each except in the political field where, through some inscrutable malevolence of fate, neither has copied the virtues of the other. It has been given to the Malayalees to combine in themselves the gregariousness of the Andhras and the sturdy realism of the Tamils.

*               *          *

I regret an error in last week’s Sidelights and sincerely apologise for it to readers of Swatantra and all others concerned. It was stated that travelling allowance is not paid to legislators if they arrive in the city more than a day prior to the meeting of the legislature and the holding of the Congress Legislature Party meeting just two days in advance of the legislature se3ssion was for the reason that a large attendance was not desired at the Party meeting. Actually, under the scheduled arrangement, it was not T.A. (travelling allowance) that the Party members have to forego but D.A. (daily allowance). There is a world of difference between the two and the substitution of the one for the other mars the value of the whole argument and was grossly unfair to the Premier. I do not know what amends to make for so inexcusable a blunder.—(September 13, 1947) S A K A.

SIDELIGHTS : : Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation.—COLTON.

SWATANTRA—SEPTEMBER 6, 1947

IT is now over five months since Sri Omandur was elected leader of the Congress Legislature Party. The election of leader under the Party rules is for a year. For more than five months out of the year, the Party has had no executive committee. The executive committee is as much an integral part of the Party machinery as the leader and it is an unheard of thing that such an integral part should be allowed to be missing for so long a time.

*               *          *

Now at last a meeting has been arranged for election of the executive committee. The meeting is fixed to take place on the thirteenth. The legislature is to meet on the fifteenth.   If the leader had intended that the Party meeting should be attended by the smallest possible number of people, he could not have pitched upon a more favourable date. Travelling allowance is not paid to legislators if they arrive in the city more than a day prior to the meeting of the legislature. It follows that except at the cost of their T.A. members of the Congress Legislature Party cannot attend the meeting scheduled for the thirteenth.

*               *          *

It would appear that it was pointed out to the leader that by postponing the date of the meeting by one day a far larger attendance could be had. But the date remains unchanged evidently for the simple reason that a large attendance is not desired. The smaller the meeting, the easier the maneuvering so as to get ‘safe’ and acceptable members packed into the executive committee. The Premier seems to have studied his legislators at least to the extent of knowing that the majority of them are not likely to forego any allowance due to them in order to attend any meeting. Honest man that he is with a far from flattering opinion of the honesty of others, he has taken to capitalizing that greatly self-advertised virtue of his to political ends in ways novel and unique unrecorded in history as ever having been thought of previously by others in a similar position.

*               *          *

The establishment of a Premier’s Secretariat is a stroke of genius on Sri Omandur’s part that secures for Madras an innovation not found elsewhere in India. Other Premiers are content to treat the whole of the Secretariat as their own and the attractions of a Secretariat within a secretariat  are lost on them. Exercise of power by proxy is inevitable when power is greatly desired but the knowledge and experience required for exercising it competently is lacking. One of our publicists with a very big reputation found at an early stage of his ambition that his brain was not equal to his opportunities. He loved to deliver addresses and have them well thought of and reported in the papers the next morning with commendatory comments. But on his own resources he could never prepare a speech. Secretaries were therefore engaged. He had a regular secretariat at work collecting ideas for future speeches, and when occasion arose they would put up drafts of speeches, but the great man who had to deliver them was hard put to it when it came to deciding which speech to choose. So he appointed another secretary to select one out of the various speeches for actual use.

*               *          *

Advisers tend to multiply as high offices are occupied by persons lacking capacity to discharge their responsibilities properly with their own resources of judgment. An economic adviser is an inescapable adjunct to a Minister for Finance when the Minister on account of ignorance gets lost and has to be helped out. There is an adviser in the offing for every Minister not knowing what to do with the power that has come to him. The dispersion of administrative control among innumerable known and unknown advisers has led to a veritable chaos of cross purposes, in the midst of which food has become scarce despite plenty of production, corruption has become rampant, communalism a flourishing political gospel and blackmarkets established institutions in the economy of the day.  

   

*               *          *

The limits of Sri Omandur’s capacities for leadership stand unfolded before the public in a record singularly barren of any good to the people governed. He was supposed to be a saint indifferent to material inducements who could be depended upon to renounce his title of leader at the appropriate time at the bidding of the makers of his fortune. He has sorely disappointed those that banked on this assumption. And as the Congress High Command themselves were among those that shared such an assumption, he has become a problem to the High Command who want to get rid of him but do not know how. Power has gone to his head and become an intoxicant, as it is naturally bound to do in the case of persons unfamiliar with it and not endowed with the largeness of vision required for sustaining its strains without loss of equilibrium. What with prodigious concentration of effort over small things he has brought a great office down to a comical level. Most of his colleagues must by now be feeling him to be an extremely irritating and impossible leader to get along with. He seems to have placed reliance in the rousing of communal passions for maintaining his position—a Justicite in Congress garb. A misfit if non-communalism is to be the sheet-anchor of Congress politics.—(September 6, 1947) S A K A.                                                                                      

SIDELIGHTS : : The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticised.—LONGFELLOW.

SWATANTRA—AUGUST 30, 1947

THE present Ministry has been in office for five momentous months—time enough for a review of their work. Individually the record of the Ministers has been inglorious. Most of them have been barren, some positively reactionary, and one or two, in charge of important portfolios, so conspicuously incompetent as to have become a public menace in their present positions. From none has any outstanding constructive policy, conceived in the public interest for improvement of the prevailing miserable conditions of life, so far come.

*               *          *

At all times sycophants gather round Governments. At a time like the present when so many controls are in operation, existence is impossible without official favour for certain classes of people engaged in particular occupations. These are now the life and soul of the prodigiously advertised “receptions” that the Ministers get, and they have learned to do a very flourishing business out of it. They and the police form a buffer between the public and the more unpopular of the Ministers. The old enthusiasm of the people for Congress and Congress leaders is rapidly vanishing.

*               *          *

The present set of Ministers shave already cost the Congress and general goodwill of the masses. The Ministers have sunk to a position lower in public confidence than even the Advisers. It is recognized that the Advisers were good administrators in a bad setting, unlike the Ministers who are squandering the invaluable advantages of a good setting by bad administration.

*               *          *

The Food Minister has created round himself an atmosphere of challenge about his own personal response to his department’s procurement injunctions. He is thrown on the defensive—a plight far from dignified for the holder of an officer whose good faith is to be taken for granted if he is to do any good work, and on whose wisdom and reputation for disinterested public spirit the whole food economy of the province and the success of its procurement operations hang. Dr. Rajan has deteriorated considerably since the days he acted as Health Minister in C.R.’s cabinet. He has lost his guts. While formerly he commanded respect as a strong man, he now evokes derision as a dabbler in intrigue concerned only in tenaciously clinging to a post of which the main object he has signally failed to justify.

*               *          *

Of the other Ministers, the Finance Minister has by now completely succeeded in establishing his position as one who knows very little of finance. It is dangerous to the safety of the province to permit Sri Gopala Reddi to administer a subject of which he knows so little. Sri Chandramowli has confessed in public his impotence as against the permanent administrative service. Why should a self-confessed impotent Minister stay on? For whose benefit? As for the Industries Minister, precious little has come from him by way of plans for industrial regeneration. But he seems very willing to place the power of the State into the hands of his own business colleagues of pre-ministerial days—a thing that calls for careful investigation about the advisability of ever entrusting the Industries portfolio to a company-promoter. Sri Avanashi has gone about like a veritable Don Quixote waging hectic battles against imaginary evils in public education, ignoring its essential needs, confounding its cultural mission with the sowing of illwill and communal passion, and generally making a mess of things and vainly mistaking it to be so much of progress. The other Ministers have just fallen into the ruts of old routine. They show no sign of ever being able to break new ground in conformity with the need of the times.

Sri Omandur the Premier is reported to be having a tough time with his colleagues as they with him. He has turned out to be no weakling. He has shown that he possesses personal rectitude. He has exhibited a firm will in the matter of calling erring Ministers to order when in his opinion they erred. He has abstemiousness, he is non-acquisitive and he is not disposed to throw out his favours rashly. He is capable of dealing with nepotism sternly. But all his virtues are fashioned into a small mould and spoiled by a narrow outlook; they are applied to trifling details; they are therefore lost in the sands of littleness. The Premier lacks constructive vision and the spacious judgment appropriate to his great office. He has a parochial mind that is being perpetually lost on the fringes of the stupendous problems confronting him as the head of the administration. In history, it is not the easy-going licentiates but the puritans of irreproachable personal character and sectarian temperament living in the iron cages of rigid pre-determined values, that have done the greatest harm.—(August 30, 1947) S A K A.

SIDELIGHTS : : This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.—ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

SWATANTRA—AUGUST 23, 1947

FOUR of the members of the Indian Dominion Cabinet are real leaders of men in the sense that large masses of people hang on them for guidance. Three of them have risen to power on the crest of Gandhian influence, but three more dissimilar beings can rarely be found adorning the effective leadership of a single political organisation. Jawaharlal of the three represents a grand contradiction in Congress politics which has continued up to date under the shelter of national preoccupation with the major activity connected with the anti-imperialist struggle. But the moment for the resolution of the contradiction has come, along with independence—a moment foreseen by Subhash Bose, that can no longer be postponed indefinitely.;

*               *          *

Subhash said of Nehru, ”He is looked upon by almost everybody in India as an infallible guide on everything, even though on his own showing he vacillates at every step. You find the peasant hails him as his spokesman, labour as their protagonist, the Communist patronises him, the capitalist dotes on him, the artist hails him as a pathfinder in belles letters, the mill owner gushes over him ignoring the disconcerting fact that he is actually spinning away, without conviction, to prove a worthy heir to Gandhiji and a friend to the Daridranarayana—a word he abhors . . . An artist may afford to be decorative . . . . He may even hug the charming inconsistencies to cut a picturesque figure. But for a man of action, a statesman, an administrator and above all for one who bids fair to grow into the world figure, it were madness even to dream that one could do without a backbone . . . . I will beg leave to prophesy: if he really wants to serve India through politics he must first of all make sure of his foundations.  For, if he does not take care to seek solid ground under his feet, the ground won’t seek his feet either.” (From The Subhash I Knew by Dilip Kumar Roy)

*               *          *

Unlike Nehru, Sardar Patel is all backbone and no vacillation and the same can be said of Rajendra Prasad also. But Rajendra Prasad is an individualist immersed in practical work for social welfare, devoid of personal political ambition and with no taste for intrigues connected with power consolidation on party lines. He acts on the principle of “one step enough at a time” and refuses to be drawn into the controversies that lie beyond. A man with no rancour and incapable of making enemies. Power has come to him unsought through sheer character, universally recognized by all warring groups as one of unique purity and straightforward rectitude. His genius for evading conflicts tends now to concentrate the struggle for primacy in power between Nehru and Patel, though it is not unlikely that his very detachment may finally bring him to the top, over the heads of both. For the time being, all the glamour of titular limelighted premiership belongs to Nehru, while Patel goes on quietly gathering the strings of effective control over the party into his own hands, planting dependable lieutenants of his own in key positions in the administration and in the important offices that influence and dominate public opinion. The major voice in the determination of all the big appointments is that of Patel. He has capital at his elbow. Unlimited access to the wealth and resources of rich traders and owners of industry who look to him for patronage and protection, control over the most powerful and influential of the departments of Government at the Centre and over the whole mechanism of vote-catching, his own single-track will, burdened by few scruples in the pursuit of power, and the supreme asset of a lifetime’s close association with the Mahatma to an extent precluding  for ever,  under any circumstances, any possibility of an open breach combined to make Sardar Patel the most dreaded and formidable among the leading figures propelled to supreme office in the new Dominion of India.

*               *          *

(1)    Rajendra Pasad; (2) Jawaharlal Nehru; (3) Vallabhbhai Patel; (4) Baldev Singh; (5) Bhabha; (6) Dr. S.P. Mookherjee; (7) Abul Kalam Azad; (8) Rajkumari Amrit Kaur; (9) Dr. John Mathai; (10) R.K. Shanmukham Chetti; (11) Jagjivan Ram; (12) N.Y. Gadgil. (13) Rafi Ahmad Kidwai; (14) Dr. Ambedkar.

Dr. Ambedkar is the only non-Gandhian member of the Central Government entitled to political recognition on the basis of mass suffrage. Dr. Mukherjee of the Hindu Maha Sabha and Sardar Baldev Singh represent no doubt very important communities. But they have not attained that level of unchallengeable representative hold over their respective communities that belonged to Mr. Jinnah in the case of the Muslim League and is exercised by Dr. Ambedkar over the scheduled castes. They could have been ignored, or replaced by others from the same fold, without any convulsion being caused thereby. But Dr. Ambedkar is the very spearhead of the hopes and aspirations of millions of India’s suppressed humanity dubbed and treated as untouchable over the ages. If democracy is a force symbolizing the enslaved to redemption, and if that force can be said to be incarnated in one individual more than in others, that individual is Dr. Ambedkar. He is different from Jagjivan Ram who, according to all accounts has given a very good account of himself as a member of the Interim Government, but who required to be carried on the shoulders of Rajendra Prasad for initial recognition of his status as administrator. But Dr. Ambedkar’s stature needs no stilts to be brought to the level of the topmost leader of any other party. His ability is as great as his learning and knowledge, and both are well matched by the vigour of his resistance to monopoly and privilege and his devotion to the cause of the downtrodden in the land.

*               *          *

Nehru, Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Ambedkar are thus the only ones in the Cabinet whose political importance is equal to their official position as administrators and who can therefore be depended upon to exercise their judgment independently without nervous fear about the consequences of dissenting from the wishes and viewpoints of powerful patrons. In the case of none of the others can it be said that their position as members of Government is matched by their influence as leaders of men. Maulana Azad who shone well so well as Congress President and conducted himself with such unwearying dignity during the recent most difficult period in Congress history, makes somehow a far from happy impression as Member for Education. He has lost his historical position and sunk into comparative un-importance since he assumed a portfolio. In the case of some of the other members, lack of political importance as judged from a national scale, is counter-balanced by admirable individual qualities. Dr. Mathai, for example, has vast experience in the management of industrial concerns without the capitalist bent of mind which is the besetting bane of industrial magnates. The Tatas in whose service he rose to distinction have ever been less concerned with profit than with national prosperity and the advancement of science—and they have not monkeyed with the intrigues of power politics. They have to be differentiated from the Birlas who have taken patriotism in the stride of business, whose whole outlook is one of acquisitiveness and whose strangle-hold over the Congress exposes that great institution today to the taint of capitalist bias and the aversion of millions of socialistically inclined anti-capitalist people. But Dr. John Mathai is that invaluable rarity, a Socialist of liberal outlook with managerial experience of capitalist industry. Rare qualities are credited to Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur too, and to Rafi Ahmad Kidwal. But in their case as well as of those among the rest not so well endowed, promotion has come by favour, which means that the ambition of securing camp-followers has prevailed over other considerations with the arbiters of our national destiny responsible for the formation of the country’s Government.

*               *          *

Shanmukhan Chetti’s  appointment as Finance Member is of special interest for the displacement of C.R. involved in it—a step well in accord with the power-hunter’s repugnance for tall poppies in his neighbourhood, and ominously illustrative of dark and unhappy possibilities in the relations between the South and the Centre in the coming days. Shanmukham Chetti is an advocate of relaxation in political standards, given to taking such pleasure as come his way without squeamishness. I reproduce here what I wrote of him six years ago as it might be of some interest to readers now: “Sir R.K. Shanmukham has revealed himself to be a progressive constitutionalist. He has shed the trappings of the patriot, but he has acquired considerable success as an administrator. He has the true administrator’s gift of discovering dependable men for fulfilling difficult tasks. He is an economist of vision and insight, and is very able in the expounding of complicated themes. His sense of logic is keen and vigilant, and in all administrative matters, he strives to render justice by keeping an open mind. He is prudent and tactful and is endowed abundantly with commonsense. He has got entangled into membership of a reactionary political party, but his Justicite persuasions, based on expediency, are apparently a result of his frank acceptance of his own limitations for the hardy functions of Congress membership.”—(August 23, 1947) S A K A.

SIDELIGHTS : : From exactly the same materials one man builds palaces, while another builds hovels.—G. H. LEWES.

SWATANTRA—AUGUST 15, 1947

TWELVE of the 32 Presidents of the United States were elected to that high office without a majority of the popular vote. This could happen because, in most of the States, the people do not have a chance to vote directly for the President. They vote for electors who in their turn are pledged to vote for the candidate of the party to which they belong. William Langer, one of the Senators, has now introduced in the Senate an amendment to remove the outworn machinery of the electoral college and to provide for the election of the President by a direct vote of the people.

*               *          *

Describing the electoral college as a relic of the stage-coach era when there were no facilities for rapid communication, Langer says, “I want to make absolutely certain that the man sworn into the Presidency of the United States is the man that the majority of the people want.” One other very important change advocated by him is that the job of nominating candidates for the Presidency should be “taken out of the hands of the politicians and placed where it belongs—squarely on the shoulders of the American people.” The selection of the highest executive officers of the State, he argues, should be taken “out of the atmosphere of smoke-filled backrooms and political horse-trading.” He appeals to the people of the United States “to rise up in their might” and demand the abolition of the electoral college ; to insist upon their fundamental right to nominate and elect the President by a direct popular vote. He assures them, “The people can have that right if they want it, and as soon as they want it. But they will never get it if they wait for the politicians to give it to them on a silver platter.”

This worn-out mechanism of electoral college, this relic of a bygone stagecoach era, which they are now attempting to get rid of in America, is just what the framers of our constitution here in India have chosen to borrow from the American constitution. This is a great pity. Before the discredited electoral  college system gets established permanently as an integral part of the constitution, public opinion should be roused to the need of preventing it and act promptly to prevent it. In a democracy people have no rights other than the over-riding right to appoint their own Government. If they lose that right, they lose all. They have to protect it against the professional people wanting office, seeking it with a hunter’s instinct, looking up on Government as their trade and drawing the line at nothing in the effort to get power and hold power.

*               *          *

Not only the electoral college system, but every device that conduces to the defilement of political democracy with trickery and chicanery should be resisted. One such device in Madras is worth noting as a revealing exhibition of the character of the present leadership. One of the first acts of Omandur’s regime was the introduction of a rule precluding any change of leader except with a two-third’s majority in the party. The rule makes nonsense of the High Command’s argument in connection with the dethronement of Prakasam—“He had lost the confidence of the majority of members in the party, so what could we do about it?” If the rule had preceded the crisis, the ex-Premier could not have been dislodged at all. The present position is that with only one vote more than one-third, Omandur can successfully defy any attempt on the part of the rest of the legislators to oust him. The rule is a fraud on democracy.—(August 15, 1947) S A K A.