(EDITORIAL): It will probably be uncharitable to dismiss Lord Pethick-Lawrence’s New Year message to India as merely conventional, but one is struck by its dubious phraseology. Claiming that the rise of the Labour Party to power “with an overwhelming majority” has altered the British Government’s attitude to the Indian freedom issue, the Labour Secretary of State nevertheless visualises India’s ultimate destiny as “the full and free status of an equal partner in the British Commonwealth”. Paradoxically, this has been the trend of all pronouncements on India by Labour statesmen in Parliament and elsewhere since they came to power, whereas even die-hard Amery used latterly to recognise that the Indian peoples, if they so willed, might eventually decide to carve their destinies outside the charmed circle of the British Commonwealth.

In the Cripps proposals the right of secession was explicitly recognised and these are still said to hold the field; which hardly squares

with Labour’s constant harping on the Commonwealth idea. …[T]he Muslim League, as well as the Congress, are irrevocably wedded to the goal of complete freedom, whatever differences there may be regarding the method of its attainment and the shape of it when it comes… .

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2021