A truce is wanted

Lahore, Tuesday, September 23, 1924

WE strongly and wholeheartedly associate ourselves with the appeal which Swami Shraddhanand has addressed to communal newspapers not to give sensational headings to communal news, not to comment on Hindu-Muslim quarrels and to refrain from criticising one another at least for a period of three weeks. This is clearly the very least which patriotic newspapers can do, both in view of the great crisis through which the country has been passing and of the penance which the Mahatma has imposed upon himself. We do hope they will readily, ungrudgingly and unanimously respond to the appeal. Let there be no delusion on the part of the most communally minded among newspapermen on one point. Whatever may be the case in ordinary times, most of those for whom they usually speak want none of these things at the present time. The Mahatma’s fast has created a healthy revulsion of feeling against the existing tendency even in the less responsible sections of the public, with the result that most people are in favour of a truce as an essential preliminary to a permanent peace. Such things as penance and prayer are not for the whole country. But the whole country can pause and think. It can ask itself, as all normal-minded men and women occasionally do even when swayed by passions and prejudices, where its madness has led it to and whither it is drifting. We do not know if it was any part of the Mahatma’s object to lead the country into this attitude in many who a fortnight ago would have suspected themselves and far less have been deemed by others to be capable of it.