Belated response

Lahore, Thursday, September 4, 1924

THE Government has at last made up its mind to say a few words about Judge McCardie’s extraordinary summing up in the O’Dwyer-Nair case. And what words they are! In going through them, the first thought that strikes one is, if this is all that the Government of India had to say, why should it have taken so long a time to say it? Why should it, in particular, have refrained from saying it even when it published Lord Olivier’s obviously belated despatch? At that time, the public in India was told that the Government’s views on the subject would be published soon. What is there in the precious resolution which has now been published in the form of a Gazette of India Extraordinary that required this long and careful drafting, that could not, indeed, have been penned by a clever Under-Secretary within the brief space of a quarter or at most half an hour? Of the three paragraphs which make up this witty despatch — for has not brevity been described as the soul of wit — the first contains, besides a statement of familiar facts, only a single expression of opinion, an expression which not only does no good to anyone but which shows how little regard the ‘Simla gods’ have for Indian feeling even in a matter in which Indians admittedly feels strongly and deeply. “The Governor-General in Council,” says the resolution, “desires to emphasise the view expressed by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons on June 23, 1924, that a further discussion of the matters referred to in the question addressed to him would not be conducive to public interest.”