Mahatma’s speech

IT was a characteristically simple and lucid speech with which Mahatma Gandhi opened the proceedings of the eleventh session of the Punjab Provincial Conference in the Bradlaugh Hall on Sunday morning. The keynote of the speech, as of the two speeches made by him at Amritsar on the previous day, was the emphasis he laid on the supreme necessity of solving the communal problem. So strongly was he convinced of the imperativeness of this necessity that not only did he deal with this subject to the almost complete exclusion of every other, but again and again told the conference — not a very usual thing for the president of such a gathering — that the work they had assembled to do was of minor importance compared with the work he himself had to do outside the conference along with other leaders, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. This was, of course, the simple truth. The conference, in spite of the catholicity of its constitution, was in its actual composition a Hindu body, even as the Khilafat Conference was a Muslim body. Neither could, therefore, be regarded as the proper place where an attempt could be made to solve the most burning of all problems in Punjab and India, a problem on the solution of which the strength and solidarity of the national movement, be it for the attainment of Swaraj or any other purpose, inevitably depended. That place had to be found outside those bodies, and in the present case it was actually found in the informal conferences that met from time to time during the Mahatma’s stay in our midst, and to which naturally he and everybody else attached the greatest importance.