The Congress programme

WE do not know if Mr Asaf Ali gave his interview, of which a telegraphic report appeared in our last issue, before or after the publication of Mahatmaji’s two articles on the Ahmedabad meeting of the All India Congress Committee. It is certainly no easy thing to reconcile the most important of his conclusions, that regarding the revelation of Mahatma Gandhi’s mind, with what the Mahatma has told us himself. “The Mahatma” he said, “has proved himself a practical idealist. Those who had begun to look upon the old programme of the quintuple boycott as the law of the Medes and the Persians must now see its plasticity.” If these words mean anything, they mean that the Mahatma has not only voluntarily but ungrudgingly accepted the changes in the Congress programme which circumstances forced upon him at Ahmedabad. We wish with all our heart that this were true. Unhappily, a perusal of the Mahatma’s two articles can leave no doubt in one’s mind that it is not so. That the acceptance of the changes was voluntary goes without saying; indeed, in their final stages, they were made at the instance of the Mahatma himself. But so far from the acceptance being ungrudging, the Mahatma has told us in the clearest possible terms that he is only biding his time, that the most important and urgent task he has placed before himself is to obtain, of course, by perfectly fair and legitimate means, such a majority in his favour as to be able to restore his old programme in its entirety. It is worse than self-deception for those who, like Mr Ali, are convinced of the supreme desirability of changing the old programme to blink this fact, instead of facing it manfully as it ought to be faced.