PANDIT MOTI LAL NEHRU’S INTERVIEW

THE observations made by Pandit Moti Lal Nehru at the interview he granted a few days ago to a Press representative at Allahabad constituted not only a strong pronouncement on almost all the subjects that are agitating the public, but a pronouncement which is representative of the mind of that large section of Congressmen who have now definitely formed themselves into a new party within the Congress. With nine-tenths of what he said we are ourselves in full agreement. Such pre-eminently are his views on Civil Disobedience, on the repudiation of public debts and the so-called mandate theory. As regards the last of these, a minority of Congressmen, including ourselves, have maintained these two years and a half that the resolutions of the Congress are not mandatory, that the only thing that is mandatory about the Congress is its creed. Pandit Moti Lal Nehru is exactly of that opinion. “There is no duty laid on Congressmen,” he said, “to carry out every resolution of the Congress, whether they believe in it or not. This is admitted on all hands.” Just so, but the admission has in most cases been publicly made only during the past few months. Prior to that, the only non-co-operation leader of the first rank who had publicly proclaimed the truth was Mahatma Gandhi himself. Regarding the repudiation of public debts, this is what we wrote in our issue of January 4:—“If when the Councils were actually captured by Congressmen, the Government wanted to incur debts or liabilities in defiance of the wishes of those bodies or their elected element and the latter felt that they had a determined people at their back, it would be time enough for them and for the Congress, as a part of the actual attempt at paralysing the Government machinery, to repudiate the loans if they considered it otherwise desirable.”