Parties in India

BETWEEN the no-changer, who refuses to see any difference between the Swarajists and the Liberals either in their programme or policy, and the Liberal who refuses to make any difference between the Swarajists and the no-changers, the party so ably led by Chittaranjan Das and Motilal Nehru is verily between the devil and the deep sea. One tells us in season and out of season that the Swarajists have completely adopted the Liberal principle and programme of constitutional opposition and that it is only a lack of courage and candour that makes them still call themselves non-co-operators. The other is equally unwearied in telling us that however the Swarajists may have concealed their real purpose in the Legislative Assembly, they and the orthodox non-co-operators have still everything in common. The first forgets or affects to forget that to say that the Swarajists are only Liberals differently writ is to leave entirely unexplained the tremendous difference between the achievements of the two in the Legislature, and between the situations they have respectively created by their activities. What man of ordinary intelligence and sense of fairness can be blind to this difference? The second forgets that if the Swarajists and no-changers were, indeed, interchangeable terms, public life in India today would not be what it is, whether in its strength or its weakness. And yet there is a sense in which both are right; and this is only too clearly seen by a fourth party to whom the no-changer, the Swarajist and the Liberal are all one and the same thing. We refer to the representatives of vested interests, both official and unofficial.