to certain correspondents who analyse the Indian situation for British newspapers, there are at present two great perils hastening India to ruin: the one is Mahatma Gandhi and the other Hindu-Moslem unity. With as little sense of humour as imagination these observers on the spot delude themselves and their British readers by a misreading of facts, whose patent absurdity makes it seem the result rather of deliberate self-blinding than of short-sightedness. The leadership of Mr. Gandhi and the closer fraternisation of the two great Indian communities symbolise a new unification of political forces, which cannot help being inconvenient to people who counted on the perpetual success of the ‘divide and rule’ principle. Beneath the fact of unity, which they find undeniable, these British correspondents do not see the growing cohesiveness of a nationalism conscious of its own strength, but merely a conspiracy to deprive Britain of her brightest jewel. They therefore take care to feed the British reader with such a variety of misrepresentation as may be relied on to play on his instinctive feeling that India is a possession and not a trust.
