During the past hundred years, the cause for Indian independence has been peculiarly marked by a lack of action: by vague peregrinations of "passive resistance" by Eastern political religiosos in Bombay and Calcutta, by glib protestations of Occidental parlor progressives in London and Washington, and by the well-meaning, but weak movements of British diplomats between Simla and New Delhi. All have realized the genuine desire of the Indian for liberty, but all have tried to build from the top, speaking of the establishment of ministries and legislatures and agencies, and overlooking, in their plans, proposals for pulling the average Indian out of the squalor and ignorance in which he now exists. Talk about India these days is inevitably concerned with the struggle for political fredom, disregarding the social condition upon which that liberty will be based.

If one word could describe India, it would be poverty. The ignorance of the farmer, the infant mortality rate, the cholera epidemics, the biannual famine, are all results of the unhappy fact that there isn't enough to eat. India, whose population totals almost 400 million, and whose land area is actually a subcontinent, must import rice from Burma and Thailand. Her own production, per acre, is only one-third that of Japan. The average farmer earns about twenty dollars a year, when his land yields anything. When it fails, as it does so often, he gets into the statistics as one of the two million famine victims. In his ignorance, he cannot see the need for scientific methods of agriculture, and continues to use cow dung for fuel instead of fertilizer. In his poverty he cannot afford to spend time in learning, nor rupees in buying anything to aid his production. He is born in a small bamboo shack, and after about thirty hungry years (if he is fortunate) he will die there.

To attempt to put the finger of blame on any one or any thing for this predicament is either impossible or difficult. You might find fault with Hindustan climatology, and carefully show the effects of the monsoon rain on the caloric intake of the Bengali peasant; there is some relation. Or you might find the Hindu religion, totalling 65 percent of the population, a hindrance to progress in its rigid caste definitions. Then, there are always the British, for it was through their policy of laissez-faire that little or no social advancement was achieved in India--or in any of their other colonies. But whatever the cause, the effect exists in lean and filthy reality.

And they continue to talk of the political panacea. The British have failed--or never tried--to promote the welfare of India. The plans of the Nationalist leaders, much concerned with the preservation of their own personal spirits in the Vedaic aftermath, are similarly vague. To give meaning to this liberty, both the British and the Indians must work together from the ground to achieve some social foundation on which to build a union of the Indian peoples. Education, agricultural reform, social security, and systems of public health must be strengthened beyond their present token status as newsreel scenes of British paternalism. Freedom, more than a word, is more than a constitution and a congress.