Page:Forty Thousand Followers of Gandhi in Prison.djvu/3



FORTY THOUSAND FOLLOWERS OF

GANDHI IN PRISON.

Since the British—following the departure of the Prince of Wales from India—undertook to stifle the Non-Co-operation movement by the imprisonment of Mahatma Gandhi and many of his followers and by other strong measures, little has been allowed to come out of that great land to show what is really going on. Highly censored despatches have given only glimpses of wholesale arrests and severe treatment of the Nationalists.

Much interest, therefore attaches to a document which has come to this country from India, a copy of the speech of Pandit K. Santanam, the new leader of the Nationalist movement in the Punjab.

The speech was delivered at the meeting of the Punjab Provincial Conference, called by the Non-Cooperators to adopt measures for carrying on their campaign in a manner to avoid repression.

Pandit Santanam dealt at length with the new British repression and charged that this policy had been accompanied by grave abuses. He said 40,000 of the leading spirits in the Non-Co-operation movement are held in jail in India under distressing conditions and multitudes more have been arrested without any real cause.

Our space not allowing us to give the speech in full, we shorten it somewhat on the lines of an excellent article recently published in the New York World.

Said Pandit Santanam in part:

It is our privilege as also our sacred and Rh