Friday, October 12, 2007

12 October Goes Unmourned!

Faid Ahmad Faiz died long before 12 October 1999. God spared him from seeing another wrethed day in the history of a dejected people of a distressed land. He had had enough as you can see from his following poem (which I have tried to mess up by translating into Pinglish).

Imagine! Eight loooooooong years of misery and oblivious bliss of callousness. Musharraf and his partners in crime are busy power playing and spinning and distorting and bulldozing. Benazir is busy making deals and bargains and stooping to help hiding her blatant corruption behind shamefacedly flagrant, hastily issued mutually accommodating ordinances. Fazl ur Rahman is busy selling his father's good name and his own dark soul for leading the lambs of opposition parties en mass to the delayed, slow motioned slaughter like a Ghaddar layla (draft lamb). Qazi Hussain is busy throwing belated tantrums at his own foolishness or methodical madness and seeking forgiveness for his past crimes so that he has the clean slate to commit new blunders or heists. Judges are busy collecting pay checks and perks and filling space in august, majestic houses of justice and trying their best to avoid dispensing justice and doing utmost to stay clear of stepping on delicate toes.

Common people are too busy making just enough to feed their starving families who are barely clinging to what is called existence. Among them who commit crimes of being righteous, religious, or vigilant of their own or others' rights find themselves extraordinarily renditioned into black sites and go traceless leaving their loved ones behind beating their chests and banging on the doors of power and justice, in vain.

Who is there to remember and commemorate what befell the people of Pakistan today eight fateful years ago? Some crafty ones among polititians who are worried to stay relevant are showing token presence by making ritual, limpy statements of condemnations because they can't do more than that. They have run out of all steam.

What a pathetic bunch of motley fools!

No one asks who robbed the poor masses? Who has their blood on his hands? Who is there to mourn for 12 October, 1999?

KaheeN naheeN hai, kaheeN bhi naheeN lahoo ka suraagh
Nah dast-o naakhun-e qaatil nah aasteeN peh nishaaN
Nah surkhi-e lab-e khanjar nah rang-e nok-e sinaaN
Nah khaak par koi dhabbha nah baam par koi daagh
KaheeN naheeN hai, kaheeN bhi naheeN lahoo ka suragh



Nowhere, blood can't be traced anywhere!
It's not on murdrer's nail, hand or sleeve;
Dagger's edge reddened neither arrowhead;
No dust stained, no wall smudged;
Nowhere, no trace anywhere.

Nah sarf-e khidmat-e shaahaaN keh khoonbahaa daytay
Nah deeN ki nazr keh baiaana-e jazaa daytay
Nah razm gaah mayN barsa keh mu'tabar hota
Kisi 'alam peh raqam ho kay mushtahar hota
Pukaarta raha, bay asra, yateem lahoo
Kisi ko behr-e samaa'at nah waqt tha nah damaagh

Nah mudda'ee, nah shahaadat, hisaab paak huwa
Yeh khoon-e khaak nasheenaaN tha rizq-e khaak huwa.



Served to no king's purpose, so no applaud;
Not devoted to a faith, so no reward;
Flow'd not on a battlefield, not honor'd;
Brandished on a flag, nor bannered;
Kept calling, haplessly. Orphaned blood!
None paid mind to it, none time;

No plaintiff, no witness, no case.
T'was blood 'f squalids, left no trace.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Quake Kids


Day before yesterday was the second anniversary of the earth quake that has shaken to their foundations the Capital of Azad Kashmir, Muzaffarabad, and other towns and villages in its vicinity and the northern parts of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of people were either killed or rendered homeless. The news had disturbed me at that time but then distance, time and other disturbing news replaced its horror with other horrors - such as Baluchistan, Waziristan, and Masjid Haffsah in Islamabad -and daily grind called life.

Then while watching TV on 8 October I happened to watch the miserable conditions of the homeless victims of the quake whose lives have still not been put together. They are living in temporary shelters - up to twenty people to a room of 12 X 14 feet.

I must admit that TV is a powerful medium. Certain images you watch are so potent and so disturbing in their impact that they leave a indelible mark on your thoughts. ARY's Faiza was showing the misery and patience of young kids who were waiting in line with their metal pots in their hands for water that was barely trickling from a tiny rubber pipe. There were little girls and boys, who had big dreams in their hears, but were obliged to go to rickety schools whose fee their parents could hardly afford.

Faiza was focusing on the shattered lives of these children, their parents and grand parents who were waiting, probably in vain, for the money their governments had promised them two years ago to help build their houses and start new lives. Some of them had received only 25,000 rupees ($400) as initial installment, which they had been forced by circumstances to spend on the food stuffs and other basic necessities. The rest of the promised 175,000 had not reached them yet.

I am sure the money received from generous Pakistani and foreign donors was sitting "somewhere" but had not arrived where it actually belonged yet because the government of Azad kashmir, according to an official of an NGO, had repeatedly shot down some kind of "master plan" for one or another reason.

I am leaving for Pakistan this Saturday, the Eid Day, and I intend to go visit these forsaken places to see if I can be of any help. Insha Allah

Two thing, I think, I may be able to do: help make some kind of arrangement for drinking water; and try to establish free schools.

I have to find out the complete picture, first. Then get some people together and see how much money and resources I can come up with or collect and how much help I can get from governments of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir or Pakistani-Americans.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Stones and Dogs



Today I am feeling so miserable.

Today is Saturday and I am off today. I am home and have nothing to do. So I am reduced to sleeping, and watching TV between numerous bouts of sleep. Whenever I turn the TV on and listen to the regurgitated news, and see talking-heads drone on and on about the presidential "election", a hoax in fact, and the "deal" that preceded it, and the quick-fix ordinance that gave a blanket protection to the corrupts and the criminals who have blood on their hands and lucre in their off shore bank accounts, I feel like a person who is forced to helplessly watch his house burning from behind the bars.

I can't do anything about it so I end up feeling miserable. I try to calm myself by telling my blood not to boil over because I am afraid of getting an ulcer or something worse - a brain hemorrhage, may be.

But it does not help.

A question constantly hovers over my already high-strung nerves. That question always starts with a 'why' or 'where'.

Why did we want or need a country of our own, in the first place, if we could not figure out how to run it, without running it into ground? Why did we lose a value system - a sense of right and wrong? Why is it only the 'expedient' rather than right, we want to do, paying no mind to the fact whether it has any good in it for our masses or for our country? Why do we have no morality left?

So many whys. More than one person's mind can handle without going to what American call the luny bin, and Pakistanis call the mental hospital.

Don't they - these power-hungry power-grabbing classes - see rampant misery, poverty, cruelty, and oppression of the masses? How can they? They are the ones who have made this mess.

Security personnel is not secure! Military Jawans and officers, in hundreds, are kidnapped in broad day light, and slaughtered without impunity. Military schools are being abandoned and their students moved. Society over all has been ripped apart into polarized, contentious factions of all hues and stripes. Hundreds of innocent people have been abducted by 'security forces and intelligence agencies' and are traceless. The masses are dieing with hunger, disappointment, and hopelessness? They are illiterate and sick and have no hope of getting any education or cure.

A few who are still clinging to the values and principles are laughed at and made fun of. They are considered stupid and ridiculed for not cashing in their virtue, honesty and integrity for a few days' of power-sharing. Pakistan has become a country where, in Saadi's and Faiz's lamenting word, the stones are tied up and the dogs are free to loiter, bark, and bite.

Is there any light visible at the end of this dark, long tunnel?

Where is the power of the virtuous? Why the miserable classes don't unite against their oppressors? Why don't they rise up - all at once - and throw out and destroy the system of oppression and those who support it? Why are they taking so long to understand that their emancipation lies in their own unity and recognizing the faces of their oppressors and getting rid of them?

Is there any remedy left short of being drastic?

If the miserable, appressed masses of Pakistan decide to stand up en mass and destroy, once and for all, the oppressive system and not be content with changing faces of oppressors, they won't be miserable any longer.

And I am sure I won't feel miserable either, on my day off.

Friday, October 05, 2007

American Torture

New York Times

October 4, 2007

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

By SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”

The debate over how terrorist suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office’s proper role.

“The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,” said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, “lost its ability to say no.”

“The approach changed dramatically with opinions on the war on terror,” Mr. Kmiec said. “The office became an advocate for the president’s policies.”

From the secret sites in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe where C.I.A. teams held Qaeda terrorists, questions for the lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters arrived daily. Nervous interrogators wanted to know: Are we breaking the laws against torture?

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. “You think you’re making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ‘Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “We couldn’t tell them, ‘Do the best you can,’ because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.”

Mr. Kelbaugh said the questions were sometimes close calls that required consultation with the Justice Department. But in August 2002, the department provided a sweeping legal justification for even the harshest tactics.

That opinion, which would become infamous as “the torture memo” after it was leaked, was written largely by John Yoo, a young Berkeley law professor serving in the Office of Legal Counsel. His broad views of presidential power were shared by Mr. Addington, the vice president’s adviser. Their close alliance provoked John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to refer privately to Mr. Yoo as Dr. Yes for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired, a Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Yoo’s memorandum said no interrogation practices were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” A second memo produced at the same time spelled out the approved practices and how often or how long they could be used.

Despite that guidance, in March 2003, when the C.I.A. caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were again haunted by uncertainty. Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program “has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review” and “has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.”

“The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,” Mr. Little added.

Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.’s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed’s background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.

Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda’s structure and plans.

“We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,” Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. “We were getting good information, and then they were told: ‘Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.’”

The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general’s hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith, who left the Justice Department soon afterward, first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Six months later, the Justice Department quietly posted on its Web site a new legal opinion that appeared to end any flirtation with torture, starting with its clarionlike opening: “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.”

A single footnote — added to reassure the C.I.A. — suggested that the Justice Department was not declaring the agency’s previous actions illegal. But the opinion was unmistakably a retreat. Some White House officials had opposed publicizing the document, but acquiesced to Justice Department officials who argued that doing so would help clear the way for Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation as attorney general.

If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith’s dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him.

Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith’s rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Bradbury’s biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury’s father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.

Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.

“We all grew up together,” said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. “You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.”

But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.

Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.

“As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,” said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. “At O.L.C., you’re not writing law review articles and you’re not theorizing. You’re giving a client practical advice on a real problem.”

As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president’s lawyer.

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be “fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,” recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times “vituperative,” said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was “professional and collegial.”

While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.

Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was “very troubled” at the notion of a probationary period.

“If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,” Mr. Cooper said. “You’re implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.”

Mr. Bradbury said he made no such concessions. “No one ever suggested to me that my nomination depended on how I ruled on any opinion,” he said. “Every opinion I’ve signed at the Office of Legal Counsel represents my best judgment of what the law requires.”

Scott Horton, an attorney affiliated with Human Rights First who has closely followed the interrogation debate, said any official offering legal advice on the campaign against terror was on treacherous ground.

“For government lawyers, the national security issues they were deciding were like working with nuclear waste — extremely hazardous to their health,” Mr. Horton said.

“If you give the administration what it wants, you’ll lose credibility in the academic community,” he said. “But if you hold back, you’ll be vilified by conservatives and the administration.”

In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury’s approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.

Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.

But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.

“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade campus on Law Day — a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program — Mr. Comey spoke of the “agonizing collisions” of the law and the desire to protect Americans.

“We are likely to hear the words: ‘If we don’t do this, people will die,’” Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

“It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most,” he said. “It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.”

Mr. Gonzales’s aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.

Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.’s methods.

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture — the prohibition on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment.

Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.

At the administration’s request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.

At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.

“If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,” Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, “then they are now saying that officials broke current law.”

In the end, Mr. Bradbury’s opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.’s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that “shocks the conscience” was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.

In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.

Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration’s defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an “Ask the White House” feature on a Web site.

Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury’s public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role.

A senior administration official called Mr. Bradbury’s active role in shaping legislation and speaking to Congress and the press “entirely appropriate” and consistent with past practice. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Bradbury “has played a critical role in achieving greater transparency” on the legal basis for detention and surveillance programs.

Though President Bush repeatedly nominated Mr. Bradbury as the Office of Legal Counsel’s assistant attorney general, Democratic senators have blocked the nomination. Senator Durbin said the Justice Department would not turn over copies of his opinions or other evidence of Mr. Bradbury’s role in interrogation policy.

“There are fundamental questions about whether Mr. Bradbury approved interrogation methods that are clearly unacceptable,” Mr. Durbin said.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy’s top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

“I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country’s good, some people will do a lot of it for the country’s better,” Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.

Monday, October 01, 2007

That Man

Monday, Sep. 20, 1948 Time

That Man

Out of the travail of 400 million in the Indian subcontinent have come two symbols—a man of love and a man of hate. Last winter the man of nonviolence, Gandhi, died violently at the hands of an assassin. Last week the man of hate, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, at 71, died a natural death in Karachi, capital of the state he had founded. His devoted and equally fanatic sister, Fatima, was at his side; so was his daughter, Mrs. Dinah Wadia, whom he had disowned because she married a Parsee (as he had done before her).

Gandhi's death shamed Hindus and Moslems into halting the communal massacres which he had been unable to stop during his life. Jinnah's passing might release a new wave of fanaticism which even he would have opposed. As he died a crisis which might bathe all India in blood was boiling up. When the news of his death reached New Delhi, a Hindu said, "A man can be more dangerous in death than in life." He meant that the inflammatory preachings of Jinnah the agitator would live on, but the occasionally restraining hand of Jinnah the politician had been removed.

"The Best Showman." Jinnah was born in Karachi in 1876 of a wealthy trading family; at 16 he went to England to study law. As an advocate of the Bombay High Court he was, according to a colleague, "the best showman of them all ... His greatest delight was to confound the opposing lawyer by confidential asides and to outwit the presiding judge in repartee."

He joined the Congress Party and for a while worked for Hindu-Moslem unity. In 1921, he abandoned the Congress to build the Moslem League and to work for a separate government for Indian Moslems. The walls of his meeting halls blazed with such slogans as: "Make the blood of slaves boil with the force of faith!" and "Make the small sparrow fight the big hawk!" He would stalk into meetings wearing his "political uniform"—native dress with a black astrakhan cap—and whip the Moslems into a frenzy. Sometimes, in his fury, his monocle would pop out of its socket. After meetings, he would go home, change to Western clothes and be again the suave Western lawyer.

Enemies among the Moslems whispered against him: "Jinnah does not wear a beard; Jinnah does not go to the mosque; Jinnah drinks whiskey." Yet his power increased to the point where he was able to force the Hindus and the British to split India into two dominions. He became governor general of Pakistan. With the split came the riots. His part in them will not soon be forgotten by Hindus. Last week, when news of his death reached New Delhi's bazaars, there was bitter exultation. A Hindu refugee said:

"I had six people working under me in the West Punjab. Because of that man, I now work as a watchman for one rupee, eight annas [45¢] a day. Now that man is dead, but what about me?"

"A Man of Destiny." The Hindustani Times devoted a page to an uncompromising attack on Jinnah's motives and methods. However, it concluded: "A man of destiny, he was perhaps the greatest man of Islam since Mohamed."

Jinnah did not underestimate his own importance. Recently, a delegation from the Moslem League called on him to urge a policy with which he disagreed. Gently, the League spokesman reminded Jinnah of a debt. "Sir," he said, "because of this league you got Pakistan." Jinnah snapped, "No. Because of my iron will I got Pakistan. I can see ahead 50 years-which you and even my Pakistan ministers cannot."

Last June he retired to a cool, quiet mountain resort in Baluchistan Province. Against the advice of his doctors, he flew back to Karachi last week to confer with Premier Liaquat Ali Khan on the war between India and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The strain of the flight was too much for his old heart. Two hours after his arrival he was dead.

Behind him Jinnah left no outstanding favorite, no one man who could command the unquestioning respect of other contenders. The cabinet hastily appointed as governor general Khwaja Nazimuddin, British-educated premier of East Bengal. The real struggle for influence would be between Liaquat Ali Khan and Foreign Minister Sir Mohamed Zafrullah Khan.

Liaquat, 53, is a plump, bald, practical politician, whom Hindus regard as a moderate. Zafrullah Khan, 55, Pakistan's spokesman in the U.N., is handicapped politically because he is a member of the Ahmadiyya community, an offshoot from Mohammedanism. Mizza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the sect, who died in 1908, taught that Christ had escaped alive from the cross, fled to Kashmir, where he died, and was buried at Srinigar. Hindus regard Zafrullah Khan as a brilliant fanatic.

Jinnah's death raised the possibility that his political heirs might seek the final solution for insolvent, disorganized governments: war.

Jinnah Riding High

Monday, Jun. 14, 1943 Time

Rose Petals & Scrambled Eggs

Mohamed Ali Jinnah was riding high (literally — on a dais mounted on a Dodge truck) when his Moslem League convened in Delhi in April. Never before in the League's hitherto pedestrian history had his followers turned out in such numbers.

There was a parade two miles long. Showers of rose petals fell on Jinnah's mat of grey hair. Police guards on the roof tops saw to it that nothing heavier than rose petals was dropped.

For three hours, under a blistering sun, Jinnah, emerging as India's No. 1 political figure during the suppression of the Congress party, shouted his battle cry of Pakistan. Behind him, huge maps indicated that Pakistan (a separate Moslem state) took in all three North Western provinces and vaulted over the huge United Provinces and Bihar to include Bengal and Assam in the northeast. This was the most ambitious claim to territories since Jinnah had first espoused Pakistan as a slogan to bargain against Hindu political domination. The directed cheers of his party and the pandal (huge tent) bright with Pakistan banners (see cut) heartened him.

Jinnah's Power. Equally heartening to Jinnah last week was the formation of a coalition Moslem League ministry in the North-West Frontier Province. This brought the governments of four of the five Pakistan provinces under Moslem League domination, after a series of involved political maneuvers in which the Congressites accused the British Raj of building up Jinnah as proof that Indians cannot unite politically.

The League faced dangers in taking over power when food shortages and spiraling inflation plagued all India. Its Pakistan program, in practice, might well mean the economic suicide of the provinces involved. It is axiomatic in India that "Hindu and Moslem interests can no more be separated than you can unscramble eggs." Nevertheless, Jinnah at last dominated the areas he threatened to withdraw from the rest of India.

Gandhi's Decline. In India's first general election (1937) Jinnah's party, roundly trounced by Gandhi's Hindu-dominated Congress party, won less than one-eighth of all the seats officially reserved for Moslem candidates in the Moslem provinces. But the Congress party, with 8,000 leaders still under arrest since last August's riotous break with the British, was in a weakened condition last week. From the Aga Khan's palace at Poona, Gandhi made his first public attempt to get back into the political stream since a 21-day fast had failed to gain him his freedom (TIME, March 15). The move had been prompted by Jinnah himself.

At the Delhi conference Jinnah had described Britain's Secretary of State for India, Leopold S. Amery, and Viceroy Lord Linlithgow as "pukka diehards still dangling the carrot of unity before donkey-like India." Jinnah had suggested that the country "unite and drive the British out," and asked Gandhi to write him a letter. The Raj, Jinnah said, would not dare to stop such a message. The Raj did dare. Jinnah commented: "The letter of Mr. Gandhi can only be construed as a move on his part to embroil the Moslem League in a clash with the British."

Joshi's Program. Monocled Jinnah, with his Bond Street clothes, his rich palace at Bombay and his Moslem belief in violence, has gained power through reviving the Moslems' vanished pride in their onetime imperial greatness and through brilliantly, if not always logically, espousing Moslem grievances against the Hindus.

Gandhi, with his mysticism, his dhoti, his self-imposed poverty, his goats, his spinning wheel, wants a united India, but he has lost power through the failure of his "Quit India" campaign and his pitiful attempts to meet India's economic ills through makeshift remedies.

No makeshift remedies were those proposed by a third Indian leader, taut, be spectacled Puran Chandra Joshi, Secretary of the Indian Communist Party. Last week his party met in Bombay, with as much fiery speechmaking as Jinnah's Moslem League had displayed. "Cultural squads" reworded ageless folk tunes into and-Japanese songs. The Bombay sweeper-women gave a specialty dance. Characteristically Indian was one Red chant set to an old devotional tune: "Do not think that revolution means thirst for blood; it means love for a higher life."

In ten months the Communists have grown from virtual oblivion (they were banned from 1934 to July 23, 1942) to challenge the Hindu Mahasabha as India's third strongest political party. Their internal program is for land division, higher wages, a breaking down of all restrictions of caste, creed and custom. Externally their policy is basically anti-imperialist, but to Joshi, trading British imperialism for Japanese slavery is foolish. The average age of party members is 27. Claimed membership: 16,000 regular party members, 400,000 peasant "supporters," 39,000 students.

Sir Stafford Cripps


Monday, Apr. 13, 1942 Time

At Stake: A New World

A stupendous historical drama had been scheduled for last week?there had never been anything like it before, on any stage—but in the acting it proved to be highly undramatic, at least to U.S. spectators. The greatest empire since Rome was offering self-rule to the vast and legendary subcontinent of India?and there was not one quotable line or breathtaking episode.

If history thus refused the spectacular, it was partly because the principal actor, Sir Stafford Cripps, was anything but glamorous. He stretched out the hand of British friendship, begging India to "accept and trust" it, but the proffered hand hung limp and ungrasped in the hot air of New Delhi.

As the drama bogged down in the unreadable "statements" of politicians, it was energized from the wings. Two magnificent prompters were heard: the President of the great republic of the New World sent a personal messenger with a note to "someone" on the Indian stage; and a Chinese soldier, Chiang Kaishek, publicly intervened to advise India to join with the white man's empire to fight for freedom everywhere. Meanwhile, the enemy advanced—a horde of savage fighters from the far-off islands of Japan, and, looming beyond the northwest mountains, Hitler's Legions of Nihilism.

But as this week began, Sir Stafford was still the central actor; he might yet bring off a climax worthy of the times.

After two weeks of brilliant and pains taking labor, the "Red Squire" looked years older. So great had been his confidence in the plan that he had expected to be on his way back to London this week. It was almost inconceivable to him that his beloved Indians would not readily and cheerfully accept his English version of Christian idealism.

But Sir Stafford had fought too many tough legal battles to quit after the first round. And this was the biggest battle of his life. If Sir Stafford succeeded, he might be a hero for all time. If he failed, people might admire him for having undertaken a stupendous task, but his political future might be jeopardized. If he failed, the future of both Britain and India would be dark. If he succeeded, a new and better world might be born of the travail of empire.

All week, in his modest Queen Victoria Road bungalow, the tall, prim-mouthed, high-domed intellectual worked and conferred. He accepted no social engagements. Rising shortly after 7, he donned an ill-fitting suit and high stiff collar, breakfasted lightly at 8, then spent several hours conferring with his staff, writing dispatches, seeing the press. Except for a 25-minute break for lunch, he interviewed Indian leaders from midmorning until 8 p.m. He met them on the porch, led them through the large-pillared hall to his study, offered them cigarets and then got down to business. After dinner and more staff talks, he called on the Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, at 10.

Nehru & Gandhi. No sooner had Sir Stafford reached India than rumors spread through the hotels and bazaars that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, spiritual head of the potent Indian National Congress Party, would come to New Delhi to see that the party vetoed Sir Stafford's plan. Sure enough, the wily Saint arrived, in loincloth and carrying a staff, after a 24-hour rail journey from his mud hut in central India. On the way he acted as his own pressagent, handing notes (he did not speak; it was his day of silence) through the train window to newsmen at the stations.

Though Gandhi was not a member of the Congress Working Committee, he attended sessions and dominated all but five of the twelve members, including the Moslem president of the Congress, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. However much Gandhi longed for India's "freedom," he balked at any plan which would involve India more deeply in the war. For two hours Sir Stafford did his Christian-Socialist best to sway the Hindu Saint. The little man with the minxy smile merely kept repeating: "India cannot be conquered by the Japs so long as we do not cooperate with the invaders." After the interview Sir Stafford was tired and exasperated. And presently the Holy Man began worrying about his wife's health and went off home.

But if Sir Stafford Cripps could swing Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, active leader of the party, away from Gandhi, there was still hope of a favorable Congress vote. Nehru's dilemma left him with both feet off the ground. He was fanatically loyal to Gandhi, but he also wished to be India's savior. He saw the point like a practical Westerner, yet he felt as a mystical Hindu. While the horns of the dilemma gored deeper, Nehru, sitting in his cousin's modern mansion, grew hourly more nervous and distraught. Outside in the garden beautiful young sari-clad Indian women sipped sherry.

One night Sir Stafford invited Pandit Nehru to dinner. After dinner they talked for hours, looking out on the rose garden bathed in full moonlight. The two men. both masters of crisp, precise English, made a potentially magnificent team. Both idealists, both intellectuals, both patriots, they were nevertheless separated by the mountainous past and by the cloudy future. Some day Sir Stafford Cripps might be the leader of an empire?or what was left of it. Nehru some day might be the leader of an empire which might be greater. Could those two empires be aspects of the same thing? Sir Stafford thought they could be; Nehru doubted it.

But Sir Stafford's plan was couched in practical terms. His plan stipulated that during the war the British would continue to direct India's defense. As Nehru well knew, the Congress wanted India?defenseless without the British?to "defend" itself, under its own Defense Minister. At week's end Congress President Azad, Pan dit Nehru and the British Commander in Chief in India, Sir Archibald Wavell, met to try to work out a compromise. There was talk that Nehru would be satisfied if he were given a post similar to that of the War Secretary in Britain. It was also reported that the Congress was asking for General Wavell to replace Lord Linlithgow as Viceroy.

Jinnah & Co. Nehru (if he can carry the Indian National Congress away from nonresisting Gandhi) represents only a large minority of Sir Stafford's problem. Another great minority Sir Stafford had to deal with was India's 80,000,000 Moslems.

His proposal for them : the opportunity to form a separate state. This proposal was not misliked by the Moslem League's President Ali Mohamed Jinnah, who fears' nothing so much as the establishment of a Hindu raj, hand-picked by Congress. But it was much misliked by Nehru and other Congress leaders: they feared Moslem secession, cried that Indian unity should not be destroyed.

Jinnah, the leader of the Moslems (in impeccable Savile Row clothes), knew that he was in a strong bargaining position. It seemed unlikely that he would compromise on the secession clause. At week's end Jinnah muezzined to the faithful: "A lot of propaganda has been going on in the press . . . Sir Stafford Cripps is a trained politician. . . . He has been holding press conferences giving explanations which are construed differently in different quarters and might prove harmful. I shall be compelled to explain the position to my people. . . ."

But, as Sir Stafford well knew, Jinnah is not the spokesman for India's Moslems; his League actually represents only a small fraction of them. In the 1937 election the League won only 104 of the 480 seats reserved for Moslems in the eleven Provincial Assemblies; of 7,000,000 Moslem voters, only 300,000 voted the League ticket. Jinnah's importance is that he epitomizes the Moslems' fear of the Hindus?and this religious civil strife is the chief obstacle to Sir Stafford's mission.

India is nothing if not selfconscious: Indians derive both humor and a satisfying sense of tragedy from their hopelessly internecine differences. As Sadhu Singh Dhami, a distinguished Sikh scholar, said last week: "The cow is sacred to the Hindus and pork repulsive to Moslems. . . . The Hindus are rather noisy in their ritual and greet an interesting variety of mute gods with a blare of conch shells and din of gongs, while the Moslems' worship of Allah is austere and silent and includes a bit of healthy physical exercise. The Moslem is circumcised, while the Hindu is not; the Moslem clips his mustache in a certain way, while the Hindu does not. The Hindu wears a wisp of long hair on the top of his head; if he is of high caste, he adorns himself with the 'sacred thread' and a mark on his head; the followers of the Prophet wisely dispense with these accretions."

Sir Stafford, tactfully, paid no attention to such differences, went on with his job.

The Revolution. If neither British nor Indians completely understand the problem of India, certainly one Frenchwoman thought she did. After chic Biographer-Journalist Eve Curie met Sir Stafford Cripps in India last week, she wrote: "I came away . . . with the impression that in New Delhi ... I was not only witnessing the birth of self-government in India but the awakening of a new spirit in England itself?the bold, generous spirit without which neither Great Britain nor any other country can hope to win the war." Mlle. Curie's observation was almost as accurate as it was bold. Sir Stafford had indeed gone to New Delhi with something bigger than just a plan for India. He brought from No. 10 Downing Street an idea vaster than Mlle. Curie's generous, feminine hopes?vaster, even, than Britain's old ideas of empire.

Though Winston Churchill's War Cabinet formulated its present-day version and Sir Stafford Cripps attempted to interpret it to the Indians, neither statesman originated the idea. It was conceived?no man could say when or how?somewhere in the British spirit; it could be interpreted (by Britain's friends) as a marrow-rooted sense of decency, or (by Britain's enemies) as a guilty conscience. Neither interpretation quite explained Sir Stafford Cripp's mission. The rough idea (as British as it was understated) was that people everywhere should have more freedom and more fruits of the earth. Millions of Britons nodded approval when Sir Stafford, in one of his first speeches in Parliament as a member of the War Cabinet, said that Britain could regain and hold her empire only "on condition that we hold it in the interest of the world and of the people who live in those parts."

In the last two years a revolution has been taking place in beleaguered Britain. It has been a thoroughly novel make of revolution: quiet, moderate, nonviolent, for the violence has been directed at the real oppressor, the enemy.

Pursuing individual freedom, the British have survived many forms of government. They believe that their 1918-1939 Government was unworthy to govern. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, they now feel, represented an era in which that individual freedom was made parochial, in which Britain's moral empire was considered less important than world trade. After the Norway fiasco, when Britain was threatened with annihilation, the British turned to Winston Churchill, a desperado whose heart was in the right place, to save them. He did save them, and Britain will never for get it.

But as the war progressed?particularly after the entry of Russia and the U.S.?the British wanted more than a savior. When they saw that they did not face probable death, but probable victory, they began to think about the future again. And they found that they had to think in world terms, in terms of empire. To a people who had not for decades consciously thought in those terms, this attempt was unsettling. Winston Churchill was a godsend to Britons, because he alone revived in them a sense of their historic greatness and the idealism which underlay their mundane pursuits. But he was not prepared to mark out their future for them.

When Singapore fell, when the Imperial troops were thrown back in Libya, when German battleships slipped through the Channel, the British for the first time began to question Churchill's vision. When Sir Stafford Cripps returned from Moscow with a smile on his face, they thought they had found someone more atuned to the revolutionary present and the possible future.

The Coup. Sir Stafford arrived from Moscow at a time when the British were disgruntled with their leaders, and passionately grateful to the Russians. They did not choose to remember that Sir Stafford had never been very popular with the Russians, that it had been Lord Beaverbrook (next to Hitler) who was mainly responsible for the improvement in Anglo-Soviet relations. In good British taste, Sir Stafford took what was coming to him.

At first Churchill tried to handle Sir Stafford by absorbing him. He offered him Lord Beaverbrook's job as Minister of Supply, but without War Cabinet rank. Sir Stafford's refusal made him more popular than ever. When he broadcast three days later about the "lack of urgency" in the British war effort, his audience was almost as big as Churchill's. Letters piled in by the thousands, all demanding: "For God's sake do something!" On his first day in the House of Commons he astonished fellow M.P.s by quietly sitting on the farthest back bench, with ordinary members, instead of on the front Opposition bench.

A week later, Churchill bowed to public pressure, appointed Sir Stafford Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House. Thus was scored one of the outstanding political coups of modern times, by a man about whom the world knew only a little less than the British.

The Man. Sir Stafford Cripps bears a marked resemblance to Woodrow Wilson. He has the same tight, twisted, sickly mouth, the same cold-chisel intellect, the same egotistical integrity. Wilson's ideals were embodied in liberalism at home and in the League of Nations, while Sir Stafford's gravitated to Socialism in Britain and his current crusade to get 352,000,000 Indians to make peace among themselves and accept his offer of freedom.

Stafford Cripps was the youngest son of the late Lord Parmoor, who enjoyed the distinction of being made a knight by a Liberal Government (1908), a Lord by a Coalition Government (1914) and Lord President of the Council by a Labor Government (1924). Stafford's mother, who died when he was only four, was a sister of the eminent Fabian Socialist, Beatrice Webb.

In his youth Stafford leaned more toward science than toward politics. He built underground houses on his father's estate and, when he was 17, invented a glider which, called "Stafford's Folly," crashed the first time he tried to fly it from a hilltop. As a schoolboy at Winchester he wrote an exam which won him a scientific scholarship to Oxford. The paper was so good that it was shown to University College's great Sir William Ramsay, who straightway invited Stafford to study under him.

Two years after he married Isobel Swithinbank, granddaughter of the founder of Eno Fruit Salts Co., Sir Stafford forsook science for the bar, eventually built up a practice as a corporation lawyer which netted him as much as $150,000 a year. In World War I he drove a Red Cross ambulance in France, there contracted colitis, which caused him to become a vegetarian. (He sticks to his diet religiously, never drinks, but smokes his pipe and numerous long black cigars daily.) After eleven months in Flanders the Government recalled him to help build and run a mammoth explosives factory.

Stafford Cripps learned politics from his father, whom he often accompanied on speaking tours, but he did not run for Parliament until 1928. Then 39, he stood unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate for West Woolwich. In 1930, five days after he was knighted, Sir Stafford was appointed Solicitor General in the Labor Government, though he was not yet an M.P. By this time he had become an ardent pacifist (his son* is now a conscientious objector), and the more he studied "domestic ills" the more he became convinced that Socialism was their solution. Britain, however, was not fully aware of his conversion. Stanley Baldwin tipped him as a "future Conservative Prime Minister."

But from the early 1930s onward, Sir Stafford left no one in doubt as to where he stood. He refused Ramsay Macdonald's offer to serve in the National Government, because he would have no truck with the Conservatives. He formed a Socialist League of extreme leftists within the Labor Party, with a program to end the power of the House of Lords. Said he: "If need be, the Constitution as we know it must go by the board." He even committed the unforgivable sin of attacking the Crown: "No doubt we [Socialists] shall have to overcome opposition from Buckingham Palace. . . ."

In 1939 he organized a Popular Front of Liberals. Laborites and Communists to try to bring down the Chamberlain Government. For this he was ousted from the Labor Party. On the outbreak of war Sir Stafford offered his services to the Government. He was ignored. The next thing Britain knew, he was on a trip around the world, calling on Molotov, Nehru and Roosevelt. Some said that he was on a secret mission for the Chamberlain Government. Others believe that the trip was arranged by the Churchill group. In any case, soon after Churchill became Prime Minister, he appointed Sir Stafford Ambassador to Moscow.

Sir Stafford has annoyed a good many people?some by his politics, others by his personality. In 1936, Canadian-born, Conservative M.P. Beverley Baxter, then a top Fleet Street journalist, wrote: "In considering the case of Sir Stafford Cripps let me make a frank confession. If we ever are so politically bankrupt that we must choose between Communism and Fascism, I am for Fascism. . . . Sir Stafford Cripps, that political agent provocateur . . . would plunge our people into misery, bloodshed and chaos, and would inevitably bring into existence a dictatorship that would . . . end all personal liberty. . . ."

There are still millions of Britons who cannot stand the sight of Sir Stafford because he is too red. But millions more are beginning to like his coloration?not primarily because they want Communism or Socialism in Britain but because they feel that the leftist leaders are best equipped to win the war and the peace.

Sir Stafford's mission to India is an important milestone in his political career, but even if he fails it will not necessarily be the last milestone. If he succeeds, he will certainly be the No. 1 candidate for the Prime Ministry, should anything happen to Winston Churchill. Even if he fails in India, he might still move from No. 11 Downing Street, his present address, to No. 10. Britons are determined to have a more dynamic, more progressive war policy. They hope Churchill will produce it. So does Sir Stafford. If Churchill fails, the nation will probably ask for Sir Stafford Cripps.

* Sir Stafford also has two adopted sons.

Lord Wavell


Monday, Jul. 16, 1945 Time

Soldier of Peace

In Simla last week, 21 Indians and one Englishman struggled to solve one of the world's most vexatious problems — giving self-government to India. The Englishman bore the resounding proconsular title of His Excellency, Field Marshal the Right Honorable Viscount Wavell (rhymes with naval) of Cyrenaica and Winchester. It mattered little that the title of Viscount of Winchester was as exotic in Simla as the Maharaja of Patiala would be in Wapping Old Stairs. In Lord Wavell was embodied the military might and the political glory of one of the only three great powers to survive the world's first total war.

The 21 Indians scarcely represented a nation at all. Chiefly Hindus and Moslems, they were members of violently hostile religious communities, mutually contemptuous, mutually recriminatory. But if they did not represent a nation, in the modern political sense, they represented something much greater. They represented India, one of the supreme symbols on the cultural horizon of mankind.

Ancient of Days. India, among nations, is the ancient of days. Before even China, there was India. Before human memory congealed from legend into record, India loomed from the unimaginable reach of time. Its landscape matched its origins —an immense wedge of the world, vast plains cracked by a too hot sun, vast jungles writhing with growth from too dense rains, vast cities melting under the unflagging onset of oblivion and the soft decay of stone itself, 400 million people pullulating in a too frantic drive to defeat the multiplicity of daily death.

Four thousand miles of all-but-harborless coast and the width of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal shut off the Indian subcontinent from the western desert world of Semites and the eastern twilight world of Annamese, Cambodians and Malays. Along the north, the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas, walled off India from the mass of Asia.

Capacity for Greatness. Every nation is obsessed with one problem which is the measure of its capacity for greatness: Egypt with immortality; Greece with beauty; Rome with administration and law; France with rationalism; Germany with war; Britain with the freedom of the individual man. India, islanded by sea and land, and haunted by the hourly wanton foreclosure of life by death, looked within and found that its obsession was the soul and its creator, the problem of good & evil. It embodied this vision in one of the world's great faiths (Buddhism) and in religious works of great power (the Vedas and Upanishads). India, under its squalor and its filth, its superstitions and its cruel ties, its babble of 75 languages and dialects and hodge-podge of peoples, its lethal famines and lethal wars, was nevertheless the most intensely spiritual area on earth.

In its obsession, it worshipped God under all forms, from inexpressible abstraction to inexpressible obscenity, from the monkeys which defiled villages and ruined precious crops, to the snakes which every year killed 20,000 people. More extreme devotees, the Jains, even placed cloths over their mouths and noses lest they breathe in and kill forms of life too minute for vision but nevertheless God-created.

Historic Irony. In 1750 this God-obsessed nation suffered one of history's supreme ironies: its conquest was begun by the world's No. 1 modern industrial power — Britain. For a century India supplied a large part of the capital wherewith Britain financed its industrial expansion and presently formed a big part of the market to which Britain sold its manufactures.

For two centuries tiny, remote Britain ruled India by the policy of divide and conquer. The differences between India's Hindus (256 million) and India's Moslems (92 million) were more than religious; they were almost organic. Says Moslem Dr. Aziz of the Hindus in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India'. "I wish they did not remind me of cow dung." Britain was suspected of setting the Moslem League against the Hindus, slowly acquiring political maturity as the majority in the All-India National Congress. Against the caste Hindus she played the 40 million Untouchables, whose very shadow, to a high-caste Hindu, is defilement. Against both she played the panoplied, privileged world of the Indian princes and the martial nations of the Sikhs and Gurkhas.

Inspired Discernment. Then in Natal, South Africa, (circa 1905), a lean, struggling, expatriate Hindu lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, had a political discernment of genius: in God-obsessed India the politics of liberation must take the form of a religious struggle. Doffing his European store clothes and donning a dhoti, the little man moved against the British Empire in the name of four principles: satyagraha (acceptance of Truth), ahimsa (non-violence), swadeshi (home industry), swaraj (independence). From then on, the history of Indian-British relations has been a long, painful procession of thousands of nonresisting Indian nationalists passing in & out of British jails, or under the lathis (staffs) of Britain's police.

Many of the Congress leaders who sat around the conference table with Lord Wavell at Simla last week had spent more time in the last few years inside than outside of his jails. Among them were the Congress Party's Moslem President Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (both newly released from jail), and the Congress Party's moderate, resourceful lawyer Chakravarti Rajagopalachariar. In the background hovered the little man in the dhoti, Mohandas K. Gandhi, freed over a year ago. He was not participating in the conference, but his influence permeated it. Also present were the Moslem League's dapper, fractious President Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the Sikh leader Tara Singh, the Punjab's nonLeague Moslem Premier Malik Khizar Hayat Khan Tiwana. But the man on whom, more than on any other, the future of 400 million Indians depended at this climax of 200 years of British rule, was the short, thickset, smiling, one-eyed, taciturn Englishman at the head of the conference table.

Soldier v. Non-Resister. Lord Wavell was the latest scion of a long line of soldiers. The name Wavell (spelled in 60 different ways) runs like a minor but recurring theme through a thousand years of British history. It begins with William de Vauville, a Norman kinsman of the Baron de Briquebec, who came to England with William the Conqueror. A De Vauville fought in the Crusades over the same Near East deserts where his famed descendant was to fight five centuries later. Three Wavells (the first in 1478) were Mayors of Winchester. Of a 17th Century Richard Wavell, preacher and friend of John Bunyan, it is recorded that "like Bunyan [he] was only too familiar with the inside of jails." A 19th Century Wavell discovered the mineral wavellite.

The past three generations of Wavells have produced three generals for the British Army: Lord Wavell's grandfather, Major General Arthur Goodall Wavell, soldier of fortune who fought in Central America; and the Viceroy's father, Major General Archibald Graham Wavell, who fought in several of Britain's colonial campaigns.

Archibald Percival Wavell was born (1883) near his father's barracks in Essex. He was cradled to the blare of bugles, lulled by the thud of marching feet. At the age of six, he first saw India (on the same trip he also took his first look at Egypt). A boy of few words, he noted briefly in his diary: "Went ashore at Port Said." He received a stern classical schooling at Winchester (the twelfth of his line to go there), proceeded comfortably through Sandhurst, then, like his father before him, joined the Black Watch Regiment, in which he was a kilted second lieutenant. As a subaltern he saw the tail-end of the Boer War. Later Wavell returned to India for a spell of soldiering, pigsticking, horse racing, and Kiplingesque social doings at Peshawar.

In the Ypres offensive in World War I, Wavell (a brigade major) lost his left eye. He tried concealing his blind eye with a monocle, later gave it up.

The Desert Fox. In 1917, Wavell was sent to Palestine to join the staff of Lord Allenby, master of desert warfare and conqueror of the Turks. The association marked a turning point in Wavell's career. He emerged from the campaign with: 1) an intense admiration for the military genius of Allenby, which later flowered in the biography, Allenby: A Study in Greatness; 2) two hard-won Turkish nicknames —"the desert fox" and "the greatest bloodhound." In a terse footnote in his poetry anthology. Other Men's Flowers, Wavell recalls how Lord Allenby, who had just received news of his son's death in action, quietly recited Rupert Brooke's sonnet, The Dead:

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,

Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.

The years had given them kindness, Dawn was theirs,

And sunset and the colors of the earth.

These had seen movement and heard

music; known Slumber and waking; loved; gone

proudly friended;

Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; Touched furs and flowers and cheeks. All this is ended.

There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter

And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,

Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance

And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white

Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,

A width, a shining peace, under the night.

This desert-fighting phase first brought out in Wavell an urge to express himself Biblically to his officers, a habit he developed to a high degree in his later Middle East campaigns. For a warning against unexpected rainy seasons in desert climates, he drew on Elijah's message to Ahab in I Kings, 18:44 ("Prepare thy chariot and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not"). The danger of floods in Palestine he underlined with a quotation from Jeremiah 12:5 ("How wilt thou do in the swelling of the Jordan?"). The folly of expecting military assistance from Egypt he expressed through II Kings, 18:21 ("Now, behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it").

Soldier to Proconsul. In 1937 Wavell returned to the Near East as commander in chief in Palestine and Transjordan, largely stamped out the bloody Jewish-Arab riots. In 1939, he assumed command of the British forces in Egypt. World War II swelled his Egyptian garrison into the Imperial Army of the Nile, an amorphous instrument which he painstakingly fashioned into a weapon that drove the Italians out of Cyrenaica. It was a famous victory at a time when Britain, standing singlehanded against the Axis might, was staggering under successive defeats. For the first time the name of Wavell was heard round the world.

In 1943 Wavell doffed his uniform, was made a peer and Viceroy of India. The soldier became the proconsul. But he was unlike any other proconsul who had ever been seen in India. Hitherto it had been deemed a necessity to surround the Viceregal office with a pomp and pageantry that would dazzle even India's dazzling princes. Wavell's predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, a thrifty Scot, used to travel around India in a luxurious, cream-colored train because "Indians are impressed by these things." The new Viceroy arrived in India in a rumpled lounge suit. Instead of taking the royal route through Bombay's imposing "Gateway to India," he went direct to New Delhi. He shunned parades, fanfares, ceremonial welcomes. He shattered tradition by casually meeting the outgoing Viceroy on the steps of the Viceregal Lodge. At his parties he and the Vicereine, motherly Lady Wavell, a soldier's daughter, mixed freely with the guests, instead of having them led into the Viceregal presence in relays for a few moments of stilted conversation.

Proconsul & Politicians. Lord Wavell had assumed office at one of the worst moments in British-Indian relations. Sir Stafford Cripps' mission had failed. The Indian leaders had rejected his proposals for self-government after the war, demanded immediate independence. Gandhi urged Indians to sabotage Britain's war effort. Singapore had fallen and the Japanese were streaming through Thailand and Burma. Wavell went patiently about his task of winning the confidence of the Indian leaders. He began with drastic, effective measures to curb the famine sweeping Bengal. It was an encouraging start.

With the Indian leaders who were not in jail the Viceroy engaged in earnest discussions. But most of the time he listened. With the jailed political prisoners he carried on a correspondence marked by understanding and humanity. Indians accustomed to word-jugglery and nebulous formulas noted with surprise his crisp, matter-of-fact candor. He impressed them as a disciplined, cultured administrator sympathetic to Indian aspirations, less concerned with his office than with Indian good will. To Gandhi (then in jail) he wrote: "I am in entire accord with that aim [Indian self-government] and only seek the best means to implement it without delivering India to confusion and turmoil."

Hating publicity, Wavell was nevertheless the first Viceroy to hold a press conference. Good-humoredly, he adjured photographers to picture his "bad" eye as well as his good. In his first address to the Legislature he criticized the Moslem League's plan for Pakistan (the idea of an independent Moslem state) (see map). Said Wavell bluntly: "No man can alter geography."

For 18 months Wavell went about India, a British pilgrim in search of understanding, absorbing the atmosphere of the age-old land, trying to feel his way toward solution of its problems. India, he decided last spring, was ripe for self-government. He broached his idea for a modified Cripps Plan (TIME, June 25) to Gandhi and other leaders. Assured of their willingness to consider his scheme, the Viceroy flew to London.

The Wavell Plan. He found Britain's leaders engrossed in the war's end, and the coming general election. Said Prime Minister Winston Churchill testily: "Why trouble me about this business now? Can't you wait?" Wavell said no. Britain had pledged her word that India should have self-government when the war ended. Britain must keep her word. If she was to win Indian good will, it was vital to break the three-year political deadlock at once. The situation must not be allowed to drift dangerously while momentous events brewed in Asia. Said Wavell grimly: without a new offer backed by the Government he would not return to India at all.

For two months he cooled his heels in London, waiting for the Cabinet to approve his plan. Then it was modified and passed.

As presented to Congress and Moslem leaders, the Wavell Plan awarded to Indians all posts (except Defense) in India's Executive Council—the equivalent of a national cabinet—"on a balanced representation of the main communities, including equal proportions of Moslems and caste Hindus." The door was left open for the native states, but there would be no coercion. Dominion status, as promised in the Cripps proposals, was still the goal. The Wavell Plan brought it almost within reach.

As an earnest of his intentions, the Viceroy released eight Congress leaders interned since 1942, invited chosen representatives of all parties to Simla to discuss his plan. The talks proceeded briskly, but stalled on the clause granting organizational parity to Moslems and caste Hindus. Canny Jinnah balked at the prospect of being outvoted in a Hindu-controlled Council. Hastily the factions adjourned for further consideration.

Lord Wavell waited quietly while the endless corridor conferences proceeded. He had come far, he had no intention of jeopardizing the success of his mission now. The Congress leaders were willing to take office. The Moslem League would scarcely allow itself to be squeezed out of India's new government by the Congress ministers and nonLeague Moslems. This week, when the Simla conference convenes again, the prospects for settlement are bright.

Next, Dominion Status. The stakes were greater than India itself, for they included the Empire and the world. The Wavell Plan was the first step toward Dominion status. When that was accomplished, India would become an equal partner in the Commonwealth, free (if she so desired) to secede from the Crown. Was Britain not risking "the brightest jewel of the British Crown?" Indians were not Britons linked by ties of blood and sentiment to the islands in the distant northern sea.

Perhaps. But Dominion status would confer undeniable advantages. India would join a free concert of nations who wielded an influence in world councils more potent than the sum of their parts. Industrial India, with a swiftly rising output (mostly steel and textiles), would expand most rapidly under the careful nurturing of imperial preferences. If the princes* came in (as they almost certainly would in time), the Dominion of India would become a mighty anchor in the storms that might ravage postwar Asia.

In his poetry anthology, whose footnotes are often as revealing as an autobiography, Lord Wavell had quoted one stanza of Poet Matthew Arnold's long, gloomy Obermann Once More:

The East bow'd low before the blast,

In patient, deep disdain.

She let the legions thunder past,

And plunged in thought again.

But none knew better than Lord Wavell that India was no longer content to remain plunged in thought. All Asia was astir. If Britain wished to keep India in her Commonwealth, she could only hope to tighten the bonds of Empire by loosening them.

Not until that step of high statesmanship had been achieved would India's Viceroy be free to turn to another project —a biography of Belisarius, Byzantine conqueror of the North African Vandals.

*The princes rule 562 autonomous states (715,964 sq.mi., pop. 95 million), not as part of British India but under British suzerainty.

Vallabhbhai Patel: The Boss


Monday, Jan. 27, 1947 Time

The Boss

Gandhi's toes were blistered. As he walked the flower-strewn paddyfield paths of eastern Bengal last week, through lines of Hindus and Moslems who wept and knelt to touch his bandaged feet, other Hindus and Moslems in distant Bombay chopped at each other with long knives. Twenty-two people died in the Bombay riots, including some Untouchables who were caught in the middle.

While Gandhi preached love and nonviolence to the Bengalis, an old jailbird named Vallabhbhai Patel, who calls himself "a blind follower of Gandhiji" and whom the British Raj had imprisoned eight of the past 16 years, had 40 Indian Communists, whom he hates, clapped into jail.

In short, everything was as usual in India, where the people are more fertile than the land and the paradoxes are more fertile than the people. India's pullulating contradictions obscured the view at a moment when it was more important than ever that the world understand what was going on in the seething subcontinent.

Princes & Paupers. On the 17th anniversary of the Indian Congress' Purna Swaraj (complete independence) resolution of Jan. 26, 1930, India was almost completely free of Britain but in danger of lapsing into anarchy. The infant country faced these problems, among others:

¶ Hatred between the Hindu and Moslem communities, which flared last August into the Great Calcutta Killing when 6,000 died, has now hardened into a grim struggle over Pakistan.

¶Rising prices and falling production have intensified the conflict between millions of the poorest and some of the richest people in the world. Strikes are bubbling all over India. Communist power is rising. The Congress Party is likely to split into right and left groups and the Moslems face a similar division.

¶While Gandhi continues to attack industrialization, some of his most devoted followers go ahead with plans to make India the industrial heart of Asia.

¶Freedom for India does not affect the princely states, where 93 million (25%) Indians live. These are more or less despotically ruled by an anachronistic group of princes who have, on the average, 11 titles, 5.8 wives, 12.6 children and 3.4 Rolls-Royces. Sooner or later a free Indian nation will have to deal with them; right now the Communists are advocating expulsion of the princes.

Power Is the Spur. To bring under control this vast interplay of seemingly irresistible forces and immovable bodies would take more than the fanaticism of Moslem Leaguer Mohamed AH Jinnah, more than Jawaharlal Nehru's eloquent idealism, more, perhaps, than Gandhi's combination of mysticism and manipulation. India needed an organizer. It had one. Gandhi listened to God and passed on his political ideas to Vallabhbhai (rhymes with "I'll have pie") Patel; Patel, after listening to Gandhi, translated those ideas into intensely practical politics.

Patel has no pretensions to saintliness or eloquence or fanaticism. He is, in American terms, the Political Boss. Wealthy Hindu and Parsi industrialists (like C. H. Bhabha, Patel's son's employer, who has just become Works, Mines and Power Minister) thrust huge campaign funds into his hands. With their money, Congress Party patronage, and ceaseless work, he has built a machine that touches every one of India's conflicts. In every fight his objective is the same—power for India.

As Home and Information Minister of the new Central Government, as boss of the Congress Party, Patel represents what cohesive power Free India has. This cinder-eyed schemer is not the best, the worst, the wisest or the most typical of India's leaders, but he is the easiest to understand, and on him, more than on any man, except Gandhi, depends India's chance of surviving the gathering storms.

Interrupted Rubber. The first movement Patel ever organized was a student revolt against a teacher he accused of profiteering in pencils and paper. Later, Patel went to London, studied law 16 hours a day, topped the list in a bar examination and headed back for his beloved India without stopping to tour the Continent. He has never left India since.

His legal career was mainly defending murderers and bandits and frightening district magistrates with his caustic tongue. One magistrate, hearing that Patel was expanding his practice, moved his court to a town out of Patel's reach. In later years Gandhi found in Patel "motherly qualities" that eyes less inspired than the Mahatma's never saw. Today, Patel is coldly pleased when his enemies call him "the Iron Dictator" and "Herr Vallabhbhai." Enemies and friends tell an anecdote of his criminal law days. He had just put his wife in a Bombay hospital, returned to Ahmedabad to argue a murder case. He was on his feet when a telegram arrived. He read that his wife had died, put the telegram into his pocket and went on with his argument as if he had never been interrupted.

In 1915 Patel was playing bridge in Ahmedabad's Gujerat Club when he first saw his fellow lawyer Gandhi, fresh from agitational triumphs in South Africa. At that time Patel dressed in fancy Western clothes and affected the manners of the most pukka sahib Briton. When his eyes fell upon Gandhi, Patel interrupted his game long enough to make a few scathing remarks. A year later he joined Gandhi's movement.

By 1927, when Patel had become the mayor of Ahmedabad, unofficial capital of Gujerati-speaking India, his extraordinary skill as an organizer showed itself for the first time during the great Gujerat floods. Everything broke down—transport, communications, all methods of distribution. The general Indian attitude used to be to regard such catastrophes as acts of God What little relief there was usually came from a British Government which took its good time to relieve distress. Patel initiated an unheard-of fund-raising drive for the relief of the flood victims. Supplies were moved into the flood areas by hundreds of volunteers wading through waist-deep water, carrying boxes and sacks on their heads. When lumber was required for constructing small bridges or building houses, Patel arranged for it all without making a single approach to the Government. It seemed a miracle to Indians when all the lumber arrived on the scene in the needed sizes. By the time the Bombay provincial representatives got there, no official assistance was needed.

Nothing like it had ever been seen before in India. Here at last was organization by and for Indians.

Somber Masterpiece. Now that India seems to require miracles of organization if its Government is to survive, Indians recall Patel's organizational masterpiece, the Bardoli no-tax campaign of 1928. Despite the fact that crops had been bad for several years in the Bardoli district, a 25% tax increase was ordered by the Government assessors. This was precisely the opportunity Gandhi had been waiting for to launch the first real experiment in mass civil disobedience.

Patel took charge. Dressed in simple dhoti and shirt, he trudged from village to village, day after day, exhorting the peasants at every stop to stand fast and pay no taxes. "Some of you are afraid your land will be confiscated," he said in one speech. "What is confiscation? Will they take away your lands to England?" In another speech he set forth the principle that was to govern every Congress struggle of the future: "Every home must be a Congress office and every soul a Congress organization." Under Patel's orders the peasants' buffaloes, which the Government might have taken, were brought right into the peasants' houses. No servants would work for the Government collectors. Nobody would sell them food or give them water. Some property was, of course, confiscated and sold, but bidders were few. In all Bardoli not one rupee was collected in direct taxes.

A stunned Government finally asked Gandhi for terms. The upshot was a 6¼%, not a 25%, increase in taxes. Patel emerged from Bardoli with a new and exalted status. He received the unofficial title of "Sardar," meaning captain or leader, which he has carried ever since. (Lawyer K. F. Narriman was the first to call Patel "Sardar"; years later he and Patel quarreled and the Sardar forced Narriman out of Bombay politics.)

Money Makes the Mare Go. After Bardoli, Patel became recognized as the Congress Party's chief organizer and disciplinarian. He checked up on what Gandhi's followers ate, drank and wore. He passed on the party lists in provincial elections. He approved party-sponsored legislation, and personally drafted much of it. No detail was too unimportant or sordid for Boss Patel. Recently he took charge of negotiations between the Congress Party Ministry in Bombay and the Western Indian Turf Association, which wanted to renew its license for the Bombay racetrack. Patel, who has never seen a horse race, knew what the traffic would bear. He upped the license fee from half a million rupees to three million.

Although he has handled millions in party funds, Patel has no personal love of money. With his daughter Maniben, who acts as his secretary (she has accompanied him on most of his sojourns in British prisons), he now lives in a little suite in his son Dahyabhai's Bombay house. He eats little, drinks no alcohol, quit smoking when he first went to jail. In recent years he has had serious stomach trouble. His only exercise is a walk when he rises, at 4:30 a.m. His only recreation is bouncing a ball across the room to his grandchildren. He has never seen a movie. He cares little about the world outside his country. Of 300 books in his Bombay library, every one is by an Indian, mostly about India.

Patel's closest friend is probably Ghanshyam Das Birla, jute and cotton magnate, who boycotts his own textile mills by wearing khadi (homespun).* Though Birla dotes on Gandhi, he dreams of an industrialized India. (Birla has contracts with Britain's Nuffield for an India-assembled automobile called the Hindustan Ten.) India's liberals and leftists are stridently suspicious of Patel's friendship with Birla and the other big industrialists, but Birla insists that he seeks no Government favors. Says he: "I already have all the money I need."

Bedside Talks. Last week, sicker than usual, Patel stayed in bed. Few other 71-year-old men would call it a rest. From his visitors and from the distant effects of his bold and subtle schemes, it was apparent that in Patel's mind, at least, India was no chaos, but a puzzle to be fitted together with thought and patience.

Arthur Henderson, Under Secretary of State for India, came in for final talks on the liquidation of those superlatively damned and praised institutions, the Indian Civil and Police Services. The question boiled down to a matter of severance pay; the 850 remaining British members wanted to get out. It was up to Patel to find the new men who, with the 750 Indians in the two Services, would rule India.* Nehru called twice. He and Patel have a deep bond of mutual attachment to Gandhi and to Indian independence. Otherwise, politically and temperamentally, they are antipodal. Two subjects almost certainly mentioned in Nehru's bedside talks with Patel were the Moslems and the Marxists.

The Moslem League's Jinnah, also exhausted by the crisis and the long trip from the London conference (TIME, Dec. 16), was at Karachi struggling with a problem which Patel had fashioned for him. By meeting most of Jinnah's demands, Patel had passed back to the Moslems the decisions on whether or not they would enter the Constituent Assembly, which reconvenes this week. Patel, who has said that he could end communal strife in Congress Party provinces in six months, wanted a settlement; if he could get one, time would work in his favor in the struggle for control of India. He had the police power and his Hindus had the majority.

New Techniques. A settlement of the communal issue, even if it was temporary, would allow Patel to turn his attention to the growing labor strife. Late last summer, when a famine impended, a Communist-led strike had tied up south India railroads; a nationwide 25-day postal strike in July was also Communist-inspired. Two weeks ago Karachi dock workers walked off ten grain ships for ten days to get a wage of 94¢ daily. As a result of the stoppage, the rice ration in New Delhi was cut from twelve to eight ounces. In New Delhi 100,000 children were out of school because of a teachers' strike (87% of Indians are illiterate). In southwestern India even the aboriginal Warli tribesmen refused to perform farm work, tried to chase landlords off the land.

The worst recent labor flare-up came last fortnight at Cawnpore, where militant Communist-and Socialist-led workers have developed some new bargaining techniques. They locked a labor inspector in an office and made a factory manager stand bareheaded in the sun for four hours until he agreed to reinstate four discharged employees. When the district magistrate ordered the arrest of 100 labor leaders, workers marched in protest, women in front. Police used lathis. Workers threw stones. When the police opened fire, six were killed. Last week 100,000 Cawnpore workers were still out.

As if in answer to the strike wave, police last week raided Communist headquarters throughout India. Patel's Home Ministry denied that it had ordered the raids, but few familiar with the workings of the Criminal Intelligence Department believed that it was coincidence that brought police simultaneously to Red headquarters in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Lucknow and seven other cities. India's Communist leader, smart, tousled Puran Chandra Joshi, followed the Moscow line by blaming the British for the raids.

The raiders were more thorough than bright. They searched homes as well as offices, spent 5½ hours going through the files of one Delhi office. A police official turned up a copy of Molotov's famous Paris speech of Aug. 5. He did not like what he read. "Who is this man?" he snapped. But Molotov was present only in spirit.

In spite of recent Communist gains, the Socialists, led by lithe, 44-year-old Jai Prakash Narain, are still the strongest group in the Congress Party's left wing. Narain went to the Universities of California, Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio State, became a convert to Communism in Chicago, where he sat up late talking to intellectuals. Returning to India, he soon abandoned Communism for Socialism because the Communists tried to impose a Moscow-dictated line on India. Narain's estimated 1,000,000 followers (out of India's 4,000,000 industrial workers) do not include Narain's wife. She says: "I am faithful to Jai Prakash domestically, but to Gandhiji politically."

Which Way? Fidelity to Gandhiji was still the dominant note in Indian politics. But what did it mean in practical terms? Gandhi, in steaming Bengal, talked of love, and sang:

If they answer not to thy call, walk alone, If they are afraid and cower mutely, facing the wall, O thou of evil luck, Open thy mind and speak out alone.

Patel would not walk alone if he could help it. He was obviously trying to base the new Indian nation on a compromise of the communal issue, a mildly rightist line in the labor split—plus full use of the police power (which Gandhi deplored but Organizer Patel did not). When the British Cabinet Mission reminded Patel last spring that he might be sent to jail again for defying the Raj, Patel replied calmly: "My bags are packed." That is the way he understands the game, and that is the way he plays it, in & out of power.

The strong, repressive arm of law & order would be no permanent solution in a country where the average per capita wage is 5¢ a day and a quarter of the population of Bombay and Calcutta sleep on the streets. But the other horn of the dilemma is unrestrained freedom for communal and class conflict which, in a weak, new state, might disastrously degenerate into chaos. Patel is obviously going to try it his way. The Boss has performed miracles of organization before.

*Khadi is the official Congress uniform, supposed to symbolize Gandhi's cottage industry drive and to emphasize Congress leaders' connection with the toiling masses. But hand spinning is so inefficient that a khadi outfit costs as much as a good suit of English tweeds. *To Indians there are few if any callings higher than the Civil Service. A recent movie ad, stressing its subject's sacrificial devotion to her art, said: "She turned down an I.C.S. man to become a movie star!"