Indian.terror worse than British

By ISRAEL EPSTEIN

ABOR has been shaken

India by wholesale arrests,
raids and killings of the kind
hitherto identified with Hitler
in Germany or Chiang Kai-Shek
in China. Her first Indian-head-
ed government is attacking
Wage earners’ and _ sharecrop-
ping peasants’ organizations with
a fury not seen even under full
British rule. .World opinion is
caught unawares, having long
accepted Premier Pandit Nehru
as a liberal and Socata

in

What is happening is shown
by a statement of Moraji Dessai,
security minister for Bombay
province, that no trial will be
given 2,000 arrested labor lead-
ers headed by President S. A.
Dange of the All-India . Trade
Union Congress and executive
committee member of the World
Federation of Trade Unions.

“Evidence against them is not

of a nature to satisfy a court of
law,” Desai told newsmen, drag-
ging in the well-known red her-
ring. “Communists are too clever
for this.” But the men will stay
in jail, Dessa said, because that
same evidence “satisfies my own
conscience.”

By contrast, the Nehru govern-
ment has made practically no

-arrests among members of the

fascist Hindu Mahasabha and
RSS storm troop organizations
which engineered the murder of
the revered Mahatma Gandhi,
the man who led India toward
independence for 40 years.
e

N2#RU has publicly announ-

ced abandonment of his own
pledges to divide landlord es-
tates, prosecute profiteers and
nationalize major industries when
he gained power. He now says
it would be silly and even “re-
actionary” to run plants based
on “obsolete” technology for pub-
jie benefit not private profit.
The modern way, he explains, is
to wait till the government can
build up-todate factories run by
atomic energy—something world
scientists say is decades off.

Meanwhile landlords get 70
percent of crops in rent. Profit-
eers continue to profiteer. Indi-
an industrialists, cheered by
government union smashing,
happily cut wages below present
averages of $5 a week or less.

Paralleling Nehru’s sellout of

poverty-stricken men and wo0-
men who made him premier by

By ARNOLD SROOG

—NEW YORK.

Even before the Un-Amer-
ican Committee’s “police
state” pill, sponsored by Rep.
Karl Mundt, was reported out,
the gathering movement to de-
feat it had already begun to
pick up momentum. —

The bill, which among other
things would make member-
ship in the Third Party a
crime, has already been de-
nounced by Henry Wallace.
Arthur Garfield Hays of the
American Civil ‘Liberties.
Union, the Civil Rights Con-
gress and many trade unions.

From a meeting called by
Rep. Vito Marcantonio (ALP-
NY) recently, a permanent or-
ganization was set up to dir-
ect the campaign against the
measure. :

Hatched out of a series of
so-called hearings held by the
Un-American Committee, the
bill is the most sweeping pro-
posal yet to reach the U.S.
Congress to set aside consti-
tutional guarantees of civil
and political rights and to es-
tablish in its place the rule of
the FBI. As admitted by the
‘report of the subcommittee
which conducted the hearings,
the bill asserts as fact that
which the witch-hunters could
not and can not prove — that
there exists. a “world commun-
ist conspiracy’ directed from
Moscow. :

‘Using this unproved and
unprovable assertion as @ ba-
sis, the bill. would label every
action taken by. an individual
opposing present U.S. foreign
policy as proof of membership
in this non-existent “world

_ Communist | conspiracy”, de-
_clare it a crime and place the
“criminal” in prison for a
term running as high as 10
years.

Purportedly directed against
communists, the bill is actual-
ly as sweeping a measure as
anything devised by the Nazis.
“The Un-Americans assert that
“around the hard core of
(Communist) Party leadership
“are concentric rings of indi-
viduals and organizations, in-

Mundt Bill denounced —

bill to

ly, no American can be con-

_For who can tell whether or

cluding dupes and _ fellow-
travellers, who knowingly and
unknowingly do the party’s
work.”

Since under the terms of the
“unknowingly do the .
-party’s work” is just as much
a “crime’é as to do it knowing-

sidered safe from this charge.

not an action “unknowingly”

helps a non-existent conspira-

Age

Examples of the type of ac-

tivity that could be considered

to “subvert the interests of

the U.S.” would be:

@ Support of a Jewish state
in Palestine.

@ Advocating outlawing the
atom bomb.

Striking. ;
. Supporting Wallace.
Membership in the Com-

munist Party.

Opposing Jim ‘Crow in the

army.

e@ Opposing universal mili-
tary training and the
draft.

e Being an alien,

One of the most dangerous
activities that a citizen could
engage in under the pill’s
terms would ‘be to join an or-
ganizations—any kind at all,
because the bill sets up the
department of justice with its
FBI snoops as the deciding
voice on whether or not an
organization is subversive.
“The terms for determining
what is ‘subversive’ are so
broad any organization can be
30 labelled, making its officers
and members liable under the
bill.

If an organization is found
“suilty, the bill magnanimous-
ly grants it the right of appeal
—to the attorney general, who
found it “guilty” in the first
place.

In calling on people and or-
ganizations all over the nation
to swing into action against
the bill, the Communist Party
charged that these proposals,
if adopted, “would carry our
country far along the road to-
wward war and an American
form of fascism.” : x

fighting so hard for independ-

ence that Britain ‘could no long-

er run India in the old way is

“his government’s stand on for-

eign issues.

Nehru. used to swear that
whatever he did, he would al-
ways support the struggle of
all Asia’s colonial. peoples for
freedom. Since taking office he
has given given no aid to the
Inddb - Chinese resisting the
French. His delegates in the Un-
ited Nations have approved a
forced “truce” which gives most
of Indonesia back to the Dutch.
He ships coal India needs for
herself to Chiang’s civil war in
China.

Those disposed to sigh with re-
lief that here is one situation
in which present U.S. policy
plays no messy role can save
their sighs. Not accidentally,
Nehru is capping his record-
breaking turn toward reaction
and “private enterprise” by
planning a trip to Washington to
ask for dollar credits under a
“Marshall plan for Asia.” Not
long ago Republican foreign pol-
icy leader John Foster Dulles
referred to Nehru’s government
as “Hindu Communist.” Nehru,
guided by U.S. Ambassador
Henry C. Grady, has since been
clearing himself by a _ private
Taft-Hartley anti-Communist af-
fidavit written with anti-labor
terror. |

Indian .goyernment members
have spelled things out further
by explaining that U.S. private
investments, as well as Marshall
plan money, could hardly be ex-
pected while Indian labor’s wage
demands made investment “un-
economical.” Nehru’s_ back-
tracking on nationalization in
India means~ that her develop-
ment will rely on foreign capi-
tal instead of the country’s own
immense wealth extracted from
the few who now own it. Profits
will: flow out of the land, with
only a small part left to Indian
partners in the business. Con-
trol, of course, lies where money
lies. No self-respecting Wall
Street firm will invest without
this. assurance.

The India story also highlights
a constant truth about colonial
independence movements. While
a direct foreign ruler is the com-
mon enemy, all subject groups
fight together. Then the people
begin to ask for a full belly, but
the local rich want only the
tribute the foreigner used to
gather, this time for themselves.

—LONDON

NE hundred and thirty Ameri-
can and 380 British officers were
attached to the Monarchist army
units in action in the Mount
Krusia area during March and
April, states Free Greece Radio.

With the winter over, there is
a general stepping-up of mili-
tary activity, although no signs
yet of the “great spring offen-
sive” by the Monarchists. An-
other preliminary offensive by
the Monarchists, in the Drama
area of Macedonia, has eneded
in complete failure, Free Greece
Radio announces, |

The Monarchist offensive be-
gan on April 13, but the Demo-
crats took the initiative and be-
gan their counter-offiensive the
next day. In Athens, the author-
ities are claiming fantastic suc-
cesses in the Roumeli area but,
Free Greece Radio said, the
course of events will prove that
the situation there is similar to
that at Drama.

In defending this greed against
the poor, who outnumber them,
they call in another foreigner.

He uses their dependence on
outside power to run_ things
more and more. Thus China got
out from under the Japanese
only to have Chiang try to lend-
lease her as a U.S. base. Greece
emerged from German occupa-
tion to (find her rulers doing the
same.

It is only the strength of the
common people, born of Second
World War struggles against the

Axis, which enables them to put
in 2 claim for ownership of

their own land. In China, that
strength is close to bringing
them to victory. It exists in In-
dia too, Without asking Nehru
for any foreign capital, five mil-
lion peasants in Hyderabad state
have driven age-old landlords
from 2,000 villages covering
thousands of square miles. Un-
ions may be shattered, but
workers and their unbearable
grievances remain. The last

word is with the many, not the
few, once the many move.

She sent 3,000 to death |

Ruth Closius (top) stands between guards as she listens to death
_sentence in a British Military court in Hamburg, Germany. The
28 year-old former wardress was convicted of sending more than
3,000 women to the gas chamber at Ravensbrueck concentration
camp. (Below) Elfriede Mohneke, 26, former SS woman at the
camp, faints as she receives a 10-year sentence.

U.S. directs Greek drive |

The initiative for offensive ac-

‘tion is still with the Democrats

in most parts. In the Pelopon-
nese, they are dictating action
at will, The town of Kalavryta

which the Democrats captured
on April 11 and held for two
days before withdrawing, provid-
ed them with large quantities of
captured supplies.

Nazis head new army

—PRAGUE.

PLANs for a new German army
are being completed, under
the supervision of General Franz

_ Halder, former chief of staff in

Hitler's Reichswehr, according to
the Czechoslovak army daily
newspaper Ograna Lidu.
‘Already, a number of other
high-ranking Nazi, generals, in-
cluding General Kesselring, who
was sentenced to death by a Brit-
ish court in Italy, are at work in
the new German General Staff
headquarters at Kassel.

Their group is camouflaged as
a “committee of military histor-
ians,” but the structure and tasks

of the committee are almost iden-
tical with those of the former
general staff.

Obrana Lidu assumes that
Field -Marshal von Rundstedt,
considered by the British to be
the ablest of German generals,
will be made commander-in-chief.

Observers here recall the reve-
lation, last month, that plans for
an army of 500,000 for the future
West German state, to be equip-
ped with American arms and
paid for through the Marshall
plan, had been outlined in a mem-
orandum from American Military
Governor Lucius D. Clay to Sec-
retaries Marshall and Forrestal.

PACIFIC TRIBUNF—MAY 14, 1948—PAGE 3