November 21, 1953 Progressive People's Party against the union recognised by the employers and the previous government. K n o w i n g what type of union employers all over the world like to recognise, when the dispute is between the workers in the sugar plantations and owners of these plantations, one need have no access to secret police documents to understand what is what. Moreover, the relation between a ruling party and trade unions is a matter that people in any country would rather decide for themselves. If this is denied, the Transport House should get active and truculent w i t h the Government of India for its alleged preferential treatment to the Congress sponsored I N T U C . The limited self-government granted to British Guiana under the Constitution that has now been suspended reserved the portfolios of police, finance and some other essential matters to British civil servants. So the situation created by the expulsion of the popular party from the Government is not very different from the deadlock in the provincial legislatures in the. regime of Dyarchy. The White Paper* on the suspension of the constitution in British Guiana deserves to be circulated very widely in this country so that people can see what stage has been reached by the national movement in British Guiana. These landmarks are all too familiar to us. Fomenting of strikes for political ends, attempting to oust established trade unions by legislative action, removal of the ban on the entry of West Indian communists, attempt to repeal the Undesirable Publications Ordinance, plan to secularise church schools, and undermining the loyalty of the police, good God, have we not heard all these before? True, the P P P fomented race hatredIts propaganda was antiWhtie. Forget for the moment the use made of this particular section of the penal code under the British regime- Must all colonial people have the philosophic attitude that springs from the. Indian soil and if they have to get a government of their own only when they have a Gandhi to lead them, they can only look to Moscow for deliverance, since Gandhis are not horn every day. Or Jag an w i l l have the wholehearted support of the people even * Cmd. 8980 British Guiana: Suspension of the Constitution. London. Her Majesty's Stationary Office. 9d. Available from British Information Services, New Delhi. though the Government of I n d i a for diplomatic reasons may not welcome h i m w i t h open arms. There is not a shred of evidence in the White Paper to suggest the existence of a Communist plot. Assuming that the P P P has associations w i t h the communist i n ternational trade union organisation, does it automatically disqualify it, though freely elected by the peo- Britain has given the answer in the case of Indo-China. I n d i a has not. Having started on the inclined plane what the British have got to in British Guiana w i l l gladden the hearts of communists but i t w i l l seriously perturb Pandit Nehru. On this question, the people have a right to demand a forthright answer from him. Last of the Stalwarts w I T H Sadanand doses a chapter in the history of journalism in this country. News papers are new better produced, have much bigger circulation and arc incomparably better in the presentation of news. But it is big business today. There is no room for the non-conformist in them. Finance, technical equipment, organisation and business management—these determine the fortunes of a newspaper, not its politics or its news angle; it no longer serves a cause. Sadanand, though not: old in years, belonged to the old generation of newspapermen in the sense that he look up newspaper work in the spirit of a mission and not of busmess, albeit in his time he handled large funds, lost money and made money and perhaps played with money " Played " is the term to use, for he had the temerity at a time when the British regime was in trill vigour and Renters, the British news agency, was working hand in glove with the Government of the day to challenge the suptemacy of its imnenusis powerful international news combine. Apart from the economics of it, it was a challenge against the unholy influence of news which was filtered and disinfected of all matter that was no! to the liking of the powers that were. Those who knew how difficult it was to get the correct news when the press and people were fighting the Government of the day need not be told how foolhardy the attempt was, and vet how worthwhile. Though he belonged to the order of the old stalwarts in making newspaper work his mission of life, Sadanand was in a way ahead Trot only of that generation, but. even of the present, for primarily he was a newsman and where news was concerned, he was extraordinary alert, and as cager for promptness of transmission as the most enterprising and forwardlooking of American newsmen. The 1282 Free Press Beam Services, which he started, was intended to be ahead of the times even in the technique of transmission. It flopped. That was not surprising. But it failed as much for the politics as the economics of it, which was rather an unpleasant surprise to those who chose to remain blind to the realities behind newspaper enterprise when it develops into big business. The pioneer in news agency work in this country was the late K C Roy, the founder of the Associated Press, lie was the First to set up an Indian news agency in this country, He ran it at great cost and with the utmost sacrifice; but it was heart-breaking work, for even the nationalist newspapers were not responsive. Alter an unequal fight, he succumbed. The Associated Press lived on, but as a subsidiary to Reuters. Sadanand failed in his first attempt: tried again with no better result; but he did not succumb. His last effort after independence also failed, but this time he was gambling for big stakes and any other man would have been broken by this failure. It: could not break Sadanand 's spirit.; but his health suffered and the end came much sooner than was to be normally expected. Even those who have known him intimately find it difficult to believe that Sadanand was only 53 at the time of his death. The burden of years seemed to bear heavily on him. But it was not physical ailments alone that: had aged him. He squeezed into his comparatively short life activities that others could hardly cover in a much longer span of years. Starting to report news as a lad of 17, he was challenging Reuters before he was 30, and along with news agency work, which was his first love, he brought out the Free Press Journal on his own at an age when few journalists get i n dependent charge of the news desk. T h e Free Press Journal was a secretarial success from its first appearance and on the crest of the Civil Disobedience movement which was then sweeping the country, it carried aloft the banner of a free press u n t i l the Government of the day shut it up by imposing fine after fine which reached the staggering total of Rs 70,000. Again in the ' Q u i t India Movem e n t ' of 1942, the Free Press journal came out as the champion of freedom of the press; but by then, the Government had succeeded in l i n i n g up newspaper editors on its side and alas, the days of independ ence had already ended. Naturally, it was Sadanand again who was the first to come forward when the Government of Free India brought a Press Bill which, this lifelong champion of a free press thought, was intended to curb this freedom. The protest had its effect; but the opposition put up by the newspapers fizzled out. Nevertheless, Sadanand's jounals still bear the motto on the top of the editorial columns: " Freedom of expression is our birthright and we shall not rest until it is fully guaranteed by the Constitution ". V i t a l , if sometimes mercurial, frank and outspoken to a degree, a man of so much energy was bound to have his moods and rages. He had a rare quality of leadership; but no man who has inflexible standards and fines not spare himself can spare others.