WHETHER the meeting of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee, which is to be held to-morrow, will or will not be the stormiest meeting of that body ever held, what one can safely assert is that no previous meeting of that body, or, indeed, of any other Provincial Committee, ever aroused so extraordinary a measures of interest either in the Province concerned or in the country. The reason is obvious. The principal issue before the meeting is recognised on all hands to be the outstanding political issue both in Bengal and India. That issue is not merely whether the Bengal Pact, which to most of us is already dead, should be buried out of sight or should be left where it is, so that the sore made by it may be kept open; but whether the time has or has not come when the fundamental principle of that pact, which, if valid, is undoubtedly of all-India application, should be definitely and finally discarded. It is true that neither of the two parties to the dispute is so far prepared to openly avow, or perhaps even to admit to themselves, that this last is the real issue before the meeting. But the fact cannot admit of a moment’s doubt. No one could have been in Calcutta or Bengal for ever so short a time after the recent riots without realising that his was the definite issue which was troubling men’s minds; and what Calcutta and Bengal felt during and on the morrow of the riots is the feeling of the whole country to-day. It is not merely that the Calcutta riots exceeded all similar occurrence in the country both in their duration and in the intensity of their violence.
