"PIM" Treads on Indian

Toes

From Our Own Correspondent

Suva. Dec. 16.

fPHE “PIM” contained a statement to X. the effect that at a time when the British have been pushed out of India, and when the Dutch and other Europeans are in the process of being pushed out of Indonesia, Palestine and elsewhere, there seems to be a good case for pushing the Indians out of Flii, in the interests of the Fijians.

People should really know better than to say things like that. They hurt Indian feelings.

“Fiji Samarchar,” an Indian weekly published in Suva, recently contained a letter from a correspondent who appeared to be incoherent with fury, or, possibly, righteous indignation, over the reference in “PIM.”

The letter informed the readers of “Fiji Samarchar” that “PIM” was, in effect, a scurrilous publication operated on behalf of “European vested interests”; but the writer added, regretfully, that it has a large circulation in the South Pacific Islands.

The Indian writer argued that if the Indians should be emptied out of Fiji, Australia should be handed back to the Aborigines, South Africa to the Hotten tots (not the Indians?) and New Zealand to the Maoris. But it took a column of abuse for him to say it.

In the eyes of a section of the Indian press in Fiji, “PIM” is now bracketed with its reptilian (tin the Pickwickian sense) contemporary, the “Fiji Times,” which is said to be “poisoning the political atmosphere of Fiji” because it has been rather sharp on the subject of Indian political manoeuvres in what is still a British Colony.