Rising Pressure

Gnarled little 72-year-old Mohandas Gandhi has recently lost seven pounds. Last week he was down to around 90. Doctors who visited his whitewashed hut in the mud village of Sevagram said that his blood pressure was rising, that hard work and the blazing Indian heat were exhausting him. They advised a fortnight's rest.

Gandhi at once began working harder than before. He received the Indian National Congress Party Working Committee to discuss ways of continuing to protest British rule. Among those present: huge, bearded Abdul Gaffar Khan, a Moslem who spends his life preaching Hindu Gandhi's nonviolence principles to the fierce Pathans of the Northwest Frontier Province; the Congress Party's spade-bearded Moslem President, Maulana Abdulkalam Azad, who gesticulates like a French prefect; the poetess and veteran Congresswoman, Madame Sarojini Naidu, Gandhi's principal female disciple, who calls him Mickey Mouse; India's second-best-known citizen, handsome, socialistic Jawaharlal Nehru.

Although Gandhi wants Allied troops to remain in India (TIME, July 13), he believes that immediate political independence is of the utmost importance for India's defense. On this subject, Jawaharlal Nehru made a shrewd psychological point last week. Said he: "Submission to England develops a spirit of submission to the Jap."

As a means of protest, the Congress Committee recommended that Indians refuse to yield property under wartime requisition until the British Government pays in full. And, once again, Gandhi proposed to rub salt into the wound of British-Indian relations. The committee urged that Indians violate the Government salt monopoly by making their own salt. In 1930 Britain jailed Gandhi for leading 79 disciples on a 200-mile "Salt March."

At week's end rumor had it that the Congress Committee, before it was through, would announce some vast campaign of protest. Mohandas Gandhi's followers often claim that his awareness of India is as sensitive as his palate, which can tell the temperature of his daily soup to within a fraction of a degree. If so, India was in a mood for protest. For that was Gandhi's mood.

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