Only One Answer

Mohandas K. Gandhi last week survived a crisis that had caused a panel of nine reputable doctors and the people of India to believe that this time he would die. At week's end Gandhi's uremic condition improved. He was more cheerful, weak but "perky." This week it appeared that his aged but surprisingly resilient body would last out his 21-day fast.

Doctors said that a change in Gandhi's diet from sour lime juice to sweetened juice on the 12th day had stopped his nausea and possibly prevented his death. Gandhi himself said: "God intends me to live."

A sense of anticlimax was felt in the Western world. It was a natural view for Occidentals. But to the Indian people a great tragedy had been averted. And, to their minds, Gandhi's fast had 1) revived India as a United Nations problem affecting the entire military and political future of the East; 2) again enshrined Gandhi as a saint; 3) brought rival political and religious groups together.

The Charge. The British view, from Winston Churchill on down, was that Gandhi's "failure" to die merely showed that the irascible Mahatma's bluff had been called at last. Cranky old George Bernard Shaw exploded ("stupidest blunder . . . the King should release Gandhi unconditionally as an act of grace"), but Britain as a whole backed the Indian Government. British Tories were solidly anti-Gandhi. Labor Party leaders considered India as a sort of slum-clearance project for future consideration. Most Britons applauded, a New Delhi White Paper: "Only one answer can be given to the question as to who must bear responsibility for the mass uprisings and individual crimes which have disgraced and are still disgracing the fair name of India. That answer is--the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Mr. Gandhi."

The Rebuttal. The Indian rebuttal was that Gandhi and his followers had been imprisoned and held without trial. If others forgot, the Indians remembered official British figures on arrests: between Aug. 9, 1942, when Gandhi's Congress party was outlawed, and Dec. 1, 60,229 Indians were jailed; on Dec. 1, 39,496 were still under arrest; Indian police and Government troops fired 528 times on crowds of Indians; 958 Indians have been flogged.

The Cross. Gandhi still had one more weapon left. If nothing else, Gandhi's powerful personality had escaped from seven months' enforced obscurity in jail. Within his philosophical creed of Satyagraha, which calls on the power of "love and true knowledge" to overcome all difficulties, he might still hope to "melt the hearts" of his enemies.

As the 21-day ordeal drew to its close, Gandhi had the Koran and Vedic hymns and verses from the Gita read to him. He also called for his favorite hymn (by British Author Isaac Watts): When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. Each day he was massaged and cared for as tenderly as an incubator baby. Around his scrawny shoulders was a red and black checked homespun blanket. On the wall of his small, high-ceilinged room in the Aga Khan's gruesomely Victorian Palace in Poona was a Hindu calendar with the motto: "O Lord!"

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