The Failure

Dispatches from India last week scarcely mentioned the Marquess of Linlithgow, Viceroy of India, personal friend and unrelenting political enemy of Mohandas K. Gandhi. But it was Lord Linlithgow, tall, stern symbol of British policy, unbending in his scarlet-carpeted marble palace, who had stood his ground and defeated Mohandas Gandhi, frail symbol of India's ceaseless struggle for her independence.

Gandhi had survived a fast of 21 days without wringing a single concession from Linlithgow. There had been cold logic behind the Viceroy's refusal to release Gandhi. From the standpoint of the Indian Government, the triumph of Linlithgow was complete, the failure of Gandhi was unqualified.

To Linlithgow, the victor, went Britain's praise for being the first Viceroy to withstand the pressure of a Gandhi fast without budging an inch. It was considered more newsworthy but less important that Gandhi, thinner than ever, his head propped on pillows, had broken his fast with a glass of orange juice in the Aga Khan's palace. Gandhi, whom the world's press last week had almost forgotten to call "Mahatma" ("Great Soul") was again just a prisoner, held incommunicado and charged with inciting revolt in wartime.

Outside India. There were many prompt to claim that Gandhi, the politician, had not only dried up his sources of world sympathy but was washed up politically as well. The blunt truth was that the Western world had always been less interested in the fate of India than in the tug of war between the British Raj and such articulate Indians as Mohandas Gandhi. Now, once the excitement of the fast was over, the West was not greatly concerned about the life or death of a shriveled little man in a loincloth.

Inside India. News that Gandhi had ended his fast was received with prayers of thanksgiving by millions of his followers and sympathizers. Illiterate, mystical, depressed, the Indian masses rejoiced that Gandhi's life, which is their symbol of hope and liberation, had been spared. But Indian political leaders did not attempt to gloss over the adverse effects of the fast. They were frankly worried.

Indian leaders were aware that even if the great mass of Indians were ready for a general uprising--and there is no evidence that they are--it would have little chance of success while India was packed with troops (mostly Indian). It was also clear that Gandhi's fast, hitherto an infallible weapon in reaching moral victory or political compromise, had achieved neither. The one channel left to them was political action, and the chances of effective action were low indeed last week. In

Gandhi's own Indian National Congress party there was discouragement and bewilderment.

Partly because of Gandhi's decline, Moslem League Leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah was, superficially, in a stronger position to bargain for his partition of India into separate Hindu and Moslem states. Chakravarthi Rajagopalachariar, a Congress partyman who had broken with Gandhi over the "Quit India" resolution of Aug. 8, 1942, and had reunited with him during the fast, called on Indian leaders to "think furiously." It was time for them to think. Whatever the mistakes and blunderings of the British in India, they had not bumbled the Gandhi issue as they saw it. Neither had they solved the Indian issue: for that, something more statesmanlike than simple rigidity would be required.

Inside Gandhi. There was no way of determining what Gandhi thought about the world reaction. Quite possibly he no longer cared. After 20 years of fasting and arguing with the British, he had avowedly made his final break last August with them when he called for civil disobedience. And he was quite capable of viewing his fast as at least a partial success. He had set out to fast 21 days ("God willing") and, surprisingly, he had done so. In the terms of his creed, he had purified his thought. He had also managed to escape from seven months of obscurity, confer with party followers for the first time since he was confined, and he had dramatically brought himself back into the consciousness of his people.

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