Resurrection

Two months after the British had let him out of prison to die, sick, 74-year-old Mohandas Gandhi tottered back onto India's political stage.

Point of No Return. Since mid-1942, when the Raj last imprisoned the Mahatma, both he and his political instrument, the All-India National Congress, had declined in power. Malaria, amoebic dysentery, low blood pressure, hookworm, anemia, weak heart & kidneys had sapped his body. His wife had died. All the leading members of the Congress Working Committee had been jailed since they voted an ultimatum to Great Britain to leave India to the Indians immediately or face mass civil disobedience (Gandhi's famed, fateful "Quit India" resolution).

In the same years, his most potent Indian rival had grown in power. As Gandhi speaks professionally for India's Hindu masses (255,000,000), so Mohamed Ali Jinnah speaks professionally for India's Moslems (92,000,000). Jinnah maintained that Hindu-Moslem unity was impossible. He insisted that, in a free India, autonomy should be granted to areas where Moslems are in the majority, and he called his doctrine Pakistan. Gandhi called Pakistan a perpetual vivisection of Mother India, held until last week that the whole Hindu-Moslem question should be postponed until independence is achieved.

Last week Gandhi suddenly reversed himself--or seemed to. He sent word to Jinnah that he was willing to accept the principle of Hindu-Moslem separation, let the people in mixed areas decide by plebiscite. It was not Pakistan, it was hedged with qualifications, but it was a momentous concession for Gandhi to make.

The Mahatma retreated--or seemed to retreat--on other fronts. He said that he has no intention of reviving his old weapon, civil disobedience, while the war lasts. He assured Lord Wavell that he wants to aid the Allied cause, recognizes that India is a base of military operations. In a sentence laden with admission that much had happened to him and to India, he said: "I have no intention of taking the country back to 1942."

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