War of Inaction

Last fortnight in a furnace-like jail cell at Poona, the little human lemur who is India's greatest figure, the Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, slowly sipped a glass of fruit juice. Half an hour later, on scheduled time, he began a one-man war of inaction: a three-week fast to protest India's stigma on Untouchables. The first day he drank a good deal of water, mixed with salt and soda. That night the British Government released him from Yerovda Jail, his home since January 1932. Still sprightly, he stepped into an automobile at the jail entrance, was driven to the villa of one of his followers, Lady Vittal Das Thackersey.

From a marble veranda on a hilltop overlooking Poona, the Mahatma issued that same night a potent announcement: for at least a month the civil disobedience campaign and the boycott of British goods should cease. He hoped that the Government would release all civil-disobedience prisoners. Then Gandhi concentrated on his fast, slept, spun, talked, took water, salt and soda.

On the second day nausea began. On the third day excruciating hunger pangs racked him. He gave up spinning and his doctor forbade him to talk. He slept comfortably, awoke early, gnawed by restlessness. On the fourth day jaundice developed. The 63-year-old man. down to 93 lb., was too weak to move. Water had become so revolting to him that he found it hard to drink enough for his needs. On the fifth day he got his second wind at starving: his system had temporarily given up hope for food. Vichy water had stopped the nausea. By day Gandhi basked in the sun; by night he stared at the stars from Lady Thackersey's veranda. His eyes sank further into his head, his collarbone stuck out like a harness. But as he began the second week of his fast he was cheerful. His wife, released from jail, was with him. His son Harilal (eldest of four) came to make his filial peace after a twelve-year estrangement. Father patted son on the back, broke his prescription of silence to talk happily.

His six doctors noted that the wizened, little brown body had failed with amazing rapidity but was organically sound. They ventured a guess that it might survive its "unconditional, irrevocable" three- week fast. India's Hindu millions who look on Gandhi as little less than a god, prayed that it would.

But Gandhi's romantic disciples thought he would die. A German Jewess, Dr. Margaret Spiegel, having fled to him from Germany and the Nazis, went on a counter fast. She thought he would end his fast because "he cannot let me die." On the third day another disciple told her she was making Gandhi worry, persuaded her to take a glass of milk and two oranges. A Buddhist monk. Tan Yu-shan, began a sympathy "fast unto death."

Elsewhere Gandhi's fast was "a confession of failure." From a Vienna sanatorium Vallabhai Jhaverbai Patel, onetime president of the All-India Congress, and Subhas Bose, onetime Mayor of Calcutta, began a campaign to remove Gandhi from leadership of the Indian Nationalist movement. Said they, "It is futile to expect to effect a change of heart in our rulers merely through suffering or trying to love them. Noncooperation cannot be abandoned, but the form of noncooperation must be changed into a militant one and there must be freedom for a fight to be waged on all fronts."

Meanwhile in Benares, India, the working committee of the Indian National Congress met last week to consider calling off the civil disobedience campaign ("sa-tyagraha" or passive resistance). From 1929 until January 1932 when Gandhi was jailed, white-capped Gandhites had stretched themselves full-length in front of boycotted shops, streetcars, trains. As fast as they were carted away, others took their places. President after president of the Congress was jailed. The rank & file became slowly discouraged by the severity of the penalties and by Gandhi's gradual switch from the cause of home rule to the emancipation of the Untouchables. Last week civil disobedience, one of the strangest methods of warfare ever invented, had become a feeble weapon. Observers believed the Nationalist Hindus might plump for co-operation in the British plan of autocratically supervised self-government. One thing might stop them: the uprising of lower castes that would surely follow Gandhi's death.

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