Gandhi In High

It was so hot in New Delhi last week that airplane pilots clad only in shorts said they were still comfortable at 20,000 feet. Was Mohandas Gandhi crazy with the heat?

Under the blazing sun, little Mohandas Gandhi's faith in the non-violent noncooperation which he urges for India's defense reached such furnace temperature that he wrote in the journal Harijan: "The presence of the British in India is an invitation to Japan to invade India. Their withdrawal would remove the bait. . . . Free India would be better able to cope with the invasion. Unadulterated noncooperation would then have full sway."

Most Occidentals who heard these words thought, as usual, that Gandhi was completely balmy. But wildly exaggerated as Gandhi's faith in his own defense technique may be, it is not at all beyond possibility that the British-Indian Army's fighting may be aided to a degree by Gandhi's non-violent noncooperation.

It is fanciful, at least, to urge Indians in general to fight the Japanese invader. Britain has long forbidden weapons to India's citizens--probably no more than 2,000,000 out of India's 350,000,000 have ever seen a rifle--and now Britain has no weapons to give them, except wooden batons. Armies of villagers equipped only with sticks and fists would be small hindrance to Japan.

But armies of non-violent non-cooperators might be a considerable obstacle. Gandhi's policy is anything but pacifism. It is organized mass resistance whose nearest U.S. equivalent is the sit-down strike. Gandhi's followers would obstruct Japan by refusing the invader their labor; they would not work in factories, run trains, operate telephones or telegraphs, draw water or grow crops for Japan. If Japan killed them for their resistance, it would not help Japan. And followers of Gandhi have sometimes proved their willingness to die--in front of streetcars or police, or in hunger strikes--for their cause.

The really white-hot question: How many non-violent non-cooperators would appear if India were invaded?

Moral Basis. In answer to Occidentals who thought his Oriental formula fibreless, little Mohandas Gandhi last week declared that the U.S. and Britain lack the moral basis for waging war. In an interview with the United Press, he said that they could gain it only by giving all Asiatic peoples political independence and racial equality. The U.S., he said, might have brought about peace but had lost the opportunity; but even now it would be possible for the U.S. to withdraw from the war if she would divest herself of "the intoxication of immense wealth."

Asked about the possibility of his visiting the U.S.* he said: "I have no faith that I could do anything good for India by going to America. They would lionize people; they would listen to them, but they would go their own way. . . . It is difficult to wean the golden calf from the worshipers of Mammon."

*For the possibility that he might be visited by a muscular American, see p. 64.

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