Toward Disaster?

India's week began and ended with deceptive quiet. In the cooling monsoons of central India the Congress party Working Committee met with Mohandas Gandhi at Sevagram. Monday was Gandhi's day of silence, but Tuesday morning the silence was broken. Correspondents were summoned to receive the committee's decision. In a high-pitched, whistling voice, the 90-lb. archenemy of the British Raj declared that, from now on, the people of India would be in open, nonviolent rebellion against British rule.

By Wednesday morning the resolution had reached New Delhi. The Viceroy's Council met in the long, high-windowed council room, darkened against the glaring sun. What they would do was a foregone conclusion. The British Government of India does not possess the authority to commit Constitutional suicide; at best it could refer the decision to His Majesty's Government at London. This it did.

In New Delhi nothing except muted headlines indicated that India was approaching a rendezvous with history. Heat-drugged, half-nude Indians still slept in the shade on sun-baked pavements or sprawled dozing on the grassy lawns of Government buildings and homes of pukka sahibs. From miles away bright British flags could be seen snapping in the north wind above the copper dome of the viceregal palace, as gayly and unconcernedly as if the British Government were not facing the most serious threat to its power since the Mutiny of 1857.

The Threat. The core of the Congress resolution demanded that Britain withdraw politically from India, and threatened to use all the possible nonviolence of the people to compel Britain to withdraw. The resolution did not alter Gandhi's position that he does not wish to interfere with United Nations military forces in India (TIME, July 13). But Jawaharlal Nehru explained that nonviolence envisaged more than industrial strikes--it would be a general strike, peaceful rebellion. Nehru's thesis was simple: only Indians could organize India for war, because anybody could do anything better than the Government of India today--that is a fundamental axiom."

"I think this may be illegal," said one British official after he finished reading the resolution. There was no doubt that, by the law of India, Nehru, Gandhi and every member of Congress was subject to arrest. Gandhi and Nehru, both astute lawyers, knew the law. But both they and the British knew that India's problem was not to be solved by legalities.

How far did Congress represent India? Never had Congress entered mass action with so much of its own press against it. The Bombay Chronicle, Lahore Tribune and Madras Hindu assailed the Congress policy. The great Madras leader Chakravarti Rajagopalachariar ("C.R."), who recently resigned from the Congress, was speaking against its policy publicly, though hissed and booed. Dawn, the organ of the Moslem League, which represents some, but far from all, of India's huge Moslem minority, was crying that Britain's yielding to Congress would result in "the rule of the jungle, anarchy and disorder."

But Congress, the most powerful political group in India, has roots in the illiterate, hungering Hindu peasantry, in Hindu shopkeepers and middlemen, thousands of English-speaking Hindu intellectuals. The silver-haired Nehru, honestly and brilliantly antiFascist, believed that India would repeat the history of Burma and Malaya unless Indians could be persuaded to take part in its defense, and that they would take part only if they felt themselves free, not slaves. Gandhi, with a great emotional understanding of the small peasants, apparently sensed that at last had come the moment of British embarrassment in which to launch his fifth nonviolence campaign.

Hour of Decision. The Government of India and Congress had matched strength four times previously, but this time the result might be different. Congress insisted that it would not yield an inch. So in private, did the British. Like the antagonists in a great tragedy, the two forces seemed to be moving along appointed grooves to an appointed, unalterable end--disaster.

But not until Aug. 7 would the Congress Working Committee's proposal be submitted to the party's general committee. In the meantime many things might happen, many other counsels might prevail. At week's end one of the Congress papers attempted to suggest an alternative. Said the Delhi Evening National Call: "As we look around we find that there is only one man and one country that can save the United Nations from a fatal catastrophe and the cause they represent--that man is President Roosevelt and that country is the United States."

It was a week of history in India, but it seemed that less than 1% of 1% of India's millions realized its implications. Along the fringes of India blackouts reigned in Calcutta, Bombay and Colombo, but nightclubs plied their trade and hotels were fuller than ever. Chief event of the week was the departure of Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. A conscientious soldier, the Duke had made an exhausting 9,000-mile trip from one end of India to the other, holding countless reviews, eating innumerable dinners with princelings, ministers and soldiers. He was called "Sunshine" by newspapermen.

Despite the heat, the Government hung on doggedly at New Delhi as a gesture to the war effort. Air-cooled movies offered U.S. pictures. But none could compare with Jhoola, an Indian epic of love & song running riot in its 21st week to enthusiastic audiences at the Jubilee Theater.

It seemed impossible for both Americans and Britons, fresh out from home and arriving full of vim & vigor, not to fall into the cushioned grooves of normal Delhi society. Americans were happy with a new batch of air mail, including copies of TIME. But they itched and scratched with prickly heat; some of Delhi's victims treated it with table salt, others used antiseptic solutions; all scratched.

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