GANDHI-AT 75

...For if the Indians could not rule themselves, they were not fit to undertake to rule their country...

...Thus does empire again assert itself—the sheer, brute power of empire, which is as old as Egypt, Babylonia, and Rome, and as new as Britain, Germany, and Japan...

...Gandhi is one of the supreme spirits of all time...

...In 1§22, came the first great non-cooperation campaign which convulsed India to its remotest corners, and shook the British Empire to its foundations...

...Gandhi's march to Dandi in 1930, accompanied by 79 brave disciples, to violate the salt tax, must ever be remembered as one of the supremely dramatic chapters in the annals of human history...

...Winston Churchill said: "Tyranny is our (the English-speaking peoples') foe...

...6, 1943, on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree, Mr...

...Jawarhalal Nehru, for example, has become so used to British prisons that he calls them his "other home...

...The hour of imperialism has struck—imperialism in any place, under any flag, in any "disguise...

...That is the signal of Gandhi's life...

...The shock of this gross betrayal marked the turning point of Gandhi's life, and the opening of that new chapter of Indian history, dominated by his personality, which can end now only with complete national independence...

...He himself as a convinced pacifist could not take up arms, but he urged the recruiting of those who could...

...In *he supreme act of statesmanship in his great career, Gandhi, in cooperation with the famous middle-of-the-road liberal, Mr...

...Roosevelt bestrides a world by which Gandhi is despised and rejected...

...Nothing is more amusing than the picture of this young Indian as a law student in London, carefully groomed with Prince Albert coat and tall hat...

...whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat...

...To this extent it was clearly understood that, at the close of the war, India would be given recognition for her staunch allegiance to the Crown and her substantial help in material and men...

...It is this enormous fact that makes Gandhi so important—so much more than a patriot, a popular leader, a national statesman...

...The promises of the British Premier, Mr...

...A. L. Amery, Secretary of State for India in the British Cabinet, has announced to the House of Commons in London that Gandhi's plan is "in no sense a response to Field Marshal Viscount Wavell's recent invitation to Gandhi to produce constructive proposals...

...His whole soul was stirred within him to revolt...

...Lloyd George, were definite upon this point, or so it was thought...

...Empire must go—that is the lesson of these times...

...Gandhi's Supreme Act All things, of course, have come to a climax in this war...

...And this incredible nonviolent action has been successful...

...Returning to India in 1914, Gandhi loyally supported the British Empire in the first World War...

...The story of this fight is one of the great epics of human heroism and sacrifice...

...Gandhi, the "naked fakir" as Chur-'hill once contemptuously called him, Gandhi who has warred through all these years, with the pure weapons of the spirit, against "tyranny" as he meets it and as his fellow-countrymen have long endured it, Gandhi, the saint, the seer, the generous and far-seeing statesman—Gandhi is the answer to these questions...

...On India's side Gandhi asks for the immediate release of all the Indian leaders now in prison, the organization of an ad interim autonomous federal government for India, and a guarantee of full Indian independence after the war...

...It was the testimony of no less a man than Lord Lloyd, the royal Governor of Bombay, that this rebellion against the Raj came within a hair's breadth of success...

...One Of The Supreme Spirits In an address at Harvard University, delivered on Sept...

...His .one ambition at that time was to conform successfully to English customs and ideas...

...There can be no victory for freedom in this war which does not wrest India from the rule of Britain, as the Low Countries from the rule of Germany, and China and the Philippines from the rule of Japan...

...There is nothing, he says, to talk about...

...This success has not yet reached its consummation...

...They did not know any too well, perhaps, what it was all about, but they knew Gandhi and trusted him with an almost religious fervor and devotion...

...Shall'the Indian not be "ever ready to spring at (the) throat" of British tyranny, as the Frenchman and the Norwegian at the throat of Nazi tyranny...

...The Cripps Plan, said Mr...

...It was here that Gandhi learned the uses of nonviolent resistance, and developed his amazing technique of non-violent non-cooperation as a program of mass action...

...Gandhi some months ago, when stricken by the death of his wife and by what was feared might be fatal illness, was released from confinement...

...Like the words of the Atlantic Charter, do they have no application to the East...

...Lord Wavell, the Viceroy, has declined even to meet Gandhi to talk it over...

...But the war ended, and there came from Britain not reward, but the tyranny of the Rowlett Acts, the horror of the Amritsar massacre, the repudiation of pledges, and the denial of justice...

...These demands were modest—dominion status would have satisfied the utmost longings of most Indians in that day...

...Churchill think that these words mean...

...After years of trial and tribulation, humiliation and cruel suffering, heroism and limitless sacrifice, the Indians have learned the meaning as well as earned the reward of liberty...

...The very thing that we are said to be fighting against in this war is what India has known for so long, and still knows, at first hand under British rule...

...Gandhi was thrown off a train carefully segregated* for whites...

...It is this plan, comprehensive, conciliatory, cooperative, shrewdly and-sincerely calculated to meet every condition laid down by Britain as the basis of her own promise of independence for India, which the Empire now refuses even to.consider...

...Worse than this, he was made to see the daily indignities and inequities visited upon laboring Indians who were treated in South Africa as coolies and therefore as social pariahs...

...For there is no man today, and few in history, who can compare in stature with this Indian leader...

...Nothing outside of Germany and the Nazis can be found to match this wholesale repression of a great people...

...More than any other man today Gandhi is the witness of humanity's resolve to be free, and the prophecy of what the future holds if this resolve is not fulfilled...

...Thus, to the Moslem League, which has been making so much trouble under the misguided leadership of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Gandhi has conceded the principle of Pakistan, or Moslem autonomy, to the extent at least of proposing a plebiscite of all peoples, in the parts of India in which the Moslems have a majority in population, on the question of the formation of a separate Mohammedan state after independence is obtained from Britain...

...To Britain, in turn, he has offered to suspend civil disobedience and concede full support to the war against Japan, and to leave all military control and direction in English hands...

...The plan therefore has been rejected by the British Government even as a basis of discussion...

...If the world is to endure at all, it must be free...

...And if it does not go in this war, east as well as west, then there will be another and third World War over this same issue...

...Abandoning all personal plans, he placed himself at the head of his stricken countrymen, and organized and led a sustained struggle to win for them not only decent treatment as human beings, but also those rights and privileges under the law which belonged to other men...

...India is not yet free...

...This liberty must now either be granted by the British Crown, or else in due course will be seized by an aroused and resolute people...

...Beginning Of A Struggle Within two years Gandhi was at the head of a movement of revolt which included not merely the liberal leaders and the educated classes of India but the great masses of the Indian people as well...

...In a fight that lasted off and on for 20 years, and involved persecution, imprisonment, and continued humiliation and suffering, Gandhi won at last the victory, and incidentally a personal prestige that made his name familiar and revered throughout the eastern world...

...Non-Violent Resistance It was when he went to South Africa, as a lawyer in the early practice of his profession, that he was first awakened to the mission of his life...

...As it was, it failed only because Gandhi himself called it off when violence broke out, under extreme provocation, among his own followers...

...Only the influence of his saintly mother, a member of the puritanical Jain sect in India, held him steadfast to his Indian faith, and bound him thus early to that rigorous discipline of inner life which made him in his turn become an ascetic and a saint...

...Churchill rules an empire of which Gandhi is the slave...

...It is interesting to note that, at the start of his career, Gandhi was the most conventional of men...

...The stubborn intransigence of the Empire, the futile gesture of the Cripps Plan, the unshaken steadfastness of Indians of all parties, led to the sweeping flood of arrests in August 1942, which put tens of thousands of India's most influential and distinguished leaders behind the bars of British jails...

...Therewith is he more than the leader of a great people: he is as well the leader of a cause, and that cause the most precious to the soul of man...

...But Gandhi and his Congress have achieved the will to victory...

...Gandhi has been arrested and imprisoned so many times that he must have long since lost the count—and with him thousands of the outstanding leaders of Indian life...

...What'does Mr...

...He belongs to no one nation or people, but to humanity—and not to this age alone, but to the eternities...

...O yes, Stalin commands armies that Gandhi never saw...

...This first non-cooperation campaign was the beginning of a fight for liberty, under Gandhi's leadership, which has continued un-interruptedly to this day...

...Here for the first time in his mature years he encountered, in unadulterated form, the race problem, as directed in this case not only against the black natives but also against himself and Orientals generally...

...Above all, there has been the august spectacle of a whole people battling for their independence from alien rule without resort to arms...

...Amery, is still open—a plan unanimously rejected by every party in India, including the Moslems on the one hand and the moderates, or liberals, on the other...

...But when posterity has done its work with these contemporary figures, Gandhi will be as Jesu*s over Herod and Tiberias Caesar...

...Now, in his 75th year, he is using the scant time and scant measure of freedom which are still his, to work out peacefully and constructively that problem of liberty for India which every one now knows must be settled if not by nonviolence then ultimately by violence...

...Forced to obey the military mandate of Britain, as Poland, France, Finland, and other occupied countries in Europe were forced to obey the mandate of the Reich, India remained faithful to her own sense of dignity and honor, and demanded national independence as the only condition under which she could fight effectively and loyally against Japan in a war for the liberation of all peoples from tyranny...

...His fame is sure—and his work, whether finished in his time or later, a perpetual monument...

...Rather than have violence, he would have India remain in bonds...

...The tumult and the shouting dies, The captains and the kings depart...

...Gandhi's hunger strikes have again and again held the anxious and admiring attention not only of India but of the world...

...He was refused admission on a Sunday evening to a white Christian church...

...Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, A humble and a contrite heart...

...Like other Indian leaders of that day, he was convinced that if his country did not fail Britain in her dire extremity against Germany, Britain in turn would not fail India in her legitimate demands for freedom under the Raj...

...C. R. Rajagopalacharia, former premier of Madras, has presented a sweeping plan of settlement, based on mutual conciliation, which is evidence at once of his keen mind and exalted spirit...

...Do the "trappings or disguise" of English-speaking peoples save them from the reproach and penalty of "tyranny...

...Faced by no charges, brought to no trial, convicted of no crime, these men and women to this day languish helplessly in detention camps or prisons...

...If humanity were civilized enough to recognize its truly great men, and the times were propitious for any thought but that of violence and death, this date would be the occasion for world-wide acclaim...

...For the first time the slum dwellers in the cities and the myriad peasants in the villages were awake and active...