Foreign News: THE MIND OF GANDHI

India’s leaders, especially Mohandas Gandhi, are often badly misunderstood in the West. They are, indeed, not easy for most Western minds to understand. One difficulty is the fact that their statements, as carried in the Western press, are frequently too brief to be illuminating. Below is an extended interview with Gandhi, cabled from India last week by TIME’S Correspondent Jack Belden:

I found Gandhi flat on his back on a white mattress laid on a clean-swept floor made of cow dung.

Over his head waved a punkah, drawn by a white-clad woman disciple. About his body was a simple cotton loincloth, the thread of which was spun by his own hands. In one hand he held a rag, which he constantly dipped into a bowl of water by his side and wiped over his shiny bald head. About him followers and secretaries knelt crosslegged. Gandhi looked old as wisdom, skeleton-thin, sharp, birdlike; now all his teeth are gone. He seemed in remarkable spirits.

“So you’ve come to vivisect me. All right, I’m at your disposal.”

I said that Indian papers were hinting that he and other Congress leaders might be arrested. He waved his hand airily. “That wouldn’t matter. I’d still be in their midst. Our arrests would stir everyone in India to do his little bit. Even the stones would arise. Stones can be nonviolent, you know,” he said with a twinkle.

Nonviolence. Gandhi insisted that a method of nonviolence [against Japan] could not only be effective but was the only course open to him. Said he: “We have no army, no military resources, no military skill, and nonviolence is the only thing we can rely on. Of course we can’t prevent invasion: the Japs will land, but they will land on an inhospitable shore. We do not need to kill a single Jap; we simply give them no quarter. We may be unable to withstand their terror and may have to go through a course of subjection worse than the present state, but we will carry on.”

Gandhi added: “I do not want to help the Japs, even in order to free India. India, during the past 50 years’ struggle for freedom, has learned not to bow to any foreign power. The moment my demands are complied with, India, instead of being sullen, becomes an ally. Remember, I am more interested than the British in keeping the Japs out. For Britain, defeat in Indian waters may mean only the loss of India, but if Japan wins, India loses everything.”

A free India, said Gandhi, would not necessarily declare war against Japan, but it “becomes an ally of the Allied powers simply out of gratefulness in payment of debt, however overdue. Human nature thanks a debt or when he discharges a debt. All I have done is make this appeal [for independence] on bare and inherent justice and hope to find an echo in the British heart. Britons play desperately on the physical field. Let them play desperately on the moral field and declare that India’s independence is fair, irrespective of India’s demands.”

Gandhi brushed aside the objection that a free India would mean nothing if India’s Moslems did not accept Hindu rule. “I have not asked the British to hand over India to Congress or to the Hindus. Let them entrust India to God or, in modern parlance, to anarchy. Then all parties will fight one another like dogs, or will, when real responsibility comes, reach a reasonable agreement. But I expect nonviolence to arise out of that agreement.”

Americans. I asked: “What do you think of American troops’ presence in India?”

Said Gandhi: “It is a bad job because it is an imposition on India. It is not at India’s request or consent that they are here. It is enough irritation that we were not consulted before being dragged into war—that is our original complaint—but to have brought American forces here is to tighten the stranglehold on us. I am not prejudiced against Americans and my thousands of friends in America, but it is my point that all these things are not happening at the invitation of India.

“We can’t look upon them with philosophic calm and can’t close our eyes to things daily happening in front of us. India is being ground to dust and humiliated, even before the Japanese advent, not for India’s defense and no one knows for whose defense. And so, on one fine morning, I came to the decision to make this honest demand:

“For heaven’s sake, leave India alone. Let us breathe the air of freedom. It may choke us, suffocate us as it did the slaves under emancipation, but I want the present sham to end.’

“There is no other way but saying to them: ‘You must go,’ and if British rule ends, that moral act will save Britain and America. If they choose to remain here, they should do so as friends, not proprietors, of India. American and British soldiers may remain here, if at all, by virtue of a compact with free India.”