INDIA: Happy Birthday, Dear Mohandas

Children appeared at nightfall as if conjured up by magicians. They skipped from house to house with secretly printed bulletins calling for new mass demonstrations against British rule during the week of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s 73rd birthday.

When the day came, followers of Gandhi’s Indian National Congress party picketed government offices, sang their anthem, Bande Mataram.* They hung out Congress flags. They closed their shops. Leaders who were still unjailed tried to control the violence. They failed.

In Orissa Province furious mobs stormed police stations. At Eram 25 were killed. In Old Delhi gunfire dispersed 2,000 demonstrators. In Bombay, scene of earlier gas attacks (see cut), lathee charges left blood-covered cobblestones in front of a statue of Queen Victoria. Some Indians in the hinterlands used bows and arrows. Guerrilla gangs attacked railways.

Conservative Congress members tried to convince younger party members that Gandhi’s nonviolent noncooperation was not an outmoded weapon. But with the Mahatma in jail on what may be his last earthly birthday, discipline was deteriorating. There was little evidence that violence was any more under control than when Gandhi and other Congress leaders were jailed two months ago.

Jarred by outside criticism, the British in India repeated their charges that Gandhi was a screwball pacifist at best, a traitor at worst. They claimed that, having governed India for 168 years, they were better prepared to meet India’s present crisis than well-meaning intruders. They asked how, with a Japanese invasion threatened, immediate Indian independence could be granted when the Indians could not agree among themselves? This was a valid point, but twistable.

Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Moslem League president, played the British against the Hindu-dominated Congress party to gain power for himself and his vague plan of a separate Moslem state. The British pointed to Jinnah’s intransigence as an example of clashing Hindu-Moslem aspirations. It gave point to the British claim that Indian nationalists must unite before independence (preferably dominionhood within the Empire) will be granted. But efforts to promote a national wartime government were balked by the British Raj’s refusal to allow any dealings with the jailed Gandhi.

Thoroughly disgusted, Allah Bakhsh, Moslem Premier of Sind Province and president of the All-India Azad (independent) Moslem Conference, returned to the government his Order of the British Empire and gave up his British title, Khan (prince) Bahadur. He announced that he was starting a movement of his own, to “fight British imperialism from within and foreign aggression from without.”

In India Allah Bakhsh’s stand carried weight. In London it and a flood of other protestations over the mishandling of the Indian crisis apparently carried none. The House of Commons debated a new India Bill (to bypass court appeals in cases of military executions). When Leopold Amery, Secretary of State for India, announced that British planes were being used to machine-gun mobs in Bihar Province (TIME, Oct. 5), Tory backbenchers burst into cheers.

*Hail to the Motherland: “I bow to thee, Mother, rich with rivers, rich with fruits, with cool breezes, with green fields full of corn. Oh, Mother, I bow to thee.”