INDIA: Frogs in a Well

A small boy in a tattered dhoti idly dawdled toe marks in the deep dust. Monsoon skies were slate-grey overhead. The oppressive heat gave added pungency to the smell of human filth in the Girgaun district of Bombay’s slums. Shopkeepers moved listlessly; talk dribbled in the bazaars. Suddenly everything changed. Word sputtered from mouth to mouth that the British Raj had jailed Mahatma Gandhi.

No longer listless, Hindus in the Girgaun ran riot. Four double-decker busses were wrecked. One was set afire, blazed high in the sky. Traffic snarled. Foreigners were stoned. So were police, who answered with tear gas, then fired directly into the crowds. The small boy ran from one trouble spot to another. Finally he remembered some blackjacks that he knew about. He got them, took up a stand on the street corner, sold them for one rupee each.

Thus last week did a tragic hour, damned by logic and twisted by emotionalism, come to the subcontinent of India. In a crisis caused by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s threat of open revolt, the British struck first. The slamming of jail doors on the leaders of the Indian National Congress party was their answer to Gandhi’s demand for immediate Indian independence.

The Hour. In the dawn’s early light, Bombay’s police commissioner arrested Gandhi at the home of Ghanshyam Dass Birla, a wealthy Indian industrialist. The elderly Pied Piper, who had been up until 2 a.m. writing reports and memoranda, was sleepy but good-humored. He was given an hour to get ready. During that time he had a breakfast of orange juice and goat’s milk. He heard a Sanskrit hymn and a few words from the Koran, read by a young Moslem girl. He scrawled a last-minute message to his followers. Then, with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita (sacred Hindu poem), the Koran and an Urdu primer under his arm, a garland of flowers around his wizened neck, he was taken in the commissioner’s car to Victoria station. “Nice old fellow, that Gandhi,” the commissioner said. The train chuffed on to Poona. There the Mahatma was imprisoned in the rambling stone “bungalow” of the rich Aga Khan.*

With Gandhi went Mme. Sarojini Naidu, poetess, and Madeline Slade, the British admiral’s daughter who has been Gandhi’s devoted follower for 17 years. Mme. Gandhi, older (73), tinier (barely four feet tall) and far frailer than her scrawny spouse who is still tough as nails despite the fiction that he is sickly, was allowed to remain in the Birla home. But that evening, she, too, was arrested when she tried to make a speech before 30,000 persons in a big Bombay park. The meeting was broken up, but not before other speakers read the last message from Gandhi: “Every man is free to go to the fullest length under ahimsa (non violence) for complete deadlock by strikes and all other possible means. Karenge ya Marenge! (Do or Die!)

The Presidents. Nearly 200 party leaders were rounded up and jailed. White-capped Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s leading disciple and right-hand man, who is also a well-proven friend of the United Nations, was sent to Yeravda, six miles from Poona. Into the same jail went white-bearded Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, President of the Congress party. A few minutes before his arrest Azad smuggled out a message: if party leaders were seized, “every Congress member becomes Congress President.”

This message, coming before Gandhi’s set off the first riots. It was read by a woman in the canvas tentlike Pandal, where 250 party leaders of the day before had voted (with 13 opposing) authorization for Gandhi to lead his last great civil disobedience campaign. Scattered by police who threw tear-gas bombs and whacked heads with lathis (five-foot bamboo staves), Gandhi’s followers quickly reassembled in the streets. Hundreds threw stones and vegetables at police who rushed the Bombay provincial party headquarters and seized all administrative documents. Before nightfall, when reserves of British officers and yellow-turbaned native police were held in readiness for blackout riots, at least eight persons were killed in Bombay alone. In 48 hours police and troops fired “about ten times” into unruly mobs. The list of bullet-wounded soon passed the hundred mark. Bands of men and women lay down on streetcar tracks or piled rubble on the rails. Others hauled passengers out of automobiles and forced cyclists to dismount with the admonition that they must walk “because this is a democracy.” Growing nastier mobs began stoning foreigners. A.P. Correspondent Preston Grover’s car was shot at, bombarded with bottles, rocks, chamber pots.

Spreading from Bombay, the riots took on increasingly serious proportions. At Poona 14 were injured when goondas (Hindu for hoodlums) threw bottles into windows. At Lucknow, police fired on student demonstrators. Demonstrators stoned trains, cut wires, smashed police lamps. In Ahmadabad police killed one person when they fired directly into a mob trying to burn the police post. In New Delhi a small crowd fought its way past a barricade at the foot of the hill leading to the Viceroy’s palace, but later was turned back. Whites in New Delhi said: “It’s here,” kept close together for mutual protection. In Calcutta there were demonstrations, but no immediate strike call for war workers in strategic factories. The British feared that communal riots between Hindus and Moslems might break out. The stoning of Moslem shops by Hindus in Bombay was one portent of even greater trouble.

The strategy of the British Raj was plainly to strangle what it called “open rebellion” before the rebellion could get organized. The British hoped to quell the riots in a few days, expected support from Communists, Untouchables, Moslems. Their program was ready for the push of a button. During the week the Viceroy’s Council met almost daily instead of once a week. It was a period of great decision for the eleven Indians on the 15-man council. If they approved the arrest of Gandhi, it meant that their decision would haunt Indian politics for decades. It would cut them off from any Congress party support. On the fateful Friday they trudged three times up the winding spiral stairs of the Viceregal lodge to the Council Room. They left late at night with their decision made, their plans laid.

In moves that meant total war against the Congress party, with the backing of the Viceroy, the 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, and the Home Government, the Council: 1) ordered strict control of the national press; 2) gave provincial authorities power over local governments; 3) announced that shops closing their doors as a part of a general strike would be immediately taken over by the Government. When the hour came the British operated with extraordinary efficiency.

August 7. Just as they struck first at week’s end, the British struck hard earlier in the week with the revelation of documents seized last April in a raid on the Congress party headquarters at Allahabad. These documents were used to prove that Gandhi at that time had planned, as the first act of Indian independence, to negotiate for peace with Japan. Nehru and Gandhi promptly noted that the raid was illegal, claimed that the documents were misinterpreted by the British to influence

U.S. opinion and turn Gandhi supporters against him in Britain. To the British, the documents were evidence that Gandhi was a traitor. To the Congress party the British action was a dirty trick. Meeting in Bombay, on the fateful August 7, the party gave its answer.

Of all India’s cities, Bombay represents the best and the worst that the Raj has brought—from enlightening contact with western civilization to the tragic abuse of industrialism expressed in miles of grimy slums like those in the Girgaun district. In this poverty-riddled, proud, resplendent citadel on the seven interwoven islands at India’s gateway, the Congress leaders met with settled purpose. Inside their huge Pandal electric fans hummed. They had the unprecedented extravagance to provide chairs for everyone. They opened their meeting with terrific trumpet blasts. A band played Marching Through Georgia. Crowds surged on Gandhi when he arrived in his loincloth, a narrow white scarf around his neck. Twice he lost his glasses. Each time his admirers tried to put them back on for him. Momentarily forgetting nonviolence, he swung his fists to ward off the overzealous. Inside the Pandal, Gandhi spoke, cross-legged from a couch, into a microphone. A friend explained: “He has some difficulty because he has lost his teeth.”

Friends. But Gandhi had not lost his wits. He handed U.S. correspondents a “letter to American friends” urging that the U.S. intercede for Indian independence. “You have made common cause with Great Britain,” he said. “You cannot therefore disown responsibility for anything that her representatives do in India.” He contended that “false propaganda had poisoned American ears,” ended his letter with the salutation: “I am your friend.”

At the Pandal microphone Gandhi also professed his friendship for the British: “I know that they are on the brink of the ditch, and are about to fall into it. Therefore, even if they want to cut off my hands, my friendship demands that I should try to pull them out of the ditch.” Sadly, as if the British were tired little children, Gandhi explained that the British position in India could be saved only by granting the Indians freedom. “We can show our real grit and valor,” said he, “only when it becomes our right to fight. My democracy means that everyone is his own master. . . . We do not want to remain frogs in a well. We are aiming at world federation. It can come only through nonviolence. Disarmament is possible only if you use the matchless weapon of nonviolence.”

Nehru. From such lofty thoughts in the midst of a ruthless world war, Gandhi turned to Pandit Nehru, gave him credit as “my guru” (teacher) in international affairs. Said Gandhi: “I do not want to be the instrument of Russia’s defeat, nor China’s. If that happens, I would hate myself.” The voice was Gandhi’s, but the sentiments were those of Nehru, torn between his knowledge of the world and his love for the Mahatma. Grave and drawn was Nehru’s face when he rose to speak. There was finality in his words. He spoke of a British “defeatist attitude,” urged that “valiant fighters” replace the “creaking, squeaking and shaking machinery of the Government of India.” He urged that Hindus “give up that attitude of mind which welcomes the Japanese.” He drew the session’s loudest cheers when he suggested participation of a free India in the ranks of the United Nations.

When the session closed, Gandhi had authorization to call for a satyagraha (civil disobedience campaign) which had been recommended by the Congress working committee on Aug. 7. It was a powerful weapon in his hands, a weapon the British called blackmail. To Gandhi, a crusader with a one-track mind, it was a weapon with which to bludgeon immediate independence from the British. He said he hoped President Roosevelt would intercede and announced he would make a last-minute appeal to the Viceroy before leading his followers into action. But there was no time: the next morning the Indian Government cracked down.

Claims. In the British House of Commons, Indian Secretary Leopold Stennett Amery admitted that “Gandhi has his own idiosyncrasies.” But Amery thundered that Gandhi’s action in calling for civil disobedience was “a stab in the back to all who are fighting in India, or for India, in the cause of the United Nations, whether they be Indian, American or Chinese.”

The British position is that, in wartime, Gandhi’s mysticism, his saintliness, his idiosyncrasies and his shrewd playing of politics do not excuse treasonable acts. As blunt as a lathi is the Government’s claim that Gandhi is both an appeaser and pro-Japanese traitor.

In Nehru the British have seen a fine mind, an incorruptible honor, an intelligent approach to world problems. But they distrust him because of his faith in Gandhi and an emotionalism which led him to say: “We prefer to throw ourselves into the fire and come out a new nation or be reduced to ashes.” To finish off their case against Gandhi and Nehru, the British official position is that Gandhi’s voice is not the voice of India. They claim that his party is losing power, that it cannot possibly represent all of India’s heterogeneous peoples and makes no attempt to do so. If immediate independence were granted to India, it would mean a one-party political dictatorship, immediate civil war and chaos that would provide easy entry for Japanese invaders.

Counter-Claims. The Indian view, as brought back to the U.S. last week by Correspondent Louis Fischer after a week’s conversations with Gandhi, is that the British are “smearing” Gandhi and wooing U.S. public support of an oppressive, undemocratic and inefficient Indian and colonial policy. Sir Stafford Cripps, said Fischer, at first led Indian leaders to believe that they would receive a free rein in running their affairs. Subsequently, said Fischer, Sir Stafford was tripped up by Empire politicians. Amidst a wealth of verbiage and argument, Fischer found a sound point in claims that free Indians would fight invading Japanese; and that, inversely, if India’s long-smoldering hatred of the British is fanned, the Indians may be apathetic to “new masters.”

Although Gandhi once may have been flirting with the Japanese, either out of unworldly wisdom or as a counterfoil to the British, the final draft of the “Quit India” resolution was pro-Ally. Also on the record is Gandhi’s petulant manifesto last fortnight to the Japanese: “Our offer to let the Allies retain troops in India is to prevent you from being misled into feeling that you have but to step into this country. If you cherish any such idea, we will not fail to resist you with all the might we can muster.”

The Spectators. Said a leader in the New Delhi Evening National Call: “Britain has opened up a second front. The blitz is on. . . . She has drawn first blood. There is thunder in the clouds and lightning flashes surcharge the horizon.” But the green, white and gold banners of the Congress party hung limp and forlorn from Hindu shops in Delhi. Just as forlorn were U.S. officials in India. Quietly, quiet Lauchlin Currie, special U.S. envoy to the Chinese government, slipped into town. After him came Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff and Commander of U.S. Forces in China, Burma and India. Representatives of a nation which 167 years ago rebelled against British imperial rule, they were witnesses to another struggle for freedom. Plain to see was the tragedy of India. Not so plain was the part that the U.S., with all the good will in the world, could play.

It was only a year ago that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill asked the world’s admiration for their Atlantic Charter. It was a pledge of sorts, even if Churchill subsequently announced that it did not apply to India (and Burma) and the British colonies. And Americans, despite a generally pro-British and occasionally miserably misinformed interpretation of the Indian question in press and radio, were aware that in India the Atlantic Charter, and all that went with it, had come up against the first big test. Before he was jailed Pandit Nehru had said: “It is curious that people who talk in terms of their own freedom [the Americans] should level the charge of blackmail against those who are fighting for their freedom.”

TIME Correspondent William Fisher cabled: “My own conclusion is that, if an earnest and honest effort were made to settle the India affair today by Britain, or preferably by the United Nations working in cooperation with Britain, it could be done.”

* In six arrests for political activity, Gandhi has three times been sent to Yeravda jail. In 1922 he planted a mango tree, underwent a famous appendectomy in which a quick-witted, nimble-fingered British surgeon saved his life when the prison lighting system failed. Back again in 1930, Gandhi built a little brick platform in his cell for more convenient squatting. In 1932, under the mango tree he had planted in 1922, Gandhi undertook his first fast-to-the-death.