The Spinner

The little brown man with the spinning wheel was spinning more & more frantically--for some of the threads were running rather short. Mohandas K. Gandhi was 74. He had striven for a generation to free India from British rule. But India was not independent. Moreover, the war in Europe was drawing to a close. Less than ever would the Raj be impressed by the little brown man's threats and promises to help or hinder Allied victory. He must do something quickly.

First he must try to end the deadlock between the truculent Moslem League and the All-India National Congress. To the League's President Mohamed Ali Jinnah last month he offered recognition of the principle of Pakistan--the right of a Moslem majority to set up an independent Moslem state. For years Gandhi had brushed off the Pakistan idea as the "vivisection of Mother India."

Sneered ungrateful Leader Jinnah: "A parody of negation. . . . Pure shadow and husk of our Pakistan scheme."

Last month Gandhi invited Jinnah to talk it over. Jinnah squirmed. But persuasive, popular, moderate Chakravarthi Rajagopalachariar, who had talked Gandhi into accepting the Pakistan idea, constituted himself a one-man arrangements committee. From his comfortable Madras law office he kept the wires busy. Jinnah agreed to the meeting he had refused since 1937.

Gandhi had also offered to meet India's Viceroy, Lord Wavell. If Lord Wavell would promise India independence at once, Gandhi would throw the power of the All-India National Congress behind the Allied war effort. Said the Viceroy, who knows that the Congress speaks for only a fraction of India's 390,000,000 people: there was no point in a meeting now, but the Government would gladly consider "any definite and constructive proposal."

At week's end reluctant Mohamed Ali Jinnah had worried himself into the last resort of a statesman: he was taken sick. His meeting with Gandhi would have to be postponed.

The little brown man with the spinning wheel spun more & more frantically, pathetically, for he was old, and he knew with an urgency unknown to most of the politicians he dealt with that until the problem of India's unity and India's freedom was solved, the problem of peace and security for Asia and for the world could not be solved.

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