GANDHI DEFENDS INDIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 163, 7 August 1942, Page 3

GANDHI DEFENDS INDIA

Sir,-The cartoon entitled "Gandhi Defends India," which you published last week, showing Gandhi drawing a thread from a spinning-wheel across the path of a Japanese tank, was striking ‘and superficially clever. I imagine your source was the American magazine Time, but to put this picture in truer perspective you should also have published some of the text which appeared with’ the cartoon on Time’s page. May I be allowed to quote now from this source? "Wildly exaggerated as Gandhi’s faith in his own defence technique may be, it is not at all beyond possibility that the BritishIndian Army’s fighting may be aided to a degree by Gandhi’s non-violent non-co-opera-tion, "It is fanciful, at least, to urge Indians in general to fight the Japanese invader. Britain has long forbidden weapons to India’s citizens- probably no more than 2,000,000 out of 000,000 have ever seen a rifle-and now Britain has no weapons to give them, except wooden batons. Armies of villagers equipped only with sticks and fists would be small trance to Japan. "But armies of non-violent’ non-co-opera-tors might be a_ considerable obstacle. Gandhi's aig is anything but pacifism. It is mass resistance, whose nearest U.C. equivalent ts the sit-down strike, Gandhi’s followers would obstruct Japan by tefusing the invader their labour; would not work in Talat — trains, ones telephones or telegra iw grow for Japan. If Ja killed then for tr resistance, it would not help Japan. And of Gandhi have sometimes proved their willingness to die -in front of street-cars or police, or in hunger strikes-for their cause."

PERSPECTIVE

(Wellington),