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"If We Could Spit . . ." With independence, Gandhi's great victory, came defeat. India, seething with fear and fanaticism, spurted blood in scores of riots. Mohamed Ali Jinnah, once a member of Gandhi's All-India Congress Party, bolted, saying that the Congress was an instrument to impose Hindu rule on India's Moslem minority. With a notably unmystical metaphor, Gandhi said: "If we Indians could only spit in unison, we would form a puddle big enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen." But Jinnah refused to spit in unison with Hindus, for any cause. He demanded, and got, his separate Moslem state of Pakistan.
Lone Voice. Independence without unity was as ashes in Gandhi's mouth. He continued to work for the reunion of Pakistan with India. But in the last half year of his life Gandhi found not only the Moslem leader, but many of his own Hindus, opposing attempts at reconciliation. Orthodox Hindus resented his inroads on Hindu customs which Gandhi considered brutal, and therefore indefensible: untouchability, suttee (widow suicide), child marriages. Hindu and Sikh refugees from Moslem hate and murder, pouring into Delhi and other Indian cities, clamored for revenge. The militant Hindu organization Mahasabha (Great Society), to which Gandhi's assassin belonged, worked to make Indiaa purely Hindu state. Patel gave some encouragement to the extremists, which may partly explain why, at Gandhi's funeral, his head was bowed.
Hindus, not Moslems, stoned Gandhi's house when he went to Calcutta to encourage communal peace last August. On his 78th birthday, Oct. 2, Gandhi spoke sadly: "Why do I receive all these congratulations? . . . The time was when whatever I said, the masses followed. But today I am a lone voice in India." In November, a TIME correspondent went to see him. Gandhi said: "Can you squat?" The reporter squatted. Gandhi at one point in the interview said: "Three hundred years is as nothing." He returned to the present: "The fear haunts me that India must yet go through a deeper blood bath." The government which he had dominated came closer & closer to open war on Pakistan. Only Gandhi's fast last month checked the drift toward open hostilities over Kashmir State.
Violence broke out in India anew after Gandhi's death. Fifty were reported killed as-Gandhi admirers exacted a blood price from the Mahasabha extremists. Some dared to hope that Gandhi's injunction to abhor violence might take on added force from his martyrdom.
The hope was slim. In his lifetime his fellow men had sensed that Gandhi had a great message; of what the message was, they had scarcely an inkling. Gandhi, by the manner of his death, told them a little more of what he had been trying to communicate—but not enough to make them live as he had tried to. The world which revered few men had revered him—but not enough to follow where he pointed. The world was ashamed, and bewildered. Premier Nehru, that great and learned and most fluent man, came back to Gandhi's cooling pyre the day after the cremation. He spoke a few halting, wistful sentences, like a lost child. Said Nehru:
"Bapuji, here are flowers. Today, at least, I can offer them to your bones and ashes. Where will I offer them tomorrow, and to whom?"