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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.