The enigma of Mahatma Ghandi

London: A host of officials in the India Office in Whitehall, a swarm of Government servants in India, a thousand and one traders in London, Bombay, and Calcutta know Mr Gandhi and fear him (writes a correspondent of the New York Tribune). To them he appears a greater menace to the British Empire than all the revolutionists, Bolshevist agitators, Indian fanatics and other troublemakers of the last 50 years. But who is Mr Gandhi? In the Asiatic Review for October, N.M. Samarth, a distinguished lawyer and prominent leader of the Moderate movement in India writes: “Mr Gandhi is not an extremist in the sense in which that term is generally applied and understood in Indian politics. Indian extremists, rightly viewed, are Indian patriots in an angry mood. That mood necessarily postulates absence of coolheadedness. Mr Gandhi is nothing if not coolheaded. He is an idealist, pure and simple — an idealist with an unshakable faith in adamantine ‘soul force’, as the only force opposed to physical force which can compel the most powerful Government, however stern and unbending, to yield to the dictates of justice as he conceives it.” — ODT, 18.1.1921.