Word: viceroys
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Dispatches from India last week scarcely mentioned the Marquess of Linlithgow, Viceroy of India, personal friend and unrelenting political enemy of Mohandas K. Gandhi. But it was Lord Linlithgow, tall, stern symbol of British policy, unbending in his scarlet-carpeted marble palace, who had stood his ground and defeated Mohandas Gandhi, frail symbol of India's ceaseless struggle for her independence...
...disrupt a stable wartime economy on which both British and American armed forces are dependent. But the Raj was prepared to meet this type of unrest. The only effective weapon left to Gandhi's badly battered Congress party was a fast. Sir Reginald Maxwell, Home Member of the Viceroy's council, called it "repugnant to Western ideas of decency...
...against Gandhi was based on the Western interpretation of pragmatic justice. To the British, Gandhi was guilty of calling for a civil-disobedience campaign last August which set off a mass outburst. Lord Linlithgow held Gandhi legally responsible for the deaths that had occurred, the damage done. In the Viceroy's words, Gandhi's fast was "political blackmail"; as such it was Gandhi's "sole responsibility." This was the official British view. Any weakening of this position, setting Gandhi free-and thus permitting him to break his fast -would be an admission that the British were wrong...
...Eleventh Hour. A message from the Viceroy reiterating that "if he (Gandhi) fasts while in detention, he does so solely ... at his own risk" chilled all hopes for compromise. Rajagopalachariar visited Phillips but came away convinced that the Americans can do nothing...
Between Gandhi's will and that of the Viceroy the final clash had come. Like a Greek tragedy the action moved inexorably toward the climax. A frail little bag of bones had decided he would drink only fruit juice for three weeks, and the whole British Empire quivered. A world that uses and more than half believes in force watched the struggle with divided sympathies and a strange sense of shame...