“I do not want help from anybody to make India free,” Gandhi declared. “I want India to save herself.”
“Throughout history,” I recalled, “nations and individuals have helped foreign countries. Lafayette went from France to assist America in winning independence from Britain. Thousands of Americans and other foreigners died in Spain to save the Spanish Republic.”
“Individuals, yes,” Gandhi said. “But America is the ally of the England which enslaves us. And I am not yet certain that the democracies will make a better world when they defeat the Fascists. They may become very much like the Fascists themselves.”
I said, “This is where, as I told you the other day, we must agree to differ. I find the concentration of Indians on problems of their freedom to the exclusion of social problems a disappointment and a shortcoming. Bose is a young man with a propensity for dramatic action, and were he to succumb in Germany to the lure of Fascism and return to India and make India free but Fascist, I think you would be worse off than under British rule.”
“There are powerful elements of Fascism in British rule,” Gandhi exclaimed, “and in India these are the elements which we see and feel every day. If the British wish to document their right to
