Page:Fischer - A Week with Gandhi.pdf/130

 he has devoted his life to the people. He lives like the people and shares their primitive hardships and poverty. He has no money and no property. He wants only one thing—a free India. And since so many millions of Indians want the same thing, Gandhi has become the symbol of a nation’s yearning.

Everywhere in India, whenever an Indian criticized the British I would insist that he explain to me why he was anti-British. I said to an Indian Moslem who is a high civil servant in the British government, “Why are so many Indians anti-British?”

“Why shouldn’t we be?” he exclaimed. “That is the more appropriate question.” No nation likes the foreign nation which rules it, he added.

Gandhi has devoted Moslem followers and Hindu followers, and Parsis and Untouchables who believe in him because he, more than any other man, has striven for decades to free his country. Many of them differ with Gandhi on numerous questions. There are Moslems who accuse him of wanting to establish Hindu rule. But few deny the constancy of his labors for national redemption. In modern times, the urge towards nation hood has been elemental, natural, and instinctive. Gandhi is the most forceful Indian exponent of this urge.

Gandhi has the conviction that he can, sitting in