ABSTRACT
Many Indians who had not approved of the Congress decision to end British rule while World War II still raged felt compelled by news of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's fast to leave the sidelines. On 17 February 1943, three non-Congress Indian members of the viceroy’s Executive Council resigned to protest the government’s indifference to the fast. News of Gandhi’s physical condition could not be suppressed altogether, but British officials did what they could to reduce the impact. In Delhi, for example, the Hindustan Times was ordered not to print headlines regarding the fast ‘extending over a width greater than that of two columns of the usual width’ or in type ‘exceeding one-fifth of an inch in overall height’. Gandhi’s fast was certainly an escalation, in accord with his sense of the climactic nature of this mid-World War II confrontation. He had never before fasted to exert even indirect pressure on a viceroy.
