The Unity Conference

Lahore, Saturday, September 27, 1924

THE characteristically frank and outspoken statement which Mahatma Gandhi has issued to the Press with regard to the Unity Conference, which commenced its sittings at Delhi yesterday, ought to put the assembled leaders on their guard against approaching the question before them from a wrong, narrow or inadequate point of view. Undoubtedly, it is the Mahatma’s fast which has brought the Conference together, but the participants in this gathering will do no good to the Mahatma or the country if in their natural anxiety to terminate the fast they will hurriedly arrive at a patched-up peace. The Mahatma is the very last person in the world to be taken in by a make-believe peace, however honest may be the intentions of those responsible for it and however much they may be prompted to arrive at it by their love of him. Nor, even if there were any chance of the Mahatma being deceived by appearances, must the fact be overlooked that he who has fasted once may fast again, and that with the inevitable breaking down of a hastily concluded and wrongly conceived peace, there would be nothing to prevent the Mahatma from repeating the penance. There is a significant passage in the statement in which the Mahatma himself seems to emphasise this possibility. “A false truce,” he says, “will only aggravate my agony and my next state will be worse than the present.” From every point of view, therefore, the injunction of the Mahatma that there should be no mental reservations because of the fast is not only the best but also the soundest in the circumstances.