According to the BBC and The Atlantic, Winston Churchill was not shy about his disdain for Mahatma Gandhi. “It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir … striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace,” Churchill said of the pacifistic activist, per the BBC.  

Churchill was particularly bothered by and suspicious of Gandhi’s use of fasting as a form of protest and worked to uncover Gandhi as a cheat. The Atlantic reported that Churchill sent the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, at least two different letters expressing his doubts and trying to prove them. 

In one, he said, “I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics. Would it be possible to verify this.” Churchill was never able to verify Gandhi was sneaking nourishment, but once said if he is really fasting, let him starve himself to death. 

Specifically, he said to the British cabinet, per the BBC, “Gandhi should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting. We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.”

Churchill couldn’t even let it go after Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, writing in 1951 (per The Atlantic), “It was certain, however, at an early stage that he was being fed with glucose whenever he drank water, and this … enabled this frail being to maintain his prolonged abstention from any visible form of food.”