He went on fast on the 13th of January 1948. Now this is very very important, this was his last fast: January the 13th 1948 till January the 18th. It was to be his fifteenth fast in public life, but some people have a different calculation about the number of fasts he undertook. But be that as it may, this fast… Many people say that Gandhi went on fast to get 55 crores transferred from India to Pakistan…see he was betraying the country, and so on and so forth…
Actually the immediate reason for this fast was his demand that the mosque in Mehrauli, [the shrine of Qutubuddin] Bakhtiyar Chishti, be returned to Muslims. It had been seized.