Time

As Britain prepared to strike its colors in New Delhi, Mohandas
Gandhi, India's great apostle of nonvoilence appealed to his followers
to "go out among your districts as spread the message of the
Hindu-Moslem unity." But when independence came in 1947, it was gospel
of hate that swept the two new nations on the vast Indian
subcontinent.

Overnight, families that lived as friendly neighbours for decades in
British India became mindless enemies in Hindu India and Moslem
Pakistan. Within nine months after partition, some 16 million refugees
had fled crazed mobs in both countries. Perhaps 600,000 were
slaughtered. "If they were children" wrote British Historian Leonard
Mosley describing the carnage, "they were picked up by their feet and
their heads smashed against the wall. If they were girls they were
raped and their breasts chopped off. And if they were pregnant, they
were disemboweled."

That was 24 years ago. Today, the religious animosities that have
already wraped the past and present of one-fifth of humanity seem to
have become permanent. Not only do Hindu and Moslem troops of the two
countries clash at borders, but Hindu and Moslems civilains also
frequently tear at one another in cities and towns. In West Pakistan,
communal troubles are rare only because very few Hindus hung on after
partition. But in East Pakistan, Moslem opression had caused a steady
Hindu migration to India even before current troubles began. Now the
light-skinned Pathan and Panjabi troops from the West rule by the gun,
dark-skinned Bengali Moslem try to survive by informing on their
equally dark-skinned Bengali Hindu neighbours. In India, meanwhile,
the sight of a Hindu mob seeking vengeance for Moslem insult is all
too famalier. Such incidents have grown fairly frequent since 1964,
when the theft of what was purported to be a sacred hair of Mohammed
from a mosque in Kashmir sparked three months of turmoil through out
India and East Pakistan. Two years ago, 1000 Indians were dead and
30,000 homeless after a week of roiting that followed an incident in
the modern industrial city of Ahmedabad. The provocation: a procession
of Moslems had collided with a herd of sacred cows being led through
the streets by a group of Indian sadhus(holy men).

The 468 million Hindus and 181 million Moslems who share the teeming
subcontinent are divided by social and cultral differences that go far
deeper than the economic and religious prejudices, that divide, say,
the catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland. The Hindus
inhabits a world peopled by deities, in which material things and the
individual are fundamentally unimportant. He lives a life carefully
circumscribed by a whole host of social, cultral and religious taboos.
All outsiders are suspect, but beef-eating Moslems are particularly
"unclean". (Moslems, for their part, regard Hindus and other
nonbelievers as infidels.) Almost all of the subcontinent's Moslems --
89%, by one authoritative estimate -- are descendants of low-caste
Hindus who converted to Islam, which emphasizes individuality and
equality under a single deity. They did so primarily to escape the
inexorably rigid social and religious restrictions imposed on them as
"Untouchables" by the Hindu caste system.

The Hindu-Moslem struggles go back centuries. Some 1,500 years before
Christ, tall, fair-skinned Aryans invades the subcontinent, subjugated
the dark-skinned Dravadians who inhabited it and imposed on them the
caste system. But during the millenniums after Christ, plunderers from
Central Asia--Turks, Persians and Afgans -- brought with them the
flaming sword of Mohammedanism. By the mid-17th century, when the
Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, the subcontinent was
firmly under Moslem rule, and its Hindus were a subjugated majority.

By the 18th century, the Mogul Empire was in decline, and rebellious
armies under Hindus and, later, Sikh leadership had begun to pull it
apart. The British finished the job, and as they began to annex great
swatches of the old Mogul Empire. England's soldiers and
administrators unwittingly opened the way for a dramatic Hindu
renaissance. The first British conquest was the vast state of Bengal,
or what is now India's West Bengal state and East Pakistan. As shrewd
and energetic traders, Bengal's Hindus had close ties with the
British, and they naturally found positions in the new civil service.
As British rule spread, so did the new Hindu elite. They became not
only civil servants but also teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers,
landowners and fininciers, writers, poets, philosophers and reformers.

The proud Moslems, warriors and horsemen rather than merchants and
intellectuals, turned inward and all but abandoned the field to
Hindus. As Historian Arnold Toynbee described it, "A British arbiter
had decreed that the pen should be substituted for the sowrd as the
instrument with which the competition was conducted." As independence
approached, the Moslems understandably grew uneasy about the prospects
of life under a vengeful Hindu majority. Moslem Leader Mohammed Ali
Jinnah demanded the creation of a seperate Islamic nation, Pakistan.
Among the five provinces that opted to join the new nation was East
Bengal, whose Moslem majority had no desire to live under
Hindu-controlled government in New Delhi. Despite the ravaging that
East Bengal has taken at the hands of the West Pakistanis troops, the
attitude persists. Says and Indian official: "If an Indian army
marched into East Pakistan and drove the West Pakistanis out, it would
for ten days be the Indian army of liberation and on the eleventh day
become the Hindu army of occupation."

But why have the divided Hindu and Moslem states not been able to
maintain a seperate peace? Gandhi always thought that a common thread
of indianness would somehow hold the two together. But the explosion
of Hindu-Moslem hatred after partition was enough to poison a whole
generation of Indians and Pakistanis. In the meantime, a new
generation has grown up on both sides -- one that does not even
remember the days not so long ago when all thought of themselves as
Indians.