INDIA: Written in Blood

What was Mohamed Ali Jinnah up to? In a sharp reversal of his policy of last July the lean, leathery Moslem League leader agreed last week to nominate five men to the All-India Congress presided over by his archrival, Pandit Nehru. But he had named third-raters: in New Delhi, prominent Moslems boasted that the League had joined the coalition with the idea of breaking it up.

That peace had not accompanied coalition soon became evident. In an ill-timed visit to North-West Frontier Province, Nehru was met at Peshawar airdrome by 5,000 Moslem sympathizers, armed with spears and guns. His caravan of armored cars was stoned. Tribesmen insulted him by walking out on his speeches. Enraged, the Pandit called them “pitiful pensioners,” an allusion to the fact that Britain pays them annual tribal subsidies to be nice. Gleefully, the League’s newspaper Dawn editorialized that the Pandit should be made “honorary propaganda secretary of the Moslem League.”

Meanwhile, saber-swinging mobs in the Noakhali district of east Bengal, where Moslems outnumber Hindus 5-to-1, burned, looted and massacred on a scale surpassing even the recent Calcutta riots. In eight days an estimated 5,000 were killed, with scores of Hindu girls abducted.

An alarmed Mohandas K. Gandhi offered advice to the women which, for a vegetarian, seemed surprising: the only way they could avoid dishonor, he said, was to bite their tongues or hold their breath until they died.* If that would not work, he snapped, let them take poison. He was feeling crotchety, anyway, and “thoroughly ashamed” of an error he had made in a letter, calling the Moslem League “the authoritative representative” (of an overwhelming majority of Indian Moslems), instead of “the most authoritative representative.” Peevishly, he muttered that a man who made such mistakes probably would not live to be 125, after all.

*In Chicago, the American Medical Association’s quidnunctious Dr. Morris Fishbein doubted the efficacy of the Gandhi suicide technique.