India: A Sad Centennial

Much of the civilized world this week is noting the centennial of the birth of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,India’s great apostle of peace and nonviolence. Yet in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where the Mahatma was born on Oct. 2, 1869, his own countrymen set the stage for the anniversary observances with the bloodiest religious riots since independence 22 years ago.

In a seven-day outburst of communal hatred, Hindu and Moslem mobs tore through the capital city of Ahmedabad, a prosperous and progressive metropolis of 1,600,000 graced by four buildings designed by Le Corbusier. By week’s end, at least 1,000 Indians lay dead in Ahmedabad, Baroda and other nearby cities, 3,500 were in prison and over 30,000 were homeless.

Abiding Animosities. A favorite Indian slogan is “Unity in Diversity,” but the abiding religious, regional and linguistic animosities that are grouped under the term communalism have long made the phrase a mockery. Of all the hatreds that roil the subcontinent, none is deeper than the religious hostility between India’s 460 million Hindus and 60 million Moslems—a heritage of the bloody Moslem conquest that established the Mogul Empire four centuries ago. Hindu-Moslem rioting has grown more and more frequent since 1964, when three months of turmoil cost 500 lives. The cause then: theft of a sacred relic, said to be a hair of Mohammed, from a Kashmir mosque. This year religious clashes have been occurring at a rate of one per day.

The tensions that lay behind last week’s chaos had been building for months. In one case, tempers flared briefly when a Hindu policeman accidentally knocked a copy of the Koran off a Moslem bookseller’s cart. Uneasiness increased when 100,000 Moslems paraded through the city to protest the burning of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem last August—confirming the conviction among many Hindus that Moslems give true allegiance not to India but to Islam. Only a small spark was needed to touch off an explosion.

It came when a herd of sacred cows got in the way of a religious procession of 1,000 Moslems. The Moslems chased the Hindu sadhus (holy men) from their herd and stoned a temple where they took refuge. Violence, fanned by false rumors that the sacred cows had been butchered, spread quickly. Rampaging groups destroyed shops and homes in every part of the city. Using everything from Molotov cocktails to light bulbs filled with acid, they slaughtered men, women and children with what one Indian official described as “rare brutality.” Hundreds had their throats cut, many with small, razor-sharp hand sickles. Others were dragged from their homes by frenzied mobs who trussed them up, doused them with gasoline, set them afire and then built pyres of household possessions around the flaming corpses.

Forgotten Admonition. The bloodletting went uncurbed for two days as Ahmedabad’s predominantly Hindu police force time and again moved in on Hindu mobs only after the damage was done; though Moslems make up only 20% of the population, they suffered perhaps 70% of the casualties. Not until New Delhi dispatched more than 4,000 troops and special police, armed with orders to shoot rioters on sight, did violence begin to subside—at least in the city. In the hinterlands, mobs halted two trains and dragged passengers off, killing 17 and wounding 20.

Ahmedabad soon swarmed with refugees. At one point, 20,000 Moslems crowded into the city stadium. Seven days after the riots began, a grim Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Mahatma) drove silently past Ahmedabad’s blackened buildings, then returned to New Delhi and summoned the heads of India’s states to discuss ways of avoiding future Ahmedabads. Her advice might well be the same as Gandhi’s admonition to his Congress Party members 44 years ago: “Go throughout your districts, and spread the message of Hindu-Moslem unity.”