INDIA: Vicious Circle

In little more than a month of independence, India and Pakistan had slipped back 300 years. In both countries last week, rioting, slaughter, rapine, destruction continued. More than 5,000,000 people had become refugees, uncounted thousands had been slain.

Pakistan cried for outside help. To the rest of the British Commonwealth it addressed a plea for aid in ending violence. To the U.N. it proposed that six observers be sent to Pakistan and India. Pakistan’s appeal made India shriek.

Cried Congress Party President Acharya Kripalani: “The real solution of the whole ill lies with Pakistan itself.” In calling itself an Islamic state, he said, Pakistan had incited Moslems against Sikhs and Hindus, thus drawing reprisals upon Moslems in India. “[We must] base citizenship on a territorial basis and forget . . . that two-nation theory which started the whole vicious circle.”

Worse than Death. The venom of communal bitterness had been thickened by the record flare-up of an old frontier practice—the abduction of tens of thousands of women. From one train arriving at Amritsar last week, 150 young girls had been taken. In Bikaner State, an official estimated that Sikhs fleeing there from Pakistan had lost 40 of their women. So grave had woman-stealing become that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Lia-quat Ali Khan and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru held special discussions about it last week; both Governments agreed to hunt out and return abducted women. It would not be easy. The women were scattered far & wide; those taken by Moslems were veiled in purdah. Harder still was the problem of persuading devout Sikhs and Hindus to take their violated women back.

A new threat to peace arose in the heart of Western India. His Highness the Nawab Saheb of Junagadh, a Moslem ruling a predominantly Hindu state, decided to join Pakistan. One of his sub-chiefs, the ruler of Babariawad, applied for admission to India. The Nawab rushed troops to Babariawad. Some 60,000 of his subjects fled to India.

At a Bombay mass meeting, a “revolutionary government” was formed which declared war on the Nawab. The “revolutionary” Premier: Samaldas Laxmidas Gandhi; portly nephew of Mohandas K. Gandhi.