INDIA: Flowers for the Empress

In his little wooden hut in Calcutta, 78-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi last week drank a glass of sweetened lime juice, thus ending a 73-hour fast (his first since 1943) in protest against communal violence. Half an hour later a dozen Hindu and Moslem youths came to beg Gandhi’s forgiveness for rioting, solemnly promised not to do it again. At his bare brown feet the penitents placed big bundles containing knives, rifles, a much-used Sten gun and a dozen U.S.-made hand grenades.

The old Mahatma magic had worked well in Calcutta. Just after 62 people had been killed, 400 injured, in 24 hours, Gandhi had announced that he would not eat until “sanity returned to Calcutta.” (Aside he said: “As usual I shall permit myself to add salt and soda bicarbonate to the water I may wish to drink during the fast.”) Anxious Calcuttans read about the Mahatma’s pulse rate, his blood pressure (both diastolic and systolic) and the acetone and albumen in his urine; they stopped rioting.

At week’s end, having warned Calcuttans that next time he would fast to death if they did not behave, Gandhi turned his pacifying powers to a far more difficult test. He headed for the Punjab, scene of the bloodiest communal killings of all India.

Near Rohri in Pakistan several hundred Moslems stopped a train, hauled out 13 Sikhs, clubbed them to death with hockey sticks. An Indian Army courier told how, in the remote Shakirgarh district of Pakistan, a small Hindu military force had found only 1,500 known survivors from a community of 120,000 Sikhs. He estimated that over 100,000 had been butchered, caught between a howling Moslem mob and the flooded Ravi river.

Famine and disease threatened to follow in the wake of the carnage. In the Punjab, traditionally India’s granary, fields lay unharvested for hundreds of miles on either side of the border, as farmers ran away or hid. In Lahore only one or two banks stayed open because the clerks had gone back to Madras. Throughout Pakistan there was little commercial activity. Hindu and Sikh merchants, engineers and mechanics had joined in the general exodus.

In the refugee camps, where thousands huddled in filth and existed on one eighth of a pancake a day, many now shouted “Bring back the British Raj!”

And in Lahore somebody hung flowers on the statue of Queen Victoria.