Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Read Free Book Online Page A

reciting the Koran in a different language, Urdu. Even the primitive drugs of cow's urine and herbs, with which they struggled against the same diseases, were based on different systems of natural medicine.
    To those social and religious differences had been added an even more divisive, more insidious distinction. It was economic. The Hindus had been far swifter than the Moslems to seize the opportunities that British education and Western thought had placed before India. As a result, while the British had been socially more at ease with the Moslems, it was the Hindus who had administered India for them. They were India's businessmen, financiers, administrators, professional men. With the Parsis, the descendants of ancient Persia's fire-worshiping Zoroastrians, they monopolized insurance, banking, big business and India's few industries.
    In the towns and small cities, the Hindus were the dominant commercial community. The ubiquitous role of the moneylender was almost everywhere taken by Hindus, partly because of their aptitude for the task, partly because of the Koranic proscription of the practice of usury.
    The Moslem upper classes, many of whom descended from the Mogul invaders, had tended to remain landlords and soldiers. The Moslem masses, because of the deeply ingrained patterns of Indian society, rarely escaped in the faith of Mohammed the roles the caste system had assigned their forebears in the faith of Shiva. They were usually landless peasants in the service of Hindus or Moslems in the country, laborers and petty craftsmen in the service of Hindu employers in the city.
    This economic rivalry accentuated the social and religious barriers between the two communities, and it made communal slaughters, like that which had shattered the peace of Srirampur, regular occurrences. Each community had its preferred provocations for launching them. For the Hindus it was music. Music never accompanied the austere service of the mosque, and its strains mingling with the mumble of the faithfuls' prayers was a blasphemy. There was no surer way for the Hindus to incite their Mos-
    lem neighbors than to set up a band outside a mosque during Friday prayers.
    For the Moslem, the provocation of choice involved an animal, one of the gray skeletal beasts lowing down the streets of every city, town and village in India, aimlessly wandering her fields, the object of the most perplexing of Hinduism's cults, the sacred cow.
    The veneration of the cow dated to Biblical times, when the fortunes of the pastoral Indo-European peoples migrating onto the subcontinent depended on the vitality of their herds. As the rabbis of ancient Judea had forbidden pig flesh to their peoples to save them from the ravages of trichinosis, so the sadhus of ancient India had proclaimed the cow sacred to save from slaughter in times of famine the herds on which their people's existence depended.
    As a result, India had in 1947 the largest and most useless bovine herd in the world, 200 million beasts, one for every two Indians, an animal population larger than the human population of the United States. Forty million cows produced a meager trickle of milk averaging barely a pint per animal per day. Forty or fifty million more were beasts of burden tugging their bullock carts and plows. The rest, a hundred-odd million, were sterile, useless animals roaming free through the fields, villages and cities of India. Every day their restless jaws chomped through the food that could have fed ten million Indians living on the edge of starvation.
    Every instinct of reason, of sheer survival, should have condemned those useless beasts. Yet, so tenacious had the superstition become that cow slaughter remained an abomination for the very Indians starving to death so those beasts could continue their futile existence. Even Gandhi maintained that in protecting the cow it was all God's work that man protected.
    To the Moslems, the thought that a man could so degrade himself as to