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

worship a dumb animal was utterly repugnant. They took a perverse delight in driving a protesting herd of cows right past the front door of a Hindu temple en route to the slaughterhouse. Over the centuries, thousands of human beings had accompanied those animals to their death in the riots which inevitably followed each such gesture.
    While the British ruled India, they managed to keep a fragile balance between the two communities, using at the
    same time the antagonism to ease the burdens of their rule. Initially, the drive for Indian independence was confined to an intellectual elite in which Hindus and Moslems ignored communal differences to work side by side toward a common goal. Ironically, it was Gandhi who disrupted that accord.
    In the most spiritual area on earth, it was inevitable that the freedom struggle should take on the guise of a religious crusade, and Gandhi made it one. No man was ever more tolerant, more genuinely free of any taint of religious prejudice than Gandhi. He desperately wanted to associate the Moslems with every phase of his movement. But he was a Hindu, and a deep belief in God was the very essence of his being. Inevitably, unintentionally, Gandhi's Congress Party movement began to take on a Hindu tone and coloration that aroused Moslem suspicions.
    Their suspicions were strengthened as narrow-minded local Congress leaders persistently refused to share with their Moslem rivals what electoral spoils British rule allowed. A specter grew in Moslem minds: in an independent India they would be drowned, by Hindu majority rule, condemned to the existence of a powerless minority in the land their Mogul forebears had once ruled.
    The creation of a separate Islamic nation on the subcontinent seemed to offer an escape from that fate. The idea that India's Moslems should set up a state of their own was formally articulated for the first time on four and a half pages of typing paper in a nondescript English cottage at 3 Humberstone Road in Cambridge. Its author was a forty-year-old Indian Moslem graduate student named Rahmat Ali, and the date at the head of his proposal was January 28, 1933. The idea that India formed a single nation, Ali wrote, was "a preposterous falsehood." He called for a Moslem nation carved from the provinces of northwest India, where the Moslems were predominant, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, the Frontier, Baluchistan. He even had a name to propose for his new state. Based on the names of the provinces that would compose it, it was Pakistan —"land of the pure."
    "We will not crucify ourselves," he concluded, in a fiery, if inept, metaphor, "on a cross of Hindu nationalism."
    Adopted by the body that was the focal point of Mos-
    lem nationalist aspirations, the Moslem League, Rahmat Ali's proposal gradually took hold of the imagination of India's Moslem masses. Its progress was regularly nurtured by the chauvinistic attitude of the predominantly Hindu leaders of Congress, who remained determined to make no concession to their Moslem foes.
    The event that served to catalyze into violence the building rivalry of India's Hindu and Moslem communities took place on August 16, 1946, just five months before Gandhi set out on his penitent's march. The site was Calcutta, the second city of the British Empire, a metropolis whose reputation for violence and savagery was unrivaled. Calcutta, with the legend of its Black Hole, had been, to generations of Englishmen, a synonym for Indian cruelty. Hell, a Calcutta resident once remarked, was being born an Untouchable in Calcutta's slums. Those slums contained the densest concentration of human beings in the world, fetid pools of unrivaled misery, Hindu and Moslem neighborhoods interlaced without pattern or reason.
    At dawn on August 16, Moslem mobs howling in a quasi-religious fervor came bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing in a human skull. They came in answer to a call issued by the Moslem