Violence & Soul Force

Throughout India, the land of Gandhi's satyagraha (peaceful soul force), a tide of violence was on the rise. Never far be neath the surface since January's Bombay riots, in which hundreds of people were killed, it broke again with a sudden and terrible fury in the blaze of India's consuming summer heat.

At dawn, in the sweltering, smoky railway center of Kharagpur, near Calcutta, a locomotive chugged to a stop outside the station to discharge workers. Suddenly, a mob of 200 railroad strikers was upon it. Beating the driver and fireman to a pulp with stones, they tossed their bodies aside. Then they opened the throttle and sent the locomotive careering down the tracks into the station. It smashed into a crowd of 100 workers, throwing bodies in every direction and injuring 60 people.

Creeping Atmosphere. Deeply disturbed by the increase in such episodes, Prime Minister Nehru warned Parliament of "a creeping in of violence in our public activities. How do we produce the atmosphere that results in this?" He had hardly finished speaking when violence broke out again, this time in the pleasant little town of Kalka, among the mountain foothills of Simla. There, police, frightened and outnumbered by an attacking mob of 1,500 people armed with stones and bottles, fired point-blank into the crowd. The toll: five dead, a score critically injured.

Two days later Nehru went to Bombay for a Congress Party meeting. A thousand police guarded the road from the airport against possible violence. This time the threatened violence was not from labor unionists, but from demonstrators who opposed the Nehru government's plan to make Bombay a centrally administered area. Sitting before a statue of Gandhi, Nehru made an impassioned plea: "When your enemy tries to wound you, you get hurt, but the wound heals in course of time. But when your brother inflicts injuries on you, the wound takes a long time to heal. Dead bodies do not worry me so much as dead souls and dead hearts. Death has no fear for me. All of us have to die some day. But what I cannot tolerate is the meanness and bitterness that is gripping this nation."

Not Ready Yet. Nehru's plea fell on deaf ears. Even as he spoke, thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of Bom bay, shouting "Bombay is ours," and brandishing flags and umbrellas. Through the city they surged, shattering street lights, tearing up railroad tracks, erecting barricades, stoning cars containing members of Nehru's Congress Party. Police lobbed tear-gas shells into the rioting mobs, then fired into them pointblank. Tough Sikh reinforcements were called out, and nearly 2,000 people were arrested. Bitterly, Pandit Nehru said that Bombay is "not ready for self-rule" and will not get it for at least five years.

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