The Feeling Is Fatal

The religious violence that has ripped India and Pakistan for months was touched off by a hair trigger. When a brownish bristle from the head of the Prophet Mohammed was stolen from a mosque in Kashmir last December, long dormant hatreds erupted between the Hindus and Moslems. Though the relic was ultimately recovered, anti-Hindu rioting broke out in Kashmir and East Pakistan. When refugees reached near by Calcutta with tales of Moslem terror, the Hindus struck back.

Last week the bloody back-and-forth took on a new dimension. Down from the scrub-grown hills of India's mineral-rich Bihar state swarmed hordes of fierce Adivasis (literally, aborigines) armed with bows and arrows. Recent converts to Christianity, but not weaned from their fierce ways, they had been enraged by reports of anti-Christian persecution across the border. Before they returned home, they had burned two Moslem villages, left rows of charred corpses bristling with arrow shafts.

In the northeastern corner of India last week, 300 people died in Hindu-Moslem riots. Had only a fraction of such religious or racial violence happened in the U.S., there would have been international headlines. But the Indian killings were a minor affair compared with the 1947 partition riots that took more than 100,000 Indian and Pakistani lives.

Still recovering from the stroke of last January, Prime Minister Nehru, 74, took to the radio to announce agreement with Pakistan's President Moham med Ayub Khan for a meeting of the two nations' Home Ministers as soon as possible in New Delhi to see how the violence could be halted -- the first sign of cooperation between the two countries in a year. Nehru spoke slowly, in a voice that cracked with emotion and was edged with weariness. "This feeling," he said, "is fatal for all of us."

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