Hindu and Moslem: The Gospel of Hate

AS Britain prepared to strike its colors in New Delhi, Mohandas Gandhi, India's great apostle of nonviolence, appealed to his followers to "go out among your districts and spread the message of the Hindu-Moslem unity." But when independence came in 1947, it was the gospel of hate that swept the two new nations on the vast Indian subcontinent.

Overnight, families that had lived as friendly neighbors for decades in British India became mindless enemies in Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan. Within nine months after partition, some 16 million refugees had fled crazed mobs in both countries. Perhaps 600,000 were slaughtered. "If they were children," wrote British Historian Leonard Mosley, describing the carnage, "they were picked up by their feet and their heads smashed against the wall. If they were girls they were raped and their breasts were chopped off. And if they were pregnant, they were disemboweled."

That was 24 years ago. Today, the religious animosities that have already warped the past and present of one-fifth of humanity seem to have become permanent. Not only do Hindu and Moslem troops of the two countries clash at the borders, but Hindu and Moslem civilians also frequently tear at one another in cities and towns. In West Pakistan, communal troubles are rare only because very few Hindus hung on after partition. But in East Pakistan, Moslem oppression had caused a steady Hindu migration to India even before the current troubles began. Now that light-skinned Pathan and Punjabi troops from the West rule by the gun, dark-skinned Bengali Moslems try to survive by informing on their equally dark-skinned Bengali Hindu neighbors. In India, meanwhile, the sight of a Hindu mob seeking vengeance for some Moslem insult is all too familiar. Such incidents have grown fairly frequent since 1964, when the theft of what was purported to be a sacred hair of Mohammed from a mosque in Kashmir sparked three months of turmoil throughout India and East Pakistan. Two years ago, 1,000 Indians were dead and 30,000 homeless after a week of rioting that followed an incident in the modern industrial city of Ahmedabad. The provocation: a procession of Moslems had collided with a herd of sacred cows being led through the streets by a group of Indian sadhus (holy men).

The 468 million Hindus and 181 million Moslems who share the teeming subcontinent are divided by social and cultural differences that go far deeper than the economic and religious prejudices that divide, say, the Catholics and the Protestants of Northern Ireland. The Hindu inhabits a world peopled by deities, in which material things and the individual are fundamentally unimportant. He lives a life carefully circumscribed by a whole host of social, cultural and religious taboos. All outsiders are suspect, but beef-eating Moslems are particularly "unclean." (Moslems, for their part, regard Hindus and other nonbelievers as infidels.) Almost all of the subcontinent's Moslems--89%, by one authoritative estimate--are descendants of low-caste Hindus who converted to Islam, which emphasizes individuality and equality under a single deity. They did so primarily to escape the inexorably rigid social and religious restrictions imposed on them as "Untouchables" by the Hindu caste system.

The Hindu-Moslem struggles go back centuries. Some 1,500 years before Christ, tall, fair-skinned Aryans invaded the subcontinent, subjugated the dark-skinned Dravidians who inhabited it and imposed on them the caste system. But during the millenniums after Christ, plunderers from Central Asia--Turks, Persians and Afghans--brought with them the flaming sword of Mohammedanism. By the mid-17th century, when the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, the subcontinent was firmly under Moslem rule, and its Hindus were a subjugated majority.

By the 18th century, the Mogul Empire was in decline, and rebellious armies under Hindu and, later, Sikh leadership had begun to pull it apart. The British finished the job, and as they began to annex great swatches of the old Mogul Empire, England's soldiers and administrators unwittingly opened the way for a dramatic Hindu renaissance. The first British conquest was the vast state of Bengal, or what is now India's West Bengal state and East Pakistan. As shrewd and energetic traders, Bengal's Hindus had close ties with the British, and they naturally found positions in the new civil service. As British rule spread, so did the new Hindu elite. They became not only civil servants but also teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers, landowners and financiers, writers, poets, philosophers and reformers.

The proud Moslems, warriors and horsemen rather than merchants and intellectuals, turned inward and all but "abandoned the field to the Hindus. As Historian Arnold Toynbee described it, "A British arbiter had decreed that the pen should be substituted for the sword as the instrument with which the competition was conducted." As independence approached, the Moslems understandably grew uneasy about the pros- pects of life under a vengeful Hindu majority. Moslem Leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah demanded the creation of a separate Islamic nation, Pakistan. Among the five provinces that opted to join the new nation was East Bengal, whose Moslem majority had no desire to live under a Hindu-controlled government in New Delhi. Despite the ravaging that East Bengal has taken at the hands of the West Pakistani troops, the attitude persists. Says an Indian official: "If an Indian army marched into East Pakistan and drove the West Pakistanis out, it would for ten days be the Indian army of liberation and on the eleventh day become the Hindu army of occupation."

But why have the divided Hindu and Moslem states not been able to maintain a separate peace? Gandhi always thought that a common thread of Indian-ness would somehow hold the two together. But the explosion of Hindu-Moslem hatred after partition was enough to poison a whole generation of Indians and Pakistanis. In the meantime, a new generation has grown up on both sides--one that does not even remember the days not so long ago when all thought of themselves as Indians.

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