At midnight on August 14, 1947, the viceroy's house in New Delhi resounded with ceremonies inaugurating India's independence from British rule. The father of the new nation agonized on a straw pallet in a stench-filled Calcutta slum hundreds of miles away; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, beloved as the Mahatma (great-soul), could not bear to join the celebrations while Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims killed one another in Punjab. Riots had started over Hindu and Sikh resistance to a partition of British India to carve out Pakistan. Almost a million people were to die in what remains the worst communal carnage in South Asian history.
Under the Pakistan plan, monotheistic Muslims, who had complained that their religious and cultural identity would be in danger in a country dominated by polytheistic Hindus, would have their own homeland. The Sikhs, whose syncretic faith combined Muslim monotheism and castelessness with the Hindu doctrines of rebirth until attaining salvation through good deeds, decided to remain in India. They had been persecuted by Islamic rulers in the Middle Ages and had since sided with the Hindus in many battles against the Muslims.
What the Mahatma had not been prepared for was his discovery that the people he had served and loved so long could be so ugly. "I have come to the conclusion," he wrote to a long time associate, "that our way was nonviolent only superficially, our hearts are violent."
If the Mahatma had been alive this past August, he might have boycotted the gala celebrations of India's fortieth independence anniversary; those violent hearts were in action all year round. On average, India had a riot per day last year, either between Sikhs and Hindus or between Hindus and Muslims. The year-round death toll was at least 1,837.
Growing estrangement between Hindu and Muslim
Although the subcontinent's Muslim-majority regions in the west and northeast broke away to form Pakistan--the northeastern part of which later emerged as independent Bangladesh--India still has eighty million Muslims, who make up 11 percent of the country's population. Most Indian Muslims had supported the Pakistan movement, thereby incurring Hindu wrath. After 1947, they became demoralized. Indian society was 83 percent Hindu and nursed a grudge toward the Muslims after losing the long and bitter fight to prevent the creation of Pakistan.
For more than a decade after independence, however, violence between Hindus and Muslims in India remained at a low level. Throughout the 1950s, Indian Muslims kept their heads down. The individual Indian Muslim felt guilty about his or his fellow Muslims' support for Pakistan, and because the memories of the 1947 riots were still fresh, it was deemed prudent to maintain a low profile. Also, Indian national Congress old guards, who believed in religion-neutral politics, were at the helm in politics and administration, and they were a shield against Hindu-Muslim hostilities.
Relations between the two communities began to deteriorate during the early 1960s, despite several quiet interludes. Today the estrangement is nearly complete in many cities, where an incident between a Hindu and a Muslim can quickly turn into a communal
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