Ghost v. Buttercups

In Bombay last week "Butler's Buttercups" struggled desperately with the ghost of Subhas Chandra Bose. On the birthday of the onetime Congress party leader who had gone off to lead a Jap-sponsored Indian army and die in a Jap plane crash, thousands of Hindus jammed downtown streets shouting Bose's battle cry, Jai Hind, (Victory to India).

At Round Temple, dividing point between Hindu and Moslem sections of the city, tough, stocky Commissioner Harold Edwin Butler's Buttercups (blue-and-yelow uniformed police) tried to bar the way. When paraders squatted on the pavements, the law hurled tear gas. Up came the Hindus with flailing bamboo lathis (traditionally a police weapon against demonstrators). Police lines broke under their charge, scattered Buttercups were beaten. Pop bottles and stones came flying from housetops together with buckets of water. Barricades of flaming trees were thrown across streets. False alarms called firemen to remote sections where gangs of goondas (hooligans) attacked them.

Casualties reached 23 dead, 600 wounded. The Bombay battle roared on through three days, and subsided inexplicably just when police expected it to grow fiercest--on the 17th anniversary of the Congress party's demand for independence.

The riots were symptoms of India's deep unrest which Bose had come to symbolize. As the new Central Legislative Assembly met for the first time in New Delhi, not only Bose's brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, but Moslem League Leader Mohamed Ali Jinnah, champion of Pakistan and once a good friend of Britain, denounced British use of Indian troops in Java, demanded their removal.

Through India rumors were spreading that Bose had not really died but was alive and working underground. The Buttercups almost wished that it were true. Bose alive was not nearly so tough to handle as Bose dead.

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